The employers want applications so badly they are willing to post job ads that don't exist.

The need for a referral to get human eyes on your resume is a different problem that isn't made better by making every application expensive for the applicant. Poor quality applicants have more time, you might say.

I disagree and think that increasing the cost of applying would indeed help this problem. If the number of applications is too high for humans to possibly review, what other possible solution could there be?

The problem posed by this article is that companies are wasting candidates' time by making applying take time while offering no actual position.

What if we imagined that companies charged a fee to apply instead of charging candidate time? Then these ghost positions would be obviously considered fraud. We don't normally pay applicants for their time, but isn't a ghost position requiring substantial time to apply also a fraud on the applicant?

All I'm saying is, by removing the payment in time, you remove the fraud.

Applicant spam is an orthogonal problem that has other solutions. Linked-in could limit applicants to one application every 30 minutes, max 16 per day. Employers can use keyword filtering as they already do.

Start accepting CVs over snail mail. Much more difficult to automate, there is a cost already embedded in the process (72¢ for a stamp) and any attempts to automate this will be obvious.

A referral isn't really useful on its own. Ideally the person doing the referral needs to have the ear of the HM and followup regularly. Otherwise it's an easily missed note on an ATS.

We could make the referrer's company email a field in the ATS