Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NHWhat it said: That this document was a “Campaign Platform Document,” bylined “Dexter Dow, Candidate for Governor,” and invited comment at “the campaign’s public correspondence address.” That RSA 354-A:7 “covers employers with as few as six employees.” That “New York City (effective 2025), Colorado, and Connecticut have already prohibited” graduation-date fields. That “93 percent of HR professionals admitted to posting ghost listings.” That a 7.4 million / 5.2 million gap represents “2.2 million listings that never resulted in a hire.” That a “2024 CWI Labs survey of sixteen hundred workers over fifty” found 59 percent reporting obstacles.
What is true: Dexter Dow is not a candidate for governor and has never been a candidate for public office. This is a policy framework published by Granite State Report, not a campaign document, and it should never have carried that byline or that masthead line. The six-employee threshold appears in RSA 354-A:2’s definition of “employer,” not in 354-A:7. RSA 354-A:7, III already prohibits any application form, inquiry or record that expresses, directly or indirectly, a limitation or discrimination as to age — so Pillar II is best framed as making an existing prohibition explicit and enforceable rather than as new ground. The states restricting graduation-date questions are Colorado (effective July 1, 2024), Connecticut, Oregon and Delaware; New York City has no such law and New York’s state bill remains in committee. The LiveCareer survey covered 918 self-selected HR professionals: 45 percent said they post ghost listings regularly and 48 percent occasionally, the latter group citing seasonal hiring and pipeline-building. BLS job openings are counted on the last business day of the month and hires across the whole month, so the two figures cannot be subtracted. The CWI Labs report was released September 24, 2024 and surveyed 1,600 Americans aged 18 to 71; the 59 percent figure applies to job seekers aged 50 and over.
What changed: The campaign framing was removed from the masthead, the byline and the closing note. The statutory citations, the multi-state comparison, the survey descriptions and the JOLTS passage were corrected, and RSA 354-A:7, III was added to the Pillar II discussion.
Still under review: The claim that twelve states require salary-range disclosure, the federal twenty-employee ADEA threshold, Vermont’s five-employee threshold, the ResumeUp.AI LinkedIn findings, the 28-to-38 percent monthly gap, and the under-$300,000 implementation estimate carry no citation and could not be independently sourced. They are unchanged and should be read as unsourced.
When: September 19, 2026, 2:55 a.m. ET.
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 IIAn explicit prohibition 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 one respect, stronger than federal law: it protects applicants of any age rather than only those over forty. And because RSA 354-A:2 defines “employer” to exclude only those with fewer than six persons in their employ, the chapter reaches far smaller workplaces than the federal statute does.
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, a substantial share of online job postings — the surveys put it somewhere between one in five and one in three — is a ghost: a listing with no intent to hire, used for market research, pipeline-building, or corporate optics.
As of April 2026, New Hampshire was also one of a shrinking number of states with no pay transparency requirement. Note that RSA 275:41-b, titled “Pay Disclosure,” is not one: it bars employers from forbidding employees to discuss their own wages, and imposes no posting obligation. Vermont’s pay transparency law took effect July 1, 2025. 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
Surveys of hiring platforms and recruiters put the share of online postings that are ghost jobs — listings with no intent to hire — somewhere between 18 and 27 percent. In a March 2025 LiveCareer survey of 918 HR professionals, 45 percent said they post ghost listings regularly and another 48 percent said they do so occasionally, the second group citing seasonal hiring and pipeline-building. 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.
New Hampshire law is not silent on this. RSA 354-A:7, III already makes it an unlawful discriminatory practice to use any form of application for employment, or any inquiry or record in connection with employment, “which expresses, directly or indirectly, any limitation, specification or discrimination as to age.” A graduation-date field is a textbook indirect specification. The gap is not the prohibition; it is that almost nobody knows the prohibition reaches application software, and the Commission has no practical way to police it at scale.
AARP testified before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging in September 2025 that algorithms used to scan resumes and applications can accelerate bias by using graduation dates or years of experience as proxies for age. Colorado, effective July 1, 2024, along with Connecticut, Oregon and Delaware, has restricted employers from requesting age-revealing dates on applications. 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 broader protection than federal law provides, because it carries no age floor. 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.
About two-thirds of workers over fifty report having seen or experienced age discrimination. In a CWI Labs report released September 24, 2024, based on a survey of 1,600 Americans aged 18 to 71, 59 percent of job seekers aged 50 and over said their age had created obstacles during hiring. 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;
- Remedies stated expressly for applicants denied at the screening stage, including documented lost wages and attorneys’ fees. Note that RSA 354-A:21-a is the provision allowing an aggrieved party to remove a complaint to superior court for damages or injunctive relief; it does not itself enumerate recoverable categories, so the enumeration would have to be added there or in RSA 354-A:21, II.
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
- NH Commission for Human Rights (expanded authority)
- NH AFL-CIO and affiliated unions
- Civil rights bar and plaintiff-side employment attorneys
- Federal coalitions working on older-applicant protections
The Problem
In June 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 7.4 million U.S. job openings and 5.2 million hires. Those two figures cannot simply be subtracted — openings are counted on the last business day of the month and hires across the whole month, and an unfilled opening rolls forward rather than disappearing. What the series does show is a durable gap between the number of roles employers say are open and the number of people they put on payroll, month after 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
- NH college career services offices
- 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 this framework estimates at under $300,000 annually, funded from existing Department of Labor enforcement budgets and recovered penalties. That estimate is the author’s and has not been scored by the Legislative Budget Assistant.
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.
Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.
