The “Ghost Skills” Employers Want but Rarely Define

Key Takeaways: 

• While 75% of job seekers believe their skills match current job descriptions, only 56% of employers agree. 
• Employers mask their actual needs with rigid technical criteria and “ghost skills,” forcing candidates to prioritize keyword optimization over demonstrating true capability.
• Indeed talent experts Matt Berndt and Kyle M.K. share strategies to transform your talent strategy and alleviate friction with candidates.

Employers across industries often say their greatest hiring challenge isn’t finding applicants — it’s finding people with the right skills. But new Indeed research suggests many workers see the problem very differently.

In an Indeed and YouGov U.S. survey about skills in hiring, 75% of job seekers say their skills match what employers are looking for, while only 56% of employers feel they’re getting the right applicants.¹

What if quality talent isn’t missing but is just difficult to recognize?

“If you’re confident there’s a talent shortage, while three out of four job seekers believe they’re qualified, that’s a red flag,” says Kyle M.K., a senior talent strategy advisor at Indeed. “It means quality candidates don’t see themselves in the way you’ve defined the role.”

In many cases, the disconnect may be that workers and employers are simply describing the same skills in very different ways.

“Most people don’t lack skills,” says Matt Berndt, head of Indeed Job Search Academy. “They lack the understanding of how to best describe those skills in the language employers are using.”

That language barrier runs in both directions, and employers may be more responsible for it than they realize.

Drawing on their deep backgrounds on both sides of the hiring experience, M.K. and Berndt share their perspectives to unpack the survey findings and what they mean for your hiring strategy, especially when it comes to asking for the skills you really want applicants to show you.

The ghost skills employers screen for but rarely mention

Many employers may not realize what they’re asking for in their own job descriptions. 

In the skills survey, talent leaders and executives agree that the most critical, foundational skills required to survive in today's market are problem-solving and critical thinking (60%) and communication and collaboration (47%).

However, Skills Map by Indeed, an Indeed Hiring Lab analysis of more than 3,000 skills across U.S. job postings, reveals that the vast majority of active roles explicitly demand business operations skills. Yet that category barely registered on employers' radar in our survey, with just 17% selecting it as a top need. 

Part of this may come down to semantics. Employers often absorb business operations skills into broader role expectations without naming them outright, while job postings — written to attract candidates — make them explicit. In other words, what leaders internally assume as a given may never get communicated at all.

“From the job seeker’s side, it can feel like employers are grading them on their answer when they never get to see the real question they are responding to,” explains Berndt. “We call those ‘ghost skills’ — the real expectations that never make it into the posting but show up in the rejection.”

In our survey, employers offered the top unwritten rules that lead to candidate failure: high-level communication, interpersonal influence and the ability to translate complex information into clear narratives. Candidates who sense these ghost skills in job descriptions may overindex on technical jargon and keyword stuffing to survive the initial automated filters.

“If we’re looking for scenario-thinking, resilience and ambiguity tolerance but we never name those skills in the posting,” says M.K., “we’re asking candidates to win a game they don’t know they’re playing.”

Why some candidates may self-select out, while others game the process

When we look at how employers and job seekers view job requirements, the contrast is stark:

• 69% of employers always or often invite candidates to apply, even if they lack some skills listed in the job description.
• But just 45% of job seekers always/often apply if they don’t have some of the listed skills.

More than two-thirds of employers are willing to compromise, yet fewer than half of job seekers take that leap if they don’t meet all the requirements listed. That means a significant share of good talent is quietly walking away before you ever see their names.

If qualified candidates are ruling themselves out because of checklist anxiety, it isn’t wise to rely solely on inbound applications. AI-powered matching tools can help surface candidates whose transferable skills align with a role, even if their experience doesn’t map perfectly to a traditional job description.

‘Ghost skills’ are the real expectations that never make it into the posting but show up in the rejection.

— Matt Berndt, head of Indeed Job Search Academy

Meanwhile, the survey data shows that some job seekers may overinflate their qualifications to get past ATS filters that weren't designed to recognize stretch potential. In our survey, nearly 7 in 10 employers say candidates always or often mischaracterize or exaggerate their skills to progress in the hiring process. Yet, only 1 in 4 job seekers admits to doing this.

