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28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days

302 points · 363 comments · rubatrejo

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rubatrejo · 1790181362 · focus · HN ↗
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toomuchtodo · 1790181435 · focus · HN ↗
Ghost jobs! Tremendous dataset. Hospitality and education roles listed near the top are likely strong signal the wages are inadequate and a refusal to raise the wage to a market clearing price. Healthcare is self explanatory, demand is voracious due to a rapidly aging population and wages available and appropriate in many cases.
> Hospitality postings sit the longest: 43.9% have been open more than 90 days, median 65 days. Healthcare turns over fastest at 19.7%.
(kudos to unlisted for aggregating and reporting, this gives me a data point to offer to jurisdictions and regulators interested in compliance monitoring in this context)
1. dofm · 1790183200 · focus · HN ↗
  Education roles are also an indication of mandatory listing: they have someone internally in mind for a future vacancy but are legally required to list it.
  1. toomuchtodo · 1790183254 · focus · HN ↗
    Any citations are welcome on this for my source of truth knowledge graph. Thank you in advance.
    mixdup · 1790183677 · focus · HN ↗
    It's the case for most government jobs (which in the US most education roles are for government institutions--whether it be traditional K-12 schools or universities). The law in most states and at the federal level require opening jobs to the general public to prevent favoritism, encourage diversity, discourage corruption, etc. It usually just results in having a job posting that is filled before it's posted as they will have an internal candidate, and the rest is for show
    Source of truth from this one is I've worked in public higher ed in two states in the US and gone through this process personally
    renjimen · 1790183862 · focus · HN ↗
    My partner is a teacher in rural Canada and this is true here, at least. District admins often design a role with someone in mind, setting very specific requirements to that effect (needs to have shop AND socials training/experience is one that comes to mind). They need to post the job to meet union criteria, but only one person could realistically fit the bill.
2. rubatrejo · 1790183669 · focus · HN ↗
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legitster · 1790181951 · focus · HN ↗
There are some browser plugins you can use for job sites like LinkedIn to filter out Ghost Jobs. It's been somewhat helpful, but honestly it feels like 90% of tech jobs right now are Ghost jobs.
It's happened so many times. Apply for a job, within an hour get an email that says I am not qualified (not true), and then a week later the same job gets posted again.
I'm normally a pretty free-market guy, but it should be illegal. It's clear-cut fraud - they are advertising something that doesn't exist, specifically to game numbers. And what's more, governments report on these numbers as if they are real job opportunities in the economy.
1. valgaze · 1790183294 · focus · HN ↗
  Sounds super annoying sorry it sucks but who exactly are they defrauding in your view? And what numbers are they gaming?
  1. dgunay · 1790183897 · focus · HN ↗
    The job market should be just that, a market, between buyers and sellers, not people who pretend to be buying in order to look like they've got money.
    I know this analogy breaks down a little bit since this behavior does actually happen, sort of, in real life p2p markets but the point is, it sucks and if you've ever sold anything on fb marketplace you know how obnoxious it is dealing with people who demand a lot of you but do not intend to actually commit to buying what you're selling.
  2. legitster · 1790184151 · focus · HN ↗
    Investors for one. If these are larger companies, they will often inflate their actual hiring numbers to make it look like they are anticipating more growth than they are actually expecting.
    But I certainly feel ripped off applying for jobs they never intended on filling. If they put up a lot of hoops to jump through to apply (submit a portfolio, set up an account, write a cover letter specific to our company), times that by the 1000 people who have applied, and it's an exorbitant amount of human time getting wasted.
    chaosharmonic · 1790209911 · focus · HN ↗
    Also, possibly the government -- depending on where they are and what kinds of tax breaks they could be getting for bringing jobs into the area.
  3. HumblyTossed · 1790184418 · focus · HN ↗
    Investors maybe. Makes your company look better than it is.
2. badatnames · 1790183308 · focus · HN ↗
  The consistent reports I'm getting through friends who have spoken to recruiters is just that standards have increased dramatically. Firms accepting only a single candidate CV from a recruiter instead of 5 or more, and the recruiter downstream working their ass off to ensure it is absolutely the best possible CV, because if it's not then they don't get paid.
