New York’s ghost-job bill sits on the governor’s desk and Texas is investigating LinkedIn. The fines that would change behavior attach to applicant data, not to the ad.
Three governments are trying to fix ghost jobs and each one picked a different lever. New York would fine the posting $2,500 per platform and double it every 30 days. Pennsylvania would fine the applicant data up to $25,000 a head. Texas is investigating the company that charges job seekers $39.99 a month to read the listings. Only one of those is aimed at the reason ghost jobs exist.
Two recruiters at the same 400-person company post reqs in March. One is real, gets filled in six weeks, and nobody remembers to take the ad down. The other has no budget behind it and never did, because the VP wants a pipeline in case someone excellent turns up.
Today both cost the company exactly nothing to leave running. Under New York’s bill, both cost $2,500 per platform, doubling monthly until somebody notices. The statute treats forgetfulness and intent identically, which tells you the drafters understood the problem better than the coverage does.
What Happened
The Wall Street Journal reported on August 21 that state legislators are moving to ban job ads for roles employers have no immediate intention of filling. Greenhouse, examining postings from its own clients, found that around 19% of jobs advertised on digital job boards in the second quarter met its ghost-job definition: a posting that received at least one application and produced no downstream hiring activity, meaning no job-test submissions and no scheduled interviews.
New York moved furthest. Senator Michael Gianaris’s S8877 passed the Senate in April and the Assembly on June 2, and now awaits Governor Kathy Hochul. It would add section 219-b to the state labor law, covering employers with 100 or more staff and, separately, third-party job posting entities. Covered postings must carry a disclosure in capital letters and bold type stating one of three things: the role is a current vacancy to be filled within 90 days with a target date, the role is a current vacancy to be filled no sooner than a stated date, or there is no vacancy and the employer is collecting resumes for later. Filled roles come down within two weeks. Violations run $2,500 for each publication or platform where the ad appears, rising to $5,000 if uncorrected after 30 days, then doubling for each subsequent 30-day period. The Department of Labor gets audit authority and job seekers can file complaints. If signed, it takes effect immediately.
Pennsylvania’s Ghost Job Postings Prevention Act, HB2321, was introduced by Representative Jim Prokopiak on March 26 and sits in the House Labor and Industry Committee. It demands more than New York does: hiring timeline, intended hire and start dates, salary range, the extent of AI use in hiring, and how many times the role has been posted in the previous year. Its base penalties run $1,000 to $5,000. Its data provision runs to $25,000 per applicant for employers that mine or sell applicant information, and it bars retention of applicant data beyond a year. Employers under 50 staff are exempt.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a civil investigative demand to LinkedIn on July 14, seeking documents, data and internal communications on how the platform advertises, markets and verifies job listings. His theory is consumer protection aimed at the Premium tier: LinkedIn charges roughly $39.99 a month for Premium Career and $69.99 for Premium Business, sells those products to displaced workers and recent graduates, and does not independently verify the hiring status of most listings. His office cited outside estimates putting ghost jobs at 20% to 33% of online listings.
The Backstory
The rate did not spike. Greenhouse has said for two years that 18% to 22% of postings on its platform qualify as ghost jobs in any given quarter. The 19% figure the Journal reported for the second quarter sits in the lower half of a band Greenhouse first published in 2024. Hunter Ng’s October 2024 analysis, which ran large language models over Glassdoor listings, landed at up to 21%. Resume Builder’s 2024 survey of 1,641 hiring managers found 40% of their companies had posted a ghost job in the past year and three in ten had one live at the time of the survey.
What changed is the volume on both sides. Greenhouse measured recruiter workload at 588 applications in the third quarter of 2024, up 26% in a year, with 38% of job seekers now mass-applying. A stable ghost rate applied to a much larger base produces far more wasted applications, which is what job seekers experience and what legislators hear about.
