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Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs
225 Teever 113 8/26/2025, 4:27:51 PM cnbc.com ↗
The controls in the actual proposal are less reasonable: they create finable infractions for any claim in a job ad deemed "misleading" or "inaccurate" (findings of fact that requires a an expensive trial to solve) and prohibit "perpetual postings" or postings made 90 days in advance of hiring dates.
The controls might make it harder to post "ghost jobs" (though: firms posting "ghost jobs" simply to check boxes for outsourcing, offshoring, or visa issuance will have no trouble adhering to the letter of this proposal while evading its spirit), but they will also impact firms that don't do anything resembling "ghost job" hiring.
Firms working at their dead level best to be up front with candidates still produce steady feeds of candidates who feel misled or unfairly rejected. There are structural features of hiring that almost guarantee problems: for instance, the interval between making a selection decision about a candidate and actually onboarding them onto the team, during which any number of things can happen to scotch the deal. There's also a basic distributed systems problem of establishing a consensus state between hiring managers, HR teams, and large pools of candidates.
If you're going to go after "ghost job" posters, you should do something much more targeted to what those abusive firms are actually doing, and raise the stakes past $2500/infraction.
I don't understand the making of excuses for small businesses as though they are somehow morally better than large businesses.
Every business owner, regardless of the size of the business, wants free labor.
We want people to buy things, yet we have sales taxes.
We want people to work productive jobs and earn money, yet we have income taxes.
Last time I was job hunting I found that 80%+ of postings were either dupes or bogus. Very vague description of the job? I'm going to keep seeing it for a long time, clearly they are not actually filling the role. Very specific, odd set of requirements, they're going through the motions but they've already picked the person and the ad is designed to match only that person.
I think they're going about this backwards. Leave the ad up, but they are required to amend it with external hire/internal hire/H-1B when the position is filled. Let people see what has happened in the past. And all jobs must be associated with some entity and indicate how long that entity has existed.
https://jobs.now
So, I convert my resume into the job description that would be posted. Thinking it will get 100% hit rate. Lo and behold, someone else took that job description and basically converted it into their resume. And got a higher ATS score!
- Recurrent and yearlong ad for the same position, with numerous applicants (sometimes in the hundreds, if not thousands). This is probably the poster child of the ghost job ad.
- Unrealistic compensation for required skills, guaranteed to weed out the junior (skill issue) and the senior (comp issue). This could also signal that the company is looking to hire from offshore markets.
- Plain unrealistic skill requirements. Even companies that hire "full-stack" know that there's a practical limit, beyond which it's probably better to spread out responsibilities, if we want any kind of productivity gain. Being unreasonably greedy about skills might be a sign that the poster wants a cop out when candidates actually turn up. "Yeah, he was capable of writing his own OS kernel as we asked, but his CSS was shit".
If endeavors like the present proposal prove inept, there are enough tools to supplement posted job ads with metrics meant to easily signal to job seekers and investors something useful about the companies posting them, with a nice and accessible UI.
The other day there was an article about streaming services driving viewers back to piracy due to their shenanigans and the resulting subpar user experience. If LinkedIn and friends continue to pretend that it's technologically beyond them to solve ghost job posting on their own network, eventually it will be addressed somewhere else.
From my experience the big issue is hiring managers who either 1) are very casual about hiring (i.e. they're willing to wait 6 months and waste everyone's time), or 2) people who like the idea of hiring but keep changing what they want to hire for (like this month we're having issues with testing, so we want a test engineer, but next month we're having issues with embedded software, so we need a new embedded engineer.
I really don't think there are bands of hiring managers posting fake job ads to make their company look more impressive, I think it's just bands of hiring managers who want a senior engineer with direct experience for <140k
Job hunting is a market and the government should tryu to make every market as efficient as possible. Imagine if you went to any other store and 17% of the items you bought were just junk and didn't work.
