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.
Also, the cost of screening ad responses is near zero compared to 30 years ago.
So we have economics that encourages ghost job listings. Personally I’d like to see big taxes on job postings scaling for company size, maybe duration too. Would solve this particular problem.
Also normal discussion with HR persons, will quickly make realize most job posts are fake. They just have it open in case "the right candidate comes along..."
And most important you have payrolls dat from companies like ADP, and internal data from aggregators like Indeed.
About 3 in 5 jobs are ghost.
That they have stooped to dodgy marketing with bad and/or massaged statistics is telling. To think that a "Voice AI" interview would be anything other than demeaning is beyond tone deafness.
ß: someone early on in the company's history must have realised that zero-friction application submissions were a terrible idea. You want candidates who at least had to go through one step on their own to submit their CV - otherwise you get flooded by LI/Indeed style spam typhoons and other eldritch horrors.
- 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.
‘Ghost jobs’ could soon be illegal in New York - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48558338 - June 2026 (139 comments)
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S8877
https://www.hrdive.com/news/new-york-passed-bill-aimed-at-ha...
Related:
This seems great, although I expect in practice we will see companies just set up automatic "sorry you haven't been successful" emails after 44 days. If you haven't heard in 45 days the answer is pretty obvious anyway.
I've seen that from some big companies for applications that didn't even get an interview - months after I already got a job elsewhere I get a random email from Microsoft or whoever saying "sorry you weren't successful".
> A machine-based system that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers from the input it receives to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments.
The AI disclosure will be noise, not signal.
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.
(because you have some niche jobs/countries on there with some postings :-)
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.
You don't need another government ban. Let capitalism do its job.
When there’s a benefit to the site and the employer, that’s two potential sources of corruption.
This is yet another "they wanna ban" but won't do type of article.
Sick of this.
There are infinite reasons that a job listing may not get marked as filled within a short timeframe used in these studies. I know some people want strict requirements or things like fining companies who don’t hire someone in time, but the majority of postings that fit this definition are not “ghost jobs”.
it should be before you can go looking to hire somebody on a work visa, rather than to keep somebody you hired on a work visa
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.
If it's a given that "nobody else will be more qualified", then they aren't making a good-faith effort, are they.
Also you chose a horrendous name for it. Holy crap, I would never sign up to a site with that name, not to look for actual work! Much less a bottom-feeding scraper bot! Most job boards try to keep sort of an upbeat or optimistic mood, at least!
As for the name: It was an intentional brand choice. I'm not trying to build "most job boards" and I'm sick of toxic positivity. Don't like the name? Use Indeed or LinkedIn instead. It's your choice.
Lastly, your characterization of the site as a "bottom-feeding scraper bot" says more about how you view technology than it does about the site. By that measure, Google is the same thing as it goes out on a schedule, scrapes site for content, creates an index, and serves that to users who query. It's a one-to-one mapping.
We already do this for discrimination lawsuits. It turns out that you can, indeed, just do things. It's illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, and it can indeed be enforced against employers who do so to the point that employers are very, very careful now to make sure they don't do this.
I have been on jobsearch lately and it was a very bad experience - it was so frustrating that I thought about building a modern/fresh jobsearch site for my region (EU), somehow crawler-powered but in the end I gave up because of all the scraping problems :-/
The scraping problems were medium hard and at least I learned some cool stuff along the way. All in all, it's been a pretty fun experience building the whole thing.
(ie.g. "www.agriculture.jobs" as example)
From my experience, lot of companies are willing to pay small amount of subscription if they have a "corp/niche specific" usergroup. (and this was actualy what my idea was about)
And if you are branch specific, it worth to curate the site, have some customer calls etc. - this would give you two winners: Companies looking clearly only for one set of applicants, and applicants who can be sure that the site content is valid.
Though, IIRC expeteer.com tried to deploy this "dating approach" onto job boards, but I do not know how they are doing these days