If you’ve applied for countless jobs and rarely hear back, chances are you’ve encountered a phenomenon that has grown increasingly common: “ghost jobs.”
Sometimes employers post a job listing that seems legitimate—but the company has no intention of hiring for the position. This can be a major source of frustration for job seekers who take the time to apply for those jobs, only to get no response or find that the company never intended to fill the role.
This month, New York state lawmakers passed a bill that could help combat the scourge of posting these jobs that don’t actually exist. If the bill is signed into law by Governor Kathy Hochul, it would require companies to spell out if and when they intend to fill a role anytime they post a job listing—and to take postings down within two weeks of hiring someone for the job.
The bill—which would apply to companies with a hundred or more employees, as well as third-party platforms that post jobs—mandates that employers have to disclose the date of when they intend to fill a job if it is within 90 days. (The law specifies the language of this disclosure and notes that it must be bolded and in all caps.)
If there isn’t a current opening or a job is unlikely to be filled in that timeframe, employers will have to note that, and still provide a projected timeframe for hiring. In instances where an employer does not actually intend to fill a job, they would have to clearly state that the goal of a listing is to collect resumes for when a job opens up in the future.
Many ghost jobs are the result of poor oversight, such as when a third-party platform posts a job that is no longer open, or does not take it down in time. A recent analysis of over 175,000 job listings revealed that about one in seven jobs was active for more than 30 days, at which point a company may no longer be reviewing applications.
But as Fast Company has reported, there are any number of reasons why employers might intentionally use faux job listings or post a job when they don’t intend to actually hire for it.
Sometimes an employer wants to create a pipeline of potential candidates for future openings—or they might just be legally obligated to post a job publicly, even if they’ve already identified the person they want to hire. In other instances, employers may be using job listings to burnish their image for investors or potential hires and project the appearance of a company that is thriving.
Whatever the explanation, ghost jobs can be vexing for people who are desperately trying to find a new role or have spent their time on job applications that are unlikely to go anywhere—particularly in a challenging job market that continues to be marred by recurring layoffs.
While there are certain red flags that might point to a ghost job, it can be difficult for workers to entirely steer clear of them; it’s not unusual, for example, to get little to no feedback from employers after applying for a job.
Enacting a law to curb ghost jobs could prove effective—but only if companies actually pay for flouting it. Even as pay transparency laws have been adopted in more states, including New York, compliance has been uneven, in part because of limited enforcement; while the law has forced many employers in New York to include salary information for job listings, some companies have continued posting broad pay ranges that are of little use to workers.
This potential law targeting ghost jobs, however, would levy much steeper fines on employers: $2,500 for each post that fails to comply with the law, with that fine doubling if the listing is not taken down within 30 days. (The amount would then double every 30 days if an employer does not take action.)
If the bill is in fact signed into law with those fines intact, employers across New York may be a lot more inclined to reevaluate their hiring practices.