Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

The controls summarized in the CNBC piece seem reasonable, or, if not that, then at least not all that onerous.

The controls in the actual proposal are less reasonable: they create finable infractions for any claim in a job ad deemed "misleading" or "inaccurate" (findings of fact that requires a an expensive trial to solve) and prohibit "perpetual postings" or postings made 90 days in advance of hiring dates.

The controls might make it harder to post "ghost jobs" (though: firms posting "ghost jobs" simply to check boxes for outsourcing, offshoring, or visa issuance will have no trouble adhering to the letter of this proposal while evading its spirit), but they will also impact firms that don't do anything resembling "ghost job" hiring.

Firms working at their dead level best to be up front with candidates still produce steady feeds of candidates who feel misled or unfairly rejected. There are structural features of hiring that almost guarantee problems: for instance, the interval between making a selection decision about a candidate and actually onboarding them onto the team, during which any number of things can happen to scotch the deal. There's also a basic distributed systems problem of establishing a consensus state between hiring managers, HR teams, and large pools of candidates.

If you're going to go after "ghost job" posters, you should do something much more targeted to what those abusive firms are actually doing, and raise the stakes past $2500/infraction.

Maybe it would be simpler to just impose a nominal tax on the total number of job openings a company creates throughout the year. Maybe as a % of the role's salary. You could even rebate it against employer payroll taxes so they get the money back when they actually hire someone.

You should never tax things you want people to do, like posting legitimate job openings

> posting legitimate job openings

You want to incentivize them FILLING job openings. Nobody cares how many jobs are posted. And posting 100 openings and filling 50 is the stated problem trying to be solved here.

The rebating idea resolves this quite neatly though. Make posting a job opening that eventually gets filled free after rebate[1], and posting a "dangling" job opening that never fills incurs tax.

Now, I can think of a dozen loopholes to get out of this[2], but it's not that it's going to disincentivize hiring.

[1] or maybe even better than free (puts a little tax incentive for hiring and keeping people beyond the typical probationary period).

[2] Can job listings be revised? Just recycle the ghost job listing in bulk before the deadline and convert it to a totally different position (Software Engineer -> Cashier) Can they not be revised? That seems like overreaching ridiculous Soviet red tape.

Nothing like this is ever going to happen. It would be incredibly expensive (on both the employer and the government side) to administer, and it would be portrayed as a tax on hiring, because that's exactly what it would be.

Rules about what a job posting can and cannot say can definitely happen, and have happened (see: salary ranges, because of Colorado's requirements). That's what CNBC depicts this proposal as comprising. Unfortunately, under the hood, it's closer to what you're talking about.