The number that should worry economists is different. Revelio Labs compared postings to hiring outcomes and found the rate of hires per job posting halved between 2019 and 2024, from eight hires for every ten listings down to four. Daniel Grimm, a former CFTC senior counsel now at DV Trading, built a Columbia Law Review Forum piece around that collapse in November 2025, arguing ghost jobs already violate Section 5 of the FTC Act. His central harm is not wasted time. It is data: job applications collect gender, ethnicity, veteran status and disability information from people who hand it over believing a job exists at the other end.
Government statistics miss all of it by construction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics asks employers to report only openings that could start within 30 days and for which they are recruiting outside candidates. June’s reading of 7.4 million openings against 5.3 million hires excludes the postings everyone is angry about. Ontario got there first, with disclosure and candidate-notification rules that took effect on January 1. California’s AB 1251 has sat in Senate Appropriations since August 2025. Kentucky’s attempt died in 2025.
The Plan
Watch where each party attaches the price.
Albany prices the ad. The per-platform structure matters more than the headline number, because a single req syndicated to a career page, LinkedIn and Indeed triggers three findings. Harrisburg prices the data, which is the only provision in either bill aimed at the motive Grimm identified. Austin prices the subscription, and Paxton is not suing a single employer. He went after the party that collected money from job seekers.
The vendors are pricing it too. Greenhouse launched Greenhouse Verified in September 2024 with four badges for Fair, Prepared, Respectful and Communicative hiring, awarded on measurable behavior inside a customer’s own dashboard. Two of the four, Fair and Prepared, are available only to customers on its Expert tier. The company publishing the ghost-job statistic sells the badge that certifies you are not producing one, and gates half of it behind the top pricing tier.
LinkedIn’s answer to Paxton runs the same way. The company points out that its policies require postings to be authentic, and that for many jobs it displays the employer’s response time and whether they are reviewing candidates. Those are signals about employer behavior rather than verification of the vacancy.
Indeed shows the shape most clearly. Three postings a month are free. Everything the company charges for sits downstream of the ad: clicks, applications, resume database access, sponsored placement at a floor of $25 a day per job since July 2025. Nothing in that pricing sheet costs an employer money for keeping a dead req alive in the free tier.
The Business Model Angle
A job ad is a free call option on labor with no expiry, and the applicant pays the premium. An employer who posts a req buys the right to hire someone later without any obligation to do so. The option costs nothing to write and nothing to carry. Roughly one in five never gets exercised, which is what a zero-premium option with no expiry date produces. Calling that dishonest misreads the instrument. Somebody does pay a premium, and it is the person on the other side: nine hours per application cycle by Jobright’s estimate across 4.4 million applications, plus the personal data, plus $39.99 a month if they upgraded in the hope of better odds.
Liability follows the invoice. Paxton’s theory is worth studying by anyone running a marketplace. He is not arguing that employers deceived Texans. He is arguing that LinkedIn took subscription money while promising access to legitimate openings. LinkedIn Premium crossed $2 billion in trailing revenue in January 2025, up from $1.7 billion in March 2024, on a business that generated $17.81 billion in Microsoft’s fiscal 2025. Apply the 20% to 27% ghost range Paxton’s own filings cite and something in the range of $400 million to $540 million a year of subscription revenue attaches to inventory nobody verified. Grimm’s roadmap names the precedent: the FTC’s Roomster case, where the platform sold paid access to rental listings that did not exist. The listings were third-party. The liability was not.
Verification is a cost center that shrinks inventory, which is why no platform volunteers for it. Every job board’s revenue scales with the number of postings and the volume of response. Confirming that a req has budget behind it removes listings, reduces applications and cuts revenue, while producing nothing the employer will pay extra for. Greenhouse solved that by selling verification as a premium feature to employers rather than a guarantee to applicants. The economics only invert when a regulator makes the unverified listing expensive, which is what the doubling fine and the per-applicant data penalty would do.
The Risk
The arithmetic does not support the political claim. If hires per posting fell from 0.80 in 2019 to 0.40 in 2024, and one posting in five is a ghost, then eliminating ghosts entirely lifts the measured yield to 0.50, since the same four hires spread across eight real postings instead of ten. That recovers about a quarter of the decline at most, and less than that once you account for 2019 having ghosts of its own. Three quarters of the collapse in hiring yield comes from real postings for real jobs that nobody filled. Both figures deserve caveats: Revelio is a labor data vendor rather than a statistical agency, Greenhouse’s ghost share covers its own client base, and the two series measure different universes.
