A Conversation about Restoring Honesty to Hiring

[00:00:00] Picture this. You know, you're sitting in a sleek glass-walled conference room. It is a Tuesday afternoon in late October. Okay, I am picturing it. You are a vice president at a mid-sized tech firm, right? And you are looking at your overwarped, deeply stressed team. You know they need help. Right, and they definitely know they need help. Exactly. But your budget is completely frozen until the next fiscal year.

[00:00:26] So, you turn to your HR director and you make a simple, almost casual request. Which is usually where the real trouble starts, honestly. It really is. You say, hey, can we just keep that senior analyst role live on the career side? Maybe push it out to a few job boards? Just to keep it out there. Yeah, just to keep it out there. You have absolutely zero intention to hire anyone. There is no headcount. There is no money. But in your mind, as that VP, it costs nothing.

[00:00:53] Right. It keeps a pipeline of resumes warm, just in case things change. And maybe most importantly, it shows the market and your exhausted team that the company is growing, that help is on the horizon. It seems entirely harmless from that side of the table. It does. Sitting in that conference room, it feels like this low-cost, low-risk, administrative decision. It is just a few clicks in an applicant tracking system, right? Literally just a toggle switch.

[00:01:20] Yeah. The posting stays live, the internet does its thing, and the company projects an image of health and expansion. Right. But what that vice president isn't thinking about is the other side of the screen. What about the hundreds of people, maybe even you, listening to this right now, who are going to spend their evenings carefully tailoring their resumes for that specific role? People who really need that job. Exactly. Who is going to answer them? And, you know, what conclusions are they going to draw about that company when they send their application into an absolute black hole?

[00:01:49] It is incredibly damaging. Okay, let's unpack this because that single, seemingly innocent decision, one multiplied across thousands of companies in an entire economy is fundamentally breaking the modern labor market. It is entirely fracturing the trust between employers and candidates. It really is. And the fallout has become so severe that it is no longer just a, you know, a human resources complaint about rude corporate behavior. Right. It's bigger than that now.

[00:02:16] Much bigger. It is evolving into a massive reputational crisis. And as we are seeing right now in 2026, it's a major legal liability that could cost companies millions. That is our mission for today. We are doing a custom deep dive just for you into the frustrating, murky and increasingly regulated world of ghost job postings. It's a topic that touches almost everyone these days. Absolutely.

[00:02:45] Whether you are a job seeker who is burning hours on customized applications. Or a burned out employee waiting for backup that simply isn't coming. Or even a business leader trying to protect your brand from a looming legal reckoning. Yes, exactly. This deep dive is going to reveal the hidden machinery of the job market. We are grounding today's conversation in an incredibly thorough eye-opening article by Dr. Jonathan H. Westover. It's a brilliant piece of research. It really is.

[00:03:11] It's from the October 22, 2026 issue of the Human Capital Leadership Review. And it's titled Phantom Openings, Ghost Job Postings, The New Disclosure Laws, and How Leaders Can Restore Honesty to Hiring. Dr. Westover's work here is just essential because he doesn't just look at the anecdotes we all see on social media. Right. The viral complaints on LinkedIn or whatever. Exactly.

[00:03:32] He actually synthesizes massive amounts of survey data, platform analytics from major hiring sites, labor market evidence, and a brand new wave of legislation to paint a complete picture. He takes a very structural approach. He does. He approaches a job posting not as a marketing flyer but as a public promise. And when organizations treat that promise as a cheap asset with no obligation behind it, they spend a kind of trust that is incredibly difficult and very expensive to earn back.

[00:04:01] So, to understand the damage, we first have to understand the threat. We need to define what exactly we are talking about here. Because as Dr. Westover points out, much of the public debate is just incredibly confused right now. Yeah, people are lumping a lot of very different practices together under this broad umbrella of ghost jobs. So, let's get into the taxonomy of these phantoms. Precision in our definitions here is vital. Especially when we eventually look at how lawmakers are stepping in.

[00:04:31] Right. Because it turns out, not all unfilled postings are born out of malice. Even though they all cause massive confusion for you, the applicant. Dr. Westover separates these non-hiring postings into four very distinct categories. The first is what we call the deliberate ghost posting. And this is exactly the scenario we opened with, right? Exactly. It is an advertisement for a role where there is no approved head count, no budget, and zero intention to hire in any reasonable time frame.

[00:04:58] It is published purely for secondary reasons, usually optics or internal leverage. It's a prop, basically. It's corporate theater. You're putting an empty chair on the stage just to make the audience think a special guest is arriving. That is a perfect way to visualize it. Now, the second category is structurally very different, even if it looks similar to the candidate. Okay, what's the second one? These are pipeline or evergreen postings.

[00:05:26] These are used by companies to continuously collect applications for roles that open up very frequently. Okay, like what kind of roles? Think about high turnover or high volume positions. So, part-time university lecturers, retail associates, nurses, or warehouse workers. But the distinction here is that these pipeline roles are actually legitimate, right? I mean, the jobs do exist, just maybe not on the exact Tuesday you happen to apply. That is the crucial caveat.

[00:05:54] They are legitimate only if the applicant knows what they are applying for. Okay. The source highlights the University of Louisville as an example of an organization doing this the right way. What do they do differently? In their Workday system, which is the software they use to manage HR, they use evergreen requisitions specifically as a tool for these high volume roles. So, they keep the posting open all the time. Yes, but they continuously review applicants and they disposition the ones who aren't a fit,

[00:06:23] meaning they update the system to explicitly reject them so the candidate isn't left hanging. That's just common decency. Right. And when a preferred candidate emerges, they actually move that candidate over to a regular active requisition to make the hire. I like to think of this pipeline posting like a dating app analogy. Okay, let's hear it. If you're on a dating app and your profile clearly says, hey, I'm not looking for a relationship right now. I'm just looking for friends, just seeing what's out there, and I swipe right on you anyway, that's on me.

