I'd support it at the federal level. It's cruel towards people looking for work, and it costs them real time at a point in their lives when time is such a critical factor.

What is cruel about having a public mailbox for stuffing job applications?

Don't even start me on what I think is the next big issue, "ghost application harvesting":

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.

Calculate the aggregate amount of time candidates spent on applying the ghost job and use the job's purported rate of pay to calculate the amount of money the company stole from the public. Was it enough to be felony theft? The person posting, or whoever instructed it to be posted, gets charged the same as if they stole that amount from a till. Instant end of ghost job postings as most wouldn't even try to find the loopholes and edge cases when prison is a risk for getting a workaround wrong.