The controls summarized in the CNBC piece seem reasonable, or, if not that, then at least not all that onerous.
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.
LorenPechtel · 1h ago
Only 17%??
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.
DebtDeflation · 6m ago
It is absolutely 80%+. The majority of the time, it is a company looking to sponsor an H1B for a role or they have an H1B in the role who they want to sponsor for PERM status (Green Card) and the law requires them to post the job to prove there are no Americans available. The next most common reason is they have identified an internal candidate for the role but corporate policy requires all jobs to be posted externally to show they are looking for the best person. The next most common reason is HR conducting market research on compensation. In all cases, there is no intent to actually fill the role with an external hire.
nickff · 1h ago
Those 'one specific person' ads are usually there to comply with an internal requirement or external regulation/law, so they wouldn't be able to say that it was filled, because that would be an admission that the whole process was a sham.
LorenPechtel · 1h ago
It would be filled, they would be required to say so. Yes, it's going to look bad, that's the point.
nickff · 1h ago
The requirement which is driving the posting is a requirement that they search for candidates other than the one specific person they have in mind. If they post it with 'already filled' in the posting, they would not be complying with the requirement. The requirement is usually driven by a law or some policy created outside the hiring process for that position, so the hiring manager(s) are not permitted to do what you suggest.
yardie · 41m ago
I was employed as a contractor for a state agency many years ago. When it was time to convert to permanent full-time they had to advertise my job on the job boards because of some law. I also had to apply to my job in the same fashion. Not a promotion or pay raise was profered, just a straightforward contractor to FTE process. And I almost didn't get it.
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!
a_cardboard_box · 45m ago
You seem to misunderstand the proposal. The proposal is that after they have done everything that is already legally required (advertise an open position for some amount of time etc), then they must amend the posting to include that the position is filled by an internal/external/H-1B hire. There is still a period of time when the position is advertised as open.
em-bee · 59m ago
the suggestion is to change the law.
dmurray · 1h ago
Why? They'd "find" the one specific person, and then report the job was filled by that person, as an internal hire if that was the case.
nateglims · 1h ago
I suspect they mean it's for sponsoring a green card for an existing employee.
mschuster91 · 55m ago
At large companies, this kind of stuff is the norm even for internal transfers. They got all sorts of whack policies in place, department leads try to work around the red tape and make very very VERY specific job postings that only the actually desired candidate can fill.
guywithahat · 1h ago
If the number is only 17%, I'm not sure we need to ban them.
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
conscion · 38m ago
> If the number is only 17%, I'm not sure we need to ban them.
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.
LorenPechtel · 1h ago
I do agree it's not about making the company look better, but that doesn't mean there isn't a problem.
And you're missing the recruiters who are simply gathering resumes.
And the scammers looking to sell you training.
nullc · 23m ago
It may be 17% overall, but distributed in such a way that its 95% of the jobs you are applying for -- because some industries or positions do it much more often.
apercu · 37m ago
If I wanted to game my stock price and mislead my competition, a bunch of highly specific (and fraudulent) job postings on my website (in combination with other investor-adjacent reporting) would be a great low cost start.
Scubabear68 · 56m ago
Somewhat related, I learned to be very cautious about LinkedIn and their job postings. I hit a couple that looked like regular companies and started to apply, but they were really fake job postings just go harvest your information. Even when you abort the process, it's too late. They take your info and put you on a zillion job sites automatically with endless email spam.
quectophoton · 11m ago
I don't get spam emails, but I get spam phone calls. Sometimes it happened suspiciously a few minutes before a call that's actually related to the position I applied for.
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.
lostlogin · 43m ago
> I learned to be very cautious about LinkedIn
A rule for life. It’s a spam machine, and nothing more as far as I’m concerned.
gosub100 · 26m ago
I still won't forgive them for the incident circa 2012 where they were sending out emails from your email account to everyone in your address book or recent contacts list in your own voice (!!) saying "hi $name, I joined linked in come network with me!".
tietjens · 17m ago
Vivid memories of this happening to me and many I knew. Totally insane and horrible. Wonder who had the brilliant idea.
carefulfungi · 1h ago
This is explictly restricting speech (restricting the right to advertise for labor) and would have to meet a high first amendment bar in the US.
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?
treyd · 33m ago
How is this actually restricting speech? It's not restricting advertisements for labor, it's restricting intentional lies made to misdirect. That's called fraud.
terminalshort · 26m ago
No it isn't. Fraud requires damages. Lying is legal. Maybe you could claim damages in the amount of time it takes to apply for the fake job, but it's not really worth it because it wouldn't be worth more than a few bucks.
didibus · 16m ago
The harm adds up, time to prepare and apply, possible time and effort and travel expense wasted if an interview was also conducted. You could say financially it's not a lot to one person, but if 100 people got deceived by the same listing? If 20% of all job listing are like that, maybe 2 million people got deceived in aggregate, now the financial harm total adds up to a lot more. And individually, to an unemployed person, even if the total loss is small, the percentage loss is higher as they likely have no revenue.