“As a talent leader, it’s easy to look at this data and complain about candidate integrity,” says M.K. “But through a lens of empathy, job seekers inflate their resumes because they don’t trust or understand the technology standing between them and a livelihood.”

Candidate trust in automated sourcing platforms

The data reveals a disconnect between how much employers and job seekers actually trust the systems now standing between candidates and opportunity.

• 58% of employers trust their current sourcing technology platforms to correctly interpret or infer adjacent candidate skills from a resume (for example, assuming that listing "MS Office" naturally implies proficiency in Word and Excel). Conversely, only 27% of job seekers share that trust.
• 46% of job seekers believe that their single biggest barrier to demonstrating actual skills is a system automatically rejecting them before a human being ever lays eyes on their applications.
• Meanwhile, 54% of employers say that their greatest challenge when assessing candidates’ skills is that resumes don’t accurately reflect actual skills — and 40% of job seekers agree.

“What this data tells me is that the trust gap in hiring hasn’t gone away — it’s just showing up in the latest technology,” says Berndt. “New tools can absolutely help employers be more efficient, but only if they’re built and used in a way that is transparent, fair and grounded in the understanding that people are more than a list of keywords.”

How to help solve your skills shortage in three steps

Berndt and M.K. point to three high-impact moves talent leaders can make right now to address the trust gap.

1. Redesign your job descriptions

Job seekers point to job deconstruction (26%) as the single most effective action employers can take to help them match skills to open roles.¹ This means simplifying a role into its essential tasks and core capabilities. Bloated, multilayered legacy job titles create application fatigue and scare away qualified talent.

💡Matt Berndt’s tip: “If you want better matches, start by stripping your job descriptions down to the essentials: What are the four to eight core capabilities someone must bring, and what are the problems they’ll wake up solving in this role? For an accurate job description, ask your top performers in the role to describe their tasks and the skills that are key to their success. Use their responses as the basis of your job description."

Go deeper → Skills-First Hiring: How to Turn Good Intentions into Real Action

2. Train hiring managers as translators

Our data reveals that nearly half of employers believe the hiring manager is primarily responsible for translating past experience into the required skill set. To equip them to do that job, move them away from resume-skimming and encourage behavioral interviews. Teach them how to ask about skill adjacencies and structural thinking.

💡Kyle M.K.’s tip: “Stay interviews and skip-level conversations are some of the best translation tools we have. They tell you in plain language what’s working, what isn’t and what employees actually need to stay. Most organizations underuse them.”

Go deeper → Diagnose Your Hiring Bottleneck: How to Turn Managers Into Data-Driven Talent Partners

3. Build trust through transparent platform sourcing

Intelligent matching platforms that infer skills from work experience can help bridge the trust gap between employers seeking efficiency and candidates who want to feel seen. Tools that actively map skill adjacencies can reassure job seekers that they are being evaluated on their capabilities, not just buzzwords they remembered to dump into a document. Indeed’s transparent matching algorithms help both your hiring team and the candidate understand why they are a match, taking the guesswork out of the process.

💡Matt Berndt’s tip: “Train hiring managers to listen for how someone thinks, not just what they’ve already done. Ask for stories that reveal how they handle ambiguity, synthesize information and recover from setbacks. Those are often the ‘ghost skills’ that separate an okay hire from a transformational one.”

Go deeper → From Hidden to Human: The Case for Radical Transparency Around AI in Hiring

Ultimately, though, deploying these strategies requires looking past the resume and confronting a deeper, more uncomfortable truth about modern recruitment.

“A lot of leaders point to a ‘skills shortage’ because that feels safer than admitting our own systems are confusing,” says M.K. “It’s easier to say the talent isn’t out there than to say our hiring model makes it hard for the right people to get in.”

Uncover more findings from Hiring Lab's research on Skills Map by Indeed.

¹Indeed U.S. Skills Census Survey, conducted in partnership with YouGov, April 2026. N = 1,012 job seekers and 504 employers.

Indeed provides this information as a courtesy to users of this site. Please note that we are not your recruiting or legal advisor, we are not responsible for the content of your job descriptions, and none of the information provided herein guarantees performance.
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