  1. legitster · 1790183857 · focus · HN ↗
    > Firms accepting only a single candidate CV from a recruiter instead of 5 or more
    Why though? I've done hiring before - it takes less than 30 seconds to skim a resume. The recruiters also have no idea what the responsibility is for the jobs they are hiring for - it's a terrible place to bottleneck candidates on.
    It sounds like everyone, including recruiters, are being sent on a snipe hunt.
    SoftTalker · 1790185584 · focus · HN ↗
    I would guess that with bots and AI, a lot of resumes are not even from real candidates, and those that are are AI slop. I don't envy recruiters or hiring managers these days.
3. rubatrejo · 1790183624 · focus · HN ↗
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4. Aurornis · 1790183980 · focus · HN ↗
  > Apply for a job, within an hour get an email
  Hiring has been crazy for years. It's worse with remote jobs because you get a firehose of applicants everywhere.
  When I was doing a lot of hiring I tried to be as responsive as possible because you don't want to lose the best candidates. I would try to review applicants as fast as they came in. You have to understand that in that hour I might get 40 resumes. 1 or 2 are amazing, another 2-3 could be worth a look, and another 5 might have made the cut if I didn't just read those 2-5 much better resumes ahead of them.
  If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
  The simpler explanation is that a tired hiring manager was just clicking buttons to dismiss applicants who didn't make the cut.
  1. legitster · 1790184851 · focus · HN ↗
    > If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
    That assumes that I am writing my resume for just your job posting. If I am just going to copy and paste the job requirement verbatim on my resume, doesn't that make your job screening applicants for actual experience much harder? Often times the difference is splitting hairs anyway ("we're looking for someone who paints brown houses").
    But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them, I would just frankly not have the time to do so.
    Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody. The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.
    shagie · 1790186166 · focus · HN ↗
    Consider the case... I've got a stack of 100 resumes and 2 hours today to select the top 10 candidates from that stack. I'll be ranking those 10 and give them to HR at the end of the day today. Tomorrow, HR will take the top 5 who are available and schedule interviews for next Tuesday. One of them will be selected from those who interview next Tuesday.
    What can you do to increase the odds that you're in the top 10 (and preferably top 5)?
    It's possible that a superficial reason was used to separate number 10 from number 11 ... and maybe number 11 would have been a great candidate and future employee. What I don't have is three weeks to do all day 9-5 1h long interviews for every candidate.
    legitster · 1790187073 · focus · HN ↗
    That makes sense for the opportunities that actually close after they are posted. I'm talking about jobs that disqualify you as a candidate same day, then repost the same listing next week. And next month. And next year. These are clearly ghost jobs.
    Regardless - it would be nothing to show some basic human decency and respect:
    - Review them more often until you get the 5 quality candidates to interview (there's no way in hell you actually review all 100 resumes fully - quit sitting on them for weeks and weeks)
    - Take down the posting after resumes are reviewed
    - Submit a basic and honest response for the people who's resumes didn't make the consideration
    - A simple human note for the candidates who were considered but didn't make the interview
    - Timely closer for the interviewed candidates who didn't get the job
    None of these add any substantial time to the hiring process, but can go a long way to remember the human in a job market that's an absolutely brutal and soulless Leviathan right now.
    shagie · 1790191893 · focus · HN ↗
    I work in the public sector. There's a requirement (i.e. law) that the job posting is available for the public to read for two weeks. No selection may be made before all applications are received.
    After two weeks, the posting is taken down.
    > - Submit a basic and honest response for the people who's resumes didn't make the consideration
    If you have 200 resumes in the pool and 100 of them weren't passed on for additional consideration because they didn't meet the requirements (education, needing visa sponsorship, outside of the country, not following the instructions for the application), how long will that take?
    Furthermore, in the litigious nation we live in, that information when provided honestly has tended to lead to lawsuits ("I wasn't considered because...").
    > - A simple human note for the candidates who were considered but didn't make the interview
    That's another 100 candidates. Three minutes each to write the email? That's three hours of someone's day. Again, this gets to the litigious situations. It only takes the allegation of bias to lead to a lawsuit - that costs way more than three hours of my day.
    This is the public sector, we don't pay a lot - that's why it's only 200 applications. In the private sector it wouldn't be hard to multiply that number by 3 or 4.
