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A Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs (cnbc.com) 67

Posted by BeauHD from the now-hiring-never dept.
After losing his job in 2024, Eric Thompson spearheaded a working group to push for federal legislation banning "ghost jobs" -- openings posted with no intent to hire. The proposed Truth in Job Advertising and Accountability Act would require transparency around job postings, set limits on how long ads can remain up, and fine companies that violate the rules. CNBC reports: "There's nothing illegal about posting a job, currently, and never filling it," says Thompson, a network engineering leader in Warrenton, Virginia. Not to mention, it's "really hard to prove, and so that's one of the reasons that legally, it's been kind of this gray area." As Thompson researched more into the phenomenon, he connected with former colleagues and professional connections across the country experiencing the same thing. Together, the eight of them decided to form the TJAAA working group to spearhead efforts for federal legislation to officially ban businesses from posting ghost jobs.

In May, the group drafted its first proposal: The TJAAA aims to require that all public job listings include information such as:
- The intended hire and start dates
- Whether it's a new role or backfill
- If it's being offered internally with preference to current employees
- The number of times the position has been posted in the last two years, and other factors, according to the draft language.

It also sets guidelines for how long a post is required to be up (no more than 90 calendar days) and how long the submission period can be (at least four calendar days) before applications can be reviewed. The proposed legislation applies to businesses with more than 50 employees, and violators can be fined a minimum of $2,500 for each infraction. The proposal provides a framework at the federal level, Thompson says, because state-level policies won't apply to employers who post listings across multiple states, or who use third-party platforms that operate beyond state borders.
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A Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs More

A Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

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  • But then how will they skirt the restrictions on hiring foreign workers only when American workers aren't available?

    • Re:But then how will they avoid immigration laws? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MacMann ( 7518492 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @05:36PM (#65620054)

      But then how will they skirt the restrictions on hiring foreign workers only when American workers aren't available?

      Much like they do now, by shifting the job requirements and such until they get the employees they want. I doubt that any real enforcement on this is possible as anyone posting bogus job openings can create excuses on how there's no "ghost jobs" listed. They can point to changes in the economy, as in the pay must be adjusted or the job eliminated because of budget issues. They can point to technology changes, some new AI made a job redundant or some new 3D printer technology didn't pan out like they hoped so they had to change the job description to fit. They can point to some new rules they have to follow, which should be trivial when the White House is issuing executive orders everyday on something or other.

      I'd like to know how anyone plans to enforce the rules to ban a ghost job. I expect it would be trivial to skirt those rules. Just having some reason to investigate possible ghost job postings could create enough "friction" to discourage the practice, as in there's going to be a need for some staff to address any questions on a posted job and they'd need to take the time to have reasonable answers for these questions.

      I remember working in a call center and I saw an opening inside the company for something of a "dream job" for me. They wanted someone with a BS degree in a related field, certifications in computer security, and a few other requirements I forget. I applied as I felt I was qualified. A short time later the job disappeared but an oddly similar job opened, for a "senior" whatever-the-duck. This job required a MS degree in some related field, computer security certifications above what I had, and a few other bits I forget. There was no way to know for sure if my applying for the job had any impact on this but the timing of the job change was rather coincidental. I felt a bit cheated as well as lied to about how the company likes to hire from within the company. I found work elsewhere shortly after that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sixoh1 ( 996418 )

        I'd like to know how anyone plans to enforce the rules to ban a ghost job. I expect it would be trivial to skirt those rules. Just having some reason to investigate possible ghost job postings could create enough "friction" to discourage the practice, as in there's going to be a need for some staff to address any questions on a posted job and they'd need to take the time to have reasonable answers for these questions.

        Actually I'm pretty sure you wouldn't like how something like this would be enforced, the actual day to day operation of labor laws have the exact same properties as laws in general 'Laws are like sausages, it's better not to see them being made' [socratic-method.com] - and I would add better not to see how they are enforced, because when a rule like this cannot actually be enforced without draconian intrusive measures, that is _EXACTLY_ what the government (state, local or federal) will do.

        As a small employer I am barraged with

        • because when a rule like this cannot actually be enforced without draconian intrusive measures, that is _EXACTLY_ what the government (state, local or federal) will do.

          A lot of things are illegal to do without tight enforcement. There are things we cannot do with money, but you don't get a tax officr behind you every time you make a transfer. Enforcement way down the line. It would be the same here, candidates would complain about ghost postings, brings a case to a judge then explains the case, or Court orders some documents to be shown and some people get questioned in front of the judge.

