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.

The general problem with this one is that there are a thousand legitimate reasons not to hire someone that are also infeasible to efficiently establish the veracity of.

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.

Exactly. We shouldn't treat corporate regulation as something you try all at once to get the wording, incentives, and disincentives exactly right and then you're stuck with it for 20 years. It should be a living document. Put something into force today. See what companies do to try to avoid/skirt the regulation--then immediately close those doors and re-run the experiment. See what they try next and close those doors too, repeat until companies have no choice but to obey the spirit of the regulations. We should be doing this, rather than having these Big Upfront Designed laws that get no iteration.

I'm not sure the incentive here is strong enough. For a specific profile they want, at $2500 for every 30 days, I could see businesses just paying that fine as an operational cost.

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.