'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York

https://www.fastcompany.com/91558427/ghost-jobs-could-soon-be-illegal-in-new-york

by toomuchtodo • 1 month ago

225 139 1 month ago

fastcompany.com

toomuchtodo4• 1 month ago

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

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

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

mcmcmc• 1 month ago

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

toomuchtodo4• 1 month ago

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.

monster_truck• 1 month ago

I don't know that it counts as a circumvention, having a visible signal of that date continually being pushed back will be very useful.

SpicyLemonZest• 1 month ago

You're presuming that this is something employers want to circumvent. As the article discusses, many of these postings are likely legitimate jobs which the employer does intend to fill, and they just don't do the work (which has minimal value to them) of ensuring that all the postings get taken down once they've filled it.

bsimpson• 1 month ago

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>"?

PaulHoule3• 1 month ago

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.

tancop• 1 month ago

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.

mmcclure• 1 month ago

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.

PaulHoule3• 1 month ago

Also a lot of companies don't want to close off the option. It is amazing how you occasionally hear back long afterwards after they fail to hire the applicants that they wanted more than you.

chaosharmonic6• 1 month ago

I've landed on a similar hot take after one job offer got rescinded by a company that refused to give a reason, to anyone involved, and then wouldn't honor records requests. (But would send me a candidate survey.)

With any job, it would be one thing if it were at the applicant stage, and I hadn't talked to a person at any point. But with this one, there was an offer in front of me and there was no one at all who had both the capacity and the willingness to explain what had just happened.

If I started the job and they pulled this on day three, they would have to give a reason to an unemployment office.

I don't care how little inclination businesses have to tell the truth. Make them commit to the lie, in writing, somewhere that it actually costs something.

sellmesoap• 1 month ago

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.

engineer_223• 1 month ago

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.

PaulHoule3• 1 month ago

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.

danielvaughn• 1 month ago

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.

Mountain_Skies• 1 month ago

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.

Retric• 1 month ago

Fraud seems like a more direct issue.

JackFr• 1 month ago

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

FireBeyond3• 1 month ago

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.

grimcompanion• 1 month ago

Totally agree. I actually got a job off of AngelList back in the day, when I was fairly junior. Was getting messages from hiring managers, founders, and in-house recruiters almost daily. 5 years later, I updated my profile with a much more legit background than before, messaged a few places - it's been 100% crickets.

engineer_223• 1 month ago

What is cruel about having a public mailbox for stuffing job applications?

RandallBrown2• 1 month ago

It's cruel to have people spend time and energy applying for a job that doesn't actually exist and they have no chance of being hired for, despite their qualifications.

wtfwhateven• 1 month ago

Terrible, perhaps even knowingly dishonest, analogy.

mancerayder2• 1 month ago

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.

dyauspitr• 1 month ago

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.

cute_boi• 1 month ago

Especially the consulting companies are doing this. And, all these ghost job requirement from green card and h1b should be removed. There must be no incentive to post ghost job.

coldtea• 1 month ago

How did people even find out ghost jobs existed?

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

indoordin0saur2• 1 month ago

Yeah. Going to be a lot harder to do this when other people in the company bring up that it is illegal.

tagyro2• 1 month ago

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.

crazygringo• 1 month ago

That's not a ghost job. That sounds like they picked some resumes and rejected the rest and hired someone, and then three months later they either needed another person to also do the same job, or it didn't work out with the original hire so they opened the hiring back up.

sib• 1 month ago

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?

mancerayder2• 1 month ago

Some companies don't know what they want and there's internal confusion. I've observed this first-hand. They'll release recs and shut them down a few weeks later, confusing HR (or HR confuses everyone), maybe re-open. It's annoying but more disorganized behavior than fake jobs.

wps2• 1 month ago

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.

chaosharmonic6• 1 month ago

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.

toomuchtodo4• 1 month ago

https://www.hrdive.com/news/eightfold-ai-lawsuit-job-candida...

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/business/ai-hiring-tools-...

woah• 1 month ago

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"?

autoexec2• 1 month ago

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/...

Aurornis• 1 month ago

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.

optionalsquid3• 1 month ago

Every employer would send "We have decided not to continue with your application".

That would still be a big improvement over just getting ghosted

idle_zealot2• 1 month ago

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.

Eh, that's like saying taxing them is pointless because they'll just spend more on accountants to find loopholes. It's only true if you have the political will to pass the laws but not enough to fund the teeth needed to enforce them. Gather reports of boilerplate rejections, launch investigations, drag companies to discovery to find their deliberate efforts to end-run the spirit of the law, extract fines sufficient to fund investigations into the next 10 companies.

wps2• 1 month ago

This seems pretty accurate to me. But like other commenters, the psychological closure of any message at all is better than nothing.

