Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

This is explictly restricting speech (restricting the right to advertise for labor) and would have to meet a high first amendment bar in the US.

Pay transparency law supporters have argued successfully that there is a compelling interest in closing gender and racial wage gaps and that salary range information can be mandated in job listings for that purpose. What's the compelling interest in this case that allows the government to control speech?

advertising for jobs that aren't actually available is fraud or deception?

If you advertise a job and fail to find a qualified candidate, and then don't fill that role, is that fraud? If you advertise for talent constantly, interview regularly, and hire rarely (but hire), is that fraud? If you have a single role to fill and advertise it multiple times in multiple states as multiple listings because that's how job posting forums work, is that fraud?

I think it can be argued that some of those are.

Same as how false price advertising, or I don't know, say you kept calling customer support but never had any problems could start to look like abuse.

Or squatting a business parking lot, you can always say, I eventually might need something from the store and intend to buy from it. I think they'd still have you towed and your argument would fail.

I've conducted probably 700+ interviews as a hiring manager. A lot of candidates I've spoken to assume job listing advertisements are an org chart. In reality, job listings (at scaling companies especially) are a lead generation tool to attract desired talent into a hiring pipeline.

The org chart is dynamic and is affected constantly by changing priority, changing budgets, promotions and departures, and the talent you're attracting. You can't effectively staff at scale under a rule that 1 job listing = 1 box in an org chart. Or at least I've not seen it done - I'd appreciate counter examples :-)

Honestly you could have just saved us all this time by stating you're a hiring manager up front.

I appreciate your optimism regarding the nature of these postings, but I've seen at multiple companies them doing exactly what they describe in the article - fake job postings to improve their appearance to investors, fake job postings to justify H1B positions, etc. Every time I was at a company that got bought by private equity, the former appeared in huge numbers. As soon as we got acquired, in preparation for downsizing, the latter appeared in huge numbers. So you'll forgive me if "managing job hard :(" doesn't land for those of us who are applying for those jobs that don't exist.