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The controls summarized in the CNBC piece seem reasonable, or, if not that, then at least not all that onerous.

The controls in the actual proposal are less reasonable: they create finable infractions for any claim in a job ad deemed "misleading" or "inaccurate" (findings of fact that requires a an expensive trial to solve) and prohibit "perpetual postings" or postings made 90 days in advance of hiring dates.

The controls might make it harder to post "ghost jobs" (though: firms posting "ghost jobs" simply to check boxes for outsourcing, offshoring, or visa issuance will have no trouble adhering to the letter of this proposal while evading its spirit), but they will also impact firms that don't do anything resembling "ghost job" hiring.

Firms working at their dead level best to be up front with candidates still produce steady feeds of candidates who feel misled or unfairly rejected. There are structural features of hiring that almost guarantee problems: for instance, the interval between making a selection decision about a candidate and actually onboarding them onto the team, during which any number of things can happen to scotch the deal. There's also a basic distributed systems problem of establishing a consensus state between hiring managers, HR teams, and large pools of candidates.

If you're going to go after "ghost job" posters, you should do something much more targeted to what those abusive firms are actually doing, and raise the stakes past $2500/infraction.

Making people able to sue for anyone feeling bad about not having gotten the job is a path you should not take. We have something similar in Germany and its horrible for companies. Leeches bleeding you dry.

i'm so glad that companies don't have feelings tho. Would you mind sharing with everyone else what you are talking about, its very vague with the descriptor of "something similar" doubly questionable with you use of calling humans leeches, 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.

not every company is some large mega corp

They all want to be, though. All business want to be big-time like Amazon, but not all of them are so lucky.

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.

No they don't. This kind of mustachio-twirling caricature isn't a helpful mental model of how business works.

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.

I find generally the most helpful thing you can factor in when trying to work out how a business is thinking is "what set of things would make my viable business predictable". If there's a factor HN threads tend to miss in these discussions, it's determinism.

You're arguing with me, but this statement...

> 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.

> The ideal business is one where you take in money and have no expenditures.

> 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.

> Every business owner, regardless of the size of the business, wants free labor.

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 don't think it's unreasonable or onerous to shift the burden of hiring onto companies well-suited and minimally impacted by this process compared to individuals.

The fines should definitely be proportional though, with larger companies facing very severe infractions.

There are rules like this in other countries around the world, and the impact is that it's much harder to change full-time jobs, because companies work around them by replacing full-time roles with contract positions, something that's much harder to regulate.

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.

I completely agree that there isn't any legislation that will "fix this problem" (other than perhaps abolition of H1B).

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).

> people sending ringers to do their coding exercises for them including different ringers or two ringers at once (oops)

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.

I'm not familiar with the process of passing a law. Is it one of those situations where the ask is open to negotiation? Like, if I want to be given a finger I first need to ask for the whole arm kinda deal? If it's the case, then as you said, perhaps the real ask is what's in the summary.

There's no real process with respect to what the statute would end up saying; it would be intensely negotiated (and unlikely in this political climate). The simplest thing to go on is what the actual proposal says.

Maybe it would be simpler to just impose a nominal tax on the total number of job openings a company creates throughout the year. Maybe as a % of the role's salary. You could even rebate it against employer payroll taxes so they get the money back when they actually hire someone.

You should never tax things you want people to do, like posting legitimate job openings

We tax things we want people to do all the time.

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.

To refute the parent, you have to argue that it's a good idea, not just that it's done. It's not hard to find plenty of things that people do which are terrible ideas.

Alcohol Tax, Nicotine Tax. Good taxes on bad things.

> posting legitimate job openings

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.

Nothing like this is ever going to happen. It would be incredibly expensive (on both the employer and the government side) to administer, and it would be portrayed as a tax on hiring, because that's exactly what it would be.

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.

I agree with you that what I described can't and won't happen.

[dead]

Only 17%??