[00:06:53] Right. You knew the terms. I knew the deal. But if your profile says you are actively looking for marriage and we go on three dates, and then you tell me, oh, actually, I'm already married. I just wanted to see if I still had it. That is incredibly deceptive. That is a very apt analogy. The harm comes entirely from the deception, from the mismatched expectations. Exactly. If an employer needs a pipeline, they just need to say so. Which brings us to the third category, the zombie posting.

[00:07:23] Zombies. I love this term. What makes a job posting a zombie? This is a real job that existed. It had budget. And it was either filled, canceled, or frozen. But the advertisement is somehow still live. How does that happen? Is it just administrative laziness, like someone just forgot to click delete? Sometimes it is an administrative drift, yeah. A recruiter leaves the company, or the hiring manager assumes HR took it down. Well, HR assumes the hiring manager closed it. Just slipping through the cracks.

[00:07:53] Right. But there is a much more technical reason this happens, which involves how the internet actually functions. Oh, interesting. The job market today is heavily reliant on third-party job boards that scrape data. So, an aggregator site will use an automated tool to scrape the original posting from your company's career page. And then they just republish it on their own site to drive traffic? Exactly. So, they are essentially copying and pasting your job ad without you even asking them to.

[00:08:22] Often, yes. And the problem arises when the company actually fills the role and takes the job down from their own website. The third-party aggregator doesn't know to take it down. Precisely. They might not update their cache immediately. The digital tether breaks. Wow. So, the job is dead at the source, but the scraped version is still wandering around the internet on three different platforms collecting resumes. It is quite literally a digital zombie.

[00:08:47] That is terrifying because as an applicant, you have no way of knowing if you are applying on the source page or to a zombie. You just hit apply. You have absolutely no idea. And finally, we have the fourth category, which we should mention briefly. Right. The outright scams. Yes. Fraudulent postings. These are designed by bad actors, not real companies, to steal personal information, harvest emails for phishing, or even run fake check scams. Which is just awful.

[00:09:17] It is. Dr. Westover notes this is a massive and growing problem, particularly with the rise of remote work. But he explicitly sets it aside for his research. Why does he set it aside? Because the laws we are going to discuss later are aimed at legitimate companies acting badly, not criminal syndicates. So, we will set this aside as well for today. Okay. Fair enough. So, we have deliberate ghosts, evergreen pipelines, and administrative zombies. Correct.

[00:09:42] But there is a companion issue here that the text brings up, and it's one that I think makes every job seeker's blood boil. It's called employer ghosting. Yes. This is where the frustration really peaks. How does a fake job posting lead to a real human being getting ghosted in the middle of an interview process? It's an inevitable chain reaction, honestly. Employer ghosting is when a company just cuts off communication with a candidate mid-process. Usually after an interview, right? Yes. Usually after an interview. And they never tell them the outcome.

[00:10:12] When an employer creates a deliberate ghost posting, they are setting up a scenario where employer ghosting is practically guaranteed. Walk me through the mechanics of that. Think about it. If you, as a candidate, manage to get an interview for a role that the company never actually intended to fill, or maybe the manager is just doing it to benchmark external talent against an internal candidate, the company eventually has to end the process. Right, but they can't tell you the truth. They can't call you up and say, hey, great interview, but the job was fake.

[00:10:40] We just wanted to see what the market rate for this skill was. Exactly. They cannot reveal the deception. So what do they do? Well, because there is no actual hiring decision to communicate, no one is getting an offer. The easiest path for the recruiter or manager is to just stop replying. Wow. Silence is the only way out of the lie that doesn't incriminate them. You nailed it. The fake posting necessitates the silent rejection. That is so cynical. It makes me so mad just thinking about it.

[00:11:09] And Dr. Westover's research shows these two practices reinforce each other heavily. Candidates are learning to associate the silence with the realization that the job was never real to begin with. It completely breaks the trust. It does. And the mechanics of why we distinguish between a deliberate ghost, a pipeline, and a zombie are going to be absolutely critical when we get to the new legal landscape. Because the laws aren't trying to ban everything, right? Right. Regulators are not trying to ban pipeline recruiting. They know companies need talent pools.

[00:11:39] They are trying to mandate that employers disclose it so candidates aren't applying under false pretenses. Okay, now that we know the anatomy of a ghost job and how they work, we really need to understand the scale of the infection. Like, how bad is this out there? It is far more widespread than most people realize. Let's peel back the numbers because moving from the definitions into the raw data reveals a labor market that is just wildly distorted.

[00:12:06] And frankly, the psychology of some hiring managers that this data exposes is quite startling. The challenge with analyzing the data on this is that different studies measure different things. But when you look at them side by side, as Dr. Westover does, a very consistent and troubling picture emerges. Where do we even start getting reliable data on this? Let's start with the most direct evidence, which comes from applicant tracking systems. The actual software that companies use to receive resumes and manage the hiring pipeline.

[00:12:35] Okay, the back end of the process. Yes. Greenhouse, which is a massive platform powering hiring for thousands of employers, looked at their internal data for the second quarter of 2024. What did they find? They found that between 18.9% and 22% of the jobs posted on their platform were ghost jobs. Wait, let me pause there. Yeah. Roughly one in five jobs on a major hiring platform. Just fake. Yes. Just fake. How do they even know that for sure?

