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'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York
- Cyclone_ 5mo agoI'm curious how they would even enforce this law. It seems like they would need to require some record keeping that's made available to the government.
- toomuchtodo 5mo agoNY State Senate Bill S8877: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S8877 https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S8877 Related: https://www.hrdive.com/news/new-york-passed-bill-aimed-at-halting-ghost-jobs/822620/ https://www.hrdive.com/news/new-york-passed-bill-aimed-at-ha... https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12977 https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12977
- mcmcmc 5mo agoSeems like it could be easily circumvented by just continually pushing the “fill by” date back on a posting
- toomuchtodo 5mo agoHave to start somewhere. Update the law as bad actors operate. Observe, iterate, etc. Failure is not trying, or when you stop attempting to improve. Trying is table stakes. "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." We are aligning incentives, with policy, to encourage desired outcomes.
- chaosharmonic 5mo agoI'm not sure the incentive here is strong enough. For a specific profile they want, at $2500 for every 30 days, I could see businesses just paying that fine as an operational cost. The incentive also exists, for the kinds of employers who would post ghost jobs, to also force in-person work again. You don't have to pay these fines to multiple states on one ghost job if the job is only available in one location.
- toomuchtodo 5mo agoI will keep this in mind while working with reps in other states to encourage a more aggressive policy stance with regards to ghost jobs. > The incentive also exists, for the kinds of employers who would post ghost jobs, to also force in-person work again. You don't have to pay these fines to multiple states on one ghost job if the job is only available in one location. 49 states to go to implement this.
- ryandrake 5mo agoExactly. We shouldn't treat corporate regulation as something you try all at once to get the wording, incentives, and disincentives exactly right and then you're stuck with it for 20 years. It should be a living document. Put something into force today. See what companies do to try to avoid/skirt the regulation--then immediately close those doors and re-run the experiment. See what they try next and close those doors too, repeat until companies have no choice but to obey the spirit of the regulations. We should be doing this, rather than having these Big Upfront Designed laws that get no iteration.
- snapcaster 5mo agoyou're not engaging with all the political and game theory issues that make that difficult to do in practice. Let alone the uncertainty that impacts businesses (even ones that are acting in good faith)
- aakresearch 5mo agoGhosting does much more harm to candidates than the burden to not-ghost does to companies. I'm not going to cry over all "talent acquisition experts" having to do some actual work. Uncertainty that businesses face does not compare to uncertainty that a candidate face after 18 months of unemployment. Ask me how I know.
- snapcaster 5mo agoI meant this idea that you can quickly iterate on laws. At least in america that's just unrealistic outside of very narrow instances
- AnthonyMouse 5mo agoThe general problem with this one is that there are a thousand legitimate reasons not to hire someone that are also infeasible to efficiently establish the veracity of. Suppose you post a job because you'll need to fill that position if you get a contract you expect to get with 85% probability. You legitimately expect to hire someone but can't in good faith make anyone an offer until the contract with the customer is signed. Then the contract negotiations take longer than expected. You still expect to hire someone soon but the deadline keeps getting pushed back by the delays, and then you have to keep interviewing new people because the ones you interviewed last month took a position somewhere that gave them an offer sooner. You might not hire someone for a year, or if the negotiations fall through you might not hire anyone at all, but at no point were you acting in bad faith. Suppose you actually need to fill a position as soon as possible but it's hard to find a qualified candidate. There are, however, countless unqualified ones who ignore the requirements and apply anyway. What do you propose to do with that? It's obviously unreasonable to penalize a company for not hiring unqualified applicants, or for doing the right thing and not making an offer until they know they won't have to rescind it, but then anyone can list those as their reason for keeping their listing open for a long time. Whether it's true depends on the company's internal state, which the company can thereby fabricate however they want. It's easy to write a job posting with stringent qualifications that gives you cover to reject any applicants for any period of time, and effectively impossible to distinguish that from an employer who actually has stringent standards. The actual way to improve it is to reform the laws that cause companies to list jobs they have no true intention of filling as a requirement for complying with some other law.
