“Ghost Job” Ads Are So Bad, Lawmakers Want to Bust Them

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You spend an hour polishing your résumé and cover letter for the perfect job opening. The only problem? The job doesn’t actually exist. “Ghost jobs” are roles that companies advertise despite having no intention of filling, and they have become so common that lawmakers are starting to intervene.

As Lauren Weber from The Wall Street Journal explains:

• As many as one in five online job postings may be ghost jobs, according to data from hiring platform Greenhouse.
• Why do companies post them? Some are building a pipeline of candidates for future roles or testing the available talent pool. In other cases, hiring plans change, and old listings simply stay online. Whatever the reason, applicants often have no way of knowing whether an advertised job is real.

But scrutiny is growing, for both employers and job platforms:

• New York legislators have passed a bill requiring employers to disclose expected hiring timelines, while New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and California are considering similar measures.
• Meanwhile, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has opened an investigation into LinkedIn over potentially fake job listings, and LinkedIn and Greenhouse have introduced verification measures intended to help job seekers identify legitimate openings.

Our take? Employers may have perfectly legitimate reasons for keeping job ads up when they aren’t actively hiring. But applicants deserve to know what they’re applying for. If a company is simply collecting résumés for future openings, they should say so. Job seekers shouldn’t have to spend time applying for a position that may never be filled.

And if you’re a job seeker, treat a job posting as a lead, but before you invest hours in an application, check when it was posted, look for the role on the company’s own careers page, and, where possible, use your network to find out whether the company is actively hiring.