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.
>i'm so glad that companies don't have feelings tho.
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.
> making the labor market in an give jurisdiction hostile enough that companies opt out entirely.
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?
> Wouldn't that create an enormous hole in the market for other less-scummier companies to jump in, albeit at perhaps lower margins?
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.
>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.
Ironically small businesses tend to be the most egregious violators of labor laws and humanity in general.
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.
As a small business owner, I spend a lot of my time doing things by the book.
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.
> As a small business owner, I spend a lot of my time doing things by the book.
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.
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.
> 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.
I am a landlord. I charge below market rent because it is enough to meet my financial goals and turning over a new tenant is annoying. I spare no expense on maintenance because I value my assets.
You may have a more reasonable stance than most landlords, but that doesn't change the essence of the transaction.
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.
> The ideal business is one where you take in money and have no expenditures.
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.
> 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.
>If you're a landlord, you want super high rent and no expenditures on maintenance or improvements.
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 believe all of this but also want to say that in my life as a renter I never once had a landlord return a security deposit without me taking them to court. There's definitely some ruthlessness.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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 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.
Some people, curiously, believe that business is only valid if it operates as a caricature of the worst traits of modern corporate America.
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.
I think you're leaving out a few "all things being equal" and other caveats. Compensation is not necessarily monetary (especially in the US), costs are more than just salary, etc.
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.
The devil is in the details. There is one interview process that is bulletproof but it's NEVER going to be adopted in mass by private companies: university / police academy admission exams.
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.
This process only works when you're hiring for an entry-level role and also don't care about differentiating for anything that isn't on your exam.
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?
I would say, when you have 2, 3, 10 candidates, you don't need an exam. Problem is when you need to be machine gunning waves of assault soldiers. An exam seems better than the usual and increasingly sick alternatives: have people waste their time talking to AI, when it's obvious all that time goes down the drain.
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.
It's not being skilled at programming, it's being skilled at interview programming, which is very different.
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.
The topic set is very different and the conditions are very artificial. There are many engineers who are amazing, but are absolute shit about writing code, under pressure, while someone is looking over their shoulder, to a leetcode medium that they haven't practiced for. Their brains go blank.
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.
Anybody going for a leetcode interview without doing prep work first is not a good candidate to start with.
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.
Just for fun, I found among my dad's papers the written tests he had to pass before he could even sit in the cockpit of an F-86 Sabrejet. They were quite comprehensive and full of minutia. For damn sure the AF wasn't going to let anyone fly one of those monsters without proving they could study and learn everything about them by heart. No excuses about brain freeze is going to fly (pun intended).
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.
Yes, because flying a war jet under pressure and landing it in the desert is the same as writing software over 5 months in an office. /s
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.
No, that optimizing and interviewing for performance under pressure is not needed for most software engineers, while it makes sense for fighter pilots. It's is definitely more stressful.
I'll repeat that the cure for test anxiety is preparation, preparation, preparation. Avoiding it, like your engineer employee, won't be helpful. Keep going to interviews, and the performance anxiety will also dissipate.
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.)
When I worked as a firefighter/paramedic, one of the axioms was that you don't train until you get it right, you train until you don't get it wrong. That, at 3am, sleep-deprived, it's so ingrained in you what to do, you can do it automatically, leaving your mental capacity for the variables of the situation, not the bare minimum of "what do I do next?"
> because companies work around them by replacing full-time roles with contract positions, something that's much harder to regulate.
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.
> 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.
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."
How is that at all unreasonable? Why is misinformation somehow ok when it directly harms workers? Don't like it that you have to change your behavior because of some abusers? Sorry but that's how society works for the rest of us.
The problem is that employers and prospective employees will disagree about what is and isn't "misinformation", and only a trial can resolve that question when the law gives a cause of action for it.
Sure, but the threat of having to spend money on a trial should incentivize employers to be factual and clear in their advertisements. Edge cases will get sorted out by trials at first, but then there will be case law that will discourage people from bringing questionable cases.
Again, this starts with a proposal to end "ghost jobs" and ends with... whatever problem it is you're trying to solve here. And doesn't fix the "ghost job" problem!
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.
> We tax things we want people to do all the time.
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.
Tobacco tax in Australia is an interesting example. A lot of people may have stopped initially but there was a more gradual decrease over time as the tax increases annually by CPI + 5%.
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.
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..)
Most economists agree that income tax and corporate profit tax should be eliminated and replaced with capital gains tax. Politically impossible, of course.
