'ghost Jobs' Are on the Rise – and So Are Calls to Ban Them
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The phenomenon of "ghost jobs" - job postings that are never intended to be filled - is sparking heated debate, with some calling for a ban on the practice. Commenters are weighing in on the possible motivations behind ghost jobs, with theories ranging from using job postings as a proxy for growth indicators to attract investors, to profiling talent that might be snatched up by competitors. While some see ghost jobs as a harmless, if annoying, tactic, others are calling out companies for "lying to make more money." A few commenters have even suggested that ghost jobs might be used to appease overworked employees or to A/B test job descriptions.
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Some say it’s to raise stock value by fake growth indicators or motivate employees that they are replaceable, but I think those 2 are just partially the case.
how does that work as a growth indicator, are there any known organizations that track your growth based on how many job postings you do, and then use that data to indicate your growth?
I don't doubt that it could happen, but if it did we would have to know about it, I also don't doubt that I don't know about it, but I would like to know.
IMHO, these aren't smart investors.. because this should be something that comes up in due diligence, the amount of money left, the current burn rate, and what the company is doing about the latter. If the company was on paper fully staffed, but also actively hiring. That would be for me an indicator that either the hiring is fake, so what else are they faking. Or that the hiring is real, and they are fiscally irresponsible.
There's another angle to all of this, and that's obviously the company isn't fully staffed, there's still some space in the runway for another hire. It's just that right now its a buyers market from the perspective of the company.. So, well, beggars can be choosers.. They're just holding out until that golden candidate comes along. This obviously sucks, and there SHOULD be a maximum length a company can have a job ad out before they have to explain why it's taking so long.
It's not uncommon for countries to require citizens to disclose Who and How many jobs they applied for this week to collect social security.. There should be something similar for companies who have job ads out.
As a wild guess this may be part of the story a company tells itself. Every individual and company needs to tell themselves a nice "story" to feel good about themselves. In case of a company "damn, look how many jobs we're posting, we're growing and doing great" is a nice story to tell. Yeah the owners/manager know it's fake, the people writing the post know it's fake, people receiving applications also know it's fake, yet it still works. On paper officially they can tell each other how great they are doing. This is more likely how a large company would operate.
Another, more positive perspective from a small company I worked for is "ABH" (Always be hiring). That means always post jobs, and continue interviewing, because you might find an exceptional engineer for whom you'd make an exception and hire them. But at least in our case it was always an honest effort every time to sit down and evaluate the candidates, pay them to visit and interview face to face and such. It wasn't a game it indeed took quite a bit of effort on our side.
Let's say you have, like, 10 jobs to do but you're only going to hire two people (either loading them up with more work, or internally reshuffling responsibilities, probably a bit of both).
So you advertise for every role in your ideal team, then get the two candidates who plug the most holes, or look like the best fit.
I feel dirty suggesting it, but it probably happens.
It was always a delicate balance between one the one hand projecting success, and on the other not scaring clients you couldn't meet demand.
How is that not illegal? Pretending to offer jobs just to suck in resumes to some database just seems like it should be illegal. Or just like running scams is illegal but they are in another country "so tough luck, you'll never get us"?
Half the shit companies do that gets them a a fine would land any individual in jail for committing the same action, but we let them get away with just paying it off. Simultaneously we give those organizations the same rights.
It’s a system with three classes of citizen where the rich and corporations have a better right to responsibility ratio and the average human has a much worse ratio
I'm sure we're on the same side, but I want to point out that that case didn't make a huge difference. By that I mean it removed a ban on political broadcasts near elections, most of the "money is speech, super pacs can do anything at all" stuff was already legal.
Propaganda works, and this was a BIG change, as it now let unlimited shady corpo money spam agit-prop with no consequence.
this was step 1 on living in a post-truth world.
This was (AIUI) the US Supreme Court decision that established the precedent that money counts as protected speech.
So much of the rot that has occurred since then can be traced back to this.
I can draw a distinction between people and corporations because it’s literally encoded in the fucking law.
I actually don’t know how or why you would imply that such a distinction doesn’t exist.