(Although it's not the approach I would take if I was a manager,) I do think there's merit in the approach. It was a real opening that could be filled, just not one that they were actively seeking people for. (IE, if someone applied, the resume would be reviewed.)
This was the 1980s or 1990s, though, so I doubt it was SPAMMed with applicants like what happens today, though.
I recently saw a project that spammed online job postings with AI slop resumes. This is great since... if your posting is slop and you don't intend to hire, you should have your inbox filled with slop. It only makes sense.
And you're missing the recruiters who are simply gathering resumes.
And the scammers looking to sell you training.
Generally when I'm looking at a company's financials more employees means less profitable.
> · There is no intent to fill the role
> · It’s not currently funded
> · It’s posted to collect résumés, test the market, or boost visibility
> · It’s recycled indefinitely without an actual opening
https://www.truthinjobads.org/faq
Even if this gets passed, it's probably unenforceable.
Then it would be possible to actually identify suspicious behaviour, and you could publish stats about companies' hiring practices so candidates can avoid them etc.
1) Person believes company is posting fake job listings and notes a few as evidence.
2) Person submits this to some government form similar to an FCC complaint form.
3) Government contacts the company to investigate or whatever.
The alternative could be like a $2000 fine per listing violation. To make it worthwhile to enforce, offer half the fine as a tax credit that can be claimed anonymously after an investigation.
I imagine most companies just want followers on LinkedIn.
But a phone number is expected here where I live (Spain). Few companies seem to respond via email (some do, but it's rare). Everyone just wants you to give them your phone number so, if they decide to call you, they will do a surprise call a few weeks after you applied, at the most inconvenient moment, with no advance notice of any kind.
And since first impressions are important, not being available during that inconveniently-timed surprise screening call is probably a negative point at least on a subconscious level.
A rule for life. It’s a spam machine, and nothing more as far as I’m concerned.
If you aren't going to shutdown offshoring and the importing of labor through the abuse of things like the H1B program, you aren't going to accomplish much in terms of fixing how the average American worker is treated.
(Joke)
Let me guess: Companies will start immediately rejecting candidates after they submit an application, and after every interview. Then, when they want to move forward they will re-invite a candidate.
Pay transparency law supporters have argued successfully that there is a compelling interest in closing gender and racial wage gaps and that salary range information can be mandated in job listings for that purpose. What's the compelling interest in this case that allows the government to control speech?
"Were you going to hire someone for this role?" "Yes." "Case dismissed."
You could also argue there is loss to other companies listing real postings, as those fake ones add noise and people might miss their posting and not apply, causing them delays in filling their position.
Plus, if the ghost jobs are to appear to be growing to investors, or to satisfy regulators to justify internal positions or foreign hiring, now there is harm to investors or false compliance to regulations.
And I'd also say, the misrepresentation of demand, might lead people to pursue education in some careers and upskill thinking there is a lot of jobs for those skills, that would be a pretty hefty financial loss if they were mislead.
if you hire rarely, same thing, if you can demonstrate that it takes a long time to find the right candidate. or, you could be requested to pause posts.
to handle a possible confusion about multiple listings, each job could have some kind of ID, in any case you wouldn't have multiple job posts in the same listing.
Umm, no? There are plenty of times when I've had roles posted that we interviewed candidates who met the written requirements (e.g., degrees, years of experience, etc) but did not pass our interview loops. It's very hard to prove a negative.
Same as how false price advertising, or I don't know, say you kept calling customer support but never had any problems could start to look like abuse.
Or squatting a business parking lot, you can always say, I eventually might need something from the store and intend to buy from it. I think they'd still have you towed and your argument would fail.
The org chart is dynamic and is affected constantly by changing priority, changing budgets, promotions and departures, and the talent you're attracting. You can't effectively staff at scale under a rule that 1 job listing = 1 box in an org chart. Or at least I've not seen it done - I'd appreciate counter examples :-)
what does that mean? if you are hiring you describe the qualifications that you are looking for. if you have a range of qualifications, you say so. if it is not a specific job, then don't describe it as such. i'd happily apply to a listing that doesn't advertise a specific role as long as my qualifications match.
if candidates come to the wrong conclusion, then maybe the job description was not clear about that.
i can see the problem with a broad listing that could be a match for anyone from junior and up, but we are talking about changing laws, so this could be taken into account.