- pseudalopex 5mo agoThe proposed law would require disclosure. Not legal penalty for no hire before the projected date. Employers can reject candidates for employment gaps. They can do this without allowing candidates to explain. Or they can decide to reject an explanation. Candidates should have equivalent information. And equivalent choice. > The actual way to improve it is to reform the laws that cause companies to list jobs they have no true intention of filling as a requirement for complying with some other law. The evidence this is the real problem is what?
- monster_truck 5mo agoI don't know that it counts as a circumvention, having a visible signal of that date continually being pushed back will be very useful.
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoYou're presuming that this is something employers want to circumvent. As the article discusses, many of these postings are likely legitimate jobs which the employer does intend to fill, and they just don't do the work (which has minimal value to them) of ensuring that all the postings get taken down once they've filled it.
- bsimpson 5mo ago> or they might be legally obligated to post a job publicly, even if they’ve already identified the person they want to hire Famous/obvious bug in the H1B process, but not sure how this legislation would address it. If they're legally obligated to post the role, won't they just say "we'll fill this job <whenever the H1B process says we can take this down>"?
- PaulHoule 5mo agoAt my Uni I have been both the beneficiary and victim of this sort of thing. I've been to interviews where I was there just to prove they did interviews and I also spent half a year working the politics to create a job for myself. I have a friend who is loved by her coworkers (and myself) who we'd all like to see get a promotion but they may be obligated to do a national search. Stuff like that happens all the time.
- tancop 5mo agogreat news if this moves forward. while we at it lets ban ghosting applicants and make companies give a direct rejection email with a reason, it can be as simple as "not qualified" or "we found a better candidate, try again next time". waiting for answers that never come is always the worst part.
- mmcclure 5mo agoThe policies around blanket ambiguity for rejections is to avoid any kind of messaging that could lead to potential legal retaliation. Frustrating, absolutely, but most employers just aren't willing to flirt with the risk.
- PaulHoule 5mo agoAlso a lot of companies don't want to close off the option. It is amazing how you occasionally hear back long afterwards after they fail to hire the applicants that they wanted more than you.
- chaosharmonic 5mo agoI've landed on a similar hot take after one job offer got rescinded by a company that refused to give a reason, to anyone involved, and then wouldn't honor records requests. (But would send me a candidate survey.) With any job, it would be one thing if it were at the applicant stage, and I hadn't talked to a person at any point. But with this one, there was an offer in front of me and there was no one at all who had both the capacity and the willingness to explain what had just happened. If I started the job and they pulled this on day three, they would have to give a reason to an unemployment office. I don't care how little inclination businesses have to tell the truth. Make them commit to the lie, in writing, somewhere that it actually costs something.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- sellmesoap 5mo agoPassive aggressive behavior around hiring and HR is a big reason I prefer self employment, I ununderstand some of the CYA reasons but I always find it yucky in the extreme.
- PaulHoule 5mo agoKinda funny. When I was looking for my current job I had an early (2019 or so) AI based system to manage my job hunt and I was struggling with "ghost jobs" and obvious fraudulent listings in New York's job bank. (e.g. they say it is a Java job in Syracuse and it is really a Cold Fusion job in Atlanta) If my job search had gone on any longer I would have given myself (and my bot) a job to search and destroy those listings.
- danielvaughn 5mo agoI'd support it at the federal level. It's cruel towards people looking for work, and it costs them real time at a point in their lives when time is such a critical factor.
- Mountain_Skies 5mo agoCalculate the aggregate amount of time candidates spent on applying the ghost job and use the job's purported rate of pay to calculate the amount of money the company stole from the public. Was it enough to be felony theft? The person posting, or whoever instructed it to be posted, gets charged the same as if they stole that amount from a till. Instant end of ghost job postings as most wouldn't even try to find the loopholes and edge cases when prison is a risk for getting a workaround wrong.