    > - Timely closer for the interviewed candidates who didn't get the job
    This is something that we're good at. The people who were interviewed know by the end of the week. Job posting opening to the selection being made is four weeks.
    legitster · 1790193093 · focus · HN ↗
    The simple and honest response can be an automated email that says you didn't meet the requirements - you would be amazed at how many job postings don't even do that.
    I can understand the justification for all of the other choices. But it doesn't mean I have to like it. The whole process is degrading and dehumanizing, and it's something that has gotten much, much worse in the last decade.
    johnnyanmac · 1790195366 · focus · HN ↗
    The GP said the quiet part out loud. They are so worried about lawsuits that they'd rather make the job market worse for everyone (including themselves) than risk a lawsuit over the most basic feedback. The product of a low-trust society.
    parineum · 1790210746 · focus · HN ↗
    This isn't really a low trust society, it's a litigious society problem.
    These lawsuits aren't a myth, if you hire a lot of people it'll eventually happen, even if you're not violating any laws. The lawsuits, even when you win, waste time and money. Giving reasons, especially customized "human" responses is absolutely going to increase your chances of being sued.
    johnnyanmac · 1790214236 · focus · HN ↗
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    fragmede · 1790214856 · focus · HN ↗
    Individuals without jobs have a lot of time since they don't have a job, and can find lawyers willing to work on contingency.
    johnnyanmac · 1790216913 · focus · HN ↗
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    sokoloff · 1790250112 · focus · HN ↗
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    Aurornis · 1790221623 · focus · HN ↗
    I thought the threat of lawsuits was a lame excuse, so I tried to give good feedback to rejected candidates who asked.
    It did not take long for one of them to try to turn it against me with threats. We would have easily won the case, but having a lawsuit hanging over my head and a target on my back as a liability for the company was not a good feeling.
    I no longer give specific feedback.
    johnnyanmac · 1790223320 · focus · HN ↗
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    sokoloff · 1790250841 · focus · HN ↗
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    johnnyanmac · 1790195028 · focus · HN ↗
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    sokoloff · 1790250174 · focus · HN ↗
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    Aurornis · 1790186514 · focus · HN ↗
    > That assumes that I am writing my resume for just your job posting. If I am just going to copy and paste the job requirement verbatim on my resume, doesn't that make your job screening applicants for actual experience much harder?
    It doesn't make the hiring manager's job harder if you decline to customize your resume. They press reject and move to the next resume.
    > Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody.
    If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.
    If there was a hidden requirement to know Python but the job listing didn't ask for it, you get a lot of applicants that don't fit. Smart hiring managers will update the job listing as they review candidates. There are some lazy companies that will have secret requirements that they don't put in the job listing, but that only creates more work for everyone involved. It's not a secret trick they're pulling to be mean. They're just bad at their jobs.
    > The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.
    Unpopular opinion around these parts, but there's a high correlation between the best candidates and people who take the time to review the job posting and customize their resume before submitting.
    I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
    > But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them,
    Complaining about low response rates and refusing to tailor your resume are highly correlated, in my observation.
    cryzinger · 1790187389 · focus · HN ↗
    Probably a dumb question, but when you say "tailor your resume", what kind of tailoring do you mean? I've seen this advice repeated a lot, but I've rarely taken it because I tend to apply to jobs with the same job title and roughly the same responsibilities; in general, I assumed that tailoring is mainly helpful if you have a diverse/generalist skillset.
    Like, it's obvious to me why a true Jack of all trades would use different resumes for applying to a plumber role vs a carpenter role, but less clear why a career plumber would tailor resumes for applying to two plumber roles at slightly different companies.
    shagie · 1790188145 · focus · HN ↗
    If the job is for a backend Java developer position, change the list of languages you know from:
    Languages: JavaScript, C#, Python, Java
    to:
    Languages: Java, C#, JavaScript, Python
    Many times people order their languages by familiarity or preference for working with that technology. Don't make the person looking at the resume have to hunt for the information. If it's last on the list, that may say something about how much you're interested in that job and how likely you are to stay.
    > but less clear why a career plumber would tailor resumes for applying to two plumber roles at slightly different companies.