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.
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.
Instead of taxing good behavior, we could just criminalize bad behavior. Besides, companies spend billions on advertising. In a weird indirect way, "ghost jobs" are advertising.
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.
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.
In this case, the relevant comparison is 85,000 net new H1B visas to the total of job postings, since the parent post seemed to be saying 80% of job postings are ghost postings from companies seeking H1B visas.
No. Neither of us said 80% are H1-B. We were agreeing that 80% aren't actually obtainable jobs, but neither of us attempted to determine what percent is from what cause.
> The majority of the time, it is a company looking to sponsor an H1B for a role
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.
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!!!'
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.
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.
They (H1B) seem to the "low hanging fruit" many (not just in this thread) are pointing to. I spend time in hiring circles and I hear this sentiment frequently. And the Ghost Post issue too. I think Ghost is bigger issue than H1B. Don't have a good solution.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
> Imagine if you went to any other store and 17% of the items you bought were just junk and didn't work.
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.
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 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.
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 seen similar listings. Urgently hiring [long list of specific skills, experience, and certifications] for in-person work only in [high cost area].
If it was really urgent, there would be some flexibility in the requirements.
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.
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 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!".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This. The unintended side effect is worse and I feel like the only winners would be the lawyers in the middle.
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
I really, really dislike ghost jobs, and I think they are way more than 17%. I have to agree, though, that finding a legal way to define and enforce them, that doesn't amount to a solution worse than the problem, will be quite difficult.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
That would be a mistake, because "securities fraud" is one of the few ways you can get smacked for lying to the public. Lying to the public about climate change? Meh, it's hard to prove damages from the lie so you'll probably get away with it. However if you lie to shareholders about global warming, and that factors into your outlook of the company, you'll get smacked with securities fraud suits.
Which is funny because startups don't get any consequences for misleading investors/customers with fake job postings and the behavior in that industry is rampant.
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)
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
> (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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...>
> This is explictly restricting speech (restricting the right to advertise for labor)
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).
No one is "given" a right to free speech -- rather, in the United States, the constitution recognizes a pre-existing right to free speech, and enjoins the government from infringing upon it. This applies regardless of what organizational structures people use to coordinate their affairs.
No, that ruling was almost exactly the opposite. The FEC tried to argue, based on the "electioneering communication" provisions of the McCain-Feingold act, that expression of opinions that might benefit a candidate was equivalent to a monetary donation to that candidate, so their authority to regulate campaign donations included the power to suppress the publication of certain political speech.
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.
I want to downvote you, but you are technically correct. I think most of us agree that there exists a compelling interest, but that in practice the case would be made that this should be struck down because it restricts speech, and the captured judiciary would certainly uphold that argument.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.)
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.
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).
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.
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.
honestly these people should be called out so maybe shame stops them from doing such shenanigans.
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.
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.
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.
>i'm so glad that companies don't have feelings tho.
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".
> making the labor market in an give jurisdiction hostile enough that companies opt out entirely.
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?
> Wouldn't that create an enormous hole in the market for other less-scummier companies to jump in, albeit at perhaps lower margins?
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.
>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.
"Companies" are organizational paradigms that people use to pursue their goals. Everything is people.
not every company is some large mega corp
Ironically small businesses tend to be the most egregious violators of labor laws and humanity in general.
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.
As a small business owner, I spend a lot of my time doing things by the book.
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.
> As a small business owner, I spend a lot of my time doing things by the book.
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.
>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.
Big organisations tend to accrete rules as they age until it's almost impossible to do anything apart from the core function.
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.
I am a landlord. I charge below market rent because it is enough to meet my financial goals and turning over a new tenant is annoying. I spare no expense on maintenance because I value my assets.
You may have a more reasonable stance than most landlords, but that doesn't change the essence of the transaction.
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.
> The ideal business is one where you take in money and have no expenditures.
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.
as a freelance software developer working from home my expenses are practically zero.
Then you're not doing your tax returns properly.
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.
depends on the country. the value of doing all that work is simply not worth the money i would get back. so why bother?
> 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.
>If you're a landlord, you want super high rent and no expenditures on maintenance or improvements.
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 believe all of this but also want to say that in my life as a renter I never once had a landlord return a security deposit without me taking them to court. There's definitely some ruthlessness.
This was also my experience.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
So... I don't get the point here?
If you want these things, you're playing the wrong game
What game are we talking about?
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.
