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Comment by ZuoCen_Liu | Hacker News Reader

Ghost jobs are essentially the 'vaporware' of the HR world. In any other department, misrepresenting your intent to engage in a transaction would be seen as a breach of professional ethics. The fact that it has become a standard KPI for HR departments to 'keep the pipeline warm' at the expense of thousands of hours of unpaid candidate labor is a massive market failure.

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Seems like participation in unemployment should require every job posting to be recorded as to date open, date filled, number of candidates applied, number interviewed. Such information should be public and weekly updated. Companies that do not comply should pay a higher rate.

Earlier this year was playing around with the idea of creating an app to track job applications and the subsequent interview process for candidates. Then using the data to give users insights into companies and roles and how responsive they are. So (with enough adoption) one could see how long they take to respond or even see other candidates they had responded to for a specific position (maybe even allow competing candidates to chat? or see where others are in the interview pipeline).

I could not figure out a way to painlessly gather this info without monitoring users' emails (privacy nightmare) or having users forward emails to the app (too painful/not conducive to user adoption). But if anyone has any ideas how to get around that?

Maybe by providing a unique email to the user that he/she will use for the company. Be sure to forward emails to the user also :D

Haha, that's unlikely.

I think the primary obstacle isn't the data ingestion method, but the fact that companies treat the recruitment lifecycle as a proprietary black box. From an HR perspective, transparency is a liability, not an asset. They have zero incentive to cooperate with an external 'tracking' tool because: 1Information Asymmetry is Power: If candidates knew exactly where they stood or how many 'ghost' positions existed, the company would lose its leverage in salary negotiations and timeline control. 2Legal and PR Risk: Making the pipeline visible exposes a company to accusations of bias or 'unfavorable' hiring patterns. 'Privacy' is often used here as a convenient shield to hide inefficiency or lack of intent. Even if you solved the email-scraping problem, you'd likely face Terms of Service (ToS) roadblocks or even legal threats from major corporations claiming you are 'scraping' or 'misrepresenting' their internal processes. The 'pain' of user adoption isn't just about email forwarding; it's about the fact that candidates are often too intimidated to participate in a system that might be seen as 'adversarial' to the very companies they are trying to join. We aren't just missing a tool; we are missing a safe harbor for candidate data sharing.

I don't think number interviewed is relevant--I don't care so much about exactly how their screening works, just that it lead to hires. The rest of it, though, definitely, and any job ad must include a link to the database.

But I would add one field: filled internally/externally/H1-B, rather than just "filled".

Yes to how filled.

> In any other department, misrepresenting your intent to engage in a transaction would be seen as a breach of professional ethics.

In most other situations related to money or contracts, it would be a criminal offense punishable by prison time.

> In most other situations related to money or contracts, it would be a criminal offense punishable by prison time

What are you thinking of? In most cases, that falls firmly under the category of bullshitting. Annoying. Unprofessional. Dishonest. But rarely criminal.

What makes this possibly illegal (though I'm still unsure if it's crimial) is that it's specifically around employer-employee relations.

Fraud is very illegal.

Only when done by individuals, or against rich people.

> Fraud is very illegal

Fraud requires intent. And a lot of commercial bullshitting either does not have fraudulent intent, or has it but in an entirely unprovable way.

How is it different in terms of breach of professional ethics than practice interviews many in tech do, never intending to take the offer? I personally have never done them (part laziness, part ethics, part lucky to have little experience of job insecurity), but have been told a few times by people that do that is stupid that I should stay sharp (and waste 5 people's time to help me for free :))

I see the parallel, but there’s a key difference in intent and scale. A candidate doing a practice interview is often a defensive reaction to a volatile market—a way to maintain a personal skill. A company posting 'ghost jobs' is a systematic corporate strategy that pollutes market data and wastes thousands of collective hours. One is an individual trying to survive the system; the other is the system itself failing to act in good faith.

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