    If one company is looking for a plumber to do PEX and another is looking for someone who is experienced with natural gas and black pipe, you might want to make sure that your experience in those two different domains of plumbing are at the front of the experience. They're both plumbers, but the heating and air conditioning company hiring a plumber is looking for different things than the residential new construction plumber.
    legitster · 1790189279 · focus · HN ↗
    It's so funny to me that a tech company will have no problem hiring a VP from, like, a beverage company - but heaven forbid you put your programming languages in the wrong order on your resume.
    shagie · 1790190997 · focus · HN ↗
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    whstl · 1790191246 · focus · HN ↗
    While this makes absolutely no sense to me, I'm pretty sure unhinged language fanatics would reject some resumes because "Java is not the first on the list".
    HR people and AIs, as much as I criticise them would not reject that.
    shagie · 1790192166 · focus · HN ↗
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    whstl · 1790193376 · focus · HN ↗
    Okay, yeah, now I agree with you.
    The last paragraph makes a great point: if the person has been out of Java the game for long, they will definitely be second to someone who's fresh out of a Java job.
    johnnyanmac · 1790196959 · focus · HN ↗
    >which pool of 50 am I most likely to find someone who knows and doesn't hate working in Java?
    The one who has actual projects or professional experience in Java? I'm surprised this is such a sticking point. I list my skills last on the resume because it's the least relevant and it was mostly to try and satisfy ATS. But reality is stranger than theory, I suppose.
    At least, that was my old approach. I found some advice I really liked and ultimately integrate a tech stack sub-bullet in every experience now. Seems to be a good balance of ATS and human(-skimming) readability.
    rendaw · 1790223508 · focus · HN ↗
    If I were reviewing 100 resumes, I wouldn't use the language list. I'd use something with actual context, like work experience.
    But more than that, why do you think someone who is terrible at java wouldn't put it first in the list when applying for a java oriented job? Assuming they were aware of this unwritten rule.
    johnnyanmac · 1790196555 · focus · HN ↗
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    drillsteps5 · 1790195175 · focus · HN ↗
    Several months ago, having exhausted all other options in fruitless job search, I asked for assistance of a recruiter who I used to work with some time ago. Just to get some pointers on how I could improve my search, with his experience working on the other side. His advice on "tailoring" was very simple.
    Go to the most popular LLM (ie Claude). Give it the job description. Give it your resume. Ask it for percentage match, it will give you a number. Then ask for advice on improving your resume, you can either ask to rework the resume by itself (if you're in a hurry) or you can work with the thing to modify the sections/entries yourself, one by one, if you have time. With each modification you will get better and better percentage match. Ideally you need to get to high 80% or maybe even 90%.
    The idea is that automated ranking tools used by recruiters/HR are ultimately use the very same LLM, so you are improving your ranking assigned to your resume by those ranking systems.
    I have to add that now this advice is mostly useless as everybody's using the same technique so you won't be standing up against others but merely be on the same level.
    Add to it the fact that many job descriptions are inaccurate and sometimes downright misleading, and hiring managers use their own criteria, and you will understand why connections/referrals is probably the only way to get hired now.
    Terr_ · 1790196000 · focus · HN ↗
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    sokoloff · 1790250511 · focus · HN ↗
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    arproy3110 · 1791027177 · focus · HN ↗
    Not a dumb question. For same-title roles, tailoring is mostly vocabulary and ordering, not a rewrite. Two "backend engineer" postings can want different things: one leans on Kafka and on-call, the other on Postgres performance and mentoring.
    Recruiters usually find people by searching the ATS for terms from the posting, then skim the first lines under each job. So the cheap version is:
    1. Use the posting's exact title if it's honestly equivalent to yours. 2. Reorder skills and your latest role's bullets so the 2-3 things that posting stresses come first. 3. Use their word where you have a synonym ("PostgreSQL" vs "relational databases").
    Ten minutes per application, not a new resume. When we crawled S&P 500 careers sites, Workday sat behind ~30% of the companies we could identify, and these systems rank and search rather than auto-reject, so tailoring is about surfacing, not passing a gate.
    (I make a resume tool, so take this with that in mind.)
    legitster · 1790188033 · focus · HN ↗
    > If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.
