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'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York

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Re: 'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York

#81

Post by JackFr »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #25
danielvaughn wrote: post #13

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.

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 l…

Sending people to prison seems like a great way to get no jobs posted.

Re: 'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York

#82

Post by FireBeyond »

sib wrote: post #70
tagyro wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Sorry, but why is that a problem? If they didn't find someone, they closed the posting, then reopened it later, what is the issue? Or, as in some cases, perhaps they did find someone? I've been at companies where we hired many engineers sequentially over time using the same job description. Should we just have arbitrarily changed the JD?

Yeah, much as it sucks, there's a gap between "we were never going to hire anyone" and "you must hire someone, if you put up a job ad".

Re: 'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York

#83

Post by thewebguyd »

sib wrote: post #70
tagyro wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Sorry, but why is that a problem? If they didn't find someone, they closed the posting, then reopened it later, what is the issue? Or, as in some cases, perhaps they did find someone? I've been at companies where we hired many engineers sequentially over time using the same job description. Should we just have arbitrarily changed the JD?

> Should we just have arbitrarily changed the JD?

No, but unique IDs for postings could help in that situation. If you want to hire, say, 10 engineers, you have 10 separate job postings with their own unique ID, they get taken down as each position gets filled.

Gives candidates visibility into how many positions the company is hiring (am I competing against 1,000 for 1 position or for 10 positions?), and clear visibility that hiring is happening and how many roles are left to fill.

> If they didn't find someone, they closed the posting, then reopened it later, what is the issue?

Closing & reopening is the problem, I suspect. Forces a re-application in some cases. I'm not sure how much any kind of legislation can help here though, just sounds like government overreach.

I don't think there's really any good solution. Easy enough to say "you can't post a job to "just collect resumes" you must actually be hiring, and intend to hire someone" but that doesn't account for situations where maybe the company did actually intend to hire, but later on mangement changed their mind...would that be considered a ghost job?

Re: 'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York

#84

Post by Grombobulous »

EGreg wrote: post #20

As 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,…

I 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.

Re: 'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York

#85

Post by thewebguyd »

OutOfHere wrote: post #45

New 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

If 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.

Re: 'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York

#87

Post by weakened_malloc »

Aurornis wrote: post #27
wps wrote: post #18

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.

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 th…

Or just allow what happens in the EU. Every time I've applied for a job and been rejected, I put through a GDPR request and find out the reasons I was rejected.

Re: 'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York

#88

Post by _DeadFred_ »

autoexec wrote: post #79
chaosharmonic wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Companies have been using data brokers to get info on potential employees for ages in violation of the law. The law has almost zero enforcement and when something is done nobody does to prison. It's almost always just the government wanting a cut of the action. For example: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2012/06/... https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2014/04/...

Prison is a limitation of freedom of movement. The equivalent for a company should be the limiting of movement of shares (no shares bought/sold/traded) for the duration of an imposed sentence. Since corporations are people and all, there needs to be an equivalent punishment.

Re: 'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York

#89

Post by engineer_22 »

tancop wrote: post #5

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.

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.

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