Last time I was job hunting I found that 80%+ of postings were either dupes or bogus. Very vague description of the job? I'm going to keep seeing it for a long time, clearly they are not actually filling the role. Very specific, odd set of requirements, they're going through the motions but they've already picked the person and the ad is designed to match only that person.

I think they're going about this backwards. Leave the ad up, but they are required to amend it with external hire/internal hire/H-1B when the position is filled. Let people see what has happened in the past. And all jobs must be associated with some entity and indicate how long that entity has existed.

It is absolutely 80%+. The majority of the time, it is a company looking to sponsor an H1B for a role or they have an H1B in the role who they want to sponsor for PERM status (Green Card) and the law requires them to post the job to prove there are no Americans available. The next most common reason is they have identified an internal candidate for the role but corporate policy requires all jobs to be posted externally to show they are looking for the best person. The next most common reason is HR conducting market research on compensation. In all cases, there is no intent to actually fill the role with an external hire.

The other kind that are insidious are the MLM people. They post a 'job' and it turns out you are about to be sold an MLM. But you can 'be your own boss!!!'

80% of what? There are 85,000 H1B visas per year, and vastly more job postings (and hirings of citizens) each year.

85,000 new H1B's. But there are multiples of that already in the US who already hold visas. So, the actual number is in the hundreds of thousands, enough to make a serious impact on supply of labor in the tech sector.

That makes a massive difference, if true.

85,000 is too many. Number should be zero or, preferably, negative.

Job Listing Site Highlighting H-1B Positions So Americans Can Apply - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892321 - August 2025 (106 comments)

https://jobs.now

Those 'one specific person' ads are usually there to comply with an internal requirement or external regulation/law, so they wouldn't be able to say that it was filled, because that would be an admission that the whole process was a sham.

It would be filled, they would be required to say so. Yes, it's going to look bad, that's the point.

The requirement which is driving the posting is a requirement that they search for candidates other than the one specific person they have in mind. If they post it with 'already filled' in the posting, they would not be complying with the requirement. The requirement is usually driven by a law or some policy created outside the hiring process for that position, so the hiring manager(s) are not permitted to do what you suggest.

I was employed as a contractor for a state agency many years ago. When it was time to convert to permanent full-time they had to advertise my job on the job boards because of some law. I also had to apply to my job in the same fashion. Not a promotion or pay raise was profered, just a straightforward contractor to FTE process. And I almost didn't get it.

So, I convert my resume into the job description that would be posted. Thinking it will get 100% hit rate. Lo and behold, someone else took that job description and basically converted it into their resume. And got a higher ATS score!

You seem to misunderstand the proposal. The proposal is that after they have done everything that is already legally required (advertise an open position for some amount of time etc), then they must amend the posting to include that the position is filled by an internal/external/H-1B hire. There is still a period of time when the position is advertised as open.

I use to work for a company that got around this by posting the job ad physically outside our offices doors. We were 5 stories in a WeWork space. Probably illegal but I doubt the company cared.

Which is still "broken" since the position was never really open in the first place - it's still a ghost listing, as the position was always going to an internal hire or H1b or whatever.

Yes, but requiring the post-fill disclosure will at least make data available to work the problem further.

the suggestion is to change the law.

Reducing regulations around H1B requirements (and fixing that by just reducing H1Bs) and internal hiring would be the way to solve it.

H1Bs aren't the only problem, though.

Why? They'd "find" the one specific person, and then report the job was filled by that person, as an internal hire if that was the case.

I suspect they mean it's for sponsoring a green card for an existing employee.

At large companies, this kind of stuff is the norm even for internal transfers. They got all sorts of whack policies in place, department leads try to work around the red tape and make very very VERY specific job postings that only the actually desired candidate can fill.

Yeah, I saw that figure and thought: Total BS.

The hallmarks of ghost job posting are so obvious that detecting them could probably be automated now.

- 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.

If the number is only 17%, I'm not sure we need to ban them.