          "you need to fill in this 150 page request form and we have to post the job publicly for a week and you have to review all 2555 resumes we receive"

          This is the situation in the public sector (at least for me, but I'm not in the US).

      • I'd like to know how anyone plans to enforce the rules to ban a ghost job.

        There's a middle ground between doing nothing and full government control, we just have to find it and make the rules tight enough to close loopholes which could be used to skirt them. Though, from what I've been seeing lately, "ghost jobs" are typically being used to skirt rules around the hiring of foreign labour over qualified local candidates.

        I live in Canada, so this doesn't exactly apply to a US discussion, but we do have a similar problem here so perhaps there's some overlap. We're seeing companies

        • While I admire the thought you put into a resolution I'm of the belief that it could be resolved by much simpler means. Put a hard cap on immigrants given employment visas. If there's some job that no local will do then I guess that job will remain empty until they find a way to train a local to fill that job.

          It appears Canada has an immigration problem that is at least on parity with the USA, likely worse. If the government is wiling to allow abuse of immigration law to artificially lower wages, and as

  • This is going to turn out like how we're chasing down illegal immigrant farm workers while actual harmful criminals go free. You going to investigate each ad? Plus how do you prove it without being draconian against the innocent? As in sometimes, there might be an opening and then some budget cut or market change and the opening is not longer relevant or fundable?

    • I agree with you sadly

    • Re:Waste of time (Score:4, Insightful)

      by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @04:41PM (#65619922) Homepage

      I think it's fine to just send a message by making it technically illegal with no plan or method for enforcement. It would be better than what we have, and it could be used as a fallback in specific cases to give a person grounds to sue. And even then, it won't stop it and it won't be easy to prove, but just having the chance of having an expense to defend it in court is possibly enough to discourage the most blatant cases.

      • Re:Waste of time (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Local ID10T ( 790134 ) <ID10T.L.USER@gmail.com> on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @05:22PM (#65620022) Homepage

        I think it's fine to just send a message by making it technically illegal with no plan or method for enforcement.

        No. This is the worst possible choice. It inevitably leads to selective enforcement: a tool to punish those who are disfavored or uncooperative.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sixoh1 ( 996418 )

          I think it's fine to just send a message by making it technically illegal with no plan or method for enforcement.

          No. This is the worst possible choice. It inevitably leads to selective enforcement: a tool to punish those who are disfavored or uncooperative.

          Kind of like those darned mortgage application forms which you have to sign under penalty of perjury? Selective prior enforcement of even a very trivial rule/law is why suddenly a few congress people and Federal Reserve employees are finding out that we've become exactly like Laverenty Beria's Soviet Union Give me the man, and I will give you the case against him [wikipedia.org].

          I'm pretty sure Stalinist Soviet "law enforcement" is not supposed to be a how-to guide for the 21st century.

          • I'm pretty sure Stalinist Soviet "law enforcement" is not supposed to be a how-to guide for the 21st century.

            I can agree that selective enforcement can be a problem, but you could have come up with a better example. If I'm picking up what you are putting down the examples you gave are of people claiming two separate properties as a "primary residence" on mortgage applications, or some other document related to home ownership, where by claiming a property as a primary residence gets people a better rate on a loan and/or a reduced rate on property taxes.

            This is a common way people will try to cheat the system for t

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by sixoh1 ( 996418 )

              My point is that this is not necessarily issue of selective enforcement of complex rules. More likely its that someone got in the news a bit too much, there was a mention of owning multiple houses, someone thought to check into it, and a common "oversight" was discovered on some papers.

              How is that not selective enforcement? Literally they selected the person to investigate, found something wrong on some form that was filed and now we have a national crisis. If the rule had been written such that the tradeoff of discouraged behavior and revenue, vs. side-effects and costs meant every mortgage was scrutinized, there wouldn't be a lurking un-prosecuted crime/ethics violation. Instead we have a rarely prosecuted crime available to use as political weapon. I don't hear many people saying "You

      • I think it's fine to just send a message

        Some will hear that message and decide that, rather than paying a lawyer to review every job ad, maybe it's time to relocate to Singapore.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dvice ( 6309704 )

      1. Create a government job seeking platform.
      2. Make it mandatory that all hiring must happen by submitting a request there.
      3. Once a job has been filled, it must be linked to the employee who got the job.

      This is how you could monitor it with no additional cost (such a system would be good for other things also). But your other concerns are still valid.

