A New Zealand job seeker who sat through a timed AI video interview — and then never heard from the company again — wants Parliament to ban job advertisements that exist mainly to collect candidate data.
RNZ reported on 3 October that job seeker Charlie Maclean has launched a petition calling for an explicit ban on “ghost” job advertisements, after she came to suspect the AI interviewer she faced was less interested in hiring her than in the data her answers generated. As she told RNZ, the agent could pick up keywords and prompt her to expand, but the timing was unforgiving: “You’re not really able to take a second to think mid-sentence because it will just assume that you’re finished and then cut you off and on to the next bit.” The company, she said, went silent afterwards.
What the petition is asking for
Maclean’s petition asks Parliament to explicitly ban job advertisements posted with no intention of filling the role — a practice usually called ghost jobs — in line with crackdowns moving overseas, per RNZ. She suspects the company that ran her AI interview wanted her personal data to train AI models, a scenario that sits at the unhappy intersection of two already-organised frustrations: ghost listings and opaque AI screening.
It is important to be precise about what is alleged and what is proven. Maclean’s accusation against the specific company is exactly that — an accusation. Victoria University organisational psychology senior lecturer Ben Walker told RNZ he does not have “case-closed” evidence of phantom listings in New Zealand, but said there is enough online commentary to suggest that some companies’ advertised roles were spurious. Companies named in online threads did not respond to RNZ’s requests for comment. The recruiters RNZ approached had not personally seen ghost jobs here, but had heard of the practice overseas; one veteran recruiter called fake-job data harvesting “a new con for the industry.”
Is the harm even contested? The scale numbers say it is plausible
The structural concern is well documented offshore. Greenhouse, which sells applicant-tracking software, analysed its own clients’ postings and found about 19 percent of jobs advertised on digital boards in the second quarter of 2026 met its ghost-job definition — at least one application, zero downstream hiring activity. A 1,000-person US survey released in March found 47 percent of candidates had applied to a role they later learned never existed, and a quarter had gone through multiple interview rounds before realising. Whatever Maclean’s specific company did, the phenomenon it sits inside is not fringe anxiety: ghost listings are common enough that US states are legislating. New York’s bill sits with the governor, Pennsylvania’s proposal would fine applicant-data collection up to $25,000 per person, and Texas is investigating LinkedIn.
What’s distinct in the NZ case is the AI-interview layer. A CV dropped into a real job pipeline at least feeds a hiring decision. An interview transcript captured by a company with no hiring intent leaves behind something more concentrated: a structured, voice-attached, keyword-indexed record of how a specific person talks about their skills under pressure. Victoria University AI senior lecturer Andrew Lensen told RNZ that CVs and cover letters contain a lot of personal data — name, education history, address, career history — and that public concern about where it ends up is “rightfully” growing.
The AI-economy loop closes here
There’s a systemic irony worth naming. The ghost-job-plus-AI-interview playbook exists because automated screening made job applications cheap to collect and expensive to read. Employers learned they could post speculative ads for nothing; AI vendors made interviews runnable without interviewers; and the leftover asset — applicant data — became valuable enough to train models on. Each individual step is defensible. The loop, from the candidate’s side, is demoralising: you prepare for an interview, perform for software, get cut off mid-sentence by a timer, and your reward is being ghosted by a job that possibly never existed.
New Zealand angle: this is the second AI-jobs story in a week to reach a NZ national broadcaster, after RNZ’s earlier reporting on graduates bulk-editing CVs to satisfy AI screeners. Our archive has tracked the same drift from several directions — NZ graduates describing AI-screened application silences, candidates withdrawing from AI interview processes, and the US ghost-jobs report showing 28 percent of 90-day-old listings. What’s new is that a NZ petitioner is treating the combination as a legislative target, not just a bad experience. Maclean’s remedy is blunt — “at least the things that you do put the effort in [for] should be real” — and if the petition gathers steam, NZ would arrive late but not last in a policy wave already running through US states.
Whether Parliament ever gets to vote on it is another matter. For now the practical takeaway for job seekers is defensive: treat interviews as data disclosure, and treat prolific, inflated-salary remote listings from companies you have never heard of as a red flag — the warning Walker gave RNZ, and the behaviour Maclean’s experience now illustrates.
LinkedIn told RNZ it requires every job to be authentic and invests in free verifications; SEEK and Trade Me both told RNZ ghost jobs are not a material issue on their sites. As of publication, the specific company accused by Maclean has not been named publicly, and no regulator has announced an investigation.