From my experience the big issue is hiring managers who either 1) are very casual about hiring (i.e. they're willing to wait 6 months and waste everyone's time), or 2) people who like the idea of hiring but keep changing what they want to hire for (like this month we're having issues with testing, so we want a test engineer, but next month we're having issues with embedded software, so we need a new embedded engineer.

I really don't think there are bands of hiring managers posting fake job ads to make their company look more impressive, I think it's just bands of hiring managers who want a senior engineer with direct experience for <140k

> If the number is only 17%, I'm not sure we need to ban them.

Job hunting is a market and the government should tryu to make every market as efficient as possible. Imagine if you went to any other store and 17% of the items you bought were just junk and didn't work.

This is a superb take. I've admittedly always thought of interviews as a process in desperate need of improvement. Thinking of it as a market is a helpful perspective shift on some long-standing ideas.

You don't need the legislation for this.

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.

So imagine job hunting is Amazon where you can’t return bad products.

Ever go to Fry's back in the day? A lot of the items they sold were junk, but they had a liberal return policy.

My Dad told me he worked for a manager who always kept a job open "just in case" someone good walked through the door. It also made it easier to hire if he got a phone call within his network, because he didn't need to jump through hoops to open the req.

(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 actually hope such open roles are spammed.

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.

This "a senior engineer with direct experience for <140k" is a fake job.

For the last few months when I go on linkedin I'm spammed with a position out of CA who wants someone with 8+ years experience, in a C-tier CA desert city, for 80-110k. They've had it listed as "urgently hiring" for about 3 months now

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

I've done consulting work for a company with an open job req (it's been open for over 6 months) for a senior embedded engineer in a high cost of living area, offering 140k and no equity. In the meantime they've been paying me $240/hour to do the same work that person would do. It truly makes no sense to me, why they wouldn't just raise their offer to 200k or whatever. But it does happen.

I would bet it's so they can cook the accounting by counting you as a "temporary" expense, unlike the salary of the as yet nonexistent permanent hire.

I do agree it's not about making the company look better, but that doesn't mean there isn't a problem.

And you're missing the recruiters who are simply gathering resumes.

And the scammers looking to sell you training.

And the ones who are after collecting people's personal information in specific industries.

It may be 17% overall, but distributed in such a way that its 95% of the jobs you are applying for -- because some industries or positions do it much more often.

Somewhat related, I learned to be very cautious about LinkedIn and their job postings. I hit a couple that looked like regular companies and started to apply, but they were really fake job postings just go harvest your information. Even when you abort the process, it's too late. They take your info and put you on a zillion job sites automatically with endless email spam.

I don't get spam emails, but I get spam phone calls. Sometimes it happened suspiciously a few minutes before a call that's actually related to the position I applied for.

But a phone number is expected here where I live (Spain). Few companies seem to respond via email (some do, but it's rare). Everyone just wants you to give them your phone number so, if they decide to call you, they will do a surprise call a few weeks after you applied, at the most inconvenient moment, with no advance notice of any kind.

And since first impressions are important, not being available during that inconveniently-timed surprise screening call is probably a negative point at least on a subconscious level.

LinkedIn is the absolute worst. For one, there's a checkbox that is clicked by default to "Follow <company>", which essentially rewards a company for posting a job with thousands of followers (job applicants).

I imagine most companies just want followers on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn = Facebook Pro

> I learned to be very cautious about LinkedIn

A rule for life. It’s a spam machine, and nothing more as far as I’m concerned.

I still won't forgive them for the incident circa 2012 where they were sending out emails from your email account to everyone in your address book or recent contacts list in your own voice (!!) saying "hi $name, I joined linked in come network with me!".

Vivid memories of this happening to me and many I knew. Totally insane and horrible. Wonder who had the brilliant idea.

I'd be more interested in knowing what the ROI was for it. And how big a bonus did that person get for the idea.

Years later, Pinterest repeated this offense.

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.

If I wanted to game my stock price and mislead my competition, a bunch of highly specific (and fraudulent) job postings on my website (in combination with other investor-adjacent reporting) would be a great low cost start.

