Seems perfectly plausible that the phenomenon of ghost jobs is real and it may be getting worse. But this SF Gate piece is dumb. The article has one source for

Seems perfectly plausible that the phenomenon of ghost jobs is real and it may be getting worse. But this SF Gate piece is dumb. The article has one source for its data points and the author does nothing to investigate or challenge the quality of that data. This is not journalism. It looks like a PR piece for resume builder. The Forbes article you linked is much more informative.