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.

Making people able to sue for anyone feeling bad about not having gotten the job is a path you should not take. We have something similar in Germany and its horrible for companies. Leeches bleeding you dry.

i'm so glad that companies don't have feelings tho. Would you mind sharing with everyone else what you are talking about, its very vague with the descriptor of "something similar" doubly questionable with you use of calling humans leeches, when the only leeches i've seen in the business world were the companies that require labor to make money and then pay back a less than equitable amount to the people doing work.

not every company is some large mega corp

Ironically small businesses tend to be the most egregious violators of labor laws and humanity in general.

Mega-corp isn't typically evil, it just wins a lot by being incredibly advantaged in whatever it pursues. Teams of lawyers, armies of engineers, rows of consultants.

Small businesses on the other hand tend to be the ones dumping oil in the river, firing employees that they don't want to back pay, bankrolling family vacations with time clock funny business, etc.

When I worked for my first mega-corp after years of small business jobs, I was blown away by how by-the-book it all was.

As a small business owner, I spend a lot of my time doing things by the book.

I get confused by other small business owners who complain about this because it’s all stuff you’d need to do anyway.

I use a double entry accounting system in an ERP. This isn’t terribly complicated. I took courses on corporate accounting in college and I took the ERP training. Even if I didn’t have all of that, I’d still have to actually do the accounting in a double entry system because of the legal jurisdiction and corporate structure.

I think that this is a byproduct of the economy being filled with small businesses owned by people who aren’t competent at operating their business as a business, which isn’t the same thing as being successful at making money.

> As a small business owner, I spend a lot of my time doing things by the book.

You are an exception.

> I use a double entry accounting system in an ERP.

Not only this requires someone knowledgeable enough but it is also time/energy consuming. If you force this on every small business, you'll probably kill something like 95% of hair-dressers.

Honestly, I don't think this is a problem. If we are scrutinizing a bakery, I'd rather the scrutiny to be put on health/food concerns rather than employee hiring practices. That is assuming the bakery employs less than 6-7 people.