    The thing though is it's a bad requirement. There are any number of great candidates who could be proficient in Python - the skills are very transferrable. (It's like trying to find a painter and filtering out people who have never painted a brown houses)
    The thing you're screening for by being so specific is not finding the most qualified person, you're going to end up with the person with the most time and patience to fib or lie on their resume.
    > I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
    That's exactly wrong - the best candidates are going to be busy people who are great at their job - the people jumping through HR hoops to get hired are by nature going to be worse candidates.
    whstl · 1790189408 · focus · HN ↗
    So, recebly I got about 600 resumes for a senior backend Python position.
    Out of those about half had no experience in backend or python, and weren't senior enough. Or forgot to include all that in their CV.
    While I'm sure a portion of those could do the job, I can't realistically interview those 300 people when there are other 300 who happen to have at least written that in their CV.
    legitster · 1790189925 · focus · HN ↗
    > So, I recently got about 600 resumes for a senior Python backend position.
    Dear lord the job market is an absolute disaster right now.
    People are clambering for the last helicopter out of Saigon.
    whstl · 1790195303 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh god, I should tell you about the frontend position, then, which got 1000 applicants and then we just closed within a week, despite not having hired anyone yet...
    yuye · 1790205575 · focus · HN ↗
    >Dear lord the job market is an absolute disaster right now.
    Indeed it is, I don't know and would never like to know the levels of desperation one needs to reach to accept writing Python as a career. (I jest, I jest)
    In all seriousness, Python (and the same goes for with Javascript/Typescript) is a popular language that is taught at many bootcamps. I'm sure that has lots to do with the number of applications for these kinds of roles.
    whstl · 1790235781 · focus · HN ↗
    That’s a good theory, but we also get ridiculous numbers for C#, design, product management and, at a previous job, Ruby and devops we also got flooded.
    Honestly the only language we do that gets a normal amount of candidates is C++, but the team that does it complains about quality too, a lot of exaggerated CVs.
    Aurornis · 1790221886 · focus · HN ↗
    > There are any number of great candidates who could be proficient in Python -
    I don't think you understand.
    You have to prioritize. You can't interview everyone.
    There may be someone in the rejection pool who might be able to pick up Python quickly and enjoy it. It does not matter if I have 10 people who can bring 5 years of Python experience to the first day on the job, and 1-2 more people who can bring 10+ years and probably teach us something about Python.
    > the skills are very transferrable. (It's like trying to find a painter and filtering out people who have never painted a brown houses)
    I've painted houses. I've done programming. This analogy is not good at all. Some people don't adapt well to new programming languages. Some people try, then decide they hate the new language and start looking for new jobs. You don't have to risk any of this when you already have more Python applicants than interview slots.
    johnnyanmac · 1790195909 · focus · HN ↗
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    Aurornis · 1790222118 · focus · HN ↗
    > Reply rates can be as bad as 1 in 500.
    I've done volunteer resume review and interview coaching in the past.
    The only people getting response rates that low either had the most awful resumes you've ever seen, or they were applying for jobs completely out of their league.
    Like the 23 year old applying for Staff Software Engineer jobs as the next step up from his junior position (which he was laid off from) with 6 typos in his resume and an e-mail address of ninjadude69@hotmail.com at the top of his resume.
    yesb · 1790196051 · focus · HN ↗
    >Unpopular opinion around these parts, but there's a high correlation between the best candidates and people who take the time to review the job posting and customize their resume before submitting.
    There's also a high correlation between matching the job description perfectly and the resume being AI generated and/or dishonest. Doubly so if the requirements are overly specific or contain pure nonsense as some do (saw "Must have 5 years experience with Claude Code" recently). You can filter out people who blatantly don't match the job and those who obviously just copied the job description. Never seen much correlation between the quality of resumes in the middle (ok to great) and how well they do in interviews.
    Not to mention at many places "requirements" are mere suggestions or a low-effort list of technologies taken from the resume of the person who quit. Everybody has their own filtering rules and hiring managers rarely agree with each other much less the HR people usually doing the first round of filtering. The true requirements come out only at the resume filtering or interview stage.
    >I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
    The "best candidate" a lot of times doesn't mean the best able to do the job. It often means the ones who 1. makes the hiring manager feel good by being enthusiastic about their (statistically) average job for average pay and 2. minimizes their perceived risk of looking bad for their hiring choice.
