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.

Because, given you aren't filing for PERM these days for someone that you have not already hired, someone off the street is going to be straight out worse than your current employee.

PERM ade sense in a theoretical world without H1s or F1s, where you are filing PERM for someone off the street. But that almost never happens outside of cases where yes, you coud put the ad in the front page NYT and you'd still hire the candidate. And thus eitehr way you slice it, looking at the resumes of your ghost ad is a waste of time either way.

And if one really wanted to go back to that kind of green card process, it has to be very fast anyway, instead of being as slow as it is. Otherwise it becomes useless regardless.

They shouldn't accept newspaper job ads anymore. It's a total scam when they use those because no one is applying for jobs from the wanted section of a local newspaper in 2026. They left too many obvious loopholes these companies take advantage of.