The New Hampshire Hiring Transparency Act
A four-pillar framework to end fake job postings, stop algorithmic age discrimination, and put enforcement behind what New Hampshire statute already promises.
Four Pillars
- Pillar IIntent-to-hire and salary-range disclosure on every job posting for positions that could be filled in New Hampshire.
- Pillar IIProhibition of graduation-date fields on applications for employers licensed, contracted, or regulated by the State of New Hampshire.
- Pillar IIIEnforcement teeth for age discrimination at the hiring stage — not just after someone is already on payroll — under RSA 354-A.
- Pillar IVA 90-day posting rule: any job advertisement active longer than 90 days must be either refreshed with a dated notice or removed.
Why This, Why Now
New Hampshire statute already prohibits age discrimination in hiring. RSA 354-A:7 is, in fact, stronger than federal law: it protects applicants of any age, not just those over forty, and it covers employers with as few as six employees, compared to the federal threshold of twenty.
The problem is not the statute. The problem is that the market has moved faster than the enforcement mechanism. Algorithmic screening now filters applications before a human being ever touches the file, and it does so in ways that are effectively invisible to the applicant and difficult for the NH Commission for Human Rights to observe, document, or act on. At the same time, somewhere between one in five and one in three online job postings in 2025 is a ghost — a listing with no intent to hire, used for market research, pipeline-building, or corporate optics.
New Hampshire is also now one of only a shrinking number of states with no pay transparency requirement. Vermont’s pay transparency law took effect July 1, 2025, covering employers with five or more employees. Massachusetts phased in its requirements through late 2025. Maine and Connecticut have related protections. New Hampshire sits surrounded by states that have modernized, and our workers pay the cost of that gap.
The New Hampshire Hiring Transparency Act is not a radical expansion of state power. It is a minimum-standards update to RSA 354-A and related statutes, matching what our neighbors already do, and giving the existing Commission for Human Rights the tools it needs to enforce what the law already forbids.
The Problem
Between 18 and 27 percent of online job postings in 2025 are ghost jobs — listings with no intent to hire. In a LiveCareer survey this year, 93 percent of HR professionals admitted to posting ghost listings regularly or occasionally. This is not an anomaly. It is a market practice. Applicants spend unpaid time, and often money, producing tailored applications for positions that do not exist.
Simultaneously, the absence of salary information at the posting stage allows employers to use applications to harvest salary expectations as market data, and to discard candidates whose expectations are too low or too high without ever making an offer.
Proposed Statutory Mechanism
- A good-faith salary range or hourly rate, expressed as a minimum and maximum;
- A general description of benefits and other compensation;
- An affirmation that the employer has a current intent to hire for the position within 180 days of posting;
- The date the posting was first published.
Likely Opposition
- Business and Industry Association of NH
- NH Chamber of Commerce
- Some national employer associations (SHRM, HR Policy Assn.)
- Free State / libertarian caucus on principle
Likely Allies
- AARP New Hampshire
- NH AFL-CIO
- Women’s Policy Institute of NH
- Unemployment counseling organizations
- Small-business coalitions undercut by ghost-posting practices of large competitors
The Problem
A graduation date is not a qualification. It is an age calculator. An applicant who graduated high school in 1985 is almost certainly over fifty-five. An applicant who graduated college in 1992 is almost certainly over fifty. Employers and their algorithmic resume-screening vendors use these dates to filter candidates by age without ever explicitly asking about age.
AARP testified before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging in September 2025 that AI-driven resume screeners now systematically use graduation dates and years of experience as age proxies. New York City (effective 2025), Colorado, and Connecticut have already prohibited the practice. Connecticut is a neighbor. New Hampshire should not lag our own region on this.
Proposed Statutory Mechanism
- The date of any educational degree, diploma, or certification;
- The date of initial entry into any workforce or profession;
- Any other field that primarily functions as an age proxy rather than a qualification indicator.
Likely Opposition
- HR technology vendors (Workday, Greenhouse, iCIMS) who embed these fields in standard templates
- Employers who use applicant tracking systems configured around graduation-date matching
- A subset of the Chamber on principle
Likely Allies
- AARP New Hampshire (lead)
- NH Commission for Human Rights itself — clarifies its existing enforcement authority
- Civil rights and legal aid organizations
- Disability Rights Center — NH (overlapping screening concerns)
- Older NH workers, a rapidly growing demographic
The Problem
RSA 354-A:7 prohibits employers from refusing to hire on the basis of age. As written, this is a stronger protection than federal law provides. But the statute was designed for a world in which hiring decisions were visible — a manager reviewed a stack of resumes and made a call. In 2026, the decision is made by a screening algorithm before a human being has read a single line. The applicant never learns the criteria. The Commission for Human Rights never sees the process. Violations are effectively undetectable.