    >If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.
    If you're not a FAANGMULA type place then sure. But also if your job posting lists something like "Python 3.14" or "7+ years Python" I know the hiring manager probably doesn't know the first thing about python. In that case I think it's fair for any decent programmer to lie because they will likely surpass the hiring managers knowledge by studying python a bit before the interview.
    Aurornis · 1790222000 · focus · HN ↗
    > There's also a high correlation between matching the job description perfectly and the resume being AI generated and/or dishonest.
    If the resume is dishonest we find out in the phone screens or first interview rounds, and the candidate is tossed.
  2. quadrifoliate · 1790186097 · focus · HN ↗
    At this point why don't you try to go out and contact candidates yourself or via a recruiter rather than posting jobs? It seems to me that with LLM-based tools you are going to find it increasingly difficult to get those 2-3 out of the 40; all 40 will be LLM-written to perfect match your posting.
    legitster · 1790186337 · focus · HN ↗
    Especially if the job is posted on LinkedIn. You can already just poll a list of the most qualified candidates and reach out to them with opportunities.
    The problem is companies would actually have to make compelling offers to qualified people.
    pixl97 · 1790186539 · focus · HN ↗
    >via a recruiter
    While not as bad as applying yourself, they can be pretty damned awful.
    Aurornis · 1790186744 · focus · HN ↗
    I do reach out to LinkedIn profiles and some social media accounts, but I'd never use LLM-written text to do so.
    You have to appear like a real human. The candidates in demand get recruiter spam all week long. If you go LLM slop canon on their inbox they're not going to respond.
    Cold outreach has a low response rate. It's worth doing, but you can't rely on it. You have to go through all angles.
    Typically I'd be doing a mix of my own cold outreach, public job postings, an internal company referral program, and for difficult roles a trusted external recruiter who I know is good for candidates.
    gedy · 1790188509 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, I’ve never understood this - earlier in my career this was the standard to have technically skilled hiring managers look for and contact people.
    Now people act like they must have this ridiculous firehose of resumes to sort through, then have non-technical HR gals sort and filter out based on whatever random criteria they use, and then by the time it gets to the hiring managers - they still have no idea if this person is a complete idiot or has any skills at all. The qualified people you actually want to hire don’t want to be treated like idiots or liars either.
    I just don’t feel it has to be this way - there is zero value in a firehose unless you were looking for desperate and cheap people.
    whstl · 1790188861 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think anyone really wants the firehose. It's just something that happens when you advertise on any popular platform.
    However I'll agree with you, the non-technical people sorting CVs on unknown criteria is something that became very widespread lately, and is certainly contributing to the problem.
    criddell · 1790188714 · focus · HN ↗
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    quadrifoliate · 1790193146 · focus · HN ↗
    Even for non-inside hires, I feel like it's more efficient for me as a hiring manager to go out and look for candidates rather than triage some AI-generated pile of crap.
  3. matwood · 1790187328 · focus · HN ↗
    > You have to understand that in that hour I might get 40 resumes. 1 or 2 are amazing, another 2-3 could be worth a look, and another 5 might have made the cut if I didn't just read those 2-5 much better resumes ahead of them.
    This sounds like a dream. We posted a job a couple of weeks ago and had 1200 applications in around 2 days. Most are complete garbage. I'm confused why they took the time to apply at all, even if AI did it for them.
    drillsteps5 · 1790193732 · focus · HN ↗
    If you go through "Show HN" posts you will see multiple projects that partially or completely automate both search and application process. Just set up a bot that searches for newly posted positions matching whatever criteria, customizes the resume, applies. Probably costs a few cents for the applicant, but increases their chances somewhat. And the rest of us deal with the consequences.
    moregrist · 1790194293 · focus · HN ↗
    Some fraction of applications that don’t really fit are submitted by people trying to keep their unemployment benefits. You have to keep applying to continue to qualify, but the jobs don’t have to be a perfect fit.
    Being unemployed is hard and can be really demoralizing. Try thinking “I’m probably helping someone pay rent until they find a job listing that works for them” when you’re rejecting obviously unsuitable applications. It at least makes the “wtf”-ness of some of them seem a little less weird.
