The opposite can also be true. Just because a position was marked as “hired” doesn’t mean anyone was actually hired.

Good to be skeptical. Remember, though, that there is zero cost to displaying ads. That means they get bundled at places like indeed. If you’re HR and have 3 openings, but have 4 ads you can run for less than the price of 3… Personally, I might run an ad for some kind of triple threat that has no chance of finding someone.

Also, the cost of screening ad responses is near zero compared to 30 years ago.

So we have economics that encourages ghost job listings. Personally I’d like to see big taxes on job postings scaling for company size, maybe duration too. Would solve this particular problem.

Rather sad to see them go down that path, because Greenhouse used to be a pretty good system. For an applicant it was reasonably low-friction[ß] and for the company doing the hiring it made their internal hiring process steps very smooth indeed. I have fond memories of being on the business end of Greenhouse when hiring and interviewing people.

That they have stooped to dodgy marketing with bad and/or massaged statistics is telling. To think that a "Voice AI" interview would be anything other than demeaning is beyond tone deafness.

ß: someone early on in the company's history must have realised that zero-friction application submissions were a terrible idea. You want candidates who at least had to go through one step on their own to submit their CV - otherwise you get flooded by LI/Indeed style spam typhoons and other eldritch horrors.

What a naive attitude. There are companies who have the same jobs posted for years without hiring anybody. This is easy to find, using search engine caches.

Also normal discussion with HR persons, will quickly make realize most job posts are fake. They just have it open in case "the right candidate comes along..."

And most important you have payrolls dat from companies like ADP, and internal data from aggregators like Indeed.

About 3 in 5 jobs are ghost.

The Ontario law defines AI:

> A machine-based system that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers from the input it receives to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments.

The AI disclosure will be noise, not signal.

> Must respond

This seems great, although I expect in practice we will see companies just set up automatic "sorry you haven't been successful" emails after 44 days. If you haven't heard in 45 days the answer is pretty obvious anyway.

I've seen that from some big companies for applications that didn't even get an interview - months after I already got a job elsewhere I get a random email from Microsoft or whoever saying "sorry you weren't successful".

The state of NY is close to passing legislation as well.

‘Ghost jobs’ could soon be illegal in New York - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48558338 - June 2026 (139 comments)

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S8877

https://www.hrdive.com/news/new-york-passed-bill-aimed-at-ha...

Related:

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12977

May I ask: Is this crawler based, I guess?

(because you have some niche jobs/countries on there with some postings :-)

that is a good looking job board. except i am missing a filter for the type of work, like IT, software, marketing, design, etc. also filtering by industry would be nice. and part-time/contract options. there seems to be a remote filter, but it's a bit confusing how to activate that.

How do you deal with false reports about bona fide jobs, but from malicious actors, such as competitors or trolls?

Well, the government actually requires a non-ghost job posting for PERM applicants. There may not be much enforcement of this, particularly employers going out of their way to try to get as few qualified applications as possible.

[dead]

Even if all of the PERM postings to be considered "ghost", it is just 120K postings per year. And PERM postings are usually promptly removed, not just hanging there like typical ghost job postings.

Quite easy to enforce with a private right of action.

I'm sure some ambulance chasing lawyer types will make quick work of the problem

Again, you need to deal with people gaming the system - claiming they were hired in order to boost credibility ranking of the company (or site).

When there’s a benefit to the site and the employer, that’s two potential sources of corruption.

Because the definition of a “ghost job” starts falling apart when you look closely at the numbers. A company that hires multiple people under a single generic listing like “Senior Software Engineer” would be classified as a ghost job, despite actually producing more hires than job listings. It would be annoying as hell if there was a law dictating that we had to post 50 separate job listings every time we wanted to hire 50 people and then carefully assign candidates to the right one so we didn’t accidentally trigger some ghost job law.

Seems like a difficult thing to enforce. Presumably not impossible to make some progress tho.

Just speculating here but perhaps those ghost job listings are used to artificially boost the appearance of growth or even just things being business as usual.

Might be useful to some folks.