The definition sweeps up the innocent. Greenhouse counts any posting with at least one application and no hiring activity, which captures frozen headcount, roles filled internally, and reqs pulled because the business changed. Andy Nelesen of SHL made the point in the Journal: approved jobs get unapproved, and managers decide to fill from inside. New York’s bill does not ban pipeline recruiting. It makes you announce it.
A carrying cost on postings will narrow the front door. The reqs that die first under a compounding fine are the speculative ones, and some share of those convert into real hires for people who had no other way in. Push that hiring into referrals and closed networks and the outsiders lose, which is the population the bill exists to protect.
The enforcement template is untested against solvent defendants. Grimm builds on FTC cases with poor collection records. Worldwide Executive settled at $1.7 million with all but $18,000 suspended for inability to pay. Roomster’s $36 million in equitable relief and $10.9 million in penalties resolved for $1.6 million on the same grounds. Those defendants were scammers. Ghost-job posters are solvent public companies, which cuts both ways: the money is collectible, and the theory will meet real litigation counsel for the first time.
Coverage gaps remain. New York exempts employers under 100 heads and Pennsylvania under 50, leaving out the smallest and most speculative posters. And syndication means the per-platform multiplier punishes whoever has lost control of their own job distribution, which for most mid-market employers is everyone.
Quick Questions
Are ghost jobs getting worse? The rate is not. Greenhouse’s 18% to 22% band has held since 2024 and the 19% second-quarter figure sits inside it. Application volume grew, so the absolute number of wasted applications grew with it.
Does the New York bill ban ghost jobs? No. It requires you to label them. An employer collecting resumes for future roles can keep doing so as long as the ad says in bold capitals that no vacancy exists.
Why is Texas investigating LinkedIn instead of the employers? LinkedIn is the party that charged job seekers. Paxton’s consumer protection authority reaches a company that sold a paid product on a representation about the quality of what it lists, which is a shorter argument than proving intent inside thousands of separate employers.
What is the biggest exposure in either bill? Pennsylvania’s data provision. The disclosure penalties top out at $5,000, while mining or selling applicant data runs to $25,000 per applicant. On a posting drawing Greenhouse’s 588-application workload figure, that is $14.7 million from one req.
Should an employer change anything before these pass? Inventory your live postings and find out which ones have no approved budget and which ones you forgot to close. Under New York’s structure the forgotten posting and the deliberate one carry the same fine, and the forgotten one is more common.
Do ghost jobs distort the official labor data? BLS excludes them by design, since its survey only counts openings that could start within 30 days with active outside recruiting. The distortion sits in private posting indexes and in what job seekers believe about the market.
The Business Model Analyst Take
The wire frame says companies are lying and lawmakers are stopping them. The economics say something duller and more useful. A job ad is the cheapest lead-generation asset in the economy, it never expires, and nobody who benefits from it pays to keep it alive. Everything downstream follows from those three facts, including the 19% rate, including the platform that declines to verify its own inventory, and including the resumes going into databases that no hiring manager will open.
For operators, two things follow. Audit your own postings this quarter, because under New York’s structure negligence and intent carry the same price, and the ad you forgot about is the expensive one. Then look at what your job applications collect. Pennsylvania’s bill puts a $25,000 head price on applicant data misuse, and most companies have never asked what their ATS retains, for how long, or who inside the building can query it.
The wider lesson has nothing to do with hiring. Any asset that is free to create and free to maintain gets overproduced until somebody attaches a carrying cost. That describes job ads, and it also describes the SKUs nobody has discontinued, the feature flags nobody has removed, the landing pages nobody has retired and the cloud instances nobody has turned off. Legislators are about to run that experiment on job postings in public. The useful question for your own business is what you are still paying to run because turning it off was never anybody’s job.