    Aurornis · 1790221482 · focus · HN ↗
    > Try thinking “I’m probably helping someone pay rent until they find a job listing that works for them” when you’re rejecting obviously unsuitable applications
    I could believe this if you were in a population 5,000 town with few employers and the person applying had to work in person.
    In our industry, where there are 1000 different remote job listings available to anyone at any time, there is no justification for this.
    brailsafe · 1790223587 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    bluecheese452 · 1790209815 · focus · HN ↗
    A lot of them are also from hostile foreign powers trying to commit economic sabotage.
    gurachek · 1790975546 · focus · HN ↗
    Wow, did anyone read all of them, or did you cut it off somewhere?
  4. johnnyanmac · 1790191489 · focus · HN ↗
    >You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
    Resumes are only a 1 page summary (2 if you're really experienced) and this kind of market has you doing hundreds of submissions if you lack connections (or your connections are also job searching). You don't have the time to tailor every application for every role.
    A shame because LLMs should really be perfect at this. Most current tools are too obsessed with writing for you (and creating a blander resume) instead of just taking a master CV and drag and dropping the most applicable roles/projects/experiences in.
5. MarleTangible · 1790184246 · focus · HN ↗
  There are also a lot of reposts coming from recruiting companies.
  I see a position getting posted for a local company, and within hours the same requirements are showing up for 10 new postings with vague company names like "... is wanted for a local manufacturer" etc.
  1. legitster · 1790184420 · focus · HN ↗
    The way I got my current job is that the company I applied for rejected my application and then hired a recruiter who brought me in with the same application.
    The company essentially handed the recruiter $10k because they were too bad at reviewing their own applications.
    mattm · 1790187749 · focus · HN ↗
    How do hire a recruiter as a candidate?
    legitster · 1790188218 · focus · HN ↗
    In this case the company hired the recruiter because "they couldn't find any candidates".
    Hiring your own recruiter can be kind of a scam - if you do it on your side they'll want ~10% of your first year's salary. But if you're interested in such a thing, all you have to do is so much as wag a finger on LinkedIn and they'll come swarming.
  2. destitude · 1790185159 · focus · HN ↗
    After I scheduled an appointment which I realized was a "recruiter" the zoom link showed the local time zone for the recruiter was from some West African country. I cancelled the appointment.
  3. thepryz · 1790188365 · focus · HN ↗
    This. I can't tell you how many times I've been contacted by a recruiter looking to fill a job that I myself am the hiring manager for or is within my reporting line. When recruiters can't even be bothered to look at the job, company and potentially hiring manager before contacting someone, the system is broken.
6. bluecheese452 · 1790209673 · focus · HN ↗
  A free market requires perfect information. Ghost jobs are the opposite of that.
7. chaosharmonic · 1790211446 · focus · HN ↗
  This kind of stuff wouldn't be happening if we regulated jobs like we regulate banks.
  Those regulations aren't perfect, but after working at one it became pretty clear that a lot of these things wouldn't fly if a bank did them.
  Falsely advertise a financial offering? Pretty clearly actionable.
  Ghost someone after they inquire about one? Deny them for some vague reason? Even just give them an unfavorable rate without specifying as much? Also doesn't hold up. You have to send adverse action notices not just providing clear communication that you're taking some kind of action against them, but giving a clear and objective reason why.
  Call around to everyone someone might have worked for or with for references, without their knowledge or consent? See "clear and objective reason why." Also, if you use a third party to do this there are a whole collection of responsibilities under the Fair Credit Reporting Act -- you have to provide people with copies of the information gathered on request, inform them anytime it's used against them, offer some process for disputing incorrect details... And that threshold is from gathering the data, not from scoring it.
  Never mind equity compensation, which is somehow special in terms of financial disclosures -- whether that's relative to the same company later offering the same stock to the public, or just more generally to any kind of investment offer.
  None of this is any less unreasonable on the employer side.
8. punkbit · 1790542074 · focus · HN ↗
  I agree, it should be ilegal!
justinator · 1790182744 · focus · HN ↗
I was under the impression a large % of jobs posted on jobs sites are done simply for compliance reasons and because HR has some "bullshit jobs" parts to it and the companies will usually simply hire from within the company itself.
1. reticulates · 1790182919 · focus · HN ↗
  Sometimes that can happen but it is not common, certainly not a large % of job posts.