How, exactly, would that convince an investor such as myself that your company is suddenly worth more?

Generally when I'm looking at a company's financials more employees means less profitable.

If i post a bunch of ghost/fake jobs, then investros *could potentially* see that as a signal that i am growing, and they should invest NOW before its too late...as one example. Another example, could be that my competition sees "enough/so many open jobs", that they might assume their market position is less than it might be - think of it as a sort of distant intimidation...but also, could be an approach for that competition to get distracted and spin their wheels trying to hire unnecessarily (to try to block up the pool of relevant candidates), thus burning budget in process, etc.

You need to think outside the box. Once you've determined that a particular technological avenue is a dead end, gin up a bunch of job postings that would suggest that you're doubling down on it and watch your competitors set money on fire trying to catch up.

(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 sure, you're right that there are vastly more creative and devious ways to leverage jobs against one's competition. :-)

It's common in the investment industry to look at the content/trends in a company's job posts. More job posts are not directly a good thing, but job posts can give insights into the departments or projects that are growing

For example: https://www.linkup.com

yes, and that's what is done.

This is explictly restricting speech (restricting the right to advertise for labor) and would have to meet a high first amendment bar in the US.

Pay transparency law supporters have argued successfully that there is a compelling interest in closing gender and racial wage gaps and that salary range information can be mandated in job listings for that purpose. What's the compelling interest in this case that allows the government to control speech?

How is this actually restricting speech? It's not restricting advertisements for labor, it's restricting intentional lies made to misdirect. That's called fraud.

Sorry, but how would you ever prove a job ad is fake?

"Were you going to hire someone for this role?" "Yes." "Case dismissed."

No it isn't. Fraud requires damages. Lying is legal. Maybe you could claim damages in the amount of time it takes to apply for the fake job, but it's not really worth it because it wouldn't be worth more than a few bucks.

The harm adds up, time to prepare and apply, possible time and effort and travel expense wasted if an interview was also conducted. You could say financially it's not a lot to one person, but if 100 people got deceived by the same listing? If 20% of all job listing are like that, maybe 2 million people got deceived in aggregate, now the financial harm total adds up to a lot more. And individually, to an unemployed person, even if the total loss is small, the percentage loss is higher as they likely have no revenue.

You could also argue there is loss to other companies listing real postings, as those fake ones add noise and people might miss their posting and not apply, causing them delays in filling their position.

Plus, if the ghost jobs are to appear to be growing to investors, or to satisfy regulators to justify internal positions or foreign hiring, now there is harm to investors or false compliance to regulations.

And I'd also say, the misrepresentation of demand, might lead people to pursue education in some careers and upskill thinking there is a lot of jobs for those skills, that would be a pretty hefty financial loss if they were mislead.

If I have 1 month of savings after which I lose my house, my car, maybe my marriage, and I invest time into your fake scheme, what is the cost to me in the end? Much more than a few bucks.

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?

The compelling interest for state and federal governments would be to ensure a fair marketplace by prohibiting false advertising and deceptive practices. California is considering Assembly Bill 1251 (Banning “ghost” job postings) to deter “unfair competition” in the labor marketplace. <https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab...>

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...>

advertising for jobs that aren't actually available is fraud or deception?

If you advertise a job and fail to find a qualified candidate, and then don't fill that role, is that fraud? If you advertise for talent constantly, interview regularly, and hire rarely (but hire), is that fraud? If you have a single role to fill and advertise it multiple times in multiple states as multiple listings because that's how job posting forums work, is that fraud?

if you fail to find a candidate then you will easily be able to demonstrate that the candidate suing you for violating the law was not qualified and therefore has no reason to sue.

if you hire rarely, same thing, if you can demonstrate that it takes a long time to find the right candidate. or, you could be requested to pause posts.

to handle a possible confusion about multiple listings, each job could have some kind of ID, in any case you wouldn't have multiple job posts in the same listing.

