Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

> If the number is only 17%, I'm not sure we need to ban them.

Job hunting is a market and the government should tryu to make every market as efficient as possible. Imagine if you went to any other store and 17% of the items you bought were just junk and didn't work.

This is a superb take. I've admittedly always thought of interviews as a process in desperate need of improvement. Thinking of it as a market is a helpful perspective shift on some long-standing ideas.

Ever go to Fry's back in the day? A lot of the items they sold were junk, but they had a liberal return policy.

So imagine job hunting is Amazon where you can’t return bad products.

You don't need the legislation for this.

You are free to build a job marketplace that profiles employer posting behavior and shares relevant info with applicants. Like it or not, employers will be forced to cooperate with you to get access to the talent pool you attract.

> Imagine if you went to any other store and 17% of the items you bought were just junk and didn't work.

I dunno, that sounds like real life? The percentage of purchases that I return or ultimately don't use is probably around there, for non-repeat purchases.

A kitchen gadget that doesn't really work, a T-shirt I order that turns out to have a weird fit or weird material, a Bluetooth whatever that randomly disconnects after 5 minutes...

If 80% of my new purchases turn out to work as expected and do their job, I consider myself to be doing pretty well.

> Like it or not, employers will be forced to cooperate with you to get access to the talent pool you attract.

Except for the problem of "talent will be forced to seek out employers, no matter how shitty or stupid the latter behaves, because they'll starve and die within a matter of weeks or months while understaffed companies can survive for years."

Doubly so in tech where the combination of A) A huge hiring spree during covid & following layoffs has created a glut in applicants, B) Economic malaise is slowing the economy, and C) Companies are being irrationally hestitant to hire because of AI.

Ghost Jobs are fraudulent on several levels, they should be legislated out of existance. (The public company favourite of "pretending we're still growing when we're not" is very clear securities fraud.)

Yelp for interview process? Isn't Glassdoor doing (something like) that?

Most people need a job to live. Other marketplaces for things people need to live are heavily regulated from seed to stomach.

I can’t possibly imagine the government making job hunting, a task that’s hard to define and changes rapidly, more efficient