- FireBeyond 5mo agoDon't even start me on what I think is the next big issue, "ghost application harvesting": I think Wellfound (f/k/a AngelList) is doing this. The jobs advertised on there are real... I'd been on the job market four months. Every day I did the rounds: Levels, Wellfound, YC/jobs, Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn. It is what it is, as a crappy jobs market. Wellfound? I didn't ever hear from anything from their job ads. And I'm pretty certain that whatever Wellfound/AngelList was, it has become a company that just markets resume writing services, resume review services, all sorts of other services that draw in your money somehow. Why do I say that? 120+ applications on Wellfound since then. Crickets. Absolutely nothing. One day I got an email, "Your profile has been viewed!". Weird, never seen an email like that from Wellfound. Indeed, "You have 1 profile view in the last 90 days". Huh. 120+ applications, 120+ times me answering filling out Wellfound's content questions on "why you would be a good fit for this role", "tell us about x and y and z", no interviews, no contact, only ONE company has ever even viewed my profile (and for what it's worth, it's not a company that has any positions open). Well, maybe my answers suck, you say. Maybe my resume isn't as impressive as I think it is. But similar answers and the same resume get me fairly steady hits on every other site I mentioned, I've got to multiple final rounds, I've been explicitly told I was hirable, I was just the number two, I was "in the top three". And to be clear, many of the companies I see on WF are advertising on other sites too. My suspicion? WF DOES take job listings, but they also harvest them from other sites - the job is real, but there's no-one from the employer reviewing the applications to their "phantom" job at Wellfound... and meanwhile all people like me are doing are providing content for WF to harvest and train models for their real business model: AI-driven resume writing and review service and other products. My AI video interview? Viewed... zero times. Huh.
- mancerayder 5mo agoHow do you enforce that? I don't even know what I applied to that's a ghost and what isn't. Maybe I'm completely clueless, but there's no difference: recruiters ghost, sometimes companies ghost and sometimes they reply, sometimes you get an F U letter, you're not good enough, sometimes not. How did people even find out ghost jobs existed? I feel like the swindle must not be new.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoAt the very least it will have a chilling effect. A few high profile arrests and companies putting out ghost jobs will know what they’re posting is illegal.
- cute_boi 5mo agoEspecially the consulting companies are doing this. And, all these ghost job requirement from green card and h1b should be removed. There must be no incentive to post ghost job.
- indoordin0saur 5mo agoYeah, on the H1B there seems to be a separate issue. Posting a job listing that is intentionally hidden or otherwise not going to get bites. That way a company can say that they couldn't find a candidate and have to hire someone in need of a visa. From what I understand they do this to undermine wages as well as having a ̶e̶m̶p̶l̶o̶y̶e̶e hostage who won't complain about poor conditions because they don't want to lose their visa.
- coldtea 5mo ago>How did people even find out ghost jobs existed? For starters you can find it out from the inside...
- indoordin0saur 5mo agoYeah. Going to be a lot harder to do this when other people in the company bring up that it is illegal.
- wps 5mo agoIn the same way that credit card companies are required to tell you the exact reasons your score has changed, companies should be required to give at least any sort of notice of rejection. Something as simple as: we have proceeded with another candidate (if and only if the role was actually filled). I know this opens up a lot of questions about enforcement and employer discrimination, but something has to be done.
- chaosharmonic 5mo agoThis does apply to third party background checks, and backdoor references in particular are just one giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Eightfold AI is getting sued right now for acting as a credit reporting agency -- not just by scoring people, but by gathering data on them in the first place for the sake of reporting to employers. If you ask a third party business to do run a background check, there are a bunch of responsibilities that triggers -- a right to view what's in the report, a right to know if it's being used against you, a right to dispute what's in it, and even to consent to it being pulled in the first place. But if some recruiter or hiring manager goes directly to your former or current boss, behind your back, this is somehow not even taken seriously as a problem.