Some people, curiously, believe that business is only valid if it operates as a caricature of the worst traits of modern corporate America.
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.
Every business owner wants to minimize costs. Every employee wants to maximize their compensation.
In other words, the Law of Supply & Demand.
I think you're leaving out a few "all things being equal" and other caveats. Compensation is not necessarily monetary (especially in the US), costs are more than just salary, etc.
Isn't Germany the largest economy in the EU and one of the most productive workforces in the world?
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.
The devil is in the details. There is one interview process that is bulletproof but it's NEVER going to be adopted in mass by private companies: university / police academy admission exams.
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.
This process only works when you're hiring for an entry-level role and also don't care about differentiating for anything that isn't on your exam.
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?
I would say, when you have 2, 3, 10 candidates, you don't need an exam. Problem is when you need to be machine gunning waves of assault soldiers. An exam seems better than the usual and increasingly sick alternatives: have people waste their time talking to AI, when it's obvious all that time goes down the drain.
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.
It's not being skilled at programming, it's being skilled at interview programming, which is very different.
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.
> It's not being skilled at programming, it's being skilled at interview programming, which is very different.
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.
The topic set is very different and the conditions are very artificial. There are many engineers who are amazing, but are absolute shit about writing code, under pressure, while someone is looking over their shoulder, to a leetcode medium that they haven't practiced for. Their brains go blank.
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.
Anybody going for a leetcode interview without doing prep work first is not a good candidate to start with.
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.
Just for fun, I found among my dad's papers the written tests he had to pass before he could even sit in the cockpit of an F-86 Sabrejet. They were quite comprehensive and full of minutia. For damn sure the AF wasn't going to let anyone fly one of those monsters without proving they could study and learn everything about them by heart. No excuses about brain freeze is going to fly (pun intended).
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.
Yes, because flying a war jet under pressure and landing it in the desert is the same as writing software over 5 months in an office. /s
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.
Are you suggesting that being in a life or death situation as a pilot is less stressful than taking a test or writing a software program over time?
No, that optimizing and interviewing for performance under pressure is not needed for most software engineers, while it makes sense for fighter pilots. It's is definitely more stressful.
I'll repeat that the cure for test anxiety is preparation, preparation, preparation. Avoiding it, like your engineer employee, won't be helpful. Keep going to interviews, and the performance anxiety will also dissipate.
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.)
When I worked as a firefighter/paramedic, one of the axioms was that you don't train until you get it right, you train until you don't get it wrong. That, at 3am, sleep-deprived, it's so ingrained in you what to do, you can do it automatically, leaving your mental capacity for the variables of the situation, not the bare minimum of "what do I do next?"
> because companies work around them by replacing full-time roles with contract positions, something that's much harder to regulate.
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.
> 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.
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
How is that at all unreasonable? Why is misinformation somehow ok when it directly harms workers? Don't like it that you have to change your behavior because of some abusers? Sorry but that's how society works for the rest of us.
The problem is that employers and prospective employees will disagree about what is and isn't "misinformation", and only a trial can resolve that question when the law gives a cause of action for it.
Sure, but the threat of having to spend money on a trial should incentivize employers to be factual and clear in their advertisements. Edge cases will get sorted out by trials at first, but then there will be case law that will discourage people from bringing questionable cases.
Again, this starts with a proposal to end "ghost jobs" and ends with... whatever problem it is you're trying to solve here. And doesn't fix the "ghost job" problem!
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.
> We tax things we want people to do all the time.
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.
> replace them with taxing things we don't want people to do
Because your tax revenue will collapse if people actually stop doing those things?
Tobacco tax in Australia is an interesting example. A lot of people may have stopped initially but there was a more gradual decrease over time as the tax increases annually by CPI + 5%.
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.
It's not possible for people to not pollute, for example.
Well yes, but if you reduce pollution by 50% then you need to double the tax and so on and so forth.
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.
> but if you reduce pollution by 50%
What a terrible outcome! LOL
Well yeah.. that’s my point.
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
Most economists agree that income tax and corporate profit tax should be eliminated and replaced with capital gains tax. Politically impossible, of course.
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.
Instead of taxing good behavior, we could just criminalize bad behavior. Besides, companies spend billions on advertising. In a weird indirect way, "ghost jobs" are advertising.
A simple tweak here is that the tax refund can be larger than the deposit.
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.
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.
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.
In this case, the relevant comparison is 85,000 net new H1B visas to the total of job postings, since the parent post seemed to be saying 80% of job postings are ghost postings from companies seeking H1B visas.
