'Applicants have to be honest — why don't employers?': Reddit's calls for penalising ghost job postings
A post on Reddit’s r/recruitinghell has put up a question to a community that has collectively spent thousands of hours applying to jobs that were never going to be filled: should companies face fines for posting positions that were never genuinely available?
Job seekers are expected to submit accurate information throughout the hiring process. Companies, by contrast, face no equivalent obligation, and some exploit that imbalance by posting ghost jobs to collect resumes, test the market, create the appearance of growth, or build a future candidate pipeline.
The original poster proposed that enforcement should also focus on this issue: endlessly reposted listings, positions left open for months after hiring has stopped, applications collected without an approved opening, or interviews conducted for roles that were never realistically available.
They acknowledged legitimate scenarios and proposed a reasonable middle ground: Disclosure requirements for speculative postings, mandatory removal when hiring stops, and confirmation of whether advertised roles were actually filled.
“Applicants are expected to provide accurate information throughout the hiring process,” they wrote. “Employers should be held to the same standard.”
What Reddit said
Several commenters supported the idea emotionally if not always practically. “It really feels like legitimate torture,” one wrote. “They should be banned from posting at all,” said another. A third acknowledged the limits of the proposal without dismissing it: “Probably wouldn’t make a difference on hiring but at least we’d have clarity.”
One netizen was sceptical, raising a valid question on enforcement. “Who is going to pay who to enforce it and where is that money going to come from?” the commenter asked.
An interesting response came from a recruiter who supported the proposal: “Of all the things the government could do for jobseekers, I wouldn’t put this in the top 20, and all it does is encourage job postings to not be used at all in favour of direct sourcing. As a recruiter, I love this idea as more regulations make my fee more attractive.”
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Ghost jobs are not a minor inconvenience. In a market where job seekers are sending hundreds of applications, spending hours on each, and sometimes turning down other opportunities to pursue a process that was never going anywhere, the psychological and practical cost of fake listings is significant.
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