'Ghost job' ads are getting so bad that lawmakers want to ban them

Based on 12 sampled comments from this thread. Analyzed 2026-08-22.

AI was a side issue rather than the thread’s real battlefield. The only concrete AI-focused point was Ontario’s new requirement that larger employers disclose when they use AI to screen resumes. Commenters treated that as a sensible transparency measure folded into a broader attempt to clean up misleading hiring practices: applicants should know whether an automated system helped decide who advanced, especially when opaque screening can make a real opening feel indistinguishable from a resume-harvesting exercise. The rest of the debate concentrated on whether ghost listings can be defined and enforced, not on the quality or fairness of hiring models. Several readers argued that regulation needs to distinguish truly nonexistent roles from broad, continuously open engineering listings that may produce multiple hires. Others suspected that cheap, automated handling of applications makes it easier for employers to cast excessively wide nets, maintain speculative listings, and leave candidates without meaningful updates. No one offered a detailed argument about AI model bias, accuracy, or automated rejection rates, so the thread does not support stronger conclusions about AI hiring systems themselves. There was broad implicit support for disclosure, but little discussion of what disclosures should contain, how candidates could challenge automated decisions, or whether AI screening is responsible for ghost-job behavior.

• Praise: Mandatory disclosure of AI resume screening gives applicants basic visibility into whether software, rather than a recruiter alone, shaped their chance of being considered.
• Concern: Cheap automated processing of job responses may encourage employers to keep speculative listings open and collect far more applicants than they intend to engage.