>> if you fail to find a candidate then you will easily be able to demonstrate that the candidate suing you for violating the law was not qualified and therefore has no reason to sue.

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. if not, why didn't you and why would you then be claiming that you can't find anyone? if you did interview them and they failed, then you have all the proof you need.

No. Obviously not. Are you intentionally being difficult? The article clearly addresses this and the main point is that these jobs are being posted with no intention to fill the role.

I think it can be argued that some of those are.

Same as how false price advertising, or I don't know, say you kept calling customer support but never had any problems could start to look like abuse.

Or squatting a business parking lot, you can always say, I eventually might need something from the store and intend to buy from it. I think they'd still have you towed and your argument would fail.

I've conducted probably 700+ interviews as a hiring manager. A lot of candidates I've spoken to assume job listing advertisements are an org chart. In reality, job listings (at scaling companies especially) are a lead generation tool to attract desired talent into a hiring pipeline.

The org chart is dynamic and is affected constantly by changing priority, changing budgets, promotions and departures, and the talent you're attracting. You can't effectively staff at scale under a rule that 1 job listing = 1 box in an org chart. Or at least I've not seen it done - I'd appreciate counter examples :-)

A lot of candidates assume job listing advertisements are an org chart. In reality, job listings (at scaling companies especially) are a lead generation tool to attract desired talent into a hiring pipeline.

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.

I'd be ok with this IF AND ONLY IF the job listing is explicit that it's a lead generation/ recruitment pipeline builder. But, it should be in big, bold text: THIS IS NOT AN ACTUAL POSITION, WE MAY OR MAY NOT EVER HIRE ANYBODY, BUT SEND US YOUR DETAILS AND MAYBE WE'LL CALL YOU.

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.

I don't think those are an issue though, these companies are actually hiring at high rates and filling positions. I don't think it would fall into ghost posting. Also, from my experience, there tends to be hiring pools, because they know it's a matter of days before they need someone else.

Apple does. That's exactly how they hire. I've also seen robotics startups so the same. It's not impossible at places that are growing.

Honestly you could have just saved us all this time by stating you're a hiring manager up front.

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.

The problem is H1B. If that goes away, or is massively reduced, then that will help a lot.

They are available, just not for you, or oft for anyone inside the country. However proving intent when they will find any and all excuses to pass on local talent is a difficult measure to ascertain beyond a reasonable doubt.

Deceptive commercial speech is illegal in many contexts.

> This is explictly restricting speech (restricting the right to advertise for labor) and would have to meet a high first amendment bar in the US.

Fraud 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.

> 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.

Does the government regulate car dealer advertisements for vehicles not on the lot and that don't exist?

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.

Oh please! Every time scammers are told to behave, they run around claiming their "free speech" is being impacted.

Free speech is about expressing opinion and fact. It doesn't grant you the right to lie and deceive.

Who decides?

Isn't that what court is for?

Are corporations given the right to free speech?

Yes. Loosely, corporations are just groups of people acting with similar goals and interests, so the free speech right flows to the company.

Citizens United specifically affirmed corporations' First Amendment rights.

Can a car dealer advertise a car they don't have for sale?

Yes. Shareholders and their agents ("corporations") have rights to free speech.

> What counts as a “ghost job”? A job listing is considered a ghost job if:

> · 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.

What would make it more enforceable?

I think you should focus on things you can enforce. For example, in Austria companies are required to provide certain information in job ads (eg. salary range, weekly hours, type of contract) and it's trivial to enforce because you can see if the information is there or not. I'm not sure if it helps with ghost job ads, though.

I think realistically the only way you could enforce this is to legally required registration of job adverts with the government (you register the advert, you receive an ID; anyone advertising jobs without a valid ID is heavily fined), and then also require companies to register the outcome of the advert (internal hire, external hire, withdrawn, etc.).

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.

They wouldn't have to register it with the government, just track it internally in the chance that they get challenged on it so they have receipts.

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.