Also, what company nowadays doesn’t use an ATS? I’ve seen a few startups that take applications via email or discord but those are few and far between. Most are using Workday/Indeed/Linkedin or what have you.

birdsongs• 1 month ago

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.

weakened_malloc2• 1 month ago

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.

RandallBrown2• 1 month ago

A sensibly written law could close loopholes like the one you described.

I'm not sure an ATS would be required either. Simply having a law that requires a response when inquired about the status of an application after a certain amount of time would suffice.

I was ghosted by a Fortune 500 company after making it to the final round of an interview recently. It took me weeks of sending emails to get them to tell me they didn't want to hire me.

mxkopy• 1 month ago

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.

EGreg• 1 month ago

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, to internalize those costs.

Laws are frameworks. My brand of libertarianism is "decentralizing concentrations of power" and "giving people the software tools to self-organize". But in the meantime, yeah, if there would be laws for anything, it would be this kind of stuff. It is why I can get behind Intellectual Property for Trademarks, before I get behind Copyrights and Patents. Trademarks are about making sure actors don't misrepresent who they are and appropriate the brand of other actors. I think many libertarians would come to support Trademark enforcement laws if they were presented that way.

cucumber3732842• 1 month ago

This is just begging for a class action-ish lawsuit.

Grombobulous3• 1 month ago

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.

0x592• 1 month ago

I'm just about to launch a job posting data api with postings I aggregate and very lightly normalize (https://kaleh.net/trace)

Anyone have an idea how this might impact me? They're not my postings, I just package em up and ship em. Strive to comply with all laws and TOS and not trying to make trouble.

janalsncm• 1 month ago

1) You would be in a good position to find and report violations to the NY department of labor.

2) You might be considered a third party platform.

0x592• 1 month ago

1) Yay 2) Fuck

robotnikman• 1 month ago

Good to see. The job market is screwed right now, and this is one big step to fixing things.

david_shi• 1 month ago

Thought this was going to be a Sopranos/mob thing

palinnilap• 1 month ago

What if online job applications were illegal, and you signed up for interviews in person with a resume after seeing the ad online.

cush• 1 month ago

Going door to door and handing out resumes used to be a thing

jamesfinlayson2• 1 month ago

Somewhat related but I remember an old boss telling me that some government departments weren't allowed to specify Australian companies only when tendering for a work, but they were perfectly within their rights to ask for tender applications to be hand-delivered to their head office, thereby making it very onerous and expensive for any non-Australian companies to bother.

defrost• 1 month ago

thereby making it very onerous and expensive for any non-Australian companies to bother.

It's a good story .. but somewhat silly, Australia is riddled with outposts of offshore foreign companies here to exploit resources, and / or rig the books for others.

OutOfHere2• 1 month ago

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

Grombobulous3• 1 month ago

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.

OutOfHere2• 1 month ago

You must not have applied much to smaller and medium sized firms in New York because they're missing salary ranges all over the place.

thewebguyd2• 1 month ago

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.

airstrike• 1 month ago

I love this initiative.

I also feel like there's a very clear private solution here which is creating a company for both employers and employees to use which requires more transparency from both.

This would essentially become a signal to both sides of the transaction that this is someone you want to do business with, and it's self-regulating.

ufmace2• 1 month ago

Good recruiters can fill this function. Yeah, there's a lot of sleazy ones out there. But the better ones only take work from real companies that intend to actually hire and real candidates that are actually looking for jobs, and have the information to screen out bad actors on both sides.

Cyclone_• 1 month ago

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.

Oras• 1 month ago

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

jadbox• 1 month ago

This should be followed in every state.

tempaway2e5645• 1 month ago

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.

anotheraccount9• 1 month ago

My company does it all the time. I've noticed all these ghost jobs are advertised in the same large city (Toronto), yet our offices are elsewhere.

avaer• 1 month ago

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.

mhb• 1 month ago

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.

sh34r• 1 month ago

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.

gib444• 1 month ago

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

tim-tday• 1 month ago

Please

michaelmrose• 1 month ago

Wouldn't it be easier for them to include a disclaimer in every job listing fulfilling the letter of the law while escaping every bit of the purpose.

chupchap• 30 days ago

Does this also cover all other employment agencies creating listing for the same one job, making it look like there are 20 openings while there is just one?

'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York

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