[00:13:03] They defined this by looking at roles that remained open for months without a single candidate being moved to a hiring stage. Or roles that were closed without a single offer being extended despite robust applicant pools. Oh, wow. So the data literally shows them doing nothing with their resumes. Exactly. But here's the more staggering number from that greenhouse report. 70% of the employers on their platform had listed at least one ghost job. 70%.

[00:13:30] So this isn't just a few bad apples or a few shady startups trying to look cool. No, not at all. If 70% of companies are doing this, it is a systemic, widespread organizational behavior. It is standard operating procedure. It appears to be deeply embedded in corporate behavior. And academic research supports this platform data too. Really? Oh. There are academics studying this? Oh, absolutely.

[00:13:53] There's a working paper by a researcher named Ngi from 2024 that applied a very sophisticated language model classification method to Glassdoor data. So they used AI to read the job posts. How does an AI know if a job is a ghost? The AI was trained to look for patterns that correlate with ghost postings. Like what kind of patterns? It looked at the duration the ad was live without any text updates, the presence of generic boilerplate language that lacks specific daily duties.

[00:14:22] Oh, like those generic must be a team player descriptions that don't actually tell you what you'll be doing? Exactly. And it cross-referenced all of that with company reviews on Glassdoor that specifically mentioned ghosting. That is so smart. What were the results? That study estimated that up to 21% of job ads might be ghost jobs, which perfectly echoes the greenhouse data. Wow. So the AI and the internal platform data totally line up? They do.

[00:14:48] It also noted that this practice is even more common in large enterprise level firms and highly specialized industries. I find it fascinating that the bigger the firm, the more likely they are to have ghost jobs. You'd think they would have tighter HR compliance. You would think so, yes. But I guess it goes back to what we were saying earlier about administrative drift. The bigger the company, the easier it is for a job wreck to get lost in the machine. Or the more layers of management there are to obscure a deliberate ghost job from internal scrutiny. That is a very fair point.

[00:15:17] You can hide a lot of bad behavior behind middle management. Okay, what about the macro data? The macroeconomic stuff is tricky, but very important context. If you follow the financial news, you are always hearing about the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the JOLTS report. You know, the job openings in labor turnover survey. Yes, it's a huge economic indicator. How does that factor into this ghost job phenomenon? This is where we need to apply heavy caution. And Dr. Westover is very careful here. Okay. Why the caution?

[00:15:45] The JOLTS data is a monthly survey where the government asks a sample of employers how many positions they are actively recruiting for. Analysts often look at this openings data and compare it to the actual number of hires made. Give me an example of the numbers. For example, in August of 2026, the BLS reported 7.1 million job openings in the U.S. But only 5.2 million hires. That's a huge gap. It is.

[00:16:11] My Perfect Resume did an analysis earlier in 2026 and found a similar gap of about one-third between openings and hires, noting that this gap has stayed significantly higher than it was before the pandemic in 2020. So we have a gap of roughly 2 million jobs just floating out there, unfilled, in a single month. That feels like a massive red flag that these are the ghosts. It is a central context, definitely. But it is not a direct measurement of ghost jobs.

[00:16:41] You cannot just subtract hires from openings and say the remainder are all fake. Why not? If they didn't hire someone, the job wasn't real, right? Not necessarily. Think about the friction in the real world. Some roles are legitimately real, but they take months to fill. Like really senior roles. Yes. If you are hiring a specialized neurosurgeon or a university president, that job will sit in the openings column for six months before it moves to the hires column. Okay, that makes sense. It just takes longer.

[00:17:09] Additionally, some hires come through internal promotions or networking without ever being counted as an external opening. Oh, so the data is just messy by nature. Exactly. And in sectors like government or public education, there are massive bureaucratic reasons why hiring is incredibly slow. So the jolts gap shows us that the labor market is incredibly sluggish and inefficient, but it doesn't necessarily prove malice on its own. Correct. The gap suggests a market full of friction.

[00:17:35] But to find the malice, or at least the deceptive intent, we have to look away from the macro data and look at what individual employers actually admit to when they are surveyed anonymously. Right. Let's get into the motives because this is where the text gets truly wild for me. The motives reveal a lot about modern management. Resume Builder did a survey in 2024 screening over 1,600 hiring managers. Almost four in ten of these managers admitted their company actively posted a fake listing in the past year.

[00:18:04] Almost 40% admitting to it directly. But why? We know it wastes candidates' time, but what is the actual upside for the company? The survey breaks down the motivations and they fall into three broad categories. Signaling, option value, and internal leverage. Let's look at the numbers. Hit me with the numbers. 67% of these managers said they did it to appear open to external talent. 66% did it to appear that the company was growing. That's the signaling aspect.

[00:18:34] Okay. I can almost understand that from a cynical business perspective. You want investors, competitors, and the media to think you're thriving. It's all about perception. Right. If you are a startup trying to raise a series B round of funding, a careers page with 20 open roles looks a lot better than a page with a zero. It is deceptive, but it's classic corporate posturing. It is posturing. It is posturing, yes. But then we get to the internal motivations and this is where the dynamic changes significantly and honestly gets pretty dark. It really does.

