Automated hiring is here to stay, and most employers using it are simply trying to cope with the volume of applications. The problem is the gap it opens. When a candidate can’t tell whether a human, an algorithm or nobody at all is on the other side of a job ad, the listing itself becomes a cheap way to collect CVs, addresses and recorded interviews. New Zealand has no rule that specifically stops that, and honest employers have the most to lose if trust breaks down.
An interview with nobody behind it
Job seeker Charlie Maclean applied for a remote role and was interviewed by an AI agent that timed her answers and cut her off mid-response. Then the company went silent. She now suspects the role was a ghost job, a listing with no real intention to hire, used to gather candidate material for AI training.
In a LinkedIn explainer launching her parliamentary petition, Maclean sets out three motives for ghost listings: disguising an internal appointment that must be seen to go to market, projecting growth that isn’t happening, and harvesting data through AI interview tools or high-volume application forms. The petition, running under the slogan ‘Say Boo to Ghost Jobs’, closes on 31 October.
To be clear, nobody has proven that a New Zealand employer is doing this. None of the recruiters RNZ spoke to had seen it locally. One with almost 20 years in the industry said overseas colleagues are already discussing it as a new con. Tribe Group chief executive Bruce Pilbrow called the scenario plausible, noting that in the AI space, ‘data is king.’ Victoria University AI lecturer Andrew Lensen said CVs carry career history, education and home addresses, and people are rightly worried about where that ends up. This is a governance gap, not yet a scandal.
Busy job boards, stubborn unemployment
The timing makes the gap more dangerous. MBIE’s Jobs Online series shows online ads up 7 percent year-on-year in the June quarter, the fourth straight quarter of growth after 11 quarters of decline. That followed 11.8 percent growth in the March quarter.
Yet hiring outcomes aren’t keeping pace. Stats NZ puts unemployment at 5.6 percent in the June quarter, with 171,000 people out of work and underutilisation at 13.8 percent. Reserve Bank data shows the number of unemployed up 8.8 percent on a year earlier, even as employment grew.
Ad volumes rising faster than jobs actually filled is exactly the environment where speculative or fake listings hide. It also means policymakers and businesses reading ad data as a demand signal may be reading noise. Maclean’s campaign claims 444,000 underemployed New Zealanders, a figure from her own material rather than an official release, but the verified underutilisation rate tells the same story of a lot of idle capacity chasing listings.
Desperate candidates, automated filters
The arms race was already under way before ghost jobs became a talking point. Earlier this year RNZ reported Te Awamutu CV writer Sarah Wrightson had seen her customer base grow 50 percent as applicants tried to beat algorithmic screening. Candidates write with AI, employers screen with AI, and nobody is confident a person ever read the application. Add the possibility that some listings exist only to collect data, and job seekers have every reason to hold back information or not apply at all. That hurts the firms genuinely trying to hire.
The fix is already on the shelf
The instinct to ask Parliament for a new ban is understandable, but new primary legislation is probably the wrong tool. The Privacy Act already requires a lawful purpose for collecting personal information and limits its use to that purpose. Recruiting someone’s interview footage to train a model under the guise of a vacancy looks like a breach on its face. Fair trading law already covers misleading conduct. What’s missing is enforcement attention, and clear guidance from the Privacy Commissioner on AI interview tools.
The market is also doing some of the work. SEEK and Trade Me say ghost jobs are not a material issue on their platforms, citing the cost of paid listings, verification and reporting tools. LinkedIn says it requires listings to be authentic and is rolling out free verification. Victoria University’s Ben Walker singled out LinkedIn as having suffered a ‘slopification’ compared with local boards. That is a commercial advantage for paid, verified, locally run platforms, and a signal to employers about where credible ads should live.
What employers should do now
If you use AI interview or screening tools, say so up front, state what data you keep and for how long, put a human on final decisions, and close the loop with every candidate. If a vendor’s terms let it reuse candidate recordings for model training, you own that reputational risk, not the vendor.
Maclean’s petition may not produce a law, and it doesn’t need to. The real test is whether employers can keep automation honest before regulators or a genuine scandal do it for them.
Sources
- RNZ: Job seeker calls for ban on ‘ghost’ interviews that harvest data for AI (2026-10-04)
- LinkedIn: OK so what are ‘Ghost Jobs’ and why should we ban them in Aotearoa? (2026-08-13)
- Stats NZ: Labour market statistics June 2026 quarter (2026-08-05)
- RNZ: AI causing headaches for both job hunters and recruiters (2026-05-06)
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