In the same way that credit card companies are required to tell you the exact reasons your score has changed, companies should be required to give at least any sort of notice of rejection. Something as simple as: we have proceeded with another candidate (if and only if the role was actually filled). I know this opens up a lot of questions about enforcement and employer discrimination, but something has to be done.
Every employer would send "We have decided not to continue with your application" once your entry in the database reaches the legally-mandated timeout period.
The part you wouldn't like is the unintended consequences: Every company would be forced to use an ATS to manage applicants, and all hiring would have to be pushed through the ATS. The ATS would have some default timeout where candidates who aren't hired get the e-mail to comply with the law. Nothing is gained because you're not getting real information, but now every company must force you to apply through an ATS portal to make sure every e-mail receives that alert.
I know it's frustrating, but stacking laws like this doesn't get useful information out of companies but it does force the application process to revolve around demonstrating compliance with the regulations.
Doubtful you would still feel that way if it became the legally mandated norm. The reason ghosting is offensive is it feels so disrespectful and impersonal. How is some bland automated message triggered by a cron job any better? The automated message doesn't respect or care about you, no person would have put any thought into it. It would be entirely automated.
If that makes you feel better it is suggestive of a deeper problem. Getting ghosted is part of life. At least its an authentic representation that you aren't worth someone's time. It seems more spontaneous, less premeditated. That's life. You just have to learn to get over it.
The primary negative aspect of Ghost jobs (from the perspective of job applicants) is not simply that it "feels bad" but that it floods the usual channels of seeking work with garbage data.
Assuming a world where there is a set of employers that would actually like to hire someone and a set of workers who are desiring employment, the set of listings that are not seeking to hire (or are only floating a job listing in perpetuity on the off-chance that some overqualified sap will take up their offer for less than they would expect in the market) encourage bad behavior from the other two parties.
It becomes substantially more difficult to parse through a pile of job listings to find what is a real (or realistic) listing and encourage the "shotgun approach" for applicants.
The flood of competing fake listings and the resultant tidal wave of shotgunned-resumes requires employers to spend more time cross-posting openings to reach real applicants and sorting through a greater number of low-effort bad-fit applications
Mild legislation that requires expected hiring dates and requires employers to say if they are just collecting resumes or face fines does not totally fix the issue but it is a welcome change in the right direction.
> The reason ghosting is offensive is it feels so disrespectful and impersonal.
That part is annoying, but the open-ended nature of it is a true problem. Having a deadline on a thumbs up/down decision at least lets you move on with your life.
My sister once applied for her dream job and didn't hear anything back for 6 months. In the mean time, she'd applied for another job, been accepted, signed all the paperwork, and worked out the notice on her old job. A week before she was due to start, the dream job contacted her to offer the job.
She decided that it wasn't fair to leave the company she'd already accepted a job with in the lurch by pulling out so late in the process. Many people wouldn't have done that, and just switched jobs.
It's definitely an ethical dilemma either way, but in this case when the company hadn't given her any indication whatsoever that she was still being considered (most likely somebody else pulled out and she was their backup option), I think she made the right choice. Better to be a company's first choice than their backup choice.
Getting a rejection message, even an automated one, removes ambiguity. You're no longer wondering if you missed a call or an email went to spam, you have it right there in writing.
In college, I interviewed with two different local companies that had internships that would continue as part-time positions during the year. Both interviews went well and I felt that the interaction was positive overall. I was confident that I would at least have a good shot at each position after the interview. Both companies ghosted me.
For someone just developing their career and who was excited to work with actual professional companies (instead of the minimum-wage jobs offered to most students), that was kind of a big deal. Looking back, I'm pretty sure that's what really instilled a lot of the cynicism toward interviews I carried even after getting an internship and graduating into a full-time sysadmin position. I honestly got lucky getting the position I did, and I think without that success my cynical view would have spiraled downward.
> Getting ghosted is part of life.
The argument is that it shouldn't be. Responses like yours when people express hope that things can change is just digging your feet in because you think that other people have to deal with the same hardships you did. Everyone acknowledges that getting ghosted sucks, so maybe having a bit of empathy and sending something, even an automated message, should be encouraged more.
It's not like job searches are the only context where you can get ghosted. It happens often enough in friendships, social activities, finding romantic partners, etc.
The more and more rude interactions like ghosting we have, the less human we become. Relationships become transactional instead of meaningful. On the other hand, talking to people as humans and leading with your humanity first makes you a better human.
I didn't want to bring up ghosting in other contexts because the conversation has been more focused around the job market. The idea that everyone hates getting ghosted even if they do it themselves is one I picked up from articles about dating, so there is still shared relevance.
The main relevant difference between the former and all of the latter is that we're generally fine with regulating the labor market, but (liberals at least) are generally much less willing to regulate the interpersonal relationships market.
(The other relevant difference is that the labor market involves a significant unilateral power imbalance between the employer class and the employee class, which is the biggest contributing factor which leads to the above difference)
An automated message would be perfectly fine, since it would still allow me to cross off that application. The people behind the message are of little import. We are unlikely to have any further interactions anyway
At least this would give you the leverage of seeing that the role is or is not still posted. It would give you a job to do as a candidate in enforcing honesty and seeing that the company wasn't stringing others along with fake postings to create the impression of growth. I would much prefer this to a "no consequences" system for people actively wasting my time.
the reason ghosting is offensive is that it keeps you waiting to hear back, with the probability you have been ghosted gradually increasing over time, rather than just letting you close that mental channel.
Would it though? Thanks to CA Prop 65 every place I go has a warning that I'll get cancer if I take one more step. If I'm walking into a nuclear waste storage facility I'll never know because of warning fatigue.
A sensibly written law could close loopholes like the one you described.
I'm not sure an ATS would be required either. Simply having a law that requires a response when inquired about the status of an application after a certain amount of time would suffice.
I was ghosted by a Fortune 500 company after making it to the final round of an interview recently. It took me weeks of sending emails to get them to tell me they didn't want to hire me.
This seems pretty accurate to me. But like other commenters, the psychological closure of any message at all is better than nothing.
Also, what company nowadays doesn’t use an ATS? I’ve seen a few startups that take applications via email or discord but those are few and far between. Most are using Workday/Indeed/Linkedin or what have you.
> I know it's frustrating, but stacking laws like this doesn't get useful information out of companies but it does force the application process to revolve around demonstrating compliance with the regulations.
Eh, that's like saying taxing them is pointless because they'll just spend more on accountants to find loopholes. It's only true if you have the political will to pass the laws but not enough to fund the teeth needed to enforce them. Gather reports of boilerplate rejections, launch investigations, drag companies to discovery to find their deliberate efforts to end-run the spirit of the law, extract fines sufficient to fund investigations into the next 10 companies.
Exactly. I hate this mentality: "We can't possibly regulate companies, because they are so clever and they'll find loopholes and work around any law we make!" So write better laws! Add provisions for loopholes you anticipate. Add wording to remove ambiguity that the company will try to use to weasel their way out. Analyze the ways companies already get around laws and shore them up with a patch. Do something!
We've tried one thing, and it didn't work so we're all out of ideas! - The USA when it comes to regulating companies.
There are a lot of regulations I would like to get rid of because they are already being evaded, or otherwise have bad second order consequences; and those second-order consequences are themselves an annoying part of the fabric of daily life that I'm familiar with.
There are definitely bad regulations. Sometimes the right answer is to get rid of them, but only if you can evaluate why they were put in place, what they were meant to stop/correct, and why/how they failed, then determine that it would be better to remove them than fix them. If you have a shitty module in your codebase it can be tempting to remove it, but if you need the feature it's meant to provide then removal isn't the right framing, or is only the right solution if you have a better design to replace it with.
You have to remember that profit-motivated companies are completely amoral actors that have and will hire militias to manage slave workers or dump known-poisonous waste into people's drinking water or spend unfathomable amounts on convincing hundreds of millions of people that climate change is a hoax if it's the most self-enriching course of action. They will literally cause extinction if not regulated.
> We've tried one thing, and it didn't work so we're all out of ideas!
(I'm sure you're fully aware of this, but just to add on to what you're saying that I agree with...)
This is all an intentional messaging strategy for kicking the can down the road indefinitely done by people who stand to lose if things are changed for the better of the masses.
Same exact strategy is used (often by the same people) to dismiss the idea of more fair taxation and lots of other things we supposedly can't ever make any progress on because our first attempt to address an obvious problem might not be perfect.
> I hate this mentality: "We can't possibly regulate companies, because they are so clever and they'll find loopholes and work around any law we make!" So write better laws! Add provisions for loopholes you anticipate. Add wording to remove ambiguity that the company will try to use to weasel their way out.