[00:19:04] 63% of these managers admitted they posted fake jobs to make their overworked employees believe that help was coming. That is just wow. And 62% that they did it to make their current employees feel replaceable. I have to stop you there. I really have to push back on this. On behalf of every listener who has ever worked a long shift, the text says that 7 in 10, 70% of these managers called this practice morally acceptable. That is what they self-reported, yes.

[00:19:32] How on earth does a manager justify that in their own head? Isn't this literally just lying to your own team? It is a profound breach of trust. You're telling someone who is drowning in work, doing the job of three people, Hey, hold on. Just keep working those weekends. A lifeguard is coming. While you haven't even hired a lifeguard and have no intention to. It is incredibly manipulative. And it gets worse. Using a fake job ad as a psychological weapon, 62% want their employees to feel replaceable.

[00:20:01] They are using it as leverage. They are basically saying don't ask for a raise, don't complain about the hours, because look at all these resumes we are collecting for your exact job. It is a tool to suppress wages and stop people from quitting. How is that morally acceptable? What's fascinating here is how human beings, particularly in competitive corporate structures, rationalize behavior when the cost feels abstract and disconnected from a human face. It's just numbers on a screen to them. Exactly.

[00:20:28] This ties directly into what economists call signaling theory. This goes back to Michael Spence's foundational work in 1973, which actually won a Nobel Prize. Okay. Signaling theory. Break that down for me. Give me an analogy. Think of a peacock's feathers. In nature, a male peacock's massive, colorful tail is a signal of health to a female. It says, I am so healthy and strong that I can survive predators even while dragging around this heavy, brightly colored tail. Right.

[00:20:57] It's a flex. It proves they are robust. Exactly. But for a signal to have value, it must be costly and credible. If it wasn't costly to produce those feathers, weak peacocks would have them too, and the signal would mean absolutely nothing. Okay. I follow that. How does it apply to corporate jobs? In the corporate world, a genuine job posting used to be a very costly, credible signal of growth. Because it wasn't easy to do? Right.

[00:21:23] Decades ago, if you wanted to hire, you had to pay for expensive classified ads in a newspaper. You had to pay external recruiters. You had to dedicate significant time. It was a costly signal that the company was genuinely expanding. But the internet changed the cost. Fundamentally. When managers realize they can fake the signal for free by just keeping a digital posting live on a website with zero marginal cost, they do it. Because it's too easy.

[00:21:51] They get the signaling benefit without the financial cost. The problem is, when a significant percentage of those signals are faked, the entire market adapts. All postings lose their value. Wow. So they are ruining it for everyone. The managers think they are getting free leverage over their employees and free PR, but they are actually destroying the currency of trust. It's like counterfeiting money. If you print a bunch of fake $100 bills, you feel rich for a day.

[00:22:18] But eventually, you ruin the economy for everyone because no one trusts the currency anymore. That is a brilliant way to put it. They think it's a victimless crime. They think it's a low cost marketing asset. But they are wildly mistaken. Let's transition into the collateral damage. Because if the managers think this is harmless, Dr. Westover's research proves otherwise. The damage is very real and very measurable. Let's look at exactly who pays the price.

[00:22:44] And spoiler alert, it hits the candidates, the companies themselves, and the entire macro economy. Let's start with the human toll on the candidates because it is profound. Dr. Westover views this through the lens of applicant reactions research. What does that mean exactly? Specifically, he's looking at Stephen Gilliland's 1993 work on procedural rules. Okay. What are procedural rules in plain English?

[00:23:10] Gilliland proposed that applicants judge an employer based on fundamental rules of fairness during the hiring process. These are basic human expectations. Like what? Honesty, timely feedback, two-way communication, and treating the candidate's time with respect. If an employer follows these rules, even a rejected candidate will think favorably of the company. But a ghost job violates every single one of those procedural rules by design.

[00:23:35] There is no honesty, there is no feedback, and there is zero respect for time. Every single one is broken. And the 2026 Resume Builder survey quantifies the psychological damage this is causing. What did they find on the candidate's side? They found that 86% of job seekers encountered a suspected ghost job during their search. This is an almost universal experience now. Almost everyone is dealing with this. 39% reported increased stress and frustration specifically due to these phantom postings.

[00:24:05] 12% were so demoralized that they actually abandoned or paused their job search entirely. They just gave up. That is heartbreaking. You have talented people who want to work who are getting completely sidelined by corporate theater. It is deeply discouraging. And think about the time theft. The time theft is the craziest part to me. It is perhaps the most quantifiable harm. Roughly a third of the respondents spent four or more hours pursuing fake jobs.

[00:24:32] And 8% reported spending over 20 hours applying for positions that never existed. 20 hours. That's half a work week. It is a massive drain on resources. Imagine you are already unemployed. Maybe money is tight. You are pouring your heart into a customized cover letter. You are researching the company's annual reports to prepare for an interview. Spending money you don't have on a new outfit. Exactly. Maybe you are buying a new suit. You are arranging childcare so you can take a Zoom call in a quiet room.

[00:25:02] All for a mirage. It is incredibly cruel. It is. And we must also acknowledge that this burden does not fall equally across the population. Oh, really? Who is getting hit hardest? The Greenhouse 2024 data reveals a deeply troubling demographic split. They found that 66% of candidates from historically underrepresented groups reported being ghosted after an interview, compared to 59% of white candidates. Why the disparity?

[00:25:29] If it's a fake job, aren't they just ignoring everyone equally? It's a great question. And it speaks to systemic issues. Often, underrepresented candidates might lack the informal whisper networks or internal referrals that help other candidates bypass the automated systems. So they don't have the insider who can say, hey, don't bother applying for that. It's not real. Exactly. They can't verify if a job is real before investing time.

