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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> (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.
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?
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.
People are too eager to tackle problems using regulation. Taxes are often preferable, because they're simpler to administer and they generate revenue for the state.
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.
The problem of the ghost jobs existing in first place is because of weak HR. HR that does not have education, can not be influential strategic personnel necessary to steward management toward right decisions. Ghost jobs are also an alternative to marketing since companies see it as a way to market themselves as successful company. Because there is no one to stop such foolish decisions, we see effect on market.
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.
In Poland, no company hires through the employment office. Why?
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.
> The first time Thompson, 53, [...] Could it be all the roles he was submitting to weren’t actually real?
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.)
Just HackerNews this. It's probably an actual vibe-code project to have a list of ghost jobs that are crowd-maintained that people can use to filter them out of job sites. Like RSS for ghost jobs.
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).
I support the idea, but the actual proposal is far too restrictive. We don’t want to make hiring harder for businesses to do, we want to cut down on fake job listings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> (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.
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?
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.
People are too eager to tackle problems using regulation. Taxes are often preferable, because they're simpler to administer and they generate revenue for the state.
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.
The problem of the ghost jobs existing in first place is because of weak HR. HR that does not have education, can not be influential strategic personnel necessary to steward management toward right decisions. Ghost jobs are also an alternative to marketing since companies see it as a way to market themselves as successful company. Because there is no one to stop such foolish decisions, we see effect on market.
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.
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.
In Poland, no company hires through the employment office. Why?
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.
> The first time Thompson, 53, [...] Could it be all the roles he was submitting to weren’t actually real?
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.)
let's start with removing posts from who's hiring that have had the same position for 3 years.
Just HackerNews this. It's probably an actual vibe-code project to have a list of ghost jobs that are crowd-maintained that people can use to filter them out of job sites. Like RSS for ghost jobs.
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).
I support the idea, but the actual proposal is far too restrictive. We don’t want to make hiring harder for businesses to do, we want to cut down on fake job listings.
But what will America's hard working ghosts do now?
Can we get regulators to do something about devilcorp postings too?
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.
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.
and can they stop asking me whether i am disable or vetern or not by default.
[dead]
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.
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.