Needless to say, that doesn't make any sense.
No. Neither of us said 80% are H1-B. We were agreeing that 80% aren't actually obtainable jobs, but neither of us attempted to determine what percent is from what cause.
> The majority of the time, it is a company looking to sponsor an H1B for a role
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.
That makes a massive difference, if true.
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
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!!!'
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 point was not to solve it, but to expose it.
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.
They (H1B) seem to the "low hanging fruit" many (not just in this thread) are pointing to. I spend time in hiring circles and I hear this sentiment frequently. And the Ghost Post issue too. I think Ghost is bigger issue than H1B. Don't have a good solution.
They're enough, and they cause many other problems. If we limit ghost jobs to salary benchmarking then that's a massive reduction.
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.
Were a lot of those the same job being offered through different recruiters, though?
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.
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.
> 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.)
Most people need a job to live. Other marketplaces for things people need to live are heavily regulated from seed to stomach.
Yelp for interview process? Isn't Glassdoor doing (something like) that?
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.
I can’t possibly imagine the government making job hunting, a task that’s hard to define and changes rapidly, more efficient
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.
> Imagine if you went to any other store and 17% of the items you bought were just junk and didn't work.
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.
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 seen similar listings. Urgently hiring [long list of specific skills, experience, and certifications] for in-person work only in [high cost area].
If it was really urgent, there would be some flexibility in the requirements.
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 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.
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
Agreed. I meant that the follow button is on each job application, by the way. It's too late to edit.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> Companies are going to play shell games
shades of Sinofsky's description of federal HR reporting
https://x.com/stevesi/status/1953920412506894347
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.
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.
This. The unintended side effect is worse and I feel like the only winners would be the lawyers in the middle.
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
> 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.
I really, really dislike ghost jobs, and I think they are way more than 17%. I have to agree, though, that finding a legal way to define and enforce them, that doesn't amount to a solution worse than the problem, will be quite difficult.
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.
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.
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?
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.
That would be a mistake, because "securities fraud" is one of the few ways you can get smacked for lying to the public. Lying to the public about climate change? Meh, it's hard to prove damages from the lie so you'll probably get away with it. However if you lie to shareholders about global warming, and that factors into your outlook of the company, you'll get smacked with securities fraud suits.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
Which is funny because startups don't get any consequences for misleading investors/customers with fake job postings and the behavior in that industry is rampant.
startups aren't public companies.
But are still capable of defrauding investors.
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
Since when are financials in line with stock price these days?
yes, and that's what is done.
> (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?
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.
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?
Sorry, but how would you ever prove a job ad is fake?
"Were you going to hire someone for this role?" "Yes." "Case dismissed."
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Value judgments are an impossible thing to adjudicate. Though people try them anyway, with lots of unjust results.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you do intend to hire, that's different than the problem being discussed.
I admit some companies fail to fill roles due to incompetence, but sadly the law can't force competence.
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.
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.
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...>
Deceptive commercial speech is illegal in many contexts.
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?
> This is explictly restricting speech (restricting the right to advertise for labor)
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).
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.
No one is "given" a right to free speech -- rather, in the United States, the constitution recognizes a pre-existing right to free speech, and enjoins the government from infringing upon it. This applies regardless of what organizational structures people use to coordinate their affairs.
Yes. Shareholders and their agents ("corporations") have rights to free speech.
Can a car dealer advertise a car they don't have for sale?
Citizens United specifically affirmed corporations' First Amendment rights.
I thought that was affirming money was speech?
No, that ruling was almost exactly the opposite. The FEC tried to argue, based on the "electioneering communication" provisions of the McCain-Feingold act, that expression of opinions that might benefit a candidate was equivalent to a monetary donation to that candidate, so their authority to regulate campaign donations included the power to suppress the publication of certain political speech.
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.
Thank you for the explanation. I'll admit this was intellectual laziness on my part.
Kind of... restricting money/spending is restricting speech/reach.
I want to downvote you, but you are technically correct. I think most of us agree that there exists a compelling interest, but that in practice the case would be made that this should be struck down because it restricts speech, and the captured judiciary would certainly uphold that argument.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
... was it Canonical? :)
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.
honestly these people should be called out so maybe shame stops them from doing such shenanigans.
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.
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.
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.
Downvoted for being honest? Interesting. I have been a hiring manager at companies who engage in this behavior.
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.