Unfortunately, that is exactly how you end up with legalese and laws that are hard for normal people to understand: because bad-faith actors will invent ambiguity, litigate definitions, and argue over the exact meaning of every word.
It's like trying to tell a child "No jumping on the bed!" and they keep doing it while insisting they're not jumping, they're hopping, and then go into a diatribe about the difference between jumping and hopping until you say something like "Do not jump, hop, bounce, spring, leap, vault, stomp, rebound, or otherwise employ your feet, legs, knees, or body weight to produce repeated or excessive vertical motion upon, across, or within the boundaries of the bed."
And then they remove the mattress from the bed, put it on the floor, and start jumping on it, and say that wasn't against the rules because you only specified the bed, and declare that a mattress on its own does not constitute a bed.
That's right. We have to assume that companies are always going to do whatever they can to get around regulation. The regulatory system needs to think of companies as nimble attackers in its threat model, and the system needs to be capable of responding with the same nimbleness.
> The ATS would have some default timeout where candidates who aren't hired get the e-mail to comply with the law.
The sibling concept of this already exists in Europe with GDPR. Companies have to ask you to keep your data (resume, application, etc) beyond a certain timeout, otherwise they must delete it. Because of this, almost everyone uses a talent system.
It seems to work fine? I appreciate knowing they're going to nuke my info, or keep it.
Or just allow what happens in the EU. Every time I've applied for a job and been rejected, I put through a GDPR request and find out the reasons I was rejected.
Once they take in your job application, they're processing your data. You've then got a right, wherever you're from, to see what information they hold on you. That includes interview feedback, test scores and so on.
This does apply to third party background checks, and backdoor references in particular are just one giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Eightfold AI is getting sued right now for acting as a credit reporting agency -- not just by scoring people, but by gathering data on them in the first place for the sake of reporting to employers.
If you ask a third party business to do run a background check, there are a bunch of responsibilities that triggers -- a right to view what's in the report, a right to know if it's being used against you, a right to dispute what's in it, and even to consent to it being pulled in the first place.
But if some recruiter or hiring manager goes directly to your former or current boss, behind your back, this is somehow not even taken seriously as a problem.
Companies have been using data brokers to get info on potential employees for ages in violation of the law. The law has almost zero enforcement and when something is done nobody does to prison. It's almost always just the government wanting a cut of the action. For example:
Prison is a limitation of freedom of movement. The equivalent for a company should be the limiting of movement of shares (no shares bought/sold/traded) for the duration of an imposed sentence. Since corporations are people and all, there needs to be an equivalent punishment.
They literally hire someone to be the head of the company, and pay them obscene amounts to set the company culture and policies but somehow they mostly avoid being responsible for bad company behaviour.
Prison for illegal behaviour should be applied to the C suite.
That just leads to the classic scheme of hiring a scrapegoat CEO, while in reality the company is being run by a person who technically holds a lesser title.
Unless that percentage was over 100% of the profit they'd still be making money from doing illegal things and the fines just become a cost of doing business.
Going that route instead of fines it should be a percentage of ownership made public. That:
1. Dilutes that shares, punishing the people who can effect the most change (shareholders)
2. Puts the government on the inside. With ownership, the government can then demand access/knowledge that they can't from a purely private company. And no company is going to want to deal with that headache if they don't have to.
Wait... are you saying that talking about an ex-colleague with anyone (without filing a bunch of paperwork or something) is a "giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act"?
Yes. But to be clear, since "anyone" is vague: I specifically mean talking to hiring teams, about ex-colleagues who haven't given them permission to ask around in the first place.
Because the Fair Credit Reporting Act governs background checks. It isn't limited to money, or to scoring -- it covers any third party that reports data about you, for the sake of determining if you're eligible for anything from a loan to an apartment to a job. The language of it is broad enough that it doesn't just cover your spending and payment habits, but extends to your general habits, criminal history, personal character, and "mode of living."
I'm saying the behavior normalized by recruiters is a giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Because when they proactively reach out to random individuals you worked with, to ask you for your views on them as a reference, without your consent, that is an exploit. It is a workaround. It is skirting the actual intentions of the thing, because its scope is limited to "agencies" -- which, no matter how broad that term might be, still ultimately means third party data collectors.
If something your boss said about you came up on a background check, you would have a right to know about it. But if someone on a hiring team goes behind your back to that same boss, for those same comments, that is widely accepted as fine and normal.
Part of the law was broad. Part of the law was narrow. How did you establish the broad part was intended broad and the narrow part was not intended narrow?
I mean, I'm more than willing to take the reductive approach and just say that the purpose of a system is what it does.
But if we assume that it wasn't designed maliciously, we can look at this through another lens: FICO already existed at the time, so banks in particular would simply have no reason to bother calling around to all of your former creditors in the first place.
They would also probably need a third party agency just to find your former creditors.
If you're making hiring decisions based on someone else's statements about the applicant, that someone's statements, if false, are pretty much the definition of defamation in the US.
It's perfectly just that the applicant get to know if the reason they didn't get a job is because their bitter former boss defamed them.
I mean, agreed. I'd go even further and say the whole "Eligible for rehire?" question is an effort to backdoor this into employment verification. Employment verification should be "First date of employment? Last date of employment? Thank you."
"Are they eligible for rehire?" is the nudge nudge wink wink around "well, most of you have policies around providing formal references about performance, so here's one way we can try to gauge".
You’re conflating being ghosted with ghost jobs, which are positions that are posted but are never intended to be filled (usually cited as for data collection purposes). These waste people’s precious time while they apply for jobs.
I'd support it at the federal level. It's cruel towards people looking for work, and it costs them real time at a point in their lives when time is such a critical factor.
Don't even start me on what I think is the next big issue, "ghost application harvesting":
I think Wellfound (f/k/a AngelList) is doing this.
The jobs advertised on there are real...
I'd been on the job market four months. Every day I did the rounds: Levels, Wellfound, YC/jobs, Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn.
It is what it is, as a crappy jobs market.
Wellfound? I didn't ever hear from anything from their job ads.
And I'm pretty certain that whatever Wellfound/AngelList was, it has become a company that just markets resume writing services, resume review services, all sorts of other services that draw in your money somehow.
Why do I say that?
120+ applications on Wellfound since then. Crickets. Absolutely nothing.
One day I got an email, "Your profile has been viewed!". Weird, never seen an email like that from Wellfound. Indeed, "You have 1 profile view in the last 90 days".
Huh. 120+ applications, 120+ times me answering filling out Wellfound's content questions on "why you would be a good fit for this role", "tell us about x and y and z", no interviews, no contact, only ONE company has ever even viewed my profile (and for what it's worth, it's not a company that has any positions open).
Well, maybe my answers suck, you say. Maybe my resume isn't as impressive as I think it is.
But similar answers and the same resume get me fairly steady hits on every other site I mentioned, I've got to multiple final rounds, I've been explicitly told I was hirable, I was just the number two, I was "in the top three".
And to be clear, many of the companies I see on WF are advertising on other sites too.
My suspicion? WF DOES take job listings, but they also harvest them from other sites - the job is real, but there's no-one from the employer reviewing the applications to their "phantom" job at Wellfound... and meanwhile all people like me are doing are providing content for WF to harvest and train models for their real business model: AI-driven resume writing and review service and other products.
Totally agree. I actually got a job off of AngelList back in the day, when I was fairly junior. Was getting messages from hiring managers, founders, and in-house recruiters almost daily. 5 years later, I updated my profile with a much more legit background than before, messaged a few places - it's been 100% crickets.
Calculate the aggregate amount of time candidates spent on applying the ghost job and use the job's purported rate of pay to calculate the amount of money the company stole from the public. Was it enough to be felony theft? The person posting, or whoever instructed it to be posted, gets charged the same as if they stole that amount from a till. Instant end of ghost job postings as most wouldn't even try to find the loopholes and edge cases when prison is a risk for getting a workaround wrong.
It's cruel to have people spend time and energy applying for a job that doesn't actually exist and they have no chance of being hired for, despite their qualifications.
If you make Ghost Jobs illegal the whole thing will still be happening, it will just be driven underground to unlicenced 'haunted houses' which are less safe for the workers and less safe for the patrons. Its much better to keep this sort of thing legal and have licensed haunted houses where its easier for authorities to keep a check on the unwelfare of the ghosts and make sure organised underworld groups are not moving in and taking protection money or soul dealing.
I don't even know what I applied to that's a ghost and what isn't. Maybe I'm completely clueless, but there's no difference: recruiters ghost, sometimes companies ghost and sometimes they reply, sometimes you get an F U letter, you're not good enough, sometimes not.
How did people even find out ghost jobs existed? I feel like the swindle must not be new.
I save all the jobs I apply to, so it's fairly easy to check/compare and I found plenty of cases where job ads get reposted after some time.
In one instance, I applied for a role in December '25, got a (boilerplate) rejection email a couple of days later (although my profile directly matched the job requirements and I had previous experience working in that specific field), job ad goes offline and re-appeared 3 months later - exact same time and job description.
That's not a ghost job. That sounds like they picked some resumes and rejected the rest and hired someone, and then three months later they either needed another person to also do the same job, or it didn't work out with the original hire so they opened the hiring back up.
Some companies don't know what they want and there's internal confusion. I've observed this first-hand. They'll release recs and shut them down a few weeks later, confusing HR (or HR confuses everyone), maybe re-open. It's annoying but more disorganized behavior than fake jobs.
Sorry, but why is that a problem? If they didn't find someone, they closed the posting, then reopened it later, what is the issue?
Or, as in some cases, perhaps they did find someone? I've been at companies where we hired many engineers sequentially over time using the same job description. Should we just have arbitrarily changed the JD?
No, but unique IDs for postings could help in that situation. If you want to hire, say, 10 engineers, you have 10 separate job postings with their own unique ID, they get taken down as each position gets filled.
Gives candidates visibility into how many positions the company is hiring (am I competing against 1,000 for 1 position or for 10 positions?), and clear visibility that hiring is happening and how many roles are left to fill.
> If they didn't find someone, they closed the posting, then reopened it later, what is the issue?
Closing & reopening is the problem, I suspect. Forces a re-application in some cases. I'm not sure how much any kind of legislation can help here though, just sounds like government overreach.
I don't think there's really any good solution. Easy enough to say "you can't post a job to "just collect resumes" you must actually be hiring, and intend to hire someone" but that doesn't account for situations where maybe the company did actually intend to hire, but later on mangement changed their mind...would that be considered a ghost job?
In trading (of securities) posting an order without intent to execute is considered market manipulation, which is illegal and harshly prosecuted. There is a consideration that change of mind is possible, but you'll have a hell of a lot to prove in such case before authorities let you off.
I agree with many, pointing that companies will (try) find ways to fleece any regulation imposed. And I am not a fan of regulations myself, at all. But I think it is fair to hold businesses to some standard in many aspects, including hiring. It is already being done in regards to some, like discrimination and equality. Un- and under-employment is a matter, dealt with by society through institutions and funded by taxpayers. The "clearance rate" of job applications (from both "buy" and "sell" sides) is, therefore, a state concern. I do not think extending requirements of "business license" to demonstrate "genuine intent" would place insurmountable burden on HRs or CEOs. But of course, such extension must have some teeth.
To be clear, the current situation with excessive ghosting is not helped by decades-old push to "commoditize" jobs, particularly IT jobs. And the regulations we discuss will be a not very well-veiled recognition of its de-facto success. Which I am also not a fan of. But flip side seems worse, when companies are allowed to pretend they'd only settle for unicorn while not demonstrating a "unicorn-shaped sieve" at all.
At the very least it will have a chilling effect. A few high profile arrests and companies putting out ghost jobs will know what they’re posting is illegal.
Especially the consulting companies are doing this. And, all these ghost job requirement from green card and h1b should be removed. There must be no incentive to post ghost job.
Yeah, on the H1B there seems to be a separate issue. Posting a job listing that is intentionally hidden or otherwise not going to get bites. That way a company can say that they couldn't find a candidate and have to hire someone in need of a visa. From what I understand they do this to undermine wages as well as having a ̶e̶m̶p̶l̶o̶y̶e̶e hostage who won't complain about poor conditions because they don't want to lose their visa.
great news if this moves forward. while we at it lets ban ghosting applicants and make companies give a direct rejection email with a reason, it can be as simple as "not qualified" or "we found a better candidate, try again next time". waiting for answers that never come is always the worst part.
The policies around blanket ambiguity for rejections is to avoid any kind of messaging that could lead to potential legal retaliation. Frustrating, absolutely, but most employers just aren't willing to flirt with the risk.
I've landed on a similar hot take after one job offer got rescinded by a company that refused to give a reason, to anyone involved, and then wouldn't honor records requests. (But would send me a candidate survey.)
With any job, it would be one thing if it were at the applicant stage, and I hadn't talked to a person at any point. But with this one, there was an offer in front of me and there was no one at all who had both the capacity and the willingness to explain what had just happened.
If I started the job and they pulled this on day three, they would have to give a reason to an unemployment office.
I don't care how little inclination businesses have to tell the truth. Make them commit to the lie, in writing, somewhere that it actually costs something.
Also a lot of companies don't want to close off the option. It is amazing how you occasionally hear back long afterwards after they fail to hire the applicants that they wanted more than you.
Sitting around waiting is softer than apple sauce. You need to go make it happen.
Yes unemployment sucks, life's tough. If it didn't suck you wouldn't be looking for a job, right?
Going around trying to put bubble wrap on every hard corner of society is the wrong instinct. Wasting time and effort on things that don't move the needle at all.
Passive aggressive behavior around hiring and HR is a big reason I prefer self employment, I ununderstand some of the CYA reasons but I always find it yucky in the extreme.
> or they might be legally obligated to post a job publicly, even if they’ve already identified the person they want to hire
Famous/obvious bug in the H1B process, but not sure how this legislation would address it. If they're legally obligated to post the role, won't they just say "we'll fill this job <whenever the H1B process says we can take this down>"?
At my Uni I have been both the beneficiary and victim of this sort of thing.
I've been to interviews where I was there just to prove they did interviews and I also spent half a year working the politics to create a job for myself.
I have a friend who is loved by her coworkers (and myself) who we'd all like to see get a promotion but they may be obligated to do a national search. Stuff like that happens all the time.
Have to start somewhere. Update the law as bad actors operate. Observe, iterate, etc. Failure is not trying, or when you stop attempting to improve. Trying is table stakes.
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." We are aligning incentives, with policy, to encourage desired outcomes.
The general problem with this one is that there are a thousand legitimate reasons not to hire someone that are also infeasible to efficiently establish the veracity of.
Suppose you post a job because you'll need to fill that position if you get a contract you expect to get with 85% probability. You legitimately expect to hire someone but can't in good faith make anyone an offer until the contract with the customer is signed. Then the contract negotiations take longer than expected. You still expect to hire someone soon but the deadline keeps getting pushed back by the delays, and then you have to keep interviewing new people because the ones you interviewed last month took a position somewhere that gave them an offer sooner. You might not hire someone for a year, or if the negotiations fall through you might not hire anyone at all, but at no point were you acting in bad faith.
Suppose you actually need to fill a position as soon as possible but it's hard to find a qualified candidate. There are, however, countless unqualified ones who ignore the requirements and apply anyway.
What do you propose to do with that? It's obviously unreasonable to penalize a company for not hiring unqualified applicants, or for doing the right thing and not making an offer until they know they won't have to rescind it, but then anyone can list those as their reason for keeping their listing open for a long time. Whether it's true depends on the company's internal state, which the company can thereby fabricate however they want. It's easy to write a job posting with stringent qualifications that gives you cover to reject any applicants for any period of time, and effectively impossible to distinguish that from an employer who actually has stringent standards.
The actual way to improve it is to reform the laws that cause companies to list jobs they have no true intention of filling as a requirement for complying with some other law.
The proposed law would require disclosure. Not legal penalty for no hire before the projected date.
Employers can reject candidates for employment gaps. They can do this without allowing candidates to explain. Or they can decide to reject an explanation. Candidates should have equivalent information. And equivalent choice.
> The actual way to improve it is to reform the laws that cause companies to list jobs they have no true intention of filling as a requirement for complying with some other law.
> Employers can reject candidates for employment gaps.
They can also reject candidates for a thousand other reasons, so if you make any given reason an inconvenience or liability risk then they just claim it was one of the others.
> The evidence this is the real problem is what?
It's a known problem with, for example, H1B. They're required to advertise for a job before they can hire H1B, but they don't actually want to hire the applicants because they just want to hire the H1B, so then you get a sham listing where no candidates will be accepted.
Exactly. We shouldn't treat corporate regulation as something you try all at once to get the wording, incentives, and disincentives exactly right and then you're stuck with it for 20 years. It should be a living document. Put something into force today. See what companies do to try to avoid/skirt the regulation--then immediately close those doors and re-run the experiment. See what they try next and close those doors too, repeat until companies have no choice but to obey the spirit of the regulations. We should be doing this, rather than having these Big Upfront Designed laws that get no iteration.
you're not engaging with all the political and game theory issues that make that difficult to do in practice. Let alone the uncertainty that impacts businesses (even ones that are acting in good faith)
Ghosting does much more harm to candidates than the burden to not-ghost does to companies. I'm not going to cry over all "talent acquisition experts" having to do some actual work. Uncertainty that businesses face does not compare to uncertainty that a candidate face after 18 months of unemployment. Ask me how I know.
I'm not sure the incentive here is strong enough. For a specific profile they want, at $2500 for every 30 days, I could see businesses just paying that fine as an operational cost.
The incentive also exists, for the kinds of employers who would post ghost jobs, to also force in-person work again. You don't have to pay these fines to multiple states on one ghost job if the job is only available in one location.
I will keep this in mind while working with reps in other states to encourage a more aggressive policy stance with regards to ghost jobs.
> The incentive also exists, for the kinds of employers who would post ghost jobs, to also force in-person work again. You don't have to pay these fines to multiple states on one ghost job if the job is only available in one location.
You're presuming that this is something employers want to circumvent. As the article discusses, many of these postings are likely legitimate jobs which the employer does intend to fill, and they just don't do the work (which has minimal value to them) of ensuring that all the postings get taken down once they've filled it.
This is a great initiative. But it should apply to job boards and publishers too, asking the posting company to provide evidence. There is another issue which is fake jobs used to harvest CVs. LinkedIn and Google for jobs have a lot of these too.
IMO they don’t need another law for this. Fraud is already illegal. They need to make a very public example by indicting a few HR ghouls under wire fraud statutes for their fraudulent job listings.
Same story in the UK. Our politicians think the answer to everything is a new more specific law for something already illegal. They always co-opt the police into the announcement to back them up
It’s nonsense. The police etc just need more resources, and bigger upstream issues need to be fixed
Cue the unintended consequences. I don't know what they all might be, but one possibility is more reliance of employers on walled gardens like alumni sources.
I'm curious how they would even enforce this law. It seems like they would need to require some record keeping that's made available to the government.
Kinda funny. When I was looking for my current job I had an early (2019 or so) AI based system to manage my job hunt and I was struggling with "ghost jobs" and obvious fraudulent listings in New York's job bank. (e.g. they say it is a Java job in Syracuse and it is really a Cold Fusion job in Atlanta)
If my job search had gone on any longer I would have given myself (and my bot) a job to search and destroy those listings.
I'm just about to launch a job posting data api with postings I aggregate and very lightly normalize (https://kaleh.net/trace)
Anyone have an idea how this might impact me? They're not my postings, I just package em up and ship em. Strive to comply with all laws and TOS and not trying to make trouble.
New York doesn't even enforce its salary requirement declaration law. It will most definitely not enforce this law either. It will just sit on the books being violated openly.
Perhaps I'm naive, but I've never seen a New York job without a salary range listed. I can't tell you whether it's being vigorously enforced, but it seems to me that it's having the intended effect.
At the very least, even if enforcement is lax, it's a good piece of information for the job applicant: if you are applying for a job in NY and the posting has no salary range on it, you automatically know that employer is willing to violate the law and can make a judgement call on whether to avoid them.
Admittedly, no, most of the time I see them they're multi-location corporate roles where the company has two or three choices of offices and one of them is in NYC.
I will point out that the state law has a number of exemptions: independent contractors and interns, companies with fewer than 5 employees, and commission-based roles don't need a salary range disclosure. NYC law is generally more strict on the subject.
Perhaps if you're seeing a lot of jobs that aren't listing a range, it's possible they fit into one of those categories. After all, the vast majority of businesses measured by quantity of firms are small businesses.
If its anything like Washington state's salary disclosure law, then enforcement relies entirely on citizen reports. The state does fine, I've seen it happen (I've also seen numerous class action suits won by applications and employees using this law), but they generally aren't hunting around job boards looking for companies to fine. They rely on reports.
I also feel like there's a very clear private solution here which is creating a company for both employers and employees to use which requires more transparency from both.
This would essentially become a signal to both sides of the transaction that this is someone you want to do business with, and it's self-regulating.
Good recruiters can fill this function. Yeah, there's a lot of sleazy ones out there. But the better ones only take work from real companies that intend to actually hire and real candidates that are actually looking for jobs, and have the information to screen out bad actors on both sides.
Somewhat related but I remember an old boss telling me that some government departments weren't allowed to specify Australian companies only when tendering for a work, but they were perfectly within their rights to ask for tender applications to be hand-delivered to their head office, thereby making it very onerous and expensive for any non-Australian companies to bother.
> thereby making it very onerous and expensive for any non-Australian companies to bother.
It's a good story .. but somewhat silly, Australia is riddled with outposts of offshore foreign companies here to exploit resources, and / or rig the books for others.
The counterpoint is: make it a crime to apply for a job using AI, without disclosing your use of AI (so that your application can be thrown in the trash). Would you support that law? Because when job applications are slop, the openings are slop, and it's hard to separate the two.
Obviously the current state of things hurts only legitimate actors, but that's the world we live in today.
As a libertarian, I am okay with laws that allow people to sue for fraudulent or intentionally very misleading statements, especially ones made publicly and impose compounding costs on a lot of people. This is public harm. The laws are protections for regular people, in this case people who are looking for jobs. I'm also okay with Pigovian Taxes for the same reason: forcing actors who externalize costs to the public, to internalize those costs.
Laws are frameworks. My brand of libertarianism is "decentralizing concentrations of power" and "giving people the software tools to self-organize". But in the meantime, yeah, if there would be laws for anything, it would be this kind of stuff. It is why I can get behind Intellectual Property for Trademarks, before I get behind Copyrights and Patents. Trademarks are about making sure actors don't misrepresent who they are and appropriate the brand of other actors. I think many libertarians would come to support Trademark enforcement laws if they were presented that way.
I say this with respect for you and genuine intention for constructive discussion. Not here to bash you.
I'm not sure your described viewpoints are libertarian at all. I'm pretty sure Montesquieu-esque separatation of powers and Anti-Federalism gets you where you're at.
I don't really think a single one of these viewpoints is contradictory of the modern Democratic Party.
But anyway, maybe I'm just making this comment because my belief is that the word “libertarian” has become so cloudy that almost nobody should use it as a descriptor for their political beliefs. You can't actually just say "I'm libertarian" and have anyone come close to understanding what you mean, which might be what you are experiencing right now from me.
In the same way that credit card companies are required to tell you the exact reasons your score has changed, companies should be required to give at least any sort of notice of rejection. Something as simple as: we have proceeded with another candidate (if and only if the role was actually filled). I know this opens up a lot of questions about enforcement and employer discrimination, but something has to be done.
Every employer would send "We have decided not to continue with your application" once your entry in the database reaches the legally-mandated timeout period.
The part you wouldn't like is the unintended consequences: Every company would be forced to use an ATS to manage applicants, and all hiring would have to be pushed through the ATS. The ATS would have some default timeout where candidates who aren't hired get the e-mail to comply with the law. Nothing is gained because you're not getting real information, but now every company must force you to apply through an ATS portal to make sure every e-mail receives that alert.
I know it's frustrating, but stacking laws like this doesn't get useful information out of companies but it does force the application process to revolve around demonstrating compliance with the regulations.
> Every employer would send "We have decided not to continue with your application".
That would still be a big improvement over just getting ghosted
Doubtful you would still feel that way if it became the legally mandated norm. The reason ghosting is offensive is it feels so disrespectful and impersonal. How is some bland automated message triggered by a cron job any better? The automated message doesn't respect or care about you, no person would have put any thought into it. It would be entirely automated.
If that makes you feel better it is suggestive of a deeper problem. Getting ghosted is part of life. At least its an authentic representation that you aren't worth someone's time. It seems more spontaneous, less premeditated. That's life. You just have to learn to get over it.
The primary negative aspect of Ghost jobs (from the perspective of job applicants) is not simply that it "feels bad" but that it floods the usual channels of seeking work with garbage data.
Assuming a world where there is a set of employers that would actually like to hire someone and a set of workers who are desiring employment, the set of listings that are not seeking to hire (or are only floating a job listing in perpetuity on the off-chance that some overqualified sap will take up their offer for less than they would expect in the market) encourage bad behavior from the other two parties.
It becomes substantially more difficult to parse through a pile of job listings to find what is a real (or realistic) listing and encourage the "shotgun approach" for applicants.
The flood of competing fake listings and the resultant tidal wave of shotgunned-resumes requires employers to spend more time cross-posting openings to reach real applicants and sorting through a greater number of low-effort bad-fit applications
Mild legislation that requires expected hiring dates and requires employers to say if they are just collecting resumes or face fines does not totally fix the issue but it is a welcome change in the right direction.
In addition there are direct financial costs through increased unemployment insurance claim period duration.
> The reason ghosting is offensive is it feels so disrespectful and impersonal.
That part is annoying, but the open-ended nature of it is a true problem. Having a deadline on a thumbs up/down decision at least lets you move on with your life.
My sister once applied for her dream job and didn't hear anything back for 6 months. In the mean time, she'd applied for another job, been accepted, signed all the paperwork, and worked out the notice on her old job. A week before she was due to start, the dream job contacted her to offer the job.
She decided that it wasn't fair to leave the company she'd already accepted a job with in the lurch by pulling out so late in the process. Many people wouldn't have done that, and just switched jobs.
It's definitely an ethical dilemma either way, but in this case when the company hadn't given her any indication whatsoever that she was still being considered (most likely somebody else pulled out and she was their backup option), I think she made the right choice. Better to be a company's first choice than their backup choice.
Getting a rejection message, even an automated one, removes ambiguity. You're no longer wondering if you missed a call or an email went to spam, you have it right there in writing.
In college, I interviewed with two different local companies that had internships that would continue as part-time positions during the year. Both interviews went well and I felt that the interaction was positive overall. I was confident that I would at least have a good shot at each position after the interview. Both companies ghosted me.
For someone just developing their career and who was excited to work with actual professional companies (instead of the minimum-wage jobs offered to most students), that was kind of a big deal. Looking back, I'm pretty sure that's what really instilled a lot of the cynicism toward interviews I carried even after getting an internship and graduating into a full-time sysadmin position. I honestly got lucky getting the position I did, and I think without that success my cynical view would have spiraled downward.
> Getting ghosted is part of life.
The argument is that it shouldn't be. Responses like yours when people express hope that things can change is just digging your feet in because you think that other people have to deal with the same hardships you did. Everyone acknowledges that getting ghosted sucks, so maybe having a bit of empathy and sending something, even an automated message, should be encouraged more.
It's not like job searches are the only context where you can get ghosted. It happens often enough in friendships, social activities, finding romantic partners, etc.
The more and more rude interactions like ghosting we have, the less human we become. Relationships become transactional instead of meaningful. On the other hand, talking to people as humans and leading with your humanity first makes you a better human.
> It happens often enough in friendships, social activities, finding romantic partners, etc.
Yet as we get older we usually get the chance to curate our surroundings such that those people aren’t around us anymore.
I didn't want to bring up ghosting in other contexts because the conversation has been more focused around the job market. The idea that everyone hates getting ghosted even if they do it themselves is one I picked up from articles about dating, so there is still shared relevance.
The main relevant difference between the former and all of the latter is that we're generally fine with regulating the labor market, but (liberals at least) are generally much less willing to regulate the interpersonal relationships market.
(The other relevant difference is that the labor market involves a significant unilateral power imbalance between the employer class and the employee class, which is the biggest contributing factor which leads to the above difference)
Those aren't usually time-sensitive.
An automated message would be perfectly fine, since it would still allow me to cross off that application. The people behind the message are of little import. We are unlikely to have any further interactions anyway
At least this would give you the leverage of seeing that the role is or is not still posted. It would give you a job to do as a candidate in enforcing honesty and seeing that the company wasn't stringing others along with fake postings to create the impression of growth. I would much prefer this to a "no consequences" system for people actively wasting my time.
the reason ghosting is offensive is that it keeps you waiting to hear back, with the probability you have been ghosted gradually increasing over time, rather than just letting you close that mental channel.
> Getting ghosted is part of life
Only if you tolerate assholes in your life. Many don’t.
Nobody cares about getting a bespoke hand crafted notification, it's just nice sometimes to check that one off in the list.
Would it though? Thanks to CA Prop 65 every place I go has a warning that I'll get cancer if I take one more step. If I'm walking into a nuclear waste storage facility I'll never know because of warning fatigue.
I honestly don’t see how the two compare. I’m merely asking for a response to a query that I sent myself.
What you describe is more like SPAM: Unsolicited bulk rejections to applications that were never sent
A sensibly written law could close loopholes like the one you described.
I'm not sure an ATS would be required either. Simply having a law that requires a response when inquired about the status of an application after a certain amount of time would suffice.
I was ghosted by a Fortune 500 company after making it to the final round of an interview recently. It took me weeks of sending emails to get them to tell me they didn't want to hire me.
This seems pretty accurate to me. But like other commenters, the psychological closure of any message at all is better than nothing.
Also, what company nowadays doesn’t use an ATS? I’ve seen a few startups that take applications via email or discord but those are few and far between. Most are using Workday/Indeed/Linkedin or what have you.
> I know it's frustrating, but stacking laws like this doesn't get useful information out of companies but it does force the application process to revolve around demonstrating compliance with the regulations.
Eh, that's like saying taxing them is pointless because they'll just spend more on accountants to find loopholes. It's only true if you have the political will to pass the laws but not enough to fund the teeth needed to enforce them. Gather reports of boilerplate rejections, launch investigations, drag companies to discovery to find their deliberate efforts to end-run the spirit of the law, extract fines sufficient to fund investigations into the next 10 companies.
Exactly. I hate this mentality: "We can't possibly regulate companies, because they are so clever and they'll find loopholes and work around any law we make!" So write better laws! Add provisions for loopholes you anticipate. Add wording to remove ambiguity that the company will try to use to weasel their way out. Analyze the ways companies already get around laws and shore them up with a patch. Do something!
We've tried one thing, and it didn't work so we're all out of ideas! - The USA when it comes to regulating companies.
There are a lot of regulations I would like to get rid of because they are already being evaded, or otherwise have bad second order consequences; and those second-order consequences are themselves an annoying part of the fabric of daily life that I'm familiar with.
There are definitely bad regulations. Sometimes the right answer is to get rid of them, but only if you can evaluate why they were put in place, what they were meant to stop/correct, and why/how they failed, then determine that it would be better to remove them than fix them. If you have a shitty module in your codebase it can be tempting to remove it, but if you need the feature it's meant to provide then removal isn't the right framing, or is only the right solution if you have a better design to replace it with.
You have to remember that profit-motivated companies are completely amoral actors that have and will hire militias to manage slave workers or dump known-poisonous waste into people's drinking water or spend unfathomable amounts on convincing hundreds of millions of people that climate change is a hoax if it's the most self-enriching course of action. They will literally cause extinction if not regulated.
> We've tried one thing, and it didn't work so we're all out of ideas!
(I'm sure you're fully aware of this, but just to add on to what you're saying that I agree with...)
This is all an intentional messaging strategy for kicking the can down the road indefinitely done by people who stand to lose if things are changed for the better of the masses.
Same exact strategy is used (often by the same people) to dismiss the idea of more fair taxation and lots of other things we supposedly can't ever make any progress on because our first attempt to address an obvious problem might not be perfect.
> I hate this mentality: "We can't possibly regulate companies, because they are so clever and they'll find loopholes and work around any law we make!" So write better laws! Add provisions for loopholes you anticipate. Add wording to remove ambiguity that the company will try to use to weasel their way out.
Unfortunately, that is exactly how you end up with legalese and laws that are hard for normal people to understand: because bad-faith actors will invent ambiguity, litigate definitions, and argue over the exact meaning of every word.
It's like trying to tell a child "No jumping on the bed!" and they keep doing it while insisting they're not jumping, they're hopping, and then go into a diatribe about the difference between jumping and hopping until you say something like "Do not jump, hop, bounce, spring, leap, vault, stomp, rebound, or otherwise employ your feet, legs, knees, or body weight to produce repeated or excessive vertical motion upon, across, or within the boundaries of the bed."
And then they remove the mattress from the bed, put it on the floor, and start jumping on it, and say that wasn't against the rules because you only specified the bed, and declare that a mattress on its own does not constitute a bed.
> declare that a mattress on its own does not constitute a bed.
And so you remove the mattress from their possession, because they obviously don't need the mattress to sleep.
Make it painful for those companies that want to fight the rules.
That's right. We have to assume that companies are always going to do whatever they can to get around regulation. The regulatory system needs to think of companies as nimble attackers in its threat model, and the system needs to be capable of responding with the same nimbleness.
The problem right now of course is that the enforcers are paid off by the corporations.
> The ATS would have some default timeout where candidates who aren't hired get the e-mail to comply with the law.
The sibling concept of this already exists in Europe with GDPR. Companies have to ask you to keep your data (resume, application, etc) beyond a certain timeout, otherwise they must delete it. Because of this, almost everyone uses a talent system.
It seems to work fine? I appreciate knowing they're going to nuke my info, or keep it.
Or just allow what happens in the EU. Every time I've applied for a job and been rejected, I put through a GDPR request and find out the reasons I was rejected.
Which right exactly are you invoking?
Have a read here!
https://github.com/Leader-board/OA-and-Interviews/blob/main/...
Once they take in your job application, they're processing your data. You've then got a right, wherever you're from, to see what information they hold on you. That includes interview feedback, test scores and so on.
This does apply to third party background checks, and backdoor references in particular are just one giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Eightfold AI is getting sued right now for acting as a credit reporting agency -- not just by scoring people, but by gathering data on them in the first place for the sake of reporting to employers.
If you ask a third party business to do run a background check, there are a bunch of responsibilities that triggers -- a right to view what's in the report, a right to know if it's being used against you, a right to dispute what's in it, and even to consent to it being pulled in the first place.
But if some recruiter or hiring manager goes directly to your former or current boss, behind your back, this is somehow not even taken seriously as a problem.
https://www.hrdive.com/news/eightfold-ai-lawsuit-job-candida...
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/business/ai-hiring-tools-...
Companies have been using data brokers to get info on potential employees for ages in violation of the law. The law has almost zero enforcement and when something is done nobody does to prison. It's almost always just the government wanting a cut of the action. For example:
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2012/06/...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2014/04/...
Prison is a limitation of freedom of movement. The equivalent for a company should be the limiting of movement of shares (no shares bought/sold/traded) for the duration of an imposed sentence. Since corporations are people and all, there needs to be an equivalent punishment.
They literally hire someone to be the head of the company, and pay them obscene amounts to set the company culture and policies but somehow they mostly avoid being responsible for bad company behaviour.
Prison for illegal behaviour should be applied to the C suite.
That just leads to the classic scheme of hiring a scrapegoat CEO, while in reality the company is being run by a person who technically holds a lesser title.
Once your company is known for hiring patsies the cost of hiring a CEO will naturally increase until it becomes unaffordable to continue its ways.
Distribute the jail time among the shareholders. That will get them to incentivize legality over profits REAL quick
You got a 401(k)? Then you have to serve jail time
Frankly, I'd just prefer really huge fines, preferably scaled as a percentage of either gross or net revenue or profit.
Unless that percentage was over 100% of the profit they'd still be making money from doing illegal things and the fines just become a cost of doing business.
Who said the fines had to be under 100% ?
Going that route instead of fines it should be a percentage of ownership made public. That:
1. Dilutes that shares, punishing the people who can effect the most change (shareholders) 2. Puts the government on the inside. With ownership, the government can then demand access/knowledge that they can't from a purely private company. And no company is going to want to deal with that headache if they don't have to.
Wait... are you saying that talking about an ex-colleague with anyone (without filing a bunch of paperwork or something) is a "giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act"?
Yes. But to be clear, since "anyone" is vague: I specifically mean talking to hiring teams, about ex-colleagues who haven't given them permission to ask around in the first place.
Because the Fair Credit Reporting Act governs background checks. It isn't limited to money, or to scoring -- it covers any third party that reports data about you, for the sake of determining if you're eligible for anything from a loan to an apartment to a job. The language of it is broad enough that it doesn't just cover your spending and payment habits, but extends to your general habits, criminal history, personal character, and "mode of living."
I'm saying the behavior normalized by recruiters is a giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Because when they proactively reach out to random individuals you worked with, to ask you for your views on them as a reference, without your consent, that is an exploit. It is a workaround. It is skirting the actual intentions of the thing, because its scope is limited to "agencies" -- which, no matter how broad that term might be, still ultimately means third party data collectors.
If something your boss said about you came up on a background check, you would have a right to know about it. But if someone on a hiring team goes behind your back to that same boss, for those same comments, that is widely accepted as fine and normal.
That's the part that's a real problem.
Part of the law was broad. Part of the law was narrow. How did you establish the broad part was intended broad and the narrow part was not intended narrow?
I mean, I'm more than willing to take the reductive approach and just say that the purpose of a system is what it does.
But if we assume that it wasn't designed maliciously, we can look at this through another lens: FICO already existed at the time, so banks in particular would simply have no reason to bother calling around to all of your former creditors in the first place.
They would also probably need a third party agency just to find your former creditors.
If you're making hiring decisions based on someone else's statements about the applicant, that someone's statements, if false, are pretty much the definition of defamation in the US.
It's perfectly just that the applicant get to know if the reason they didn't get a job is because their bitter former boss defamed them.
I mean, agreed. I'd go even further and say the whole "Eligible for rehire?" question is an effort to backdoor this into employment verification. Employment verification should be "First date of employment? Last date of employment? Thank you."
"Are they eligible for rehire?" is the nudge nudge wink wink around "well, most of you have policies around providing formal references about performance, so here's one way we can try to gauge".
You’re conflating being ghosted with ghost jobs, which are positions that are posted but are never intended to be filled (usually cited as for data collection purposes). These waste people’s precious time while they apply for jobs.
I'd support it at the federal level. It's cruel towards people looking for work, and it costs them real time at a point in their lives when time is such a critical factor.
Don't even start me on what I think is the next big issue, "ghost application harvesting":
I think Wellfound (f/k/a AngelList) is doing this. The jobs advertised on there are real...
I'd been on the job market four months. Every day I did the rounds: Levels, Wellfound, YC/jobs, Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn.
It is what it is, as a crappy jobs market.
Wellfound? I didn't ever hear from anything from their job ads.
And I'm pretty certain that whatever Wellfound/AngelList was, it has become a company that just markets resume writing services, resume review services, all sorts of other services that draw in your money somehow.
Why do I say that?
120+ applications on Wellfound since then. Crickets. Absolutely nothing.
One day I got an email, "Your profile has been viewed!". Weird, never seen an email like that from Wellfound. Indeed, "You have 1 profile view in the last 90 days".
Huh. 120+ applications, 120+ times me answering filling out Wellfound's content questions on "why you would be a good fit for this role", "tell us about x and y and z", no interviews, no contact, only ONE company has ever even viewed my profile (and for what it's worth, it's not a company that has any positions open).
Well, maybe my answers suck, you say. Maybe my resume isn't as impressive as I think it is.
But similar answers and the same resume get me fairly steady hits on every other site I mentioned, I've got to multiple final rounds, I've been explicitly told I was hirable, I was just the number two, I was "in the top three".
And to be clear, many of the companies I see on WF are advertising on other sites too.
My suspicion? WF DOES take job listings, but they also harvest them from other sites - the job is real, but there's no-one from the employer reviewing the applications to their "phantom" job at Wellfound... and meanwhile all people like me are doing are providing content for WF to harvest and train models for their real business model: AI-driven resume writing and review service and other products.
My AI video interview? Viewed... zero times.
Huh.
Totally agree. I actually got a job off of AngelList back in the day, when I was fairly junior. Was getting messages from hiring managers, founders, and in-house recruiters almost daily. 5 years later, I updated my profile with a much more legit background than before, messaged a few places - it's been 100% crickets.
Calculate the aggregate amount of time candidates spent on applying the ghost job and use the job's purported rate of pay to calculate the amount of money the company stole from the public. Was it enough to be felony theft? The person posting, or whoever instructed it to be posted, gets charged the same as if they stole that amount from a till. Instant end of ghost job postings as most wouldn't even try to find the loopholes and edge cases when prison is a risk for getting a workaround wrong.
Fraud seems like a more direct issue.
Sending people to prison seems like a great way to get no jobs posted.
What is cruel about having a public mailbox for stuffing job applications?
It's cruel to have people spend time and energy applying for a job that doesn't actually exist and they have no chance of being hired for, despite their qualifications.
I suspect they would hire a Nobel laureate that was willing to work as an unpaid intern.
Terrible, perhaps even knowingly dishonest, analogy.
If you make Ghost Jobs illegal the whole thing will still be happening, it will just be driven underground to unlicenced 'haunted houses' which are less safe for the workers and less safe for the patrons. Its much better to keep this sort of thing legal and have licensed haunted houses where its easier for authorities to keep a check on the unwelfare of the ghosts and make sure organised underworld groups are not moving in and taking protection money or soul dealing.
How do you enforce that?
I don't even know what I applied to that's a ghost and what isn't. Maybe I'm completely clueless, but there's no difference: recruiters ghost, sometimes companies ghost and sometimes they reply, sometimes you get an F U letter, you're not good enough, sometimes not.
How did people even find out ghost jobs existed? I feel like the swindle must not be new.
I'll give you an example I've experienced myself:
I save all the jobs I apply to, so it's fairly easy to check/compare and I found plenty of cases where job ads get reposted after some time.
In one instance, I applied for a role in December '25, got a (boilerplate) rejection email a couple of days later (although my profile directly matched the job requirements and I had previous experience working in that specific field), job ad goes offline and re-appeared 3 months later - exact same time and job description.
That's not a ghost job. That sounds like they picked some resumes and rejected the rest and hired someone, and then three months later they either needed another person to also do the same job, or it didn't work out with the original hire so they opened the hiring back up.
if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you
This is not an isolated case, I have multiple job ads that get reposted every couple of months
Some companies don't know what they want and there's internal confusion. I've observed this first-hand. They'll release recs and shut them down a few weeks later, confusing HR (or HR confuses everyone), maybe re-open. It's annoying but more disorganized behavior than fake jobs.
Sorry, but why is that a problem? If they didn't find someone, they closed the posting, then reopened it later, what is the issue?
Or, as in some cases, perhaps they did find someone? I've been at companies where we hired many engineers sequentially over time using the same job description. Should we just have arbitrarily changed the JD?
> Should we just have arbitrarily changed the JD?
No, but unique IDs for postings could help in that situation. If you want to hire, say, 10 engineers, you have 10 separate job postings with their own unique ID, they get taken down as each position gets filled.
Gives candidates visibility into how many positions the company is hiring (am I competing against 1,000 for 1 position or for 10 positions?), and clear visibility that hiring is happening and how many roles are left to fill.
> If they didn't find someone, they closed the posting, then reopened it later, what is the issue?
Closing & reopening is the problem, I suspect. Forces a re-application in some cases. I'm not sure how much any kind of legislation can help here though, just sounds like government overreach.
I don't think there's really any good solution. Easy enough to say "you can't post a job to "just collect resumes" you must actually be hiring, and intend to hire someone" but that doesn't account for situations where maybe the company did actually intend to hire, but later on mangement changed their mind...would that be considered a ghost job?
In trading (of securities) posting an order without intent to execute is considered market manipulation, which is illegal and harshly prosecuted. There is a consideration that change of mind is possible, but you'll have a hell of a lot to prove in such case before authorities let you off.
I agree with many, pointing that companies will (try) find ways to fleece any regulation imposed. And I am not a fan of regulations myself, at all. But I think it is fair to hold businesses to some standard in many aspects, including hiring. It is already being done in regards to some, like discrimination and equality. Un- and under-employment is a matter, dealt with by society through institutions and funded by taxpayers. The "clearance rate" of job applications (from both "buy" and "sell" sides) is, therefore, a state concern. I do not think extending requirements of "business license" to demonstrate "genuine intent" would place insurmountable burden on HRs or CEOs. But of course, such extension must have some teeth.
To be clear, the current situation with excessive ghosting is not helped by decades-old push to "commoditize" jobs, particularly IT jobs. And the regulations we discuss will be a not very well-veiled recognition of its de-facto success. Which I am also not a fan of. But flip side seems worse, when companies are allowed to pretend they'd only settle for unicorn while not demonstrating a "unicorn-shaped sieve" at all.
Yeah, much as it sucks, there's a gap between "we were never going to hire anyone" and "you must hire someone, if you put up a job ad".
At the very least it will have a chilling effect. A few high profile arrests and companies putting out ghost jobs will know what they’re posting is illegal.
Especially the consulting companies are doing this. And, all these ghost job requirement from green card and h1b should be removed. There must be no incentive to post ghost job.
Yeah, on the H1B there seems to be a separate issue. Posting a job listing that is intentionally hidden or otherwise not going to get bites. That way a company can say that they couldn't find a candidate and have to hire someone in need of a visa. From what I understand they do this to undermine wages as well as having a ̶e̶m̶p̶l̶o̶y̶e̶e hostage who won't complain about poor conditions because they don't want to lose their visa.
>How did people even find out ghost jobs existed?
For starters you can find it out from the inside...
Yeah. Going to be a lot harder to do this when other people in the company bring up that it is illegal.
great news if this moves forward. while we at it lets ban ghosting applicants and make companies give a direct rejection email with a reason, it can be as simple as "not qualified" or "we found a better candidate, try again next time". waiting for answers that never come is always the worst part.
The policies around blanket ambiguity for rejections is to avoid any kind of messaging that could lead to potential legal retaliation. Frustrating, absolutely, but most employers just aren't willing to flirt with the risk.
I've landed on a similar hot take after one job offer got rescinded by a company that refused to give a reason, to anyone involved, and then wouldn't honor records requests. (But would send me a candidate survey.)
With any job, it would be one thing if it were at the applicant stage, and I hadn't talked to a person at any point. But with this one, there was an offer in front of me and there was no one at all who had both the capacity and the willingness to explain what had just happened.
If I started the job and they pulled this on day three, they would have to give a reason to an unemployment office.
I don't care how little inclination businesses have to tell the truth. Make them commit to the lie, in writing, somewhere that it actually costs something.
Also a lot of companies don't want to close off the option. It is amazing how you occasionally hear back long afterwards after they fail to hire the applicants that they wanted more than you.
Sitting around waiting is softer than apple sauce. You need to go make it happen.
Yes unemployment sucks, life's tough. If it didn't suck you wouldn't be looking for a job, right?
Going around trying to put bubble wrap on every hard corner of society is the wrong instinct. Wasting time and effort on things that don't move the needle at all.
Passive aggressive behavior around hiring and HR is a big reason I prefer self employment, I ununderstand some of the CYA reasons but I always find it yucky in the extreme.
> or they might be legally obligated to post a job publicly, even if they’ve already identified the person they want to hire
Famous/obvious bug in the H1B process, but not sure how this legislation would address it. If they're legally obligated to post the role, won't they just say "we'll fill this job <whenever the H1B process says we can take this down>"?
At my Uni I have been both the beneficiary and victim of this sort of thing.
I've been to interviews where I was there just to prove they did interviews and I also spent half a year working the politics to create a job for myself.
I have a friend who is loved by her coworkers (and myself) who we'd all like to see get a promotion but they may be obligated to do a national search. Stuff like that happens all the time.
NY State Senate Bill S8877: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S8877
Related:
https://www.hrdive.com/news/new-york-passed-bill-aimed-at-ha...
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12977
Seems like it could be easily circumvented by just continually pushing the “fill by” date back on a posting
Have to start somewhere. Update the law as bad actors operate. Observe, iterate, etc. Failure is not trying, or when you stop attempting to improve. Trying is table stakes.
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." We are aligning incentives, with policy, to encourage desired outcomes.
The general problem with this one is that there are a thousand legitimate reasons not to hire someone that are also infeasible to efficiently establish the veracity of.
Suppose you post a job because you'll need to fill that position if you get a contract you expect to get with 85% probability. You legitimately expect to hire someone but can't in good faith make anyone an offer until the contract with the customer is signed. Then the contract negotiations take longer than expected. You still expect to hire someone soon but the deadline keeps getting pushed back by the delays, and then you have to keep interviewing new people because the ones you interviewed last month took a position somewhere that gave them an offer sooner. You might not hire someone for a year, or if the negotiations fall through you might not hire anyone at all, but at no point were you acting in bad faith.
Suppose you actually need to fill a position as soon as possible but it's hard to find a qualified candidate. There are, however, countless unqualified ones who ignore the requirements and apply anyway.
What do you propose to do with that? It's obviously unreasonable to penalize a company for not hiring unqualified applicants, or for doing the right thing and not making an offer until they know they won't have to rescind it, but then anyone can list those as their reason for keeping their listing open for a long time. Whether it's true depends on the company's internal state, which the company can thereby fabricate however they want. It's easy to write a job posting with stringent qualifications that gives you cover to reject any applicants for any period of time, and effectively impossible to distinguish that from an employer who actually has stringent standards.
The actual way to improve it is to reform the laws that cause companies to list jobs they have no true intention of filling as a requirement for complying with some other law.
The proposed law would require disclosure. Not legal penalty for no hire before the projected date.
Employers can reject candidates for employment gaps. They can do this without allowing candidates to explain. Or they can decide to reject an explanation. Candidates should have equivalent information. And equivalent choice.
> The actual way to improve it is to reform the laws that cause companies to list jobs they have no true intention of filling as a requirement for complying with some other law.
The evidence this is the real problem is what?
> Employers can reject candidates for employment gaps.
They can also reject candidates for a thousand other reasons, so if you make any given reason an inconvenience or liability risk then they just claim it was one of the others.
> The evidence this is the real problem is what?
It's a known problem with, for example, H1B. They're required to advertise for a job before they can hire H1B, but they don't actually want to hire the applicants because they just want to hire the H1B, so then you get a sham listing where no candidates will be accepted.
Exactly. We shouldn't treat corporate regulation as something you try all at once to get the wording, incentives, and disincentives exactly right and then you're stuck with it for 20 years. It should be a living document. Put something into force today. See what companies do to try to avoid/skirt the regulation--then immediately close those doors and re-run the experiment. See what they try next and close those doors too, repeat until companies have no choice but to obey the spirit of the regulations. We should be doing this, rather than having these Big Upfront Designed laws that get no iteration.
you're not engaging with all the political and game theory issues that make that difficult to do in practice. Let alone the uncertainty that impacts businesses (even ones that are acting in good faith)
Ghosting does much more harm to candidates than the burden to not-ghost does to companies. I'm not going to cry over all "talent acquisition experts" having to do some actual work. Uncertainty that businesses face does not compare to uncertainty that a candidate face after 18 months of unemployment. Ask me how I know.
I meant this idea that you can quickly iterate on laws. At least in america that's just unrealistic outside of very narrow instances
I'm not sure the incentive here is strong enough. For a specific profile they want, at $2500 for every 30 days, I could see businesses just paying that fine as an operational cost.
The incentive also exists, for the kinds of employers who would post ghost jobs, to also force in-person work again. You don't have to pay these fines to multiple states on one ghost job if the job is only available in one location.
I will keep this in mind while working with reps in other states to encourage a more aggressive policy stance with regards to ghost jobs.
> The incentive also exists, for the kinds of employers who would post ghost jobs, to also force in-person work again. You don't have to pay these fines to multiple states on one ghost job if the job is only available in one location.
49 states to go to implement this.
You're presuming that this is something employers want to circumvent. As the article discusses, many of these postings are likely legitimate jobs which the employer does intend to fill, and they just don't do the work (which has minimal value to them) of ensuring that all the postings get taken down once they've filled it.
I don't know that it counts as a circumvention, having a visible signal of that date continually being pushed back will be very useful.
This is a great initiative. But it should apply to job boards and publishers too, asking the posting company to provide evidence. There is another issue which is fake jobs used to harvest CVs. LinkedIn and Google for jobs have a lot of these too.
Good start nevertheless
IMO they don’t need another law for this. Fraud is already illegal. They need to make a very public example by indicting a few HR ghouls under wire fraud statutes for their fraudulent job listings.
Same story in the UK. Our politicians think the answer to everything is a new more specific law for something already illegal. They always co-opt the police into the announcement to back them up
It’s nonsense. The police etc just need more resources, and bigger upstream issues need to be fixed
Cue the unintended consequences. I don't know what they all might be, but one possibility is more reliance of employers on walled gardens like alumni sources.
I'm curious how they would even enforce this law. It seems like they would need to require some record keeping that's made available to the government.
My company does it all the time. I've noticed all these ghost jobs are advertised in the same large city (Toronto), yet our offices are elsewhere.
Kinda funny. When I was looking for my current job I had an early (2019 or so) AI based system to manage my job hunt and I was struggling with "ghost jobs" and obvious fraudulent listings in New York's job bank. (e.g. they say it is a Java job in Syracuse and it is really a Cold Fusion job in Atlanta)
If my job search had gone on any longer I would have given myself (and my bot) a job to search and destroy those listings.
I'm just about to launch a job posting data api with postings I aggregate and very lightly normalize (https://kaleh.net/trace)
Anyone have an idea how this might impact me? They're not my postings, I just package em up and ship em. Strive to comply with all laws and TOS and not trying to make trouble.
1) You would be in a good position to find and report violations to the NY department of labor.
2) You might be considered a third party platform.
1) Yay 2) Fuck
New York doesn't even enforce its salary requirement declaration law. It will most definitely not enforce this law either. It will just sit on the books being violated openly.
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https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S8877
Perhaps I'm naive, but I've never seen a New York job without a salary range listed. I can't tell you whether it's being vigorously enforced, but it seems to me that it's having the intended effect.
At the very least, even if enforcement is lax, it's a good piece of information for the job applicant: if you are applying for a job in NY and the posting has no salary range on it, you automatically know that employer is willing to violate the law and can make a judgement call on whether to avoid them.
You must not have applied much to smaller and medium sized firms in New York because they're missing salary ranges all over the place.
Admittedly, no, most of the time I see them they're multi-location corporate roles where the company has two or three choices of offices and one of them is in NYC.
I will point out that the state law has a number of exemptions: independent contractors and interns, companies with fewer than 5 employees, and commission-based roles don't need a salary range disclosure. NYC law is generally more strict on the subject.
Perhaps if you're seeing a lot of jobs that aren't listing a range, it's possible they fit into one of those categories. After all, the vast majority of businesses measured by quantity of firms are small businesses.
If its anything like Washington state's salary disclosure law, then enforcement relies entirely on citizen reports. The state does fine, I've seen it happen (I've also seen numerous class action suits won by applications and employees using this law), but they generally aren't hunting around job boards looking for companies to fine. They rely on reports.
I love this initiative.
I also feel like there's a very clear private solution here which is creating a company for both employers and employees to use which requires more transparency from both.
This would essentially become a signal to both sides of the transaction that this is someone you want to do business with, and it's self-regulating.
Good recruiters can fill this function. Yeah, there's a lot of sleazy ones out there. But the better ones only take work from real companies that intend to actually hire and real candidates that are actually looking for jobs, and have the information to screen out bad actors on both sides.
Good to see. The job market is screwed right now, and this is one big step to fixing things.
Wouldn't it be easier for them to include a disclaimer in every job listing fulfilling the letter of the law while escaping every bit of the purpose.
What if online job applications were illegal, and you signed up for interviews in person with a resume after seeing the ad online.
Somewhat related but I remember an old boss telling me that some government departments weren't allowed to specify Australian companies only when tendering for a work, but they were perfectly within their rights to ask for tender applications to be hand-delivered to their head office, thereby making it very onerous and expensive for any non-Australian companies to bother.
> thereby making it very onerous and expensive for any non-Australian companies to bother.
It's a good story .. but somewhat silly, Australia is riddled with outposts of offshore foreign companies here to exploit resources, and / or rig the books for others.
Oh I'm sure it is. In any case, it was 2013 and at that point he still had to fly to Sydney I think to deliver a tender.
Maybe it's enough to cut the number of offshore companies applying to an easier to manage number.
Going door to door and handing out resumes used to be a thing
Thought this was going to be a Sopranos/mob thing
This should be followed in every state.
Ghost jobs didn't come from nowhere.
The counterpoint is: make it a crime to apply for a job using AI, without disclosing your use of AI (so that your application can be thrown in the trash). Would you support that law? Because when job applications are slop, the openings are slop, and it's hard to separate the two.
Obviously the current state of things hurts only legitimate actors, but that's the world we live in today.
As a libertarian, I am okay with laws that allow people to sue for fraudulent or intentionally very misleading statements, especially ones made publicly and impose compounding costs on a lot of people. This is public harm. The laws are protections for regular people, in this case people who are looking for jobs. I'm also okay with Pigovian Taxes for the same reason: forcing actors who externalize costs to the public, to internalize those costs.
Laws are frameworks. My brand of libertarianism is "decentralizing concentrations of power" and "giving people the software tools to self-organize". But in the meantime, yeah, if there would be laws for anything, it would be this kind of stuff. It is why I can get behind Intellectual Property for Trademarks, before I get behind Copyrights and Patents. Trademarks are about making sure actors don't misrepresent who they are and appropriate the brand of other actors. I think many libertarians would come to support Trademark enforcement laws if they were presented that way.
I say this with respect for you and genuine intention for constructive discussion. Not here to bash you.
I'm not sure your described viewpoints are libertarian at all. I'm pretty sure Montesquieu-esque separatation of powers and Anti-Federalism gets you where you're at.
I don't really think a single one of these viewpoints is contradictory of the modern Democratic Party.
But anyway, maybe I'm just making this comment because my belief is that the word “libertarian” has become so cloudy that almost nobody should use it as a descriptor for their political beliefs. You can't actually just say "I'm libertarian" and have anyone come close to understanding what you mean, which might be what you are experiencing right now from me.
This is just begging for a class action-ish lawsuit.
Please