'Ghost Job' Ads Are Getting So Bad That Lawmakers Want to Ban Them

bbcaulfield about 2 hours ago 18 commentsRead Article on wsj.com

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Aurornis•22 minutes ago

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•2 minutes ago

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.

johnaoss•39 minutes ago

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.

zeckalpha•about 1 hour ago

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

trollbridge•about 1 hour ago

Well, the government actually requires a non-ghost job posting for PERM applicants. There may not be much enforcement of this, particularly employers going out of their way to try to get as few qualified applications as possible.

hibikir•36 minutes ago

Because, given you aren't filing for PERM these days for someone that you have not already hired, someone off the street is going to be straight out worse than your current employee.

PERM ade sense in a theoretical world without H1s or F1s, where you are filing PERM for someone off the street. But that almost never happens outside of cases where yes, you coud put the ad in the front page NYT and you'd still hire the candidate. And thus eitehr way you slice it, looking at the resumes of your ghost ad is a waste of time either way.

And if one really wanted to go back to that kind of green card process, it has to be very fast anyway, instead of being as slow as it is. Otherwise it becomes useless regardless.

trhway•35 minutes ago

Even if all of the PERM postings to be considered "ghost", it is just 120K postings per year. And PERM postings are usually promptly removed, not just hanging there like typical ghost job postings.

alex43578•about 1 hour ago

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

trollbridge•about 1 hour ago

Quite easy to enforce with a private right of action.

thayne•27 minutes ago

How would you acquire evidence that it is a ghost job, and they didn't just decide to hire someone else? How would you even know if there is a case worth pursuing?

kylehotchkiss•about 1 hour ago

I'm sure some ambulance chasing lawyer types will make quick work of the problem

kylehotchkiss•about 1 hour ago

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

Aurornis•20 minutes ago

Because the definition of a “ghost job” starts falling apart when you look closely at the numbers. A company that hires multiple people under a single generic listing like “Senior Software Engineer” would be classified as a ghost job, despite actually producing more hires than job listings. It would be annoying as hell if there was a law dictating that we had to post 50 separate job listings every time we wanted to hire 50 people and then carefully assign candidates to the right one so we didn’t accidentally trigger some ghost job law.

DonsDiscountGas•27 minutes ago

Seems like a difficult thing to enforce. Presumably not impossible to make some progress tho.

xkqd•about 1 hour ago

Just speculating here but perhaps those ghost job listings are used to artificially boost the appearance of growth or even just things being business as usual.

Might be useful to some folks.

forinti•38 minutes ago

That would be securities fraud.

xkqd•9 minutes ago

Doesn’t necessarily have to be to mislead investors, could be to mislead applicants, competitors, whatever.

I know if my business was shittin’ the bed I wouldn’t want to give any appearance of that. Better to just let everyone think it’s business as usual, no matter what.

xboxnolifes•30 minutes ago

Isn't everything?