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).