      But with this system you could flag employees that have post ghost jobs, even if you don't punish them for doing so. You would get statistics about potential

  • at the very least do it for H1B jobs

  • It's very possible, and should be legal, for a business to put out job advertisements when they are hoping to find a perfect fit to apply and otherwise just hire no-one. That's legit.

    This group seems upset that they've probably applied to hundreds of jobs and haven't gotten hired. There could be lots of explanations for that.

  • I understand his frustration, but realistically I think this would be very difficult to enforce.

    There are positions that we've been generally interested in filling that takes months or even more than a year to fill, because of the lack of qualified applicants (either because they don't want to work in the middle of nowhere, don't want to move there without some type of moving bonus, or they don't like the salary offered).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sebby ( 238625 )

      There are positions that we've been generally interested in filling that takes months or even more than a year to fill, because of the lack of qualified applicants (either because they don't want to work in the middle of nowhere, don't want to move there without some type of moving bonus, or they don't like the salary offered).

      This - especially regarding the suggested requirement of:

      It also sets guidelines for how long a post is required to be up (no more than 90 calendar days)

      but also this is problematic:

      how long the submission period can be (at least four calendar days) before applications can be reviewed

      So now you're forcing the employer to limit applications to 90 days (and then what? Post it yet again? What a waste of time for both the employer and potential applicants), and forcing them to wait 4 days before they can fill

  • I hope they do not succeed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by linuxguy ( 98493 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @04:39PM (#65619914) Homepage

    My small 10-person company has been trying to hire an experienced software dev/architect for about 6 months. We are offering about $200K + benefits for the position and it can be remote as long as it is within the US. At first we tried hiring directly, when that did not produce results, we signed on with a recruiter. And there the results were even less compelling. We interviewed plenty of people, but did not find anybody who we considered qualified. I am not sure why this is. Maybe we are too small or not offering enough money to attract the correct candidates.

    I can totally see why some of the candidates we rejected might think that we are advertising a ghost position.

    • and how many people got auto rejected? How many people where turned down for faking stuff just to get seen by an real person?

      are you looking for very people experienced with rare skills? or need stuff like must have skills with X that is like 5 years out of date running on 10 year old hardware?

      • Some companies do look for rare skills. Some companies need 5 year old skills, or need to support 10 year old hardware supported. Sometimes people think the skills are outdated, but they are very much still needed. How many current software developers can even envision a PC with a single processor and 16K or RAM (think the original ZX Spectrum - it had built in BASIC interpreter and plenty of video games available for it). Heck, ask recent CS graduates what a pointer is and some will report you to HR for s

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by linuxguy ( 98493 )

        > and how many people got auto rejected?

        We get a lot of applicants and thoroughly vetting each applicant is not possible with the resources we have. So we have the applicants work on a small take-home project. We pay for their time if they agree to do it. This filters out the non-serious candidates. All those who turn in a good result are setup for a technical interview.

        > are you looking for very people experienced with rare skills?

        Our application is very data intensive. So, we are looking for people

    • Send me an email. I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and own a small (9 person) dev shop. I might be able to help you.

    • Sounds like you're either too picky, looking in the wrong places, or looking for someone that doesn't exist. I've seen plenty of nonsensical job postings and HR-mangled job postings that no one qualifies for.

      Please tell me you're not looking for a W11 programmer with 5 years experience!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by hwstar ( 35834 )

      "can be remote as long as it is within the US"

      That says a lot. I guess your company doesn't like employment laws outside of the USA probably because of things like:

      1. Employment At Will
      2. Binding Arbitration
      3. Noncompete agreeements

      • Re:I hope they do not succeed (Score:5, Informative)

        by Pizza ( 87623 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @06:28PM (#65620186) Homepage Journal

        you left out:

        4) $employee may need to be a US citizen (and/or physically performed in the US) if you are involved in any sort of government [sub]contracting.
        5) Timezones are a bitch, especially when there's an ocean in the middle.
        6) You don't want to have to deal with language barriers
        7) Complying with labor, tax, workplace requirements, and undoubtedly many other laws of $other_country is a huge administrative PITA if you don't already have a business presence there.
        8) etc

      • You left this out:

        Not all businesses are equipped to comply with employee regulations and tax laws for every country around the world. They don't know what they are, they don't want to know what they are, they don't want to have to worry about a bunch of different compliance requirements for various countries around the world. Furthermore, for many businesses, it's just not fucking practical.