Sixty-six percent of workers over fifty report having seen or experienced age discrimination. In a 2024 CWI Labs survey of sixteen hundred workers over fifty, fifty-nine percent said their age had actively created obstacles in their job search. These numbers do not reflect a healthy hiring market. They reflect a statute that no longer reaches the conduct it was written to prevent.
Proposed Statutory Mechanism
- Any employer with 25 or more NH employees using algorithmic or automated applicant-screening tools shall, upon request of the Commission for Human Rights, disclose the criteria used by those tools, the vendor providing them, and any demographic audit data in the employer’s possession;
- Pattern-and-practice investigative authority for the Commission — the Commission may open investigations based on aggregate hiring statistics, not solely on individual complaints;
- A presumption of discrimination, rebuttable by the employer, where an employer’s over-forty callback rate for qualified applicants falls below 50% of the under-forty rate across a six-month window;
- Damages available under RSA 354-A:21-a extended explicitly to applicants denied at the screening stage, with documented lost wages and attorneys’ fees recoverable.
Likely Opposition
- HR technology industry (national)
- Larger NH employers with automated hiring pipelines
- Business and Industry Association of NH
- Chamber of Commerce
Likely Allies
- AARP New Hampshire (lead — actively lobbying on this federally)
- NH Commission for Human Rights (expanded authority)
- NH AFL-CIO and affiliated unions
- Civil rights bar and plaintiff-side employment attorneys
- Protect Older Job Applicants Act (2025) federal coalition
The Problem
In June 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 7.4 million U.S. job openings, but employers made only 5.2 million hires. That gap — 2.2 million listings that never resulted in a hire — is not a surplus of opportunity. It is a surplus of fiction. The gap has persisted at 28 to 38 percent every month since 2021.
An analysis by ResumeUp.AI of LinkedIn postings found that jobs listed more than thirty days ago are statistically likely to be ghosts. The longer a posting sits live without a hire, the more likely it never intended to result in one. Typical corporate hiring cycles run 30 to 60 days; 90 days is a generous ceiling before a listing should be treated as stale by default.
Proposed Statutory Mechanism
- Display the original posting date in a visible location on every platform on which it appears;
- Be either removed, filled, or actively refreshed with a dated notice after 90 calendar days of continuous posting;
- If refreshed, disclose the number of times the position has been reposted in the previous twenty-four months.
Likely Opposition
- Major job boards (LinkedIn, Indeed, ZipRecruiter) who charge per-posting and benefit from stale listings
- Employers using open listings as pipeline-building
- Recruiting firms operating on candidate-harvest models
Likely Allies
- Job seekers and the unemployed (broadest political coalition in the framework)
- Ethical recruiting firms and the Truth in Job Ads coalition
- NH college career services offices
- Federal coalition backing the Truth in Job Advertising and Accountability Act (TJAAA)
- NH Department of Employment Security — cleaner data
Enforcement and Implementation
The framework assigns jurisdiction as follows, using existing state agencies wherever possible to avoid creating new bureaucracy:
| Pillar | Enforcing Agency | Penalty Structure |
|---|---|---|
| I. Intent & Salary | NH Department of Labor | $250–$5,000 per violation; private right after 3 violations |
| II. Grad-Date Ban | NH Commission for Human Rights (existing 354-A mechanism) | Existing 354-A remedies, including damages and injunctive relief |
| III. Age Enforcement | NH Commission for Human Rights (expanded investigative authority) | Damages, attorneys’ fees, pattern-and-practice remedies |
| IV. 90-Day Rule | NH Department of Labor | $250 per stale listing per day; safe harbor for active refresh |
Effective date proposed: January 1 following enactment, with a six-month grace period for employers to update applicant-tracking systems and posting infrastructure. No new state agency is created. No new state positions are required beyond expanding the Commission for Human Rights’ existing investigator capacity — a cost estimated at under $300,000 annually, funded from existing Department of Labor enforcement budgets and recovered penalties.
The Throughline
New Hampshire has spent decades cultivating a reputation as a state that respects the relationship between employer and worker. That reputation has never been premised on the idea that workers should be lied to, screened on the basis of characteristics state law already forbids, or asked to spend their weekends applying to jobs that do not exist.
The New Hampshire Hiring Transparency Act asks the state to do what its statute already says it does: prohibit discrimination in hiring, enforce honesty in advertising, and treat the applicant not as a data point in a corporate pipeline but as a citizen of the state whose time and dignity are worth protecting.
It is a small ask. It is overdue.