Of course, I'm assuming companies with actual positions to fill would gain an advantage here, but the whole recruiting industry is so broken, I'm not sure.
Either way, the true ghost listings - positions that are box-ticker listings for internal candidates or H1Bs are pretty awful.
I appreciate your optimism regarding the nature of these postings, but I've seen at multiple companies them doing exactly what they describe in the article - fake job postings to improve their appearance to investors, fake job postings to justify H1B positions, etc. Every time I was at a company that got bought by private equity, the former appeared in huge numbers. As soon as we got acquired, in preparation for downsizing, the latter appeared in huge numbers. So you'll forgive me if "managing job hard :(" doesn't land for those of us who are applying for those jobs that don't exist.
Free speech is about expressing opinion and fact. It doesn't grant you the right to lie and deceive.
Fraud or specifically false advertisement is not protected by the First Amendment. 15 USC 52 and ff.
> What's the compelling interest in this case that allows the government to control speech?
Ghost job postings negatively impact interstate commerce.
Sure, people wasting time applying to ghost jobs has a societal and economic cost, but what is the impact of government regulation of freely advertising job postings?
How does that stack up against the compliance cost of ensuring all of these regulations are being met so the company aren't fined, and the loss of legitimate postings to all of the places they would normally be posted to due to those regulatory cost?
The government has no business to be restricting speech in this manner.
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Companies are going to play shell games with the titles, responsibilities, and org structure just enough. There might also be 1st Amendment issues, too. The required reporting numbers will be hollow. The end result will be that it will be on the books, but the government won't have any enforceable actions for years.
And when you do see action, it will drag on for years. The feds go after big fish like Microsoft, which will drag it out. Meanwhile, thousands of your Series B-sized companies that are the biggest culprits, will fly under the radar.
I think you're going to see a few states do pass laws like this. The enforcement question will still be there, but it will be on a smaller scale. Results will be varied. Meanwhile, we need to keep naming and shaming companies and recruiters who do this.
Great idea in theory, tough in practice.
Not saying that will happen with ghost jobs, but it's not a given things will improve.
Also, it seems that you're making a parallel case that it makes no difference to the fentanyl market that there is a law against fentanyl, which makes me think that you apply the Law of Averages to every change that you hear anyone suggest.
e.g. if you make a law against fentanyl, some people will stop selling fentanyl, while other people will be more attracted to selling an illegal drug, therefore a law against fentanyl will have no effect on fentanyl use or sales.
The Law of Averages is not real.
I haven't even speculated whether regulation against ghost jobs would be effective. The thing about the 1A and law of averages is totally out of left field and seem like you're taking up issues with some other comment.
Especially remote jobs.
So the enforcement I think would be if you post listings without those details, you get fined.
How you'd prove if people added false details I don't know, but I think the idea is at least by giving more info on the listing it might deter some ghost listings or enable the applicant to determine if the listing seems legit.
It's a "shit or get off the pot" type deal: the easiest solution to the problem is to just find an acceptable applicant and hire them.
shades of Sinofsky's description of federal HR reporting
https://x.com/stevesi/status/1953920412506894347
I'm not mad it's happening, I'm mad it's taken this long to do.
Ghost jobs help companies do one important thing: hire the person they already selected and want in the position but have to go through the "interview" process to make things look "transparent." They post the job, "interview" some folks, included their preferred candidate, then miraculously "select" their preferred candidate over everyone else.
I suggest people just take a credibility approach. As an example, I no longer bother with HN's "Who's hiring", everything there is bullshit.
Besides, job sites are just social media, their purpose is not to inform, it is to create eyeballs to advertisers. You should discard them, like you should also cancel Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp.