Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
The controls in the actual proposal are less reasonable: they create finable infractions for any claim in a job ad deemed "misleading" or "inaccurate" (findings of fact that requires a an expensive trial to solve) and prohibit "perpetual postings" or postings made 90 days in advance of hiring dates.
The controls might make it harder to post "ghost jobs" (though: firms posting "ghost jobs" simply to check boxes for outsourcing, offshoring, or visa issuance will have no trouble adhering to the letter of this proposal while evading its spirit), but they will also impact firms that don't do anything resembling "ghost job" hiring.
Firms working at their dead level best to be up front with candidates still produce steady feeds of candidates who feel misled or unfairly rejected. There are structural features of hiring that almost guarantee problems: for instance, the interval between making a selection decision about a candidate and actually onboarding them onto the team, during which any number of things can happen to scotch the deal. There's also a basic distributed systems problem of establishing a consensus state between hiring managers, HR teams, and large pools of candidates.
If you're going to go after "ghost job" posters, you should do something much more targeted to what those abusive firms are actually doing, and raise the stakes past $2500/infraction.
I don't understand the making of excuses for small businesses as though they are somehow morally better than large businesses.
Every business owner, regardless of the size of the business, wants free labor.
Businesses are just large bunches of people, each trying to maximize various metrics given the incentives they interact with. None of those people, including the owner, is automatically pro-slavery, which is the other word for "wants free labor."
Everybody wants to maximize their money received and minimize their money and work expended to whatever degree possible. This isn't evil nor is it specific to "businesses," "business owners," or "rich people" either.
> Everybody wants to maximize their money received and minimize their money and work expended to whatever degree possible.
...is exactly in agreement with what I said above.
The ideal business is one where you take in money and have no expenditures. E.g., If you're a landlord, you want super high rent and no expenditures on maintenance or improvements.
I would also accept the other direction. That is, a tenant wants use of a property for no rent, ideally.
My point was that small businesses aren't noble somehow. They want money for free just like everybody else.
> property but no rent
I mean, I guess sure, but... only lunatics think that exists legally and sustainably.
Certainly no one who has managed to get a business degree, or attain any leadership role, thinks so foolishly.
Normal businesspeople know that if you pay minimum wage you can expect only a weak effort, and also they don't waste their mental energy fantasizing about anybody 'working for free.'
As a manager, I fantasize about getting everyone under me paid enough to hold turnover very low (because turnover sucks), but not so highly that my team becomes a poor ROI that economically should be replaced with (AI, an offshore team, a couple people from a consulting firm, etc.) -- and I'm sure the CEO and any non-crazy shareholders want that equilibrium as well.
If you could get higher rent without getting punished by the market (turnover), you would do it. If you could spend less on maintenance without getting punished by the market (turnover and reduced resale value), you would do it.
Many, if not most, landlords push both of these levers to their absolute limits.
The essence of being a landlord is that you've got your name on the title of a scarce resource that is difficult or impossible in some cases to duplicate: real estate in a particular location. The fact that your name is on this title means that you can extract value from people who need a place to live and did not arrive there first so they could buy the cheap property, build the building, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I hope to be a landlord too some day. Ownership is what matters when there's nowhere else to move. I look forward to the rent checks. However, I won't be pretending there's anything noble or fair about what I'm doing. It's just how the rules of our economy are set up.
This isn't a business. And if you found a way to do this, you'd be subject to endless audits and AML/CTF suspicions because actual businesses don't look like this.
Business owners come in a range of personalities, just like everyone else. Some are selfish and unreasonable. Some are altruistic and generous. Some are purely in it for the money, others really love building teams and working in a friendly environment. Some have global ambitions, others just want to get by with as little effort as possible.
You can claim depreciation on all your hardware (including your desk and chair).
You should be claiming some of your rent/mortgage as office expenses. And, obviously, your broadband cost, your electricity bill, your heating bill (if different), etc.
You can claim all the coffees you buy potential clients.
Having zero expenses is absolutely not what you want to efficiently run your business.
No, I'm in the landlord business, and they do not want this. They want mildly-high rent that covers overhead plus a healthy (maybe even a little fat) overhead. They want to do maintenance, because apparently the biggest paydays come 10 years down the line when they sell to some other investor... and if it's a slum they won't get a good price or even a sale. They want good reviews from people who pay rent on time (or hell, even the people who are occasionally late but come through in the end), and they just want to be a trillion light years away from the hoarders, squatters, and apartment-destroyers.
Seen from the other side, you'd come to realize that almost all the horror stories you've heard are, at minimum, far more nuanced than you were led to believe, and that some large fraction were just fabricated entirely by people you'd never want living next door to you.
>My point was that small businesses aren't noble somehow. T
That's the thing though. There's this gigantic middle ground between nobility and villainy which is people just trying to get along and do what they're obligated to do, but you have leftists everywhere constantly slandering them because a German miscreant two centuries ago liked to mooch off his rich friends.
I don't want money for free. I want to be able to earn it, and earn well. I want to feel like I've accomplished something. Only children want things for free (because they know no better), and it's what separates them from adults.
I've been a perfect tenant my entire life, and I was still always treated like trash by every landlord I've rented from. I don't think they make a distinction.
In one apartment, I even spilled some bleach in a closet, and sneakily replaced the piece of carpet from the scraps I found when they were recarpeting a nearby unit. They didn't notice or care.
Well, if that's true then I wouldn't bother being a landlord. Being a landlord just means your name is on the title of a building such that it allows you to extract money from people who need a place to live. It's not creative, it's not original, and it's only possible because they aren't making any more real estate, but they're always making more people.
I said above to another commenter: I would also like to be a landlord one day. I'm sure I'd be a decent one. But, I won't be pretending like I'm doing anything productive... I'm just extracting money from the fact that my name is on a deed. Nothing more, nothing less.
It's just how our economy is set up, and, like everyone, I plan to try and take advantage of it. I won't be kidding myself, though, that I'm somehow a productive or noble small business man.
And, I expect, as a point of fact... you haven't bothered to be a landlord.
>It's just how our economy is set up, and, like everyone, I plan to try and take advantage of it.
That's how you perceive it. But the reality of it is that while many are hustling, few are prospering, few enough even that reasonable people might wonder if the few successful ones are the result of luck more than having figured out the get-rich-quick thing that everyone's been trying to figure out for millennia. Good luck, I suppose.
Yeah, no.
I’m no longer an entrepreneur - ran out of runway - but it was always my goal to have aggressive profit sharing as part of my company. Acceptable salaries - years of those salaries saved “in the bank” and profit-share the rest.
I never wanted free labor. In fact, the reason I didn’t have employees is because I couldn’t afford them at the rate they deserved. People deserve to be treated as people. People deserve to be treated well.
I want to play the “game” of creating things I want created and making enough money to comfortably sustain myself and help those I care about.
If I’m hiring people, I want people that want the same things as me and are paid well, or people that are willing to exchange their labor for both a respectable base earning and also extra earning based on how we, collectively, are doing.
That’s the game, and some people believe it’s the only game.
I’m with you though. For me business isn’t a channel for hoarding all possible resources and assets. It’s a combination of a craft and a means to an end. I’d still do it if I needed no profession, because it’s a craft I enjoy.
It’s fun to share that craft, and it’s good to share that craft on generous terms.
The subtle irony is that the version of the “game” as referenced in that other comment is the same, expect that all those niceties only apply to executives and people who already have lots of money. A socially perverse arrangement, to be sure.
In other words, the Law of Supply & Demand.
Mega-corp isn't typically evil, it just wins a lot by being incredibly advantaged in whatever it pursues. Teams of lawyers, armies of engineers, rows of consultants.
Small businesses on the other hand tend to be the ones dumping oil in the river, firing employees that they don't want to back pay, bankrolling family vacations with time clock funny business, etc.
When I worked for my first mega-corp after years of small business jobs, I was blown away by how by-the-book it all was.
I get confused by other small business owners who complain about this because it’s all stuff you’d need to do anyway.
I use a double entry accounting system in an ERP. This isn’t terribly complicated. I took courses on corporate accounting in college and I took the ERP training. Even if I didn’t have all of that, I’d still have to actually do the accounting in a double entry system because of the legal jurisdiction and corporate structure.
I think that this is a byproduct of the economy being filled with small businesses owned by people who aren’t competent at operating their business as a business, which isn’t the same thing as being successful at making money.
You are an exception.
> I use a double entry accounting system in an ERP.
Not only this requires someone knowledgeable enough but it is also time/energy consuming. If you force this on every small business, you'll probably kill something like 95% of hair-dressers.
Honestly, I don't think this is a problem. If we are scrutinizing a bakery, I'd rather the scrutiny to be put on health/food concerns rather than employee hiring practices. That is assuming the bakery employs less than 6-7 people.
As for whether I’m an exception — maybe. Subjectively I think I am because I perceive myself to be putting more into the “business of business” than most other business owners I know, but I also have a bit more time. The services my business provides benefits from heavily cross linking service, sales, and event/auditable data. It fits cleanly into out of box sales processes that business software assumes. When we adopted our ERP we just changed our processes instead of butchering the software. What we actually offer is, to a large extent, set-it-and-check-on-it.
I would think that is a great luxury in a way. I don’t have to do back breaking labor to make a delicious batch of croissants for the masses every day. I’d rather the croissants be tasty than the bakery’s books be perfect. As long as they’re doing what they need to stay in business.
I did have something specific in mind when I made my comment about “how hard can it be?” I think I was painting with too broad a brush. When I typed that I was recalling the FinCEN BOI filings. All of two or three pages of an online wizard asking for all the same information most secretaries of state require, and such a disproportionate outrage about even having to do it. From peers in the business community I heard a lot of “this is too complicated!” Having read the FinCEN documentation on BOI, it definitely sounded way more complicated than it ever was to complete.
Big organisations tend to accrete rules as they age until it's almost impossible to do anything apart from the core function.
Nobody is concerned about companies being sad, they're concerned about making the labor market in an give jurisdiction hostile enough that companies opt out entirely.
>when the only leeches i've seen in the business world were the companies that require labor to make money and then pay back a less than equitable amount to the people doing work.
define "equitable".
At some point you'd have to realize that continuing to give companies what they want out fear of them leaving, will only incentivize companies to be scummier and scummier.
Second of all, how would you imagine companies opting out of a jurisdiction? Wouldn't that create an enormous hole in the market for other less-scummier companies to jump in, albeit at perhaps lower margins?
If non-scummy companies realize that even trying in that region will lead to lawsuits by malcontents and losers, they'll leave too. You're left only with the scummy ones, because they figure they'll have skipped town before the lawsuits come rolling in. And if your regulatory framework discourages that heavily enough to dissuade them, they'll stay away too.
When circumstances are hostile enough, no one wants a piece of it. Always lower-hanging fruit elsewhere.
A certain amount of margin is required for the company to even try to do business. Unfortunately, when the "let's turn the screws on this company" discourse starts getting Old Testament, people stop considering that.
If you want a good real life example of this, look at CA insurance companies. The state limited the rates they could charge to the point where many of them simply stopped signing up new customers and started dropping old ones.
There were no new insurers to take their place because it wasn't profitable for them either.
Companies ALWAYS pretend that this will be the result of regulation, but that doesn't change the fact that they're sometimes right.
We want people to buy things, yet we have sales taxes.
We want people to work productive jobs and earn money, yet we have income taxes.
True. But why not think about ditching those taxes, and replace them with taxing things we don't want people to do? There's a double benefit - tax revenue is raised, and people do less of those things undesirable to society.
For example, "sin" taxes.
For other examples, taxing pollution. Taxing the conversion of forest land to a parking lot. And so on.
Because your tax revenue will collapse if people actually stop doing those things?
If it’s not something that’s enforced globally you will either end up destroying certain industries and or having massive inefficiencies.
My point is that sin taxes might be a good way to discourage certain behaviors but not as good as a consistent revenue source.
Also there is a risk of perverse incentives like what happened in Tsarist Russia when most government revenue was coming from alcohol taxes.
What a terrible outcome! LOL
If the tax works you have to keep continuously increasing it every year. At some point that becomes detrimental (I mean there are good reasons why we don’t ban the usage of fossil fuels entirely..)
So it’s not a reliable source of revenue
The problem is not everyone will stop and they now face is that at 70% of the price it's encouraging a black market for illegal tobacco with associated crime and a decline in tax revenue.
You want to incentivize them FILLING job openings. Nobody cares how many jobs are posted. And posting 100 openings and filling 50 is the stated problem trying to be solved here.
The rebating idea resolves this quite neatly though. Make posting a job opening that eventually gets filled free after rebate[1], and posting a "dangling" job opening that never fills incurs tax.
Now, I can think of a dozen loopholes to get out of this[2], but it's not that it's going to disincentivize hiring.
[1] or maybe even better than free (puts a little tax incentive for hiring and keeping people beyond the typical probationary period).
[2] Can job listings be revised? Just recycle the ghost job listing in bulk before the deadline and convert it to a totally different position (Software Engineer -> Cashier) Can they not be revised? That seems like overreaching ridiculous Soviet red tape.
Rules about what a job posting can and cannot say can definitely happen, and have happened (see: salary ranges, because of Colorado's requirements). That's what CNBC depicts this proposal as comprising. Unfortunately, under the hood, it's closer to what you're talking about.
If you post a fake job and hire a H1B, you get automatically and inescapably slugged with a huge tax.
If you post a real job and hire someone, you get a tax refund.
Basically you have a set number of places, say 50 jobs and accept candidacies up to a certain date, when ALL candidates (say 1000 candidates) take the SAME exam, under the SAME conditions. They all get marked from 0 to 100% and top 50 of them get the job. If anyone of them drops out, the next in line is admitted. There can be litigations filed to dispute the mark and it's objective because the criteria is the same for everyone.
The perfect system already exists, and it's used here and there. My first intern job,out of the university, was such an exam at a small business. We were some 10 candidates, 5 or so were hired. My current big corporation employer uses the exact same approach for hiring interns, only now in today's shit market it's still some 5 jobs but 500 candidates.
The real problem is that the IT domain got filled and every year the universities and bootcamps and all churn more candidates. Gotta face the fact that most people who want to become cops, who compete at the cop entry exam, will never become cops. IT is the same now.
I don't think it's possible to create such an exam for senior or leadership roles, where a candidate's (professional) background is the key differentiator. Say you have two candidates for a C-suite role. One was formerly with company X and demonstrates A, B and C attributes. The other was formerly with company Y and demonstrates D, E and F attributes. How would you have created an exam that differentiated between the two, without the benefit of hindsight?
The fines should definitely be proportional though, with larger companies facing very severe infractions.
But the big thing here is: obviously there's a cheering section for any rules that make things harder for hiring managers, because most people here are on the other side of that transaction. Ok, sure, whatever. But none of this has anything to do with the "ghost job" phenomenon, where job postings are literally fig leaves satisfying a compliance checkbox so that roles can be sourced to H1Bs.
If it helps soothe the feelings of those who think hiring managers are demon spawn out to get them, I can add, as one of those who spent a whole season this year doing basically nothing but conducting first-round interviews all day, to hire four open SWE seats, it's misery out here for us, too.
It was a mix of laughably unqualified people; people in India lying and pretending to be in the US ("Which neighborhood in NY do you live in?" - "I live by the Statue of Liberty"); people sending ringers to do their coding exercises for them including different ringers or two ringers at once (oops); and entirely made-up resumes (we have your resume from an application 3 years ago but your entire life history has changed since).
Found this part mildly fascinating. That it's more lucrative for a significant portion of the population to be so highly skilled at programming that they can regularly serve as "ringers" to falsify entrance exams, than it is to simply complete such an exam and get a job in America. Must make great money as exam falsifiers.
Quick check on Google says it runs upwards of ₹50,000 ($570) for valuable falsifications (data is mostly from Indian exam falsification though). If you can actually manage to get one per day it's $200,000 USD in India.
Also ringers are black market, so you can be hired everywhere and not blocked by not being in the USA in the first place. You can pass the interview, but you can't find a job that hires you in the USA because of non-interview reasons or market conditions. Anybody could become a ringer because it's a purely skill based job you can self teach, while getting a job at an Indian big tech might require a degree from an ITT or even just a degree at all might be too much for you.
Honestly they would be a great hiring pool on some level if the reasons why they can't get hired had nothing to do with skill but more socioeconomic barriers like that.
I've never hired a ringer, been a ringer or even looked into it, so it's total conjecture on my part.
I'm not so sure about that. I'm suspicious of the existence of skilled programmers who cannot handle writing small programs, and vice versa.
Like seriously, go to leetcode, pick a random medium+ problem and solve it within 15-30m without bugs under pressure, on coderpad, without code execution or being allowed to look up syntax. Make sure you've never seen or been asked the question before. Now do 10 more. You'll see it's something you need to practice for specifically. Make sure you throw in a few binary search questions while you do it.
I coached a newly minted PhD engineer into spending 3 weeks studying leetcode prep materials before the interview, telling him that per-hour it would be the best investment of his career. Shockingly, he listened, studied for 3 weeks, and absolutely nailed it. And landed the big bucks job, too.
> Their brains go blank
Anyone with a degree has undergone exams that were critical to graduation. I know all about time pressure, high stakes exams. After all, I attended Caltech. I learned how to deal with them. Study the material beforehand, work all the problem sets beforehand, make sure you have it cold backwards and forwards. That's the cure for brain freeze.
Going in without prep for a $250,000 job interview is just lazy, no matter how smart or capable you are.
A crackerjack programmer that cannot learn leetcode is not a crackerjack programmer.
One day, he was flying along in his F-86 over the Arizona desert when the engine conked out. He radioed the situation to the tower, who advised him to bail out. But he knew how to figure out hour far he could fly given his speed, altitude, weight of the fuel, wind speed, etc. and calculated that he could make the strip. And he did, with a few feet to spare.
There's no way I would even dare fly one without mastering all that stuff, either.
Test anxiety is real. Anxiety disorders are real in general, not to mention ADHD, autism and more where these disabilities can interact in bad ways in interviews. It does not mean that people with these issues are bad engineers. If your instrument is inaccurate, it does not mean the thing it is measuring is wrong.
One of the best and smartest engineers I have ever hired had visible anxiety and objectively did not pass the interview but we pushed for it anyway and was hired as a jr engineer. He is a staff engineer now, leads various large company library projects and is the go to expert about various systems in the entire company and will probably become a sr staff engineer. He also probably hasn't changed jobs because he knows he's bad at interviews, which is incredibly sad.
The first few times I did public speaking, I'd freeze up and squeak. I speak regularly now, and it's not a problem anymore.
(Again, I attended Caltech. Most of us were nerds, and many Aspergers. I have worked with many people "on the spectrum" and am not at all ignorant of their differences.)
Stories like that give me goosebumps. Your dad has (had? if so, I'm sorry) just absolute balls of steel. Not to mention an incredible mind. Thank you for sharing.
Yes, then a regulator sniffs on that, company is unable to prove absence of employment-like relationship, then is fined and owes backpay on all the unpaid taxes with interest.
True, even the best cases have a nonzero baseline level of dissatisfaction. It reminds me of this quote, where one character publicly accused a judge of being corrupt based on rumor, and another character is asking whether she had anything except town rumor to go on.
> “Tell me, Royesse, what steps did you take beforehand, to assure yourself of the man’s guilt?”
> [...] Her frown deepened. "The townsmen applauded..."
> "Indeed. On average, one-half of all supplicants to come before a judge's bench must depart angry and disappointed. But not, by that, necessarily wronged."
-- The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold
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!
Needless to say, that doesn't make any sense.
You're right that I shouldn't have said 80%, but this still implies almost half of all job postings are ghost jobs from companies trying to hire H1-B visa workers.
It's still an insane claim.
- Recurrent and yearlong ad for the same position, with numerous applicants (sometimes in the hundreds, if not thousands). This is probably the poster child of the ghost job ad.
- Unrealistic compensation for required skills, guaranteed to weed out the junior (skill issue) and the senior (comp issue). This could also signal that the company is looking to hire from offshore markets.
- Plain unrealistic skill requirements. Even companies that hire "full-stack" know that there's a practical limit, beyond which it's probably better to spread out responsibilities, if we want any kind of productivity gain. Being unreasonably greedy about skills might be a sign that the poster wants a cop out when candidates actually turn up. "Yeah, he was capable of writing his own OS kernel as we asked, but his CSS was shit".
If endeavors like the present proposal prove inept, there are enough tools to supplement posted job ads with metrics meant to easily signal to job seekers and investors something useful about the companies posting them, with a nice and accessible UI.
The other day there was an article about streaming services driving viewers back to piracy due to their shenanigans and the resulting subpar user experience. If LinkedIn and friends continue to pretend that it's technologically beyond them to solve ghost job posting on their own network, eventually it will be addressed somewhere else.
From my experience the big issue is hiring managers who either 1) are very casual about hiring (i.e. they're willing to wait 6 months and waste everyone's time), or 2) people who like the idea of hiring but keep changing what they want to hire for (like this month we're having issues with testing, so we want a test engineer, but next month we're having issues with embedded software, so we need a new embedded engineer.
I really don't think there are bands of hiring managers posting fake job ads to make their company look more impressive, I think it's just bands of hiring managers who want a senior engineer with direct experience for <140k
And you're missing the recruiters who are simply gathering resumes.
And the scammers looking to sell you training.
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.
You are free to build a job marketplace that profiles employer posting behavior and shares relevant info with applicants. Like it or not, employers will be forced to cooperate with you to get access to the talent pool you attract.
Except for the problem of "talent will be forced to seek out employers, no matter how shitty or stupid the latter behaves, because they'll starve and die within a matter of weeks or months while understaffed companies can survive for years."
Doubly so in tech where the combination of A) A huge hiring spree during covid & following layoffs has created a glut in applicants, B) Economic malaise is slowing the economy, and C) Companies are being irrationally hestitant to hire because of AI.
Ghost Jobs are fraudulent on several levels, they should be legislated out of existance. (The public company favourite of "pretending we're still growing when we're not" is very clear securities fraud.)
I dunno, that sounds like real life? The percentage of purchases that I return or ultimately don't use is probably around there, for non-repeat purchases.
A kitchen gadget that doesn't really work, a T-shirt I order that turns out to have a weird fit or weird material, a Bluetooth whatever that randomly disconnects after 5 minutes...
If 80% of my new purchases turn out to work as expected and do their job, I consider myself to be doing pretty well.
(Although it's not the approach I would take if I was a manager,) I do think there's merit in the approach. It was a real opening that could be filled, just not one that they were actively seeking people for. (IE, if someone applied, the resume would be reviewed.)
This was the 1980s or 1990s, though, so I doubt it was SPAMMed with applicants like what happens today, though.
I recently saw a project that spammed online job postings with AI slop resumes. This is great since... if your posting is slop and you don't intend to hire, you should have your inbox filled with slop. It only makes sense.
We pay junior engineers more than 80k, and that's to live in a nicer, lower tax area. I hope they don't find someone and have to urgently hire a contractor with a clearance for $300 an hour
If it was really urgent, there would be some flexibility in the requirements.
A rule for life. It’s a spam machine, and nothing more as far as I’m concerned.
And years after that, NextDoor did... and even used physical mail to spam people's real neighbors using the "inviting" user's name. Despicable, and even potentially dangerous in these sad times of polarized and unhinged trash.
Oh yeah... NextDoor also exposed people's exact physical addresses to all users by default for a year or two. I mean... that's just inexcusable and deliberate irresponsibility.
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.
I imagine most companies just want followers on LinkedIn.
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.
Especially remote jobs.
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.
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.
There are many ways for a company to justify leaving a posting up if sued:
- candidate’s resume did not meet bar so company did not interview
- candidate could not be scheduled
- candidate was interviewed but did not pass
- offer was given to competing candidate but competitor rejected so company couldn’t fill position and still had to leave posting up
Companies would then need to keep super detailed records on job postings which is overhead, and then many would just choose to not publicly post to avoid the hassle
shades of Sinofsky's description of federal HR reporting
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.
> · There is no intent to fill the role
> · It’s not currently funded
> · It’s posted to collect résumés, test the market, or boost visibility
> · It’s recycled indefinitely without an actual opening
https://www.truthinjobads.org/faq
Even if this gets passed, it's probably unenforceable.
Then it would be possible to actually identify suspicious behaviour, and you could publish stats about companies' hiring practices so candidates can avoid them etc.
The alternative could be like a $2000 fine per listing violation. To make it worthwhile to enforce, offer half the fine as a tax credit that can be claimed anonymously after an investigation.
The point is if a company fills 80% of its job postings with internal hires then that's highly suss and can be investigated. I don't delaying advertising would change that?
1) Person believes company is posting fake job listings and notes a few as evidence.
2) Person submits this to some government form similar to an FCC complaint form.
3) Government contacts the company to investigate or whatever.
Generally when I'm looking at a company's financials more employees means less profitable.
(There's a classic story from the Windows 3.x era regarding pen computing, where Microsoft spent money on it and advertised that solely to force competitors to expend efforts where Microsoft knew there was no payoff)
For example: https://www.linkup.com
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
(Joke)
Let me guess: Companies will start immediately rejecting candidates after they submit an application, and after every interview. Then, when they want to move forward they will re-invite a candidate.
Pay transparency law supporters have argued successfully that there is a compelling interest in closing gender and racial wage gaps and that salary range information can be mandated in job listings for that purpose. What's the compelling interest in this case that allows the government to control speech?
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 :-)
I appreciate your optimism regarding the nature of these postings, but I've seen at multiple companies them doing exactly what they describe in the article - fake job postings to improve their appearance to investors, fake job postings to justify H1B positions, etc. Every time I was at a company that got bought by private equity, the former appeared in huge numbers. As soon as we got acquired, in preparation for downsizing, the latter appeared in huge numbers. So you'll forgive me if "managing job hard :(" doesn't land for those of us who are applying for those jobs that don't exist.
Of course, I'm assuming companies with actual positions to fill would gain an advantage here, but the whole recruiting industry is so broken, I'm not sure.
Either way, the true ghost listings - positions that are box-ticker listings for internal candidates or H1Bs are pretty awful.
what does that mean? if you are hiring you describe the qualifications that you are looking for. if you have a range of qualifications, you say so. if it is not a specific job, then don't describe it as such. i'd happily apply to a listing that doesn't advertise a specific role as long as my qualifications match.
if candidates come to the wrong conclusion, then maybe the job description was not clear about that.
i can see the problem with a broad listing that could be a match for anyone from junior and up, but we are talking about changing laws, so this could be taken into account.
if you hire rarely, same thing, if you can demonstrate that it takes a long time to find the right candidate. or, you could be requested to pause posts.
to handle a possible confusion about multiple listings, each job could have some kind of ID, in any case you wouldn't have multiple job posts in the same listing.
Umm, no? There are plenty of times when I've had roles posted that we interviewed candidates who met the written requirements (e.g., degrees, years of experience, etc) but did not pass our interview loops. It's very hard to prove a negative.
>>> Umm, no? There are plenty of times when I've had roles posted that we interviewed candidates who met the written requirements (e.g., degrees, years of experience, etc) but did not pass our interview loops. It's very hard to prove a negative.
>> if they passed the written requirements you should have interviewed them.
That is the point of my anecdote; we did interview them. And yet, we did not hire them, for a variety of reasons. For example, they may not have passed the interview. Or a reference check may have raised concerns. Or we may have hired another candidate whom we also interviewed and who did better.
Your implication, that they should have an easy and presumptively correct right to sue (and win) unless we can "demonstrate ... that the candidate was not qualified," is extremely expensive. It can easily cost 10's or 100's of thousands of dollars to defend a lawsuit.
i am only talking about the case where a company is collecting resumes but never interviewing anyone. or rejecting everyone they interview but skipping over qualified candidates they could interview but don't without a good reason.
i haven't even thought about the case where candidates pass an interview but the position still does not get filled despite that. that's probably also something to think about, but while you seem to keep talking about candidates you interviewed, until now i have only been talking about candidates you did not interview.
and again, all of this is only relevant if you are not actually filling the position, despite having found qualified candidates.
Value judgments are an impossible thing to adjudicate. Though people try them anyway, with lots of unjust results.
I admit some companies fail to fill roles due to incompetence, but sadly the law can't force competence.
Fraud or specifically false advertisement is not protected by the First Amendment. 15 USC 52 and ff.
> What's the compelling interest in this case that allows the government to control speech?
Ghost job postings negatively impact interstate commerce.
Sure, people wasting time applying to ghost jobs has a societal and economic cost, but what is the impact of government regulation of freely advertising job postings?
How does that stack up against the compliance cost of ensuring all of these regulations are being met so the company aren't fined, and the loss of legitimate postings to all of the places they would normally be posted to due to those regulatory cost?
The government has no business to be restricting speech in this manner.
This might suck for companies but sadly their peers made it necessary. Corporations keep telling us they will do the bare minimum of good behavior required by law and instead focus solely on return. Don't be surprised that we are now adjusting to that now that previous norms have been thrown out.
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 move cross country because the job market in an area looks really good, only there aren't actually any jobs, what is the cost to me in the end?
"Were you going to hire someone for this role?" "Yes." "Case dismissed."
Basically, they were arguing that "speech is money". The court ruled against that, and reaffirmed that speech in itself is always protected by the first amendment, regardless of who may benefit from it or what resources were allocated to facilitating it.
Free speech is about expressing opinion and fact. It doesn't grant you the right to lie and deceive.
Regarding First Amendment conflicts with commercial speech, the Supreme Court described its four-step analysis in Central Hudson Gas & Elec. v. Public Svc. Comm'n, 447 U.S. 557 (1980) (stating “For commercial speech to come within the First Amendment, it at least must concern lawful activity and not be misleading.”) Hence, the FTC Division of Advertising Practices (DAP) <https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/bureaus-offices/bureau-consume...> has survived legal scrutiny of its enforcement authority due to its compelling interest in fair public markets.
As the Congressional Research Service pointed out, FTC enforcement actions regarding ghost jobs would be difficult, since employer intent is not easily discoverable and consumer harm not easily quantifiable. On the other hand, “While employers generally do not have a legal duty to respond to job applicants, differing responses based on protected characteristics could violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or other employment laws.” page 2, <https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF1297...>
For instance, if an employer used job postings to hire from certain countries or age groups, this would likely violate Title VII since national origin and age are protected classes under Title VII, eg Mobley v Workday (where plaintiffs argue the Workday job postings platform violated Title VII) <https://www.pleasantonweekly.com/courts/2025/08/21/judge-ord...>
If they were advertising for labor, this wouldn't be an issue. The whole problem is that they are not trying to fill the position (or even have a position open).
Here's one way to address the problem of ghost jobs using taxes:
Force every job post to include a salary range. Make companies pay a small "job posting tax" for every listing, which is proportional to the product of the job's stated salary, and the number of views or applications it gets.
Including a salary range in every job will improve gender equality and help jobseekers save time.
The nominal "job posting tax" should aim to be a small fraction of the actual cost of making a new hire (say 1-5% of the equivalent labor cost for all the work that goes into filling a role). The tax needs to stay small, so companies aren't seriously discouraged from hiring. (Heck, you could even have the tax automatically get reduced a little bit if the economy is in a recession -- or automatically go up if data analysis determines there are too many ghost jobs. Or even refund some taxes once a hire actually gets made!)
The goal is just to apply some financial drag to companies that spam job listings. If you're inconveniencing jobseekers, you've got to pay a little tax for it. Identify the right tax scheme and everything should sort itself out.
I have a good friend that's a recruiter for a top 20 flagship research university in the US. Her line is always, "We're education. We don't do things like ghost jobs and ghostings." She'll then often tell stories where she and her colleagues do the exact same thing you hear in the private sector.
Recently she asked me if I thought it was ok to go ahead and fly a candidate out for an interview knowing the funding had just been cut. Her boss (in recruiting) wanted to anyway in case the funding was restored. Luckily the hiring managers refused to go ahead.
some universities just fly candidates to show to the dean as proof that they're working towards the school's AI initiatives. last year a school that flew me made a huge deal about how serious they were about AI and all the infrastructure they were willing to purchase for the 60 new faculty they were hiring across the entire school who do AI work.
they ended up hiring a psychology major who does nothing AI related.
If you aren't going to shutdown offshoring and the importing of labor through the abuse of things like the H1B program, you aren't going to accomplish much in terms of fixing how the average American worker is treated.
Because when hiring through employment office, you actually have to commit to the process and hire someone and do it with respectable sallary.
With thousands of candidates for one position, it is much easier to skip the governmental supervision and have the opportunity to manipulate the candidates.
Probably. But there's also another obvious explanation for why he wasn't hearing back. (Widespread ageism, which is already illegal in the US, but many, many companies don't care.)
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.
My companies have posted an awful lot of job ads in earnest over the years that haven't found suitable candidates, despite an absolute barrage of slop resumes.
Ghost jobs help companies do one important thing: hire the person they already selected and want in the position but have to go through the "interview" process to make things look "transparent." They post the job, "interview" some folks, included their preferred candidate, then miraculously "select" their preferred candidate over everyone else.
I'm not mad it's happening, I'm mad it's taken this long to do.