'Ghost job' ads are getting so bad that lawmakers want to ban them

alex43578

Great idea, virtually impossible to enforce I’d imagine.

kylehotchkiss

Instead of wanting to, why not just do it? This is a bipartisan win.

zeckalpha

Yet, the government requires these, e.g. in the case of PERM applicants. https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/employer-recruitment...

johnaoss

They have been banning them! Ontario, Canada had legislation come into effect earlier this year that achieved the following (albeit for only for companies of 25 employees or more): - Required disclosure on the usage of AI in resume screening - Mandatory salary ranges that can only have a range of $50k (except over $200,000) - Required to state if the vacancy is real or 'planned for later' - Must respond to applicant within 45-days of the final interview updating them on the status of their application. Enforcement is also made slightly easier by requiring companies to retain copies of their job postings and any additional documents that are part of the application for 3 years.

Aurornis

That statistic that 1 in 5 job listings might be a “ghost job” comes from a company developing application tracking systems (Greenhouse) and as far as I can tell they included every listing on their website that wasn’t eventually marked as hired in their system . So a company that wanted to hire multiple people under the same application, choosing to leave it open, would be classified as a ghost job. Most tech companies I worked for would have had our common hiring listings like “Senior Software Engineer” flagged as ghost jobs under this system. I think they wanted to use this report to get their name out, and it’s working because journalists like the WSJ and even politicians are now parading their report around. The Greenhouse website looks like exactly the kind of ATS you don’t want. The top feature I see on their website is “Voice AI” which will perform an AI voice interview with the candidate for you. I don’t want anything to do with that company and I don’t trust their numbers either.

bariswheel

Building a talent pool by disingenuously leaving a position open to farm resumes and have a warm pipeline of candidates should be 'regulated' at the least. I'm trying to write politely today.

ramijames

I run a mid-sized job board ( https://miserablyunemployed.com/ ) and I deal with a substantial amount of reports from users about jobs that aren't accurate or don't exist. They get taken down immediately. The worse offenders are the companies that are using fake jobs to drive traffic to their sites. There is a special place in hell for those people. I wish that legal systems were better equipped to deal with bad actors that obey the letter of the law, but skirt ethical and moral boundaries. I think a lot of the worst things in the world would get fixed if we had some better way of dealing with them.

yipinwong

Been years since "Ghost job" was to be regulated. Nothing's been done for years. This is yet another "they wanna ban" but won't do type of article. Sick of this.

klardotsh

We already have a law description we could easily expand just a tiny smidge to explicitly include these in its scope, and the punishments would already be fitting: fraud .

joeax

Instead of banning ghost job ads, job board companies like Indeed should consider "authentic job" badges for ads and require proof a person was hired to the position. When you have real, authentic jobs people gravitate to your site. If you let junk job ads (ghost or otherwise) run amok on your site, everyone leaves. This is why you don't hear about monster.com anymore. You don't need another government ban. Let capitalism do its job.

dredmorbius

Archive / paywall: < https://archive.is/bfl83 >

SilentM68

Lawmakers should do more than ban them, they should require companies to notify the applicants of their final decision. I'm still waiting for dozens of companies to let me off the hook, one way or the other. That is the worse aspect of this practice in my view, that and the nasty practice Job posters have of listing the number of applicants, typically more than 100, next to the job Ads, knowing full well they'll never respond, because those jobs have been reposted, over and over.