- toomuchtodo 5mo agohttps://www.hrdive.com/news/eightfold-ai-lawsuit-job-candidate-consumer-reports/810332/ https://www.hrdive.com/news/eightfold-ai-lawsuit-job-candida... https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/ai-company-eightfold-sued-helping-companies-secretly-score-job-seekers-2026-01-21/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat... https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/business/ai-hiring-tools-lawsuit-eightfold-fcra.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/business/ai-hiring-tools-...
- woah 5mo agoWait... are you saying that talking about an ex-colleague with anyone (without filing a bunch of paperwork or something) is a "giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act"?
- EGreg 5mo agoAs a libertarian, I am okay with laws that allow people to sue for fraudulent or intentionally very misleading statements, especially ones made publicly and impose compounding costs on a lot of people. This is public harm. The laws are protections for regular people, in this case people who are looking for jobs. I'm also okay with Pigovian Taxes for the same reason: forcing actors who externalize costs to the public, to internalize those costs. Laws are frameworks. My brand of libertarianism is "decentralizing concentrations of power" and "giving people the software tools to self-organize". But in the meantime, yeah, if there would be laws for anything, it would be this kind of stuff. It is why I can get behind Intellectual Property for Trademarks, before I get behind Copyrights and Patents. Trademarks are about making sure actors don't misrepresent who they are and appropriate the brand of other actors. I think many libertarians would come to support Trademark enforcement laws if they were presented that way.
- cucumber3732842 5mo agoThis is just begging for a class action-ish lawsuit.
- Grombobulous 5mo agoI say this with respect for you and genuine intention for constructive discussion. Not here to bash you. I'm not sure your described viewpoints are libertarian at all. I'm pretty sure Montesquieu-esque separatation of powers and Anti-Federalism gets you where you're at. I don't really think a single one of these viewpoints is contradictory of the modern Democratic Party. But anyway, maybe I'm just making this comment because my belief is that the word “libertarian” has become so cloudy that almost nobody should use it as a descriptor for their political beliefs. You can't actually just say "I'm libertarian" and have anyone come close to understanding what you mean, which might be what you are experiencing right now from me.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- 0x59 5mo agoI'm just about to launch a job posting data api with postings I aggregate and very lightly normalize (https://kaleh.net/trace https://kaleh.net/trace) Anyone have an idea how this might impact me? They're not my postings, I just package em up and ship em. Strive to comply with all laws and TOS and not trying to make trouble.
- robotnikman 5mo agoGood to see. The job market is screwed right now, and this is one big step to fixing things.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- david_shi 5mo agoThought this was going to be a Sopranos/mob thing
- palinnilap 5mo agoWhat if online job applications were illegal, and you signed up for interviews in person with a resume after seeing the ad online.
- cush 5mo agoGoing door to door and handing out resumes used to be a thing
- jamesfinlayson 5mo agoSomewhat related but I remember an old boss telling me that some government departments weren't allowed to specify Australian companies only when tendering for a work, but they were perfectly within their rights to ask for tender applications to be hand-delivered to their head office, thereby making it very onerous and expensive for any non-Australian companies to bother.
- defrost 5mo ago> thereby making it very onerous and expensive for any non-Australian companies to bother. It's a good story .. but somewhat silly, Australia is riddled with outposts of offshore foreign companies here to exploit resources, and / or rig the books for others.
- jamesfinlayson 5mo agoOh I'm sure it is. In any case, it was 2013 and at that point he still had to fly to Sydney I think to deliver a tender. Maybe it's enough to cut the number of offshore companies applying to an easier to manage number.
