How do you enforce that?

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.

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tagyro 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'll give you an example I've experienced myself:

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.

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crazygringo 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's not a ghost job. That sounds like they picked some resumes and rejected the rest and hired someone, and then three months later they either needed another person to also do the same job, or it didn't work out with the original hire so they opened the hiring back up.

	▲	tagyro 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you This is not an isolated case, I have multiple job ads that get reposted every couple of months

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sib 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sorry, but why is that a problem? If they didn't find someone, they closed the posting, then reopened it later, what is the issue?

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?

	▲	thewebguyd 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> 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?
	▲	FireBeyond 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah, much as it sucks, there's a gap between "we were never going to hire anyone" and "you must hire someone, if you put up a job ad".

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coldtea 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>How did people even find out ghost jobs existed?

For starters you can find it out from the inside...

	▲	indoordin0saur 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah. Going to be a lot harder to do this when other people in the company bring up that it is illegal.

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dyauspitr 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

At the very least it will have a chilling effect. A few high profile arrests and companies putting out ghost jobs will know what they’re posting is illegal.

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cute_boi 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Especially the consulting companies are doing this. And, all these ghost job requirement from green card and h1b should be removed. There must be no incentive to post ghost job.

	▲	indoordin0saur 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, on the H1B there seems to be a separate issue. Posting a job listing that is intentionally hidden or otherwise not going to get bites. That way a company can say that they couldn't find a candidate and have to hire someone in need of a visa. From what I understand they do this to undermine wages as well as having a ̶e̶m̶p̶l̶o̶y̶e̶e hostage who won't complain about poor conditions because they don't want to lose their visa.