Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs: The Truth in Job Advertising and Accountability Act

Summary

When Eric Thompson lost his job in October 2024 and started looking for a new one, he began a drawn-out battle with something many job seekers have come to know too well: the dreaded ghost job.He became so fed up with the practice that he's put together a working group to propose the Truth in Job Advertising and Accountability Act, or federal legislation that would make the practice illegal.The first time Thompson, 53, heard the term "ghost job," it was 2023 and his friend was discussing applying endlessly to openings and never hearing back. Could it be all the roles he was submitting to weren't actually real?Ghost jobs refer to a practice where businesses post an opening without a specific intent to hire from the ad. Companies have different reasons for doing this, like if they're constantly hiring to fill multiple vacancies with that title, to collect and store resumes for a future need, or to signal to investors that they're growing faster than they really are.Some 17% of all job posts on Greenhouse in the second quarter of 2025 were for roles the business never intended to actually fill, according to data provided to CNBC Make It.A federal proposal to ban ghost jobsFor job seekers, it all boils down to being a time-consuming headache."There's nothing illegal about posting a job, currently, and never filling it," says Thompson, a network engineering leader in Warrenton, Virginia. Not to mention, it's "really hard to prove, and so that's one of the reasons that legally, it's been kind of this gray area."As Thompson researched more into the phenomenon, he connected with former colleagues and professional connections across the country experiencing the same thing. Together, the eight of them decided to form the TJAAA working group to spearhead efforts for federal legislation to officially ban businesses from posting ghost jobs.In May, the group drafted its first proposal: The TJAAA aims to require that all public job listings include information such as:The intended...