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 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'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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Readit News
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.
Dead Comment
The fines should definitely be proportional though, with larger companies facing very severe infractions.
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.
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.
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
Dead Comment
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.
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.
https://jobs.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.
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
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.
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.
(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.
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
And you're missing the recruiters who are simply gathering resumes.
And the scammers looking to sell you training.
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.
I imagine most companies just want followers on LinkedIn.
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.
A rule for life. It’s a spam machine, and nothing more as far as I’m concerned.
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.
Not saying that will happen with ghost jobs, but it's not a given things will improve.
Especially remote jobs.
Deleted Comment
shades of Sinofsky's description of federal HR reporting
https://x.com/stevesi/status/1953920412506894347
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.
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.
> · 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.
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.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
Generally when I'm looking at a company's financials more employees means less profitable.
For example: https://www.linkup.com