The wasted evening has a witness

The loss was always real

A dead job posting does not take money from you. It takes a Tuesday evening, a resume rewritten for the third time that week, and a small, private ration of hope. We started CoBlack because we believed that loss was real, even when no one else was counting it.

For years, that cost had one owner: the candidate. You applied, you heard nothing, and the silence was filed under the price of searching. The posting sat there collecting resumes for a role no one intended to fill, and nobody had to explain it to anyone.

The law starts asking

That is what changed this year. The ghost jobs did not change. Who is asking about them did.

The scale is finally being counted. Allwork.Space, reporting Greenhouse data on August 21, puts the figure at roughly 19 percent of jobs advertised on digital job boards in the second quarter of 2026: postings that received at least one application but produced no interviews, no tests, and no hiring activity. In some industries, the same reporting adds, the share reaches one in three.

The first ghost job laws are still bills. They are moving through statehouses now. New York's Senate Bill S8877 is the first US legislation aimed squarely at the practice. It passed the State Senate in April and the State Assembly on June 2. If it becomes law, employers with 100 or more employees would have to say, in the posting itself, what a listing actually is: a vacancy they intend to fill by a stated date, a role that will not be filled sooner than a stated date, or not a vacancy at all, with resumes collected for future review. The bill reaches third-party job posting platforms too. Pennsylvania and New Jersey have active bills of their own (Inc., August 25). And in June, Senator Ruben Gallego asked the Department of Labor, the FTC and the BLS to examine ghost jobs as potential deceptive advertising.

A question for the platforms

Texas opened a different door. The state's attorney general, Ken Paxton, has issued a Civil Investigative Demand to LinkedIn, examining ghost job listings and whether the value of paid Premium subscriptions, priced up to about 70 dollars a month, was misrepresented. Inc. reported the demand on August 25. This is an investigation, not a lawsuit. Nothing has been filed against anyone, and nothing has been found or proven. What makes it worth noticing is the direction of the question. Here, enforcement attention is pointed at a platform that carries listings, not only at the employers who post them. The question is no longer just about who writes a posting. It is also about who carries it.

What a bill cannot do

We want to be honest about the limits, because honesty is the whole point. S8877 has not been signed. It has not even been delivered to the governor, so no clock is running. A bill that is not yet law changes nothing on the ground tonight. An investigation is not a finding. And no statute can reach inside an employer and make its intent honest. The most a law can do is ask that the intent be stated out loud.

Where we chose to stand

We never needed a law to believe a candidate's time had value. CoBlack has treated the dead posting as a sourcing problem since the beginning. We source openings only from validated employer career pages and ATS feeds, never from public job boards. Auto Match states why a role fits you, checked against your Career Capability Map. Auto Apply submits server-side. We cannot make any employer's intent honest. We can only choose where we look, and we chose the places where a posting is most likely to be real.

A signed law may come, or it may not. Either way, the ground has shifted. The evening a person gives to an application was never worthless. It just took the rest of the world this long to say so.