[00:25:54] Additionally, when companies use fake jobs to benchmark external talent against a preselected internal candidate, they often interview diverse candidates simply to meet internal diversity metrics for the interview slate. Knowing full well they are not going to hire them. They don't have the same full well. So these deceptive practices are actively compounding existing inequities in the labor market. It's enraging. But here's where it gets really interesting. Because if empathy and fairness don't motivate these companies to stop, maybe the bottom line will.

[00:26:23] The financial consequences are finally catching up. Let's talk about corporate self-sabotage because Dr. Westover brings up this incredible case study from Virgin Media that I think every CEO needs to hear. This is a landmark example of how candidate experience directly impacts revenue. Set the stage for us. Virgin Media, the massive telecom and broadband giant in the UK, did a deep dive analysis of their own hiring practices and discovered a terrifying metric.

[00:26:50] At the time, they were rejecting roughly 123,000 candidates a year across all their operations. That is a massive volume of applicants. It is. And what their analytics team found was that about 18% of those rejected candidates were also currently paying customers of Virgin Media. Oh, no. I can see exactly where this is going. Because of the poor treatment they received during the hiring funnel,

[00:27:16] which includes the exact kind of ignoring, lack of feedback, and ghosting we were talking about with fake jobs, these candidates were having a deeply negative emotional reaction to the brand. Naturally. An estimated 7,500 of those candidate customers canceled their Virgin Media subscriptions within a single month of their rejection. I mean, put yourself in their shoes. You pay $100 a month to this company for your internet. You apply for a job, you get ignored.

[00:27:43] Or you get an automated rejection from a no-reply email after a month of silence. It feels like a slap in the face. You are going to look at your router, get furious, call customer service, and switch to their competitor out of pure spite. Exactly. The emotional bridge is instantly burned. And when Virgin Media quantified that churn, it was costing the company approximately 4.4 million British pounds annually in direct lost revenue.

[00:28:10] That is over $5 million U.S. dollars lost purely because the recruitment team was providing a terrible experience. And the mechanism transfers directly to ghost jobs. Directly. If you are a consumer-facing brand, a bank, a retailer, an airline, and you let your hiring funnel mislead or ignore applicants with fake postings, you are directly mistreating your potential and current customers. The damage to the employer brand is immense.

[00:28:39] And what's worse for these companies is that the candidate pool is adapting. People are wising up. Yes. The resume builder data shows that over 30% of job seekers now actively check when a role was first posted. Or they cross-reference it on the corporate site before applying. They are learning to screen out the stale ads and the deceptive companies. Which means the employers who think they are clever by keeping ghost jobs up are actually screening out the most careful, well-informed, and desirable talent.

[00:29:06] The best candidates see the red flags and walk away. Exactly. It is a massive, self-inflicted wound. And it doesn't just stop at the company door. This behavior scales up to the macro economy. This is where we see the government starting to pay very close attention. The text points out an interesting angle here from lawmakers. U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego took notice of this, regardless of your politics, just looking objectively at what happened here.

[00:29:30] In June of 2026, he sent formal letters to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Labor. Yes, he is directly asking if these ghost postings are distorting the national labor demand data that the Federal Reserve watches. What exactly was he asking them to do? Looking at the text of Senator Gallego's inquiries, he is probing a very fundamental economic vulnerability.

[00:29:56] He is questioning how the BLS defines an employer who is actively recruiting and asking if they need to implement a time-to-fill measure to weed out the noise. So, he wants to clean up the data. The concern is that if a significant chunk of the jolt openings are just signaling advertisements and not real jobs, then the data is artificially inflating how tight the labor market is. Break down why that matters to the average person.

[00:30:24] Why does the Federal Reserve care about a tight labor market? The Federal Reserve uses labor market data to make massive decisions, like setting interest rates. If they look at the data and see millions of unfilled jobs, they might assume the economy is running extremely hot. That employers are desperate for workers. Right. And that this desperation will drive up wages and cause inflation. To cool that inflation, the Fed might keep interest rates high. So, it makes mortgages more expensive, auto loans more expensive, credit cards more expensive.

[00:30:54] This affects everyone. Yes. Dr. Westover notes this phenomenon could help explain the recent shift in the beverage curve. Okay, you're going to have to explain the beverage curve to me. It sounds complicated, but the beverage curve is just a foundational economic model that tracks the historical relationship between the unemployment rate and the job vacancy rate. Okay, how does it normally work? Normally, it's an inverse relationship. When unemployment is high, job vacancies are low because jobs get filled quickly.

[00:31:22] When unemployment is low, vacancies are high. That makes perfect sense. But recently, economists noticed the curve has shifted outward. We have high vacancies, but hiring remains sluggish. It doesn't make sense historically. Unless... A huge portion of those vacancies are ghosts. Exactly. If the vacancies are fake, the curve is broken. And again, regardless of where you stand on government intervention, the reality is that the stakes are incredibly high.

[00:31:48] If the Federal Reserve is looking at inflated data to make decisions about the global economy, then Bob, the HR manager leaving a fake job post up for six months on LinkedIn to look busy, is accidentally contributing to a macro economic distortion. It is a butterfly effect. It really is. And because the market has completely failed to regulate itself, and because candidates are being actively harmed and economic data is being skewed, the government is moving in. This brings us to a massive shift in how hiring happens.

