Exactly how we evaluate every job listing for legitimacy — the signals, the weighting, and the limits. No black box.
The Realness Score is a number from 0 to 100 that estimates how likely a job listing is to represent a genuine, currently open position at a real company. It is not a measure of how good the job is, how well it pays, or whether you are qualified. It answers one narrow but critical question: is this listing worth your time to apply to at all?
We publish this methodology in full because a legitimacy score is only useful if you understand what it does and does not mean. A score you cannot interrogate is just another opaque ranking.
Job boards are optimized for inventory, not accuracy. A platform with more listings looks more valuable to advertisers and employers, so there is structural pressure to display as many postings as possible and little pressure to remove stale or fake ones. The result is a market where genuine openings sit indistinguishably alongside ghost jobs, scraped reposts, pipeline-building listings, and scams. The Realness Score exists to re-introduce the signal that the market has stripped out.
Every listing is evaluated across five independent categories. Each contributes to the final 0–100 score. We weight them based on how strongly, in our experience, each one correlates with a listing being real and active.
| Signal | Approx. weight | What it captures |
|---|---|---|
| Company verifiability | High | Does a real, identifiable organization stand behind this? |
| Posting freshness | High | Is the role likely still open, or stale? |
| Description quality | Medium | Is this a specific role or a generic template? |
| Salary plausibility | Medium | Does the pay align with the market for this role? |
| Source reliability | Medium | How close to the original employer is this listing? |
Legitimate employers want to be found. We look for a consistent, verifiable organizational identity behind a listing: a real web presence, a recognizable name, and consistency between the company named in the posting and the entity actually collecting applications. Listings from vague, unnamed, or unfindable "companies" — or where the application destination does not match the stated employer — are scored down sharply, because anonymity is one of the strongest predictors of a lead-generation trap or scam.
Time is the enemy of a listing's authenticity. Genuine roles are typically filled or refreshed within weeks. A posting that has sat unchanged for many months is far more likely to be a ghost job — filled internally, frozen, or kept live to harvest a pipeline. We factor in how recently a listing was posted or meaningfully updated, with steep decay for listings that have aged well past a normal hiring cycle.
Real job descriptions are specific. They name responsibilities, required skills, team context, and a recognizable interview process. Fabricated or placeholder listings tend toward generic language that could describe any role at any company. We assess specificity, structure, and the presence of concrete role details. Extremely vague descriptions lower the score; detailed, role-specific ones raise it.
Compensation that is wildly out of line with the market — in either direction — is a warning sign. Entry-level roles advertising executive pay are classic scam bait; senior roles advertising implausibly low pay often signal a misclassified or fake listing. Where salary data is available, we compare it against typical ranges for the role, seniority, and location, and flag implausible outliers.
Where a listing comes from matters. A posting traced directly to a company's own careers page is inherently more trustworthy than one that has been scraped and reposted by an intermediary, potentially long after the original closed. We weight listings by their proximity to the original employer, with direct-from-employer sources scored highest.
| Range | Interpretation |
|---|---|
| 70–100 | Strong legitimacy signals. Apply with normal diligence. |
| 40–69 | Mixed signals. Do a quick independent verification before investing time. |
| 0–39 | Weak or concerning signals. Treat with skepticism; verify thoroughly or skip. |
The score is best used as a triage tool. On a results page of 200 listings, it turns an overwhelming list into a prioritized one: start at the top, work down, and stop spending energy long before you reach the bottom.
No automated system is perfect, and we will not pretend otherwise.
Always do your own quick verification before submitting an application, and never provide financial details, government identification, or payment of any kind before a genuine, verified interview — regardless of the score.
The weighting and thresholds are not static. We refine them using aggregate patterns — for example, which categories of listing most often turn out to be ghost jobs — and from job seeker feedback. If you believe a listing was scored incorrectly in either direction, telling us at privacy@thetruejobs.com directly improves the model for everyone.
To be unambiguous: the Realness Score is not a quality rating, not a culture rating, not a salary rating, and not a measure of your fit for the role. For fit, True Jobs offers a separate resume-based match score. The Realness Score does exactly one job — protecting your time from listings that were never real.