They would have to register them otherwise they could very easily fake the data afterwards, and you wouldn't be able to fine people advertising jobs without IDs. Nobody would have a record of all the jobs a company had advertised.

then it would just be like real estate with off market listings where companies have a black market hiring pool and then just do the legal loophole steps of registering before "officially" posting and immediately hiring their desired candidate... which would probably have the shady side effect of making the policy "look efficient" without actually solving the job search problem.

I'm unfamiliar with off market real estate listings (not a thing in the UK). Can you describe what you mean more?

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?

For this analogy to hold, wouldn't there have to be some way to withhold all people from applying to a job? Why would a company want to do this if it just increases the cost of hiring? What is the benefit to paying more for a workforce when you can just hire people normally.

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.

> (essentially banning HR ghosting in the interview process)

(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.

I’m not saying this isn’t an issue, but in the face of what’s happened to the labor markets and economy, this feels a little like pissing in the wind.

I somewhat agree, but I still think the "job posting" market needs regulation.

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.

The problem is most "ghost jobs" aren't: They're real jobs with a real intention to hire, but the hiring team can't come to a decision. I've seen it time and time again: A role gets reposted 2, 3, 4 times until the one curmudgeon on the team finally relents and somebody gets hired. It's a tremendous waste of time but it isn't a "ghost job". I predict this legislation will have approximately zero impact on people posting roles that don't actually get filled.

Perhaps, for the slice of the world that you have observed, that might be the case. But, i assure you that ghost jobs are real, and they exist on top of the types of scenarios that you described...so you can imagine that folks trying to land that job have challenges on multiple fronts...and if you live on the side of the team that can benefit when that person is hired, well, you suffer also whenever a role is not filled - either for reasons like you described, or for ghost jobs, etc.

That's a very generous interpretation of what's actually going on out there. Companies post jobs out of vanity. They think they look better when they're hiring. Good data is essential for a good economy. Fake jobs are pollution.

Sure, this is a good step. But there's something the government can do that would be much more effective: Make their own job board. California already has this by the way, but it's a bit clunky and is intended for unemployed folks. We need a serious LinkedIn competitor from the government. Just like USPS competes with UPS and Fedex, and keeps them honest, a job board run by the government would raise the quality of all job boards, effectively setting a floor on how anti-user they can be (and we all know, LinkedIn is only a job board ostensibly, it's really a dark pattern factory that nags you to pay a monthly fee for random services almost no one needs).

Seems completely unenforceable.

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.

let's start with removing posts from who's hiring that have had the same position for 3 years.

unfortunately this happens in academia too. last year was brutal for most PhDs in business schools because the number of positions dropped significantly compared to the year before, and the ones that were "on the market" weren't all legit. there were several top tier schools that did the first-round interviews or even flyout seminars only to test the waters, with no intention of hiring. the fact that universities and professors thought it was okay to waste candidates' time was in itself telling about the culture in those schools.

The disconnect between academia and private is real and often bizarre.

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.

and can they stop asking me whether i am disable or vetern or not by default.

Can we get regulators to do something about devilcorp postings too?

This is going to be very hard to enforce on a Federal level, let alone pass.

Companies are going to play shell games with the titles, responsibilities, and org structure just enough. There might also be 1st Amendment issues, too. The required reporting numbers will be hollow. The end result will be that it will be on the books, but the government won't have any enforceable actions for years.

And when you do see action, it will drag on for years. The feds go after big fish like Microsoft, which will drag it out. Meanwhile, thousands of your Series B-sized companies that are the biggest culprits, will fly under the radar.

I think you're going to see a few states do pass laws like this. The enforcement question will still be there, but it will be on a smaller scale. Results will be varied. Meanwhile, we need to keep naming and shaming companies and recruiters who do this.

Great idea in theory, tough in practice.

All regulation is hard to enforce. Have to start somewhere, and then you keep pulling the ratchet via policy.

Which is why it should not be used to prevent minor annoyances like wasting a few minutes applying for a job that isn't there.