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.
em-bee · 56m ago
advertising for jobs that aren't actually available is fraud or deception?
carefulfungi · 51m ago
If you advertise a job and fail to find a qualified candidate, and then don't fill that role, is that fraud? If you advertise for talent constantly, interview regularly, and hire rarely (but hire), is that fraud? If you have a single role to fill and advertise it multiple times in multiple states as multiple listings because that's how job posting forums work, is that fraud?
em-bee · 28m ago
if you fail to find a candidate then you will easily be able to demonstrate that the candidate suing you for violating the law was not qualified and therefore has no reason to sue.
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.
didibus · 44m ago
I think it can be argued that some of those are.
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.
carefulfungi · 12m ago
I've conducted probably 700+ interviews as a hiring manager. A lot of candidates I've spoken to assume job listing advertisements are an org chart. In reality, job listings (at scaling companies especially) are a lead generation tool to attract desired talent into a hiring pipeline.
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 :-)
miladyincontrol · 46m ago
They are available, just not for you, or oft for anyone inside the country.
However proving intent when they will find any and all excuses to pass on local talent is a difficult measure to ascertain beyond a reasonable doubt.
TimorousBestie · 36m ago
> This is explictly restricting speech (restricting the right to advertise for labor) and would have to meet a high first amendment bar in the US.
Fraud and 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?
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.
gosub100 · 25m ago
Are corporations given the right to free speech?
behnamoh · 34m ago
unfortunately this happens in academia too. last year was brutal for most PhDs in business schools because the number of positions dropped significantly compared to the year before, and the ones that were "on the market" weren't all legit. there were several top tier schools that did the first-round interviews or even flyout seminars only to test the waters, with no intention of hiring. the fact that universities and professors thought it was okay to waste candidates' time was in itself telling about the culture in those schools.
bitwize · 59m ago
Can we get regulators to do something about devilcorp postings too?
snapetom · 1h ago
This is going to be very hard to enforce on a Federal level, let alone pass.
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.
didibus · 4m ago
The proposal I think is simply to force listings to have more details like hire and start date, if it's for a backfill, if it gives priority to internal hires, etc.
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.
toomuchtodo · 1h ago
All regulation is hard to enforce. Have to start somewhere, and then you keep pulling the ratchet via policy.
terminalshort · 24m ago
Which is why it should not be used to prevent minor annoyances like wasting a few minutes applying for a job that isn't there.
toomuchtodo · 11m ago
This is not a minor annoyance, this consumes time and resources both for candidates at scale and diminishes the integrity of data from a labor economics perspective ("open jobs"). It is arguably fraud and should be prosecuted as such (and I'm fairly confident this case can be made to an electorate who isn't going to shrug off even more corporate malfeasance in a softening labor market).
mothballed · 1h ago
If you create regulation you can't effectively enforce it can actually make things worse. This is why you can buy fentanyl on every corner, but now the people supplying it have small nation-state tier armies of guys in hiluxes with machine guns and truck mounted .50 cal anti-armor guns.
Not saying that will happen with ghost jobs, but it's not a given things will improve.
pessimizer · 54m ago
I have absolutely no idea why you think this regulation would be any harder to implement than any other regulation other than a hand-wavy brief first sentence in your first comment. I have no idea what sort of juggling of job titles you're predicting that will deceive anyone for more than 10 seconds. I have no idea what 1st amendment issue you see in advertising for an employment contract that isn't backed by employment; if you advertise asthma medicine that doesn't have any effect on asthma, people understand that it's fraud.
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.
mothballed · 45m ago
I haven't argued a single thing in the straw man you've attacked.
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.
briffle · 1h ago
In theory, they can be done at the state level. I know its not perefect, but because of a few states jobs laws, I almost always see salary ranges and averages now on job postings.
Especially remote jobs.
OkayPhysicist · 53m ago
The easy way to enforce this would be to leave it individuals. Applied to a job and heard nothing back? Sue. You'd have to pretty tightly define the law, such that it could be simply applied, but I could imagine all sorts of concrete rules which would significantly improve the status quo. Something like "Public job postings may be up for no more than 60 days for a given position, interview process must last no more than 30 days beyond that. By the end of the subsequent 90 day window, the company must either hire at least one applicant and let the others know they didn't make the cut, or demonstrate that they received zero acceptable applicants by providing concrete reasons for rejection to all applicants.
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.
adolph · 46m ago
> Companies are going to play shell games
shades of Sinofsky's description of federal HR reporting
In the end this is like banning fake news, you just can't.
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.
smccabe0 · 17m ago
So now that another admin is in power, it's useful to have accurate numbers. But during the last several administrations, job posting numbers were used to backstop failing economic activity, especially post covid.
I'm not mad it's happening, I'm mad it's taken this long to do.
didibus · 9m ago
I don't think it's related. This proposal if I understood hasn't reached any political sphere, it's just a grassroots effort.
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.
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.
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!
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.
And you're missing the recruiters who are simply gathering resumes.
And the scammers looking to sell you training.
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.
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?
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.
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 :-)
Fraud and 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I'm not mad it's happening, I'm mad it's taken this long to do.