Lawmakers Take Aim At 'ghost Job' Advertisements

The government can’t do anything about your Hinge matches—unless they run a company that’s posting about roles that may not actually be open, aka ‘ghost jobs.’ These types of listings, which attract applicants but lead to no hiring activity, are running so rampant that lawmakers across the country are working to get ’em banned, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.

Your résumé isn’t chopped, you may just be applying to jobs that employers have either already filled or never intended to fill. You can sometimes recognize them as the listings that sound too good to be true and stay posted for months:

• Roughly one in five listings advertised on online job boards per quarter are ghost jobs, according to the hiring platform Greenhouse.
• This phenomenon is reportedly getting worse, but it’s been wrecking egos for a while. About 81% of recruiters said in a 2024 MyPerfectResume survey that their employers posted ghost job ads.

Here’s what lawmakers are doing about it

New York state legislators recently passed a bill (now awaiting the governor’s signature) that would fine employers if they don’t mention expected hiring timelines in their job postings. Lawmakers in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and California are considering similar reforms.

Meanwhile, Texas is going after the middleman. The state’s Attorney General Ken Paxton opened an investigation into LinkedIn last month, alleging that the platform promotes and profits from ghost jobs.

Why do employers even post ghost jobs?

In the corporate version of “hey sorry I’ve been so busy recently,” an employer might’ve approved an opening, nixed it, and then been slow to remove the job post.

But that’s a best-case explanation. According to the 2024 MyPerfectResume survey, 38% of recruiters post fake jobs to stay relevant on job boards when they’re not hiring, while 36% do it to test their listing’s effectiveness. Meanwhile, some job seekers think employers promote ghost jobs to harvest applicants’ data or to convince investors that the company is growing.—ML

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