The article frames the New York bill as a long-overdue response to documented abuse — citing the 2024 Resume Builder survey showing 40% of companies posted fake listings and 30% had active ghost listings. The editorial argues the asymmetry between candidate effort and employer intent has become brutal, and that posting jobs being 'essentially free' created the perverse incentive structure this bill targets.
By submitting the Fast Company piece to HN where it reached 184 points, the submitter signaled endorsement of the framing that ghost jobs are a real problem worth legislating. The high engagement (112 comments) suggests the developer community broadly recognizes the phantom requisition pattern from their own job searches.
The synthesis explicitly contrasts New York's approach with the Colorado/Washington/California salary-disclosure model, calling those a 'related but narrower fix.' The argument is that knowing the comp band is meaningless if the requisition itself is fictional, making New York's bill the first serious attempt to legislate intent rather than just transparency around terms.
The editorial points to applicant tracking systems like Greenhouse, Lever, and Workday rewarding funnel volume, and to the near-zero marginal cost of posting as the underlying economic drivers. This frames the bill as treating a symptom — companies will still have incentives to maintain passive pipelines and signal growth, and enforcement of 'active intent to fill' will be inherently hard to prove.
A bill working its way through Albany would make it illegal for employers to post jobs in New York that aren't real. As Fast Company reports, the proposal would require companies to confirm a listed role is actively being filled, disclose when a posting refers to a future hiring need rather than an open requisition, and remove stale listings within a defined window after a role closes. Violations would expose employers to fines from the state labor department.
The legislation lands on top of a stack of survey data that nobody in tech finds surprising. A 2024 Resume Builder survey cited by Fast Company found that 40% of companies posted at least one fake job listing that year, and 30% had active ghost listings on their career pages at the time of the survey. Roughly a third of hiring managers admitted the postings existed to give the impression of growth, keep current employees feeling replaceable, or build a passive talent pipeline for roles that may or may not materialize.
New York isn't the first state to take a swing at this. Colorado, Washington, and California already require salary disclosure in postings — a related but narrower fix. The New York bill is the first serious attempt to legislate the *existence* of the job itself, not just the comp band attached to it.
For anyone who has run a tech job search in the last 24 months, this isn't theoretical. The dev-hiring market has been a feedback loop of phantom requisitions, six-round loops that end in 'we decided to pause,' and LinkedIn postings that have been 'active' for 90+ days with 500+ applicants. The asymmetry is brutal: candidates spend hours per application — tailored resume, cover letter, take-home, prep — against a posting the company has no real intent to fill.
The economics of why this happens are well-understood. Posting jobs is essentially free. Applicant tracking systems (Greenhouse, Lever, Workday) reward volume — the more applicants in the funnel, the better the recruiter metrics look. Public companies posting roles can signal growth to investors without committing headroom. Some firms keep listings live purely as a recruiting honeypot, harvesting resumes for roles that may open six months out, or never. The cost of the lie is paid entirely by job seekers, which is exactly the kind of externality regulation is designed to correct.
The community reaction on the HN thread (184 points and climbing) is what you'd expect: equal parts 'finally' and 'this won't work.' The 'finally' camp points at the obvious — every dev knows the pattern, every dev has been burned. The skeptics raise harder questions. How do you prove intent? A company can always claim 'we were going to hire but the budget froze.' What counts as 'actively filling' — one interview a month? An open req with no recruiter assigned? Who audits this — the same understaffed state labor departments that take months to process wage-theft complaints?
There's a real precedent question too. The FTC's non-compete ban got tied up in court within months. State-level employment law that imposes substantive disclosure obligations on national employers tends to draw constitutional challenges (First Amendment commercial speech, dormant Commerce Clause). A New York-only rule also has the obvious workaround: companies just stop listing 'New York' as a location. Remote-friendly engineering roles, in particular, can be quietly re-tagged.
If you're job-hunting: the bill, if it passes, gives you a tool but not a guarantee. Treat any posting older than 30 days, posted by a company that has done multiple rounds of layoffs in the last year, or that lists 500+ applicants with no movement, as a ghost until proven otherwise. Apply if you want, but don't pay it the emotional tax of a real opportunity. Use the network — warm intros to hiring managers remain the only reliable signal that a role is real and budgeted.
If you're a hiring manager or founder: this is a chance to differentiate. Companies that publish honest 'we are hiring 2 backend engineers this quarter, here's the team, here's the comp band, here's the loop' postings get materially better candidates per applicant. The contrarian move in a market full of ghost listings is radical specificity. State the req number. State the start date. State who you're replacing or what team is expanding. Candidates can smell intent.
If you build hiring tools: there's a product wedge here. A verification layer — 'this posting is from a company that filled X% of its listings in the last 12 months' — would be valuable to both sides of the market. LinkedIn won't build it because it cuts against their posting-volume incentive. Smaller players (Hacker News' 'Who is hiring' threads, Wellfound, Otta) could. The data exists; the question is who has the standing and the appetite to publish it.
The bill will probably pass in some form — ghost-job legislation polls well across the aisle, and 'help job seekers' is a low-cost political win. The real test isn't passage; it's whether the penalty structure has teeth and whether enforcement gets funded. Watch for two markers: a private right of action (lets applicants sue, which is what actually drives compliance with employment law) and a per-listing fine that scales with company size. Without those, expect a year of compliance theater — every careers page sprouts a 'this role is actively being filled' checkbox — and the underlying behavior unchanged. With them, the structure of how tech companies post roles materially shifts, and the dev job market gets its first honest signal-to-noise improvement in a decade.
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.
If you make Ghost Jobs illegal the whole thing will still be happening, it will just be driven underground to unlicenced 'haunted houses' which are less safe for the workers and less safe for the patrons. Its much better to keep this sort of thing legal and have licensed haunted houses whe
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 en
great news if this moves forward. while we at it lets ban ghosting applicants and make companies give a direct rejection email with a reason, it can be as simple as "not qualified" or "we found a better candidate, try again next time". waiting for answers that never come is alway
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In the same way that credit card companies are required to tell you the exact reasons your score has changed, companies should be required to give at least any sort of notice of rejection. Something as simple as: we have proceeded with another candidate (if and only if the role was actually filled).