This is not a minor annoyance, this consumes time and resources both for candidates at scale and diminishes the integrity of data from a labor economics perspective ("open jobs"). It is arguably fraud and should be prosecuted as such (and I'm fairly confident this case can be made to an electorate who isn't going to shrug off even more corporate malfeasance in a softening labor market).

If you create regulation you can't effectively enforce it can actually make things worse. This is why you can buy fentanyl on every corner, but now the people supplying it have small nation-state tier armies of guys in hiluxes with machine guns and truck mounted .50 cal anti-armor guns.

Not saying that will happen with ghost jobs, but it's not a given things will improve.

I have absolutely no idea why you think this regulation would be any harder to implement than any other regulation other than a hand-wavy brief first sentence in your first comment. I have no idea what sort of juggling of job titles you're predicting that will deceive anyone for more than 10 seconds. I have no idea what 1st amendment issue you see in advertising for an employment contract that isn't backed by employment; if you advertise asthma medicine that doesn't have any effect on asthma, people understand that it's fraud.

Also, it seems that you're making a parallel case that it makes no difference to the fentanyl market that there is a law against fentanyl, which makes me think that you apply the Law of Averages to every change that you hear anyone suggest.

e.g. if you make a law against fentanyl, some people will stop selling fentanyl, while other people will be more attracted to selling an illegal drug, therefore a law against fentanyl will have no effect on fentanyl use or sales.

The Law of Averages is not real.

I haven't argued a single thing in the straw man you've attacked.

I haven't even speculated whether regulation against ghost jobs would be effective. The thing about the 1A and law of averages is totally out of left field and seem like you're taking up issues with some other comment.

The proposal I think is simply to force listings to have more details like hire and start date, if it's for a backfill, if it gives priority to internal hires, etc.

So the enforcement I think would be if you post listings without those details, you get fined.

How you'd prove if people added false details I don't know, but I think the idea is at least by giving more info on the listing it might deter some ghost listings or enable the applicant to determine if the listing seems legit.

In theory, they can be done at the state level. I know its not perefect, but because of a few states jobs laws, I almost always see salary ranges and averages now on job postings.

Especially remote jobs.

The easy way to enforce this would be to leave it individuals. Applied to a job and heard nothing back? Sue. You'd have to pretty tightly define the law, such that it could be simply applied, but I could imagine all sorts of concrete rules which would significantly improve the status quo. Something like "Public job postings may be up for no more than 60 days for a given position, interview process must last no more than 30 days beyond that. By the end of the subsequent 90 day window, the company must either hire at least one applicant and let the others know they didn't make the cut, or demonstrate that they received zero acceptable applicants by providing concrete reasons for rejection to all applicants.

It's a "shit or get off the pot" type deal: the easiest solution to the problem is to just find an acceptable applicant and hire them.

No, the easiest solution is to avoid doing anything that would qualify as a “public job posting” until you’re absolutely out of other options, which is probably worse than the status quo.

> Companies are going to play shell games

shades of Sinofsky's description of federal HR reporting

https://x.com/stevesi/status/1953920412506894347

Good luck getting anywhere with this... Companies will lobby hard to squash it.

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.

In the end this is like banning fake news, you just can't.

I suggest people just take a credibility approach. As an example, I no longer bother with HN's "Who's hiring", everything there is bullshit.

Besides, job sites are just social media, their purpose is not to inform, it is to create eyeballs to advertisers. You should discard them, like you should also cancel Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp.

Hey - not everything is bullshit on "Who's hiring" threads. I once got eight rounds of interviews with a company before being ghosted by someone off of an HN thread.

So now that another admin is in power, it's useful to have accurate numbers. But during the last several administrations, job posting numbers were used to backstop failing economic activity, especially post covid.

I'm not mad it's happening, I'm mad it's taken this long to do.

I don't think it's related. This proposal if I understood hasn't reached any political sphere, it's just a grassroots effort.