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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

#71

Post by AnthonyMouse »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #6
mcmcmc wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like it could be easily circumvented by just continually pushing the “fill by” date back on a posting

Have 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.

The 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.

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

#72

Post by avaer »

Ghost 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.

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

#73

Post by bb88 »

ufmace wrote: post #59
BanazirGalbasi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting a rejection message, even an automated one, removes ambiguity. You're no longer wondering if you missed a call or an email went to spam, you have it right there in writing. In college, I interviewed with two different local companies that had internships that would continue as part-time positions during the year. Both interviews went well and I felt that the interaction was positive overall. I was confident t…

It's not like job searches are the only context where you can get ghosted. It happens often enough in friendships, social activities, finding romantic partners, etc.

The more and more rude interactions like ghosting we have, the less human we become. Relationships become transactional instead of meaningful. On the other hand, talking to people as humans and leading with your humanity first makes you a better human.

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

#74

Post by birdsongs »

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…

> The ATS would have some default timeout where candidates who aren't hired get the e-mail to comply with the law.

The sibling concept of this already exists in Europe with GDPR. Companies have to ask you to keep your data (resume, application, etc) beyond a certain timeout, otherwise they must delete it. Because of this, almost everyone uses a talent system.

It seems to work fine? I appreciate knowing they're going to nuke my info, or keep it.

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

#75

Post by shaftway »

optionalsquid wrote: post #30
Aurornis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Every employer would send "We have decided not to continue with your application". That would still be a big improvement over just getting ghosted

Would it though? Thanks to CA Prop 65 every place I go has a warning that I'll get cancer if I take one more step. If I'm walking into a nuclear waste storage facility I'll never know because of warning fatigue.

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

#76

Post by Grombobulous »

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

Perhaps 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.

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

#77

Post by idle_zealot »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #50
ryandrake wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I hate this mentality: "We can't possibly regulate companies, because they are so clever and they'll find loopholes and work around any law we make!" So write better laws! Add provisions for loopholes you anticipate. Add wording to remove ambiguity that the company will try to use to weasel their way out. Analyze the ways companies already get around laws and shore them up with a patch. Do something! We've t…

There are a lot of regulations I would like to get rid of because they are already being evaded, or otherwise have bad second order consequences; and those second-order consequences are themselves an annoying part of the fabric of daily life that I'm familiar with.

There are definitely bad regulations. Sometimes the right answer is to get rid of them, but only if you can evaluate why they were put in place, what they were meant to stop/correct, and why/how they failed, then determine that it would be better to remove them than fix them. If you have a shitty module in your codebase it can be tempting to remove it, but if you need the feature it's meant to provide then removal isn't the right framing, or is only the right solution if you have a better design to replace it with.

You have to remember that profit-motivated companies are completely amoral actors that have and will hire militias to manage slave workers or dump known-poisonous waste into people's drinking water or spend unfathomable amounts on convincing hundreds of millions of people that climate change is a hoax if it's the most self-enriching course of action. They will literally cause extinction if not regulated.

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

#78

Post by FireBeyond »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #60
woah wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait... 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"?

If you're making hiring decisions based on someone else's statements about the applicant, that someone's statements, if false, are pretty much the definition of defamation in the US. It's perfectly just that the applicant get to know if the reason they didn't get a job is because their bitter former boss defamed them.

I mean, agreed. I'd go even further and say the whole "Eligible for rehire?" question is an effort to backdoor this into employment verification. Employment verification should be "First date of employment? Last date of employment? Thank you."

"Are they eligible for rehire?" is the nudge nudge wink wink around "well, most of you have policies around providing formal references about performance, so here's one way we can try to gauge".

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

#79

Post by autoexec »

chaosharmonic wrote: post #23
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.

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/...

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

#80

Post by FireBeyond »

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.

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.

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