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.
That would still be a big improvement over just getting ghosted
If that makes you feel better it is suggestive of a deeper problem. Getting ghosted is part of life. At least its an authentic representation that you aren't worth someone's time. It seems more spontaneous, less premeditated. That's life. You just have to learn to get over it.
Assuming a world where there is a set of employers that would actually like to hire someone and a set of workers who are desiring employment, the set of listings that are not seeking to hire (or are only floating a job listing in perpetuity on the off-chance that some overqualified sap will take up their offer for less than they would expect in the market) encourage bad behavior from the other two parties.
It becomes substantially more difficult to parse through a pile of job listings to find what is a real (or realistic) listing and encourage the "shotgun approach" for applicants.
The flood of competing fake listings and the resultant tidal wave of shotgunned-resumes requires employers to spend more time cross-posting openings to reach real applicants and sorting through a greater number of low-effort bad-fit applications
Mild legislation that requires expected hiring dates and requires employers to say if they are just collecting resumes or face fines does not totally fix the issue but it is a welcome change in the right direction.
That part is annoying, but the open-ended nature of it is a true problem. Having a deadline on a thumbs up/down decision at least lets you move on with your life.
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 that I would at least have a good shot at each position after the interview. Both companies ghosted me.
For someone just developing their career and who was excited to work with actual professional companies (instead of the minimum-wage jobs offered to most students), that was kind of a big deal. Looking back, I'm pretty sure that's what really instilled a lot of the cynicism toward interviews I carried even after getting an internship and graduating into a full-time sysadmin position. I honestly got lucky getting the position I did, and I think without that success my cynical view would have spiraled downward.
> Getting ghosted is part of life.
The argument is that it shouldn't be. Responses like yours when people express hope that things can change is just digging your feet in because you think that other people have to deal with the same hardships you did. Everyone acknowledges that getting ghosted sucks, so maybe having a bit of empathy and sending something, even an automated message, should be encouraged more.
Yet as we get older we usually get the chance to curate our surroundings such that those people aren’t around us anymore.
(The other relevant difference is that the labor market involves a significant unilateral power imbalance between the employer class and the employee class, which is the biggest contributing factor which leads to the above difference)
What you describe is more like SPAM: Unsolicited bulk rejections to applications that were never sent
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.
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.
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.
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.
We've tried one thing, and it didn't work so we're all out of ideas! - The USA when it comes to regulating companies.
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.
Unfortunately, that is exactly how you end up with legalese and laws that are hard for normal people to understand: because bad-faith actors will invent ambiguity, litigate definitions, and argue over the exact meaning of every word.
It's like trying to tell a child "No jumping on the bed!" and they keep doing it while insisting they're not jumping, they're hopping, and then go into a diatribe about the difference between jumping and hopping until you say something like "Do not jump, hop, bounce, spring, leap, vault, stomp, rebound, or otherwise employ your feet, legs, knees, or body weight to produce repeated or excessive vertical motion upon, across, or within the boundaries of the bed."
And then they remove the mattress from the bed, put it on the floor, and start jumping on it, and say that wasn't against the rules because you only specified the bed, and declare that a mattress on its own does not constitute a bed.
(I'm sure you're fully aware of this, but just to add on to what you're saying that I agree with...)
This is all an intentional messaging strategy for kicking the can down the road indefinitely done by people who stand to lose if things are changed for the better of the masses.
Same exact strategy is used (often by the same people) to dismiss the idea of more fair taxation and lots of other things we supposedly can't ever make any progress on because our first attempt to address an obvious problem might not be perfect.
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.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2012/06/...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2014/04/...
Because the Fair Credit Reporting Act governs background checks. It isn't limited to money, or to scoring -- it covers any third party that reports data about you, for the sake of determining if you're eligible for anything from a loan to an apartment to a job. The language of it is broad enough that it doesn't just cover your spending and payment habits, but extends to your general habits, criminal history, personal character, and "mode of living."
I'm saying the behavior normalized by recruiters is a giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Because when they proactively reach out to random individuals you worked with, to ask you for your views on them as a reference, without your consent, that is an exploit. It is a workaround. It is skirting the actual intentions of the thing, because its scope is limited to "agencies" -- which, no matter how broad that term might be, still ultimately means third party data collectors.
If something your boss said about you came up on a background check, you would have a right to know about it. But if someone on a hiring team goes behind your back to that same boss, for those same comments, that is widely accepted as fine and normal.
That's the part that's a real problem.
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.
"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".
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/business/ai-hiring-tools-...
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.
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.
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.
This is not an isolated case, I have multiple job ads that get reposted every couple of months
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?
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?
For starters you can find it out from the inside...
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.
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.
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>"?
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.
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.
Good start nevertheless
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.
2) You might be considered a third party platform.
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.
Related:
https://www.hrdive.com/news/new-york-passed-bill-aimed-at-ha...
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." We are aligning incentives, with policy, to encourage desired outcomes.
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.
The incentive also exists, for the kinds of employers who would post ghost jobs, to also force in-person work again. You don't have to pay these fines to multiple states on one ghost job if the job is only available in one location.
> The incentive also exists, for the kinds of employers who would post ghost jobs, to also force in-person work again. You don't have to pay these fines to multiple states on one ghost job if the job is only available in one location.
49 states to go to implement this.
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.
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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.
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.
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.