Southend is the second worst area in the UK for "ghost jobs" tricking jobseekers, a new survey has revealed.

A total of 34.4 per cent of job adverts listed online are "ghost jobs", a recruitment practice where companies fake job openings for their own benefit, according to StandOut CV.

A survey last year found that half of managers will use these ads to get more candidates for future jobs, while 43 per cent do it to give the impression that the company was growing when it wasn’t. 

Careers and CV experts, StandOut CV, wanted to find out just how big this problem is in the UK, where in the country the ghost job hotspots may be, and which job roles are most likely to face ghost job listings when looking for a new job. 

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Southend has been revealed as the second worst area in the UK for ghost jobs, with 23.70 per cent of job listings found to be ghost jobs.

To get this data, StandOut CV analysed 91,318 job listings in the 30 biggest cities, towns and boroughs, reviewing the number of jobs posted and those that were still live, but posted "30+ days ago" - the longest timeframe the job board allows. 

As no company is going to openly admit which job listings are real and fake, the experts used this tag as an indicator of it being "ghostly".

The worst area for ghost jobs in the UK was the London borough of Islington where more than a quarter (26.1 per cent) of job listings were ghost jobs.

Veterinary nurses looking for a new job were the most likely to find these listings on their job search, with almost three in five (59.1 per cent) vacancies posted being ghost jobs.

Software engineers were the second most likely to face ghost jobs (46.5 per cent of listings).