I don't love this idea. I feel like it's just going to force even more busybody work into the process - now companies will need to "respond" to every applicant, no matter how irrelevant, so that response isn't going to be high-information anyway.
Someone else suggested a good idea - make companies link to their previous request. Or even better - don't allow companies to post the exact same listing for months in a row. The actual behavior you're trying to root out is a company listing a position that isn't real - so just don't allow them to list the same not-real position over and over.
I don't know if that can be enforced, though it should be easy to script up something that checks this. But you're not going to enforce anything anyway, and I think this gets closer to actually what we want to achieve.
Yes, if you consider #1 an issue, then you're right. But I'm not sure that's an issue that should actually be addressed, because:
1. It's not anything new, unlike this "ghost jobs" thing which is a supposed new phenomenon. This makes it less likely that the status quo can be improved.
2. I believe the reason the status quo is as it is is because most companies are inundated with job applicants, many of them not even passing a basic qualifying test (e.g. people with no FE experiecnce applying to FE positions with min. required experience of 5 years).
I don't know if this is true for the HN thread, having never posted to it. It's possible it's much higher signal here so this issue becomes less relevant.
Anyway, just my 2 cents, mostly as an outsider to these threads.
What is this confusing sentence suppose to communicate? That you adore the idea? Or like it? Or hate it? Or are neutral? Or are indifferent? Or any other thousands of options? Nobody knows.
I'm sorry, I certainly don't mean to be off-putting.
The way I parse a sentence like "I don't love this idea", and the way I meant it, is that I think the idea has some merit, it's not terrible, but I'm not fully on board, it has more work to do. It's not all the way to "I don't like it" but it's not great yet.
In any case I elaborated in the rest of the post a bit more on this so I think you can see from the context what I meant.
Someone else suggested a good idea - make companies link to their previous request. Or even better - don't allow companies to post the exact same listing for months in a row. The actual behavior you're trying to root out is a company listing a position that isn't real - so just don't allow them to list the same not-real position over and over.
I don't know if that can be enforced, though it should be easy to script up something that checks this. But you're not going to enforce anything anyway, and I think this gets closer to actually what we want to achieve.