[00:32:17] If we connect this to the bigger picture, employment lawyers are describing this current moment in 2026 as a massive shift in the legal landscape. How so? For the last five to ten years, the major regulatory push in HR was about pay transparency, forcing companies to list salary bans on job descriptions. Right. We've seen that in states like Colorado, California, and New York. You can't just post a job without the salary anymore.

[00:32:40] Exactly. Now that arc is bending toward hiring transparency. Leaving fake jobs up used to be just a bad practice. Now it is rapidly becoming illegal. Doctor, Westover outlines several pieces of legislation starting up north. Walk me through what is happening in Ontario because they seem to be leading the charge here. They really are. Ontario enacted amendments to their Employment Standards Act that just took effect on January 1st, 2026. What do these amendments actually do?

[00:33:09] This law requires employers with 25 or more employees to explicitly state in their publicly advertised postings whether that posting is for an existing real vacancy. So you literally have to declare under penalty of law, yes, we are actually hiring for this. Yes. Furthermore, they are mandated to inform any interviewed applicant within 45 days whether a hiring decision has been made.

[00:33:34] 45 days. Just to say yes or no. That feels like such a staggeringly low bar for basic human decency, but the fact that it has to be legislated speaks volumes about how bad the ghosting problem got. It really does show how broken the system was. And the Ontario rules aren't just about vacancy status, right? They covered other things too.

[00:33:54] Correct. It's a comprehensive hiring transparency package. The Ontario rules also mandate the explicit disclosure of artificial intelligence if it's used to screen or select applicants. People definitely want to know if a robot is reading their resume. Absolutely. And very notably, they instituted a ban on requiring, quote, Canadian experience in job ads. Why ban Canadian experience? Isn't it normal to want local experience?

[00:34:21] Well, because it operates as a backdoor form of discrimination against highly skilled immigrants. Oh, I see. If you were an experienced software engineer from India or Brazil, you have the skills. But a requirement for a Canadian experience screens you out instantly. By banning it, Ontario is forcing employers to evaluate actual competencies rather than geographic resume items.

[00:34:45] That makes total sense. How are companies adapting to this? Are they just letting their legal teams deal with it and hoping for the best? The smart ones are not. The text highlights Queen's University in Ontario is a prime example of proactive compliance. What did they do? Instead of just dumping this mandate on HR and hoping for the best, they completely overhauled their CareerQ recruitment platform. They initiated mandatory training for all people leaders, giving them updated compliant templates.

[00:35:14] So they actually trained the managers? Yes. They recognized that hiring managers, the ones making the casual requests in conference rooms to keep jobs open, are the ones who need to change their behavior. Right. You have to fix the culture, not just the software. So that is Canada. What about the United States? The text heavily focuses on a specific bill in New York.

[00:35:35] Yes. New York Senate Bill S-8877. As of Dr. Westover's writing in October 2026, this bill passed both the state Senate and the Assembly and is awaiting the governor's signature. Just impartially looking at the mechanics of this bill, what does it require companies to do? This bill would require employers with 100 or more employees to include specific statements in bold capital letters on their job ads.

[00:36:01] Bold capital letters. They want it completely unmissable, like a warning label on a back of cigarettes. What did the statements actually have to say? It depends on the company's timeline and intent. If the role is intended to be filled within 90 days, it needs an explicit intended fill date. OK. If it's going to be filled later than that, it needs a no sooner than date.

[00:36:21] And if there is no expectation of a hire, if it is one of those pipeline or evergreen postings we discussed earlier, the ad must clearly state in those bold letters that there is no current vacancy and the company is only collecting resumes for future openings. That is huge. That would entirely eliminate the deception of the evergreen posting. You could still build your talent pipeline, but the candidate knows exactly what they are getting into before they spend an hour on a cover letter. Exactly. Informed consent.

[00:36:47] But what if a company just wants to skirt the rules? What if they just lie and say, we intend to fill this in 90 days and then just let it roll over? That brings us to another fascinating legal development. The text mentions a probe in Texas that might close that loophole. Yes. And this approaches the issue from a totally different and arguably much more dangerous legal angle for companies. Consumer protection. OK. Lay this out for me. Again, just looking at the facts of the investigation, what is happening in Texas?

[00:37:14] Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation into LinkedIn. He issued a civil investigative demand seeking internal documents to determine if LinkedIn was advertising and profiting from fake or misleading job opportunities. So instead of just going after the employers who post the jobs, the state is going after the platform hosting the jobs. Exactly. LinkedIn responded that their policies already require authenticity. But this consumer protection theory is vital.

[00:37:42] How does consumer protection apply to job hunting? If job seekers are viewed as consumers of a platform services, then fake job postings are legally a form of false advertising. It is consumer fraud. That is a brilliant legal mechanism. If I go to a grocery store and they advertise a television for 50 bucks just to get me in the door, but they never actually had the TV in stock. That's a bait and switch. That is illegal. Why should a job board be any different? It shouldn't be.

[00:38:10] Logically, if the state holds the platform accountable, LinkedIn is going to pass that pressure right down to the companies posting the jobs. They will start banning companies that post fake jobs to protect themselves from liability. Precisely. And this is why Dr. Westover warns that multi-jurisdiction employers are facing massive operational risks right now. Because it's hard to keep track of everything. Think about a massive Fortune 500 company. They might not even know which of their historical postings are still live across the Internet because of all the scraping and syndicating we discussed. Oh, the zombies.

[00:38:40] Yes, the zombies. Yet they could be penalized per platform or per state if a stale listing violates these new disclosure laws. Ignorance of your own digital footprint is no longer a defense. So what does this all mean for a listener who happens to be a hiring manager, an HR director, or a business owner trying to do things right? It means they need a new strategy immediately.

