'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Which right exactly are you invoking?

I suspect they would hire a Nobel laureate that was willing to work as an unpaid intern.

Online? It's like, a few clicks, maybe a few hurried minutes.

Unless, maybe you're so clueless that you do spend significant amount of time on each hand crafted submission, hoping the (unbeknownst to you) 23 yr old HR admin with a degree in comparative psych will appreciate the subtle indicators of subject matter expertise you've carefully woven through your cover letter and provocatively embedded in your relevant experience. Or perhaps instead, you took the time to look up the name of the hiring manager and reviewed all their socials to try to understand them better and thoughtfully included hints through your application that you share common interests, you might even see them in a bar or restaurant on their side of town, maybe you'll talk to them, you think to yourself, but no it would be too much we should simply observe, and wait, the work we've put into the application will speak for itself... In either case, yes I agree life will be hard for you, perhaps even cruel, for such a rare flower the light of day is cruelty. I wish you luck. Don't email me.

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.

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

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".

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.