In that case the company in charge, Columbia Gas, "exited" the market but all the scuttlebutt I heard in the area was that the Mass government was threatening the corporate execution of revoking their charter, which lead to Columbia gas selling their business off at a loss to Eversource
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NiSource#Massachusetts_gas_lin...
Recently investigative journalists here in Finland found out that a significant percentage of job postings over here are indeed fake. Unsurprisingly, worst offenders were recruitment companies, which sometimes listed fake jobs to generate a pool of applicants they can later offer to their clients. Doing this is easy, as no law requires these companies to disclose who their clients are when creating job postings. It's also very common for same position to get posted multiple times.
Other than wasting applicant's time, this behavior also messes up many statistics, which use job postings to determine how many open positions there are available. Basically the chances of finding a job are even worse for unemployed people than stats would imply.
https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1pp0iej/thi...
So never being offered a job because it doesn't exist doesn't lose you anything.
Ah well look, if the job posting was just to collect resumes with zero intention to actually hire, you did lose some things:
- actual time spent applying to a job that was never open - emotional damage on focus to try to get this job - loss of free market value of your data (company profited from this data, when you could have profited from it) - damages for acquisition of your personal data under a fraudulent basis (when otherwise, maybe you did not want your data shared)
Multiply this across all the fraudulent job postings, and it really starts to add up.
It's clear (to me, at least) that we need better laws to handle this sort of wide-but-shallow attack on people. It's analogous to spam.
1: https://www.canadianbreadsettlement.ca/
But was it worth it?
1. That is exactly what class actions are for.
2. That's also why we need punitive damages, so someone can't get away with unlawful actions by deliberately coasting along under the threshold where it makes sense to sue. For instance, IIRC, you can collect something like $5000 from someone who doesn't put you on their "do not call list" when requested. That amount has nothing to do with the value of the "few minutes of your time it took to" answer a telemarketing call.
It is not wire fraud because you do not pay to apply. (In general; places that charge applicants are even more scammy.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Ac...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Educational_Rights_and_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Credit_Reporting_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm%E2%80%93Leach%E2%80%93Bl...
SCOTUS is a bit different as it both isn't driven by political parties and justices have a history of more frequently breaking with the party they are seen as aligned with.
Even more broadly, there's an old quote:
The soap box is under threat: https://reason.com/2025/12/18/this-tennessee-man-spent-37-da... and https://www.npr.org/2025/04/08/nx-s1-5349472/students-protes...The ballot box is under threat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding_in_the_...
Judiciary is under threat: https://www.gov.harvard.edu/2025/07/24/the-u-s-judicial-cris... and https://judicature.duke.edu/articles/judicial-independence-t...
That just (to much the same horror and sense of unreality I had watching the 9/11 attacks unfold) leaves the ammo box.
Now, I'm British, a country where even the police are not routinely armed, so the American view that weapons are a "fundamental right" is utterly alien to me, and this difference is one of the reasons why I never seriously considered moving to Silicon Valley at any point in my career.
Trump seems pro 2nd Amendment: is that because he is afraid and needs them to like him, or because isn't afraid as he has an army and a secret service to keep him safe, or does he just plain like guns and hasn't even thought about personal risk despite getting shot at?
I definitely agree our democracy seems to be under attack on multiple fronts, and at least the people I'm often around regardless of political affiliation seem to have lost sight of how our system is intended to work.
A violent civil war wouldn't surprise me, though I don't think we're close to it yet and I hope I never see it happen. Though I would prefer seeing that rather than seeing our system successfully destroyed and replaced with what seems to be coming up, an authoritarian socialism of one form or another.
My point was simply that we can't only blame the white house when laws go unenforced, the other branches of government are intentionally a check on the executive.
there have already been CCPA enforcements against companies like Tractor Supply, Sephora, Honda, and Google (tho the GOOG was more of a "violated a lot of stuff including CCPA").
It doesn't have enough teeth to scare FAANGs, who have the money and technical ability to do whatever, but it can definitely keep companies in line.
source: did CCPA compliance and security at multiple F500
Ahhhh! A new English expression, "defecto legal"! I like it. It should be the name of a website for purposes TBD later.