- OutOfHere 5mo agoNew York doesn't even enforce its salary requirement declaration law. It will most definitely not enforce this law either. It will just sit on the books being violated openly. --- https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S8877 https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S8877
- Grombobulous 5mo agoPerhaps I'm naive, but I've never seen a New York job without a salary range listed. I can't tell you whether it's being vigorously enforced, but it seems to me that it's having the intended effect. At the very least, even if enforcement is lax, it's a good piece of information for the job applicant: if you are applying for a job in NY and the posting has no salary range on it, you automatically know that employer is willing to violate the law and can make a judgement call on whether to avoid them.
- OutOfHere 5mo agoYou must not have applied much to smaller and medium sized firms in New York because they're missing salary ranges all over the place.
- Grombobulous 5mo agoAdmittedly, no, most of the time I see them they're multi-location corporate roles where the company has two or three choices of offices and one of them is in NYC. I will point out that the state law has a number of exemptions: independent contractors and interns, companies with fewer than 5 employees, and commission-based roles don't need a salary range disclosure. NYC law is generally more strict on the subject. Perhaps if you're seeing a lot of jobs that aren't listing a range, it's possible they fit into one of those categories. After all, the vast majority of businesses measured by quantity of firms are small businesses.
- thewebguyd 5mo agoIf its anything like Washington state's salary disclosure law, then enforcement relies entirely on citizen reports. The state does fine, I've seen it happen (I've also seen numerous class action suits won by applications and employees using this law), but they generally aren't hunting around job boards looking for companies to fine. They rely on reports.
- airstrike 5mo agoI love this initiative. I also feel like there's a very clear private solution here which is creating a company for both employers and employees to use which requires more transparency from both. This would essentially become a signal to both sides of the transaction that this is someone you want to do business with, and it's self-regulating.
- ufmace 5mo agoGood recruiters can fill this function. Yeah, there's a lot of sleazy ones out there. But the better ones only take work from real companies that intend to actually hire and real candidates that are actually looking for jobs, and have the information to screen out bad actors on both sides.
- Oras 5mo agoThis is a great initiative. But it should apply to job boards and publishers too, asking the posting company to provide evidence. There is another issue which is fake jobs used to harvest CVs. LinkedIn and Google for jobs have a lot of these too. Good start nevertheless
- jadbox 5mo agoThis should be followed in every state.
- tempaway2e5645 5mo agoIf you make Ghost Jobs illegal the whole thing will still be happening, it will just be driven underground to unlicenced 'haunted houses' which are less safe for the workers and less safe for the patrons. Its much better to keep this sort of thing legal and have licensed haunted houses where its easier for authorities to keep a check on the unwelfare of the ghosts and make sure organised underworld groups are not moving in and taking protection money or soul dealing.
- anotheraccount9 5mo agoMy company does it all the time. I've noticed all these ghost jobs are advertised in the same large city (Toronto), yet our offices are elsewhere.
- avaer 5mo agoGhost jobs didn't come from nowhere. The counterpoint is: make it a crime to apply for a job using AI, without disclosing your use of AI (so that your application can be thrown in the trash). Would you support that law? Because when job applications are slop, the openings are slop, and it's hard to separate the two. Obviously the current state of things hurts only legitimate actors, but that's the world we live in today.
- mhb 5mo agoCue the unintended consequences. I don't know what they all might be, but one possibility is more reliance of employers on walled gardens like alumni sources.
- sh34r 5mo agoIMO they don’t need another law for this. Fraud is already illegal. They need to make a very public example by indicting a few HR ghouls under wire fraud statutes for their fraudulent job listings.
- gib444 5mo agoSame story in the UK. Our politicians think the answer to everything is a new more specific law for something already illegal. They always co-opt the police into the announcement to back them up It’s nonsense. The police etc just need more resources, and bigger upstream issues need to be fixed
- tim-tday 5mo agoPlease
- michaelmrose 5mo agoWouldn't it be easier for them to include a disclaimer in every job listing fulfilling the letter of the law while escaping every bit of the purpose.
- chupchap 5mo agoDoes this also cover all other employment agencies creating listing for the same one job, making it look like there are 20 openings while there is just one?