Not even that would be good enough because a lot of sham reqs still interview and then reject later.

Why? To burn money?

aye was my thought. interviewing is expensive and time consuming, and has a very small but greater than zero chance of turning into a lawsuit.

throwing up a bunch of job adverts up on a low cost platform is comparatively simple and requires no real activity after putting them up; just ignore the emails.

If nobody should be forced to hire someone, then maybe they should be forced to give metrics on how many people are hired vs job reqs posted, and that information should be given to the candidates. Good luck hiring people if you don't actually want to fill 80% of your roles and candidates know it.

The way it works for the unemployed is if they don't take an offer, benefits get cut off. So it would be on the company to prove that each rejected application did not meet the standards they were looking for (trivial - just use the same unrealistic expectations many companies already have: 10 years experience in $5_year_old_tech).

The core issue is that the common metric is a bad proxy for the actual signal. Goodhearts law and all that. Enforcing that the proxy be good is weird. It would be better to enforce publicly sharing the actual signal.

Why would interviewing people be the test? If you don't hire anyone, it isn't a real position. They should have to prove the people applying for the position could not perform or be trained to perform the position.

And they’d lie to comply just like people do in your valid example. :)