[00:39:03] Because the laws are looming, applicant trust is absolutely broken, you might be losing customers like Virgin Media did, and the old way of doing things is a legal liability. How do organizations fix this mess? Dr. Westover provides a very practical playbook. Yes, he outlines five evidence-based solutions to restore honesty to hiring. Let's explore these because they require a real operational shift. Walk me through the first one, requisition integrity.

[00:39:32] The first response, requisition integrity and posting governance, goes back to the signaling theory we discussed earlier. The peacock feathers. Exactly. If a signal is going to be valuable, it must be reliable. The most basic fix is ensuring that every single external posting maps directly to a real, approved decision to hire. There must be a one-to-one relationship between the ad on the internet and the budget line in the finance department.

[00:39:59] Which sounds incredibly obvious to a layperson. Of course, you shouldn't post a job without budget. But why is this so hard for massive corporations to actually execute? Because of silos. In a massive corporation, the person who approves the budget sits in finance. The person who writes the ad sits in the hiring department. The person who's supposed to take it down sits in HR, or it's managed by an automated software platform. So they are all disconnected.

[00:40:26] Yes, they are using three different software systems that don't always talk to each other. So how do you fix it structurally? You have to enforce structural governance. You configure the applicant tracking system so nothing goes live without an approved requisition code and a named owner who is responsible for it. Accountability. Yes. You create distinct, separate requisition types in the software for your pipeline recruiting so they don't get mixed up with active roles. And crucially, you implement mandatory expiry dates.

[00:40:56] Like a carton of milk. It has a best-by date. Exactly. Every posting gets an end date, say 30 or 45 days. When that date hits, the job automatically comes down. If the hiring manager wants to extend it, they need to provide a documented reason. That would eliminate the zombie problem overnight. Would. Law firms like Foley and Lardner are currently advising their corporate clients to do quarterly audits to reconcile live postings against open headcounts just to ensure compliance. And the platforms themselves are stepping up, right?

[00:41:26] Yes. The platforms are enforcing this too. Indeed stated in 2026 that they actively monitor for anomalies, like postings that stay open forever but never generate employer responses. And they will forcibly remove jobs that show no genuine intent to hire. Okay. Response number two in the playbook. Transparent disclosures. This feels like the easiest one to implement tomorrow. You don't need new software. You just need a better copywriter.

[00:41:53] It is relatively easy and it is rooted in decades of organizational psychology research on what are called realistic job previews or RJPs. Realistic job previews. What does the research say about them? Meta-analyses by researchers like Premack and Wanus back in 1985 and Ernest in 2011 show that giving candidates accurate, honest information up front builds foundational trust. Right. If you are pipeline recruiting, just label it in plain language.

[00:42:22] Say this is a talent pool for future openings. We expect to hire for this role next quarter. Give expected timelines. Just be honest. Honesty is the best policy. It truly is. If you pair this disclosure with pay ranges and process information, you turn a potentially deceptive ad into a genuine invitation to join a community. Are there any pitfalls here? Can companies mess this up? Yes. The pitfall here is treating it like a legal disclaimer.

[00:42:48] If companies just slap hedged legalistic boilerplate language on every single post to cover their bases, candidates will quickly learn to ignore it. Right. Just like we all ignore the terms and conditions on a software update. Exactly. The disclosure must be specific and human. Which brings us to the third response. And this one addresses the most painful part for job seekers that we discussed earlier. Closing the loop. Getting rid of the employer gersting.

[00:43:15] Based on Gilliland's organizational justice research, timely feedback is one of the easiest procedural rules to implement technologically. Yet it is the most universally neglected. Because it takes effort. Greenhouse found that over 14 million applications went completely ignored in a single quarter on their platform. To fix this, organizations must publicly commit to response standards. The text mentions a really cool initiative in Australia doing exactly this. The Circle Back initiative. Tell me about that. Yes.

[00:43:44] Founded by Steve Gard. It is a fantastic coalition of over 60 employers, including major names like Allianz Partners Australia, RMIT Training, and Affinity Education Group. And what do these companies do differently? These companies publicly commit, and are audited yearly, to respond to every single applicant. What are the actual rules they agree to? They ban the phrase, only shortlisted candidates will be contacted from all their job ads. I hate that phrase. It's the worst.

[00:44:11] They also mandate outcome messages for everyone who applies, even if it's an automated no. And they mandate constructive human feedback for anyone who reaches the interview stage. That is just incredible. Greenhouse has even started issuing a communicative badge on its platform to employers who demonstrably do not ghost candidates, based on the platform's backend data. That's brilliant. You gamify the decency. Give them a badge that candidates can see, so the candidate knows this company respects their time.

[00:44:39] That is a real costly signal of a good culture. What's the fourth response? Platform and partner accountability. Because jobs are scraped and syndicated automatically, as we discussed with the zombie postings, companies must maintain what Dr. Westover calls a syndication map. What does that look like in practice? You need a current, active inventory of everywhere your jobs live online. If your applicant tracking system pushes jobs to Indeed, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, and niche industry boards, you need to track all of those connections.

[00:45:09] Because you're legally responsible for them now. Exactly. You must write explicit takedown duties into your contracts with staffing partners and vendors. If you kill the job internally, the vendor is contractually obligated to kill it on their end within 24 hours. Are the platforms giving employers the tools to do this? They are starting to. LinkedIn began testing responsiveness insights in early 2025 to show candidates if an employer is actually reviewing applications. And Indeed has had responsive employer badges since 2018.