      • I guess your company doesn't like employment laws outside of the USA probably because of things like:

        OP said he was a 10 person company. You'll need more than 10 people just to handle the legal, commercial, taxation, and HR challenges of hiring in another country.

        Fun fact, I am the only employee at my "company" currently. I work for a large multinational but they sold the local office to a different company. To retain me they had to legally register an entire company to employ me for taxation purposes. It took a team of people 6 months to sort out this mess and this is the best solution they came up with. (And they hit an accounting snag which means my corporate cost centre needed a local approver for legal reasons, so all my costs get billed to "HR" instead of to my line manager and PWC get paid a small fortune each quarter to fix the accounting after the fact)

        You clearly have zero clue about what it takes to operate cross borders.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        That could be a reason, or it could be because hiring outside is a painful process. I was offered a remote working job from Ireland for a California based company and they had to wrangle it a weird way to make it work - I was hired by an Irish subsiduary of the parent company of this Californian company, i.e. I wasn't working directly for them, I was on the books of another division and they did whatever they had to do to bill each other for this arrangement. There was another guy in France who had a simila

    • From what little info you provide, I'd qualify and I just got laid off. I won't even try to negotiate the salary up. :) Reply with your company website and I'll go look and if my skills are close I'll apply.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

      The job market is always hard on the experienced side. Someone may have 5 years experience, but they don't have it in your specific tech stack. Your options are to accept someone who can learn on the job (and hope their experience carries over), hire less experienced people, or try to poach the perfect one with a high salary.

      People who are good will most likely be happily employed. So the best time to hire is when other businesses are laying off people.

    • The proposal only affects companies with more than 500 employees. Probably for exactly this kind of consideration.

  • Proprietary information ... (Score:3)

    by CaptainDork ( 3678879 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @04:53PM (#65619964)

    The proposal infringes on the protection of internal information.

    Imagine what investors, shareholders, and competitors could glean from information like:

    - The intended hire and start dates
    - Whether it's a new role or backfill
    - If it's being offered internally with preference to current employees
    - The number of times the position has been posted in the last two years, and other factors, according to the draft language.

  • Okay, but ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @05:05PM (#65619990)

    A Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

    How will he haunt the halls of Apple? :-)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      A Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

      How will he haunt the halls of Apple? :-)

      The power of Christ.exe compels you.

  • ... Casper will be out of work.

  • Government Contracting requires Ghost Jobs (Score:5, Informative)

    by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @05:35PM (#65620048)
    The way our governments hire contractors pretty much requires every employer that wants to compete for a given contract to round up a bunch of prospective employees -- but not actually hire them unless they win the award. There is lots of hurry up and wait when trying to work for a government. One contract I was part of the pursuit on did not announce a winner until 2 years after the RFP submissions. At which time the winner went back to all those people they had resumes for and tried to bring them on board -- good luck with that. For every contractor currently working for the government there were 10 or more -- possibly over 100 almost identical job postings before RFP-time from all of the companies that competed for the work. If you come across almost identical job postings from Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman what you are seeing is pre-RFP job postings.

  • They'll simply tweak the job description every time it's re-posted and claim it's a new position never before made public.

  • Looking at the new proposed requirements, every single one of them looks like additional paperwork that is very easy to fill out and which does nothing to root out job postings that had no intent of being filled.

  • Shit.
    I read that, and though Steve Jobs was still doing work for Apple.....
    and now someone wanted to ban him.

  • So what happens after 90 days without a hire, and the company takes the post down. No penalty, and then they repost a new position that's basically the same position? Nothing. That's what happens, nothing.
  • Crossover / Trilogy are *constantly* showing jobs as vacant and grossly inflating the salary applicants might expect to receive. There are plenty of horror stories about their application process and what it is like to work for a company that surveils you, and can fire you on the spot without cause and doesn't pay what it promises.

    It reminds me of that movie where evil guy tells someone they can have a million dollars if they push a button but someone they don't know will die.

  • TJAAA has no clout to do anything...then you want the feds to enforce things is another joke.

  • HR policies at big and small corporations need to be changed too - not only just fraud. When they plan on doing an internal hire, the default policy should not be 'we need to post this externally for a week too'. If you are concerned that your org has become too insular and not enough fresh ideas and people are coming in - posting externally on principal is just a fake band-aid on that problem.

    And it just makes the world a worse place for job seekers who get excited about a job that doesn't really exist as

  • It looks like an anti-business regulation. It would be best to wait until a pro-human administration is in power.

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