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  • Hacker News
  • Kinda 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.

    by PaulHoule
  • I'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.
    by Cyclone_
  • Cue 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.
    by mhb
  • IMO 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.
    by sh34r
  • Same 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

    by gib444
  • This 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

    by Oras
  • NY State Senate Bill S8877: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S8877

    Related:

    https://www.hrdive.com/news/new-york-passed-bill-aimed-at-ha...

    https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12977

    by toomuchtodo
  • Seems like it could be easily circumvented by just continually pushing the “fill by” date back on a posting
    by mcmcmc
  • > 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>"?

    by bsimpson
  • At 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.

    by PaulHoule
  • great 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.
    by tancop
  • Passive 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.
    by sellmesoap
  • Sitting around waiting is softer than apple sauce. You need to go make it happen.

    Yes unemployment sucks, life's tough. If it didn't suck you wouldn't be looking for a job, right?

    Going around trying to put bubble wrap on every hard corner of society is the wrong instinct. Wasting time and effort on things that don't move the needle at all.

    by engineer_22
  • The 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.
    by mmcclure
  • How 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.

    by mancerayder
  • >How did people even find out ghost jobs existed?

    For starters you can find it out from the inside...

    by coldtea
  • At 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.
    by dyauspitr
  • I'll give you an example I've experienced myself:

    I save all the jobs I apply to, so it's fairly easy to check/compare and I found plenty of cases where job ads get reposted after some time.

    In one instance, I applied for a role in December '25, got a (boilerplate) rejection email a couple of days later (although my profile directly matched the job requirements and I had previous experience working in that specific field), job ad goes offline and re-appeared 3 months later - exact same time and job description.

    by tagyro
  • If 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.
    by tempaway2e5645
  • I'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.
    by danielvaughn
  • What is cruel about having a public mailbox for stuffing job applications?
    by engineer_22
  • Calculate 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.
    by Mountain_Skies
  • Don'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.

    by FireBeyond
  • In 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.
    by wps
  • You’re conflating being ghosted with ghost jobs, which are positions that are posted but are never intended to be filled (usually cited as for data collection purposes). These waste people’s precious time while they apply for jobs.
    by mxkopy
  • This 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.

    by chaosharmonic
  • Every employer would send "We have decided not to continue with your application" once your entry in the database reaches the legally-mandated timeout period.

    The part you wouldn't like is the unintended consequences: Every company would be forced to use an ATS to manage applicants, and all hiring would have to be pushed through the ATS. The ATS would have some default timeout where candidates who aren't hired get the e-mail to comply with the law. Nothing is gained because you're not getting real information, but now every company must force you to apply through an ATS portal to make sure every e-mail receives that alert.

    I know it's frustrating, but stacking laws like this doesn't get useful information out of companies but it does force the application process to revolve around demonstrating compliance with the regulations.

    by Aurornis