The proper term is "de facto": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/de%20facto
A defect is a flaw, an error.
You want the possessive ("its"), not the shortened form ("it is") which would make that sentence:
"...look forward to it is landing"
Thank you for sharing the Spanish interpretation, TIL :)
Ahhhh! A new English expression, "defecto legal"! I like it. It should be the name of a website, defectolegal.com, for purposes TBD later.
The proper term is "de facto": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/de%20facto
A defect is a flaw, an error. "defecto" is Spanish for the English "defect".
Don't get me started about "giving a dam".
- “defect,” a flaw, an error.
- about giving a dam.”
Don’t get me started about “for purposes TBD later.”
>The senator said that the bill was "bloated."
your sentence itself doesn't have a period. In order to give it a period you'd have to write:
>The senator said that the bill was "bloated.".
But then you're saying that the senator described the bill using the (non-)word consisting of the nine characters 'b', 'l', 'o', 'a', 't', 'e', 'd', 'PERIOD'. We've decided that this doesn't make sense.
- they have limited resources and they are prioritising something else,
- there is little realistic chance of getting a conviction.
- it's not one of their politically set department targets
- they fundamentally don't think it should be illegal - say historic blasphemy laws still on the books.
Is your main concern resources or enforceability, lack of political focus or some combination of all of the above?
Fighting private lawyers is what costs courts money and is why the wealthy get way less criminal punishment.
There was a clique of employees who were tight with management and got recurring work. Which wouldn't have been a problem if the temp agency stopped advertising open jobs, once their docket was already over-full.
The biggest irony is that the majority of HN's own "Who's Hiring" are ghost jobs.
I won't disappear, it won't even decrease, even with regulation.
The thing is that whether or not a job exists at a point in time is far less black and white than you might naively think.
There are many reasons for it to be somewhat grey and banning the practice doesn’t really mean anything because you would have to quantify precisely under what circumstances a job is allowed to be advertised and as I say, it’s not as clear as you might imagine.
There is absolutely not a one to one relationship between a job and a job ad.
Sounds like you've figured out exactly the problem then. If you're advertising for a job and there isn't a job then you've got a problem.
Sometimes it would be nice to have another perosn doing X but as it's not urgent they can wait for a "perfect" candidate.
As an example would be a junior position needed as a senior needs to retire in a few years, the person is more important than the knowledge but the timeline is not really urgent
I applied for some jobs, two of them liked me and I reached the point where they were competing with each other for me, and I was in salary negotiations. One of them, suddenly, decided to stop trading. I still don't know why.
Another time, I started working(!) and getting paid, but after 6 months the person who everyone (including themselves) was expecting to leave and for me to replace had still not found a new job (presumably due to all the ghost jobs), and there wasn't enough money for both me and them. Last in, first out, bye to me.
One place hired an PM about two weeks before the investors decided to shutter the entire company. (For actual ghost jobs: in my own job hunt after that, I found listings on job boards for that company, that were clearly from several years before I'd joined given the advertised wage range; as the company had told everyone to stop coming in for their notice period, there wasn't even anyone left to ask for those to be deleted).
Back when my dad was around, one of his anecdotes about interviewing candidates was asking the candidate "Why did you leave your last job?" and getting a reply along the lines of "After 6 months, management found out that our entire floor had been hired to do the same thing as the floor next to us. One of the floors had to go."
External recruiters might then re-advertise the job with the company name removed, planning to funnel people to the company and collect their 20% commission.
External recruiters with several jobs might merge them into one. $250k job for a senior java developer with 5 years finance experience + $75k job for a junior java developer = advertise $250k job for a java developer.
A company might have a slow, centralised hiring pipeline for some roles. Google has a recruiter check the candidate's resume before putting you into a lengthy 6+ interview gauntlet, but only at the end of it do hiring managers actually check if the resume matches an open job. And if course if it takes 2 months to get through the full pipeline, the jobs open at the end aren't the same as the jobs open at the start.
I might be willing to hire for two different levels of seniority/experience, but only one or the other, not both.