[00:45:39] So you have to play ball with the platforms. You have to align your operations with these platform policies because, as the Texas AG probe shows, the platforms are under massive legal pressure to clean up the ecosystem. And they will penalize you if you pollute it with zombies. And the final response? Measuring integrity. Because in business, what gets measured gets managed. If you are only measuring the wrong things, you get the wrong behavior. Exactly.

[00:46:05] For years, HR departments measured success by cost per hire and application volume. The hiring manager would brag, oh, we got 500 applications for this role. But a ghost job inflating your numbers looks like a strong employer brand until you realize none of those people are being hired. Right. And you are just generating 500 angry rejected candidates. Leaders need to shift their metrics entirely. What should they be measuring instead? They need to track the posting to hire ratio.

[00:46:34] If you post 100 jobs but only make 10 hires, your integrity ratio is terrible. You are wasting time. They need to track the average age of a posting. And they must track the percentage of applicants who actually receive an outcome notification. There is a great case study in the text about a company that did this and saw massive operational benefits. A company called Planet. Yes. Planet is a satellite imaging company. They wanted to earn Greenhouse's candidate experience badges that we mentioned earlier.

[00:47:02] So they did the hard work. What did that entail? They retrained their hiring managers on realistic expectations. They standardized their interview criteria so decisions could be made faster. And they prioritized honest, rapid communication with candidates. And what were the results? Because a lot of executives hear this and think, that sounds nice, but we don't have the time to send all those emails. It will slow us down. The results were actually astounding.

[00:47:27] With just four recruiters managing 2,000 active applicants, Planet managed to reduce their time to hire by 43% year over year. Wait, they got 43% faster? Yes. And because they were treating people well, they increased their offer acceptance rate by 5%. That completely shatters the excuse that honesty slows you down. That proves it's not a trade off between efficiency and decency.

[00:47:51] Treating people with dignity and running an honest, transparent process actually makes you faster and more efficient in the long run. It restores what organizational psychologists call the psychological contract. Tell me more about that. There is a profound reciprocity argument here that Dr. Westover hits on beautifully. Employers today are demanding the world from candidates. Oh, definitely. They want highly tailored cover letters. They want candidates to complete hours of uncompensated take-home assessments. They want multiple rounds of interviews.

[00:48:21] The hoops you have to jump through just to get an introductory call are insane. They're even partnering with security companies like Clear to demand biometric identity verification to prove the candidate isn't an AI bot. Right. Upload your driver's license before we even talk to you. Exactly. But in return, the employer offers zero assurance that the job even exists. It is a completely one-sided relationship. It's totally unbalanced.

[00:48:45] If you want candidates to invest their effort, their data, and their trust into your hiring funnel, the employer must offer transparency and trust in return. Reciprocity is the only way a labor market functions efficiently. And that reciprocity brings us perfectly to our conclusion today. We have journeyed through a really complex ecosystem. We started with the petty, almost lazy motivations of a manager keeping a job requisition open just to look busy or to signal growth.

[00:49:13] Which causes so much damage down the line. It really does. We explored how those digital phantoms turn into zombies, how they drain 20 hours a week from desperate job seekers, and how they ultimately cost companies millions of dollars in lost consumer trust like we saw with Virgin Media. The financial hit is massive. And now we are watching international laws and state attorneys general step in to mandate the hiring honesty that the market failed to provide on its own.

[00:49:42] Dr. Westover's article makes it undeniably clear. Ghost jobs are a rot at the center of the labor market. They exhaust candidates, they betray current employees, and they literally distort the macroeconomic data of nations. The path forward seems pretty clear though. It requires a massive cultural shift in corporate leadership. We have to stop treating job postings as free billboards and start treating them as public promises. Because the laws are going to force them to, eventually.

[00:50:12] The companies that thrive in this new regulated era won't be the ones scrambling to do the bare minimum for compliance. They will be the organizations that view honesty as a competitive advantage. The ones doing it right. The ones who earn the badges, who close the loop, and who respect the candidates' time will attract the best talent. I want to leave you with one final thought to mull over, building on what we've discussed today. We know candidates are exhausted. They are burned out from applying to ghost jobs.

[00:50:40] So increasingly, applicants are turning to AI to defend their own time. That's a huge trend right now. They are using bots to auto-generate cover letters and auto-apply to thousands of listings while they sleep. At the exact same time, companies are using AI to generate these fake bloated job descriptions, and they are using AI applicant tracking systems to parse the incoming resumes and automatically reject them. It's an arms race.

[00:51:04] If this trend of deception continues, are we heading toward a bizarre future where our labor market is just candidate AI bots, endlessly interviewing employer AI bots for jobs that don't actually exist? What does human hiring even look like when the humans are entirely removed from the illusion? It's a crazy thought, but if the signal is entirely broken, maybe the machines are the only ones left talking.

[00:51:30] That is a chilling, but given the trajectory, entirely plausible extrapolation. It really forces us to ask what the fundamental purpose of a hiring process is meant to be in a digital age. Thank you for joining us for this deep dive into the phantom job market. It's been a fascinating discussion. Keep your eyes open, read the fine print, check those posting dates, and remember to keep questioning the information around you.

[00:51:55] Next time you see a job posting that's been up for six months, you'll know exactly what's happening behind that glass-walled conference room. Until next time. This closed caption is made by Sudden. This closed caption is titled by Dr. Mark Sutherland, PhD, months of study. It is made with Sidney Grant, where he is actually a friend.