- the boss has agreed to the role but has reservations, seeing a few candidates solidifies them and permission to hire us withdrawn
- the team is inexperienced at hiring and don't know what they want until they've seen a few candidates
- the company is hiring a new whole team. To make hiring easier, roles that are listed are "representative roles" - the total desired skill set across all roles is accurate but the company doesn't care what the split is, they just want a team that covers it. So a candidate who is a better fit for a listed role can be passed over in favour of one that happens to be the right jigsaw piece.
- circumstances changed since permission to hire was given, and no-one remembered to update the hiring portal; because unless you're actively hiring no-one looks at it.
This last one is quite common, because there are so many applications usually that no-one wants them in their email.
Put a tax of 10% one year's salary on any employee hired without a registry posting. (employers to put the job posting number on the I-9 form)
Put a $1000 tax on any job posting not filled or cancelled within six months. Make that information public.
Isn't this a problem? It means companies are wasting individuals' time (hence money), whereas companies are in a better position to hedge the risk. Would it be legal if I started, for example, posting fake apartment ads and not show up (because the apartment doesn't even exist)? Would it be ethical?
I am not sure if it's bad or not. It's true that it kinda wastes the candidate's time. In some cases though, the candidate is so good that the company will create a position just for them.
No... it's worse than that; it's THEFT, and monumentally offensive. It's time that everyone, EVERYONE stop giving entities a free pass on stealing from us by deliberately wasting our time.
In every aspect of life, every hour of our day, we're being ripped off. From the assholes blocking the passing lane, to "ghost jobs," to non-functioning subscription-cancellation phone numbers and Web forms... people should be going apeshit about the despicable and unpunished theft of our time.
I should say way too many are; and they act shocked when you take issue with being stolen from... as if YOU'RE the one with the problem. Pathetic.
Not just HR, but actual team leads and members who you can talk to, and mutually evaluate each other face to face. It's a superb event, highly recommended!
RTO for the recruiters, eh?
At least the few smaller companies that show up seem more immune to this, but they have the problem of wanting to pay an electrical engineer about $50,000-$60,000 for starting pay, which just isn't worth it. So everyone still puts up with the recruiters that know nothing because at least then you have a shot of earning a market rate salary.
I got one lead where the guy gave me the link for good candidates and all the others were useless.
Doing that allows me to send out 5 applications in the time it normally takes me to do 1. Since I've seen no actual correlation between effort and success, I figured quantity will give better results than quality. Of course, I might put in actual effort for an opening that I find really interesting, but that's an exception.
If you can't be bothered with a simple cover letter (a paragraph or two is fine) highlighting why you are a good fit and just send a CV..... Frankly, it comes across as low effort spamming.
Right?
I most certainly do!
Incidentally, the very idea of not providing a salary range is truly baffling. I'm amazed any such advertisements generate applicants; other than those phoning up the HR department to tell them to stop pissing about and please state the salary.
You are effectively filtering out the remaining companies that do care from the pool that you're talking to.
I was thinking this would make a positive impression and say hey, I'm really interested and I'm willing to go the extra mile. The person who answered the door and to whom I gave the envelope seemed baffled that anyone would do this... saying, you know you can do this online...
I can only conclude that this is a ghost-job situation, where they didn't envision being called out in person and on site. Otherwise, what kind of dicks don't at least raise a respectful eyebrow at (or at least acknowledge) the guy who drives over to their office to hand-deliver a letter and resume?
After that I knew for sure that I wouldn't want to work for these jagoffs anyway... even if the job were real.
People are becoming much more adverse to bring panhandled or solicited in a way they cannot ignore, in the same way spam calls are more annoying than spam texts. It's not "initiative" or "extra mile" shit, it's taking advantage of someone's politeness to waste their time.
It also looks hopelessly boomerish, up there with expecting the firmness of a handshake to land a job. I've seen this happen dozens of times and the resumes always end up in the trash within minutes. I've never seen anyone hired this way.
>AI rejects it for unknown reason and HR never sees it
>Go to company HQ to prove I'm human and see the culture
>Seething antisocial neckbeard engineer refuses to shake my hand, throws my resume in trash, and HR never sees it
The fact a simple human action like job hunting makes you boil with hatred and antipathy is shocking. I guarantee you, none of these people are thinking about you hard enough to consider intentionally wasting your time. They want to feed their families just like you.
Some time after that, I was working for a consulting firm, but my desk was not at the entrance; another engineer's was. I distinctly remember a sharply dressed college student walking in, giving that engineer a resume, saying a few things, and leaving. His resume got passed up the chain and he got hired later. The only person I know who gave a paper resume.
If you're getting a lot of foot traffic that wastes your time, maybe bring that up with your employer?
Nice bit of ageism there.
Frankly, if desiring to speak to the engineers hiring me is dismissed as "boomerish", then I'm hardly surprised recruiting is in such a mess.
In this case, the short conversation OP had proved that, no, he wouldn't be happy working there. QED.
Your reaction betrays your embitteredness and naívete, calling others "boomerish" while missing the fact that your ways are in fact already the old ways. I'd say you're the one being mocked, except you're not even getting that much attention... you're hopelessly faffing at an AI firewall and never reaching a human eyeball.
"Taking advantage of someone's politeness?" Hahaha! It's pretty clear you have no idea what politeness is.
Seriously—if you’re going to go overboard, so can I.
WTF is it with everything having to be mediated by a machine these days? People can’t navigate without GPS, remember phone numbers, or now even do their work or homework without 'AI.'
How do you explain how people managed to do all of these things before without assistance? And how do you square that with telling “boomers”—who were able to do these things—that they’re stupid and that you’re somehow better?
Seriously, it’s like we used to have weightlifting competitions where humans physically lifted weights overhead, and then you guys decided, “Nah, that’s too old and boomerish. From now on, all weightlifting competitions will use forklifts. Anyone who wants to lift the weights themselves is boomerish and stupid.”
And where's your solidarity? If you lose your job, you may find yourself wishing you could meet people in person, when all your electronically submitted job applications somehow get ignored.
No more requiring the candidate to do 30 minutes of data entry to encode their resumé into your HR system.
Then a ghost job wouldn't really waste much time, since uploading a JSON should take 30 seconds.
The need for a referral to get human eyes on your resume is a different problem that isn't made better by making every application expensive for the applicant. Poor quality applicants have more time, you might say.
What if we imagined that companies charged a fee to apply instead of charging candidate time? Then these ghost positions would be obviously considered fraud. We don't normally pay applicants for their time, but isn't a ghost position requiring substantial time to apply also a fraud on the applicant?
All I'm saying is, by removing the payment in time, you remove the fraud.
Applicant spam is an orthogonal problem that has other solutions. Linked-in could limit applicants to one application every 30 minutes, max 16 per day. Employers can use keyword filtering as they already do.
We really try to spend the time to answer every application, but since AI generated applications have become a thing, we have decided to not answer those. Why should I spent time if you haven’t spent the time?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg8jllq283o
Unless, you are actually hoping to find a full stack developer that can also serve as the principal engineer for your entire network, storage, VMware infra, plus support basically anything with cord all for ~$80-100k.
Normally when you get to the point of discussing things with a human, you find out what the actual job is. The job ad is almost always completely irrelevant to the actual job.
Making it difficult to apply reduces the number of legitimate applications, however.
Either way, you need an automated first screen.
And we need to sort out needs vs wants. Job postings should include the required skills (do not submit if you don't meet them) and a separate listing for additional skills that would be desirable. Don't waste everyone's time with a guessing game where people need to decide if they are close enough to the wish list.
I feel the biggest blunder would be when applicant gets a take-home, spends some time on it and then there is no answer. Though I never experienced that myself. I never ghosted a candidate when I was on the other side of hiring table, but I was always finding it draining my energy to write the 'no' responses
In most other situations related to money or contracts, it would be a criminal offense punishable by prison time.
What are you thinking of? In most cases, that falls firmly under the category of bullshitting. Annoying. Unprofessional. Dishonest. But rarely criminal.
What makes this possibly illegal (though I'm still unsure if it's crimial) is that it's specifically around employer-employee relations.
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