  1. Bratmon · 1790183885 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you have a source on that?
    It would be genuinely shocking to me if someone came up with evidence that the majority of jobs on job sites were made by companies that actually intended to hire the best candidate that applied through that site!
    reticulates · 1790187978 · focus · HN ↗
    Surely you should be looking for evidence of the opposite. Why would a company create a job listing if they aren’t hiring? You are supposing there’s a global conspiracy to create fake job listings.
    Every company I’ve worked at, from startups to big tech have had job listings open when they want to hire someone. Sometimes a job post will stay open for months or even years, not because it is fake but because finding the right candidate is far more important than finding a candidate.
    I empathize with the frustrating experience of seeing job listings that you’re qualified for and not being hired, and certainly a lot of companies half-ass their hiring and do not review every applicant, but fake job listings make very little sense. When they do occur, it’s for obscure reasons, not because that is standard operating procedure.
    The whoishiring thread here on HN regularly sees candidates accuse regularly posting companies of not actually hiring, even though there’s ample evidence these companies are hiring.
    Re: the original claim about job posts being created when the company already has an internal candidate, there are very few organizations where that is necessary. A private company rarely has an obligation to consider outside candidates, it is mostly seen in government recruitment and for visa reasons. Job sites charge lots of money to list, a company wouldn’t waste money advertising a job they don’t intend to hire for.
    Telaneo · 1790197501 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://www.resumebuilder.com/3-in-10-companies-currently-have-fake-job-posting-listed/" rel="nofollow">https://www.resumebuilder.com/3-in-10-companies-currently-ha...
    2024.
    Bratmon · 1790199490 · focus · HN ↗
    The evidence for ghost jobs existing is that a majority of hiring managers openly admit to posting ghost jobs: <a href="https://clarifycapital.com/job-seekers-beware-of-ghost-jobs-survey" rel="nofollow">https://clarifycapital.com/job-seekers-beware-of-ghost-jobs-...
    I'm still waiting for they evidence they don't exist, which was conspicuously absent from your post.
    reticulates · 1790203613 · focus · HN ↗
    Did you read the Clarify Capital? The definition of “ghost job” does not support the point you’re trying to make. The definition of “ghost job” in that article is so broad it includes pretty much every job post. A job post being open for 30 days does not make it a “ghost job” by any reasonable definition. The Congress publication includes no evidence or conclusion and even notes that the issue of ghost jobs is disputed. Did you just google ghost jobs and copy the first 2 links without reading them?
    Bratmon · 1790210280 · focus · HN ↗
    A job posting that's open for 30 days without hiring someone is absolutely a ghost job
    unified101 · 1790227298 · focus · HN ↗
    I rcently joined a hiring process for a role. I think a majority of the jobs will NOT be filled in 30 days, given how the process and coordination works.
  2. justinator · 1790197453 · focus · HN ↗
    n of 1 and all, but most jobs I've gotten that were worth getting were from personal reference. To the extent that applying through job sites seems like a real waste of time unless I'm really desperate.
    And to reflect that, the jobs I've gotten were the ones you'd only accept if you were really desperate.
    (Covid Times, man: Covid Times.)
2. lucicditee · 1790182953 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
3. rubatrejo · 1790183697 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
  1. dang · 1790273252 · focus · HN ↗
    Can you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.
    Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.
mgaldys4 · 1790182961 · focus · HN ↗
At least in my country, a job posting that stays up forever isn't a ghost job. It's a company that can't keep people. Either the conditions are brutal or the pay is garbage.
1. alightsoul · 1790183247 · focus · HN ↗
  What country is it?
  1. mgaldys4 · 1790183495 · focus · HN ↗
    China
2. rubatrejo · 1790183573 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
3. pixl97 · 1790186796 · focus · HN ↗
  Heh, this sounds like the more human case where if you see a person that is single you don't want to go out with them as there's a rather serious reason why they are single.
  1. aqfamnzc · 1790187910 · focus · HN ↗
    I would never date someone with standards low enough to date a person like me. Huge red flag.
AznHisoka · 1790182995 · focus · HN ↗
How do we know if this is normal or not? You really need a historical time series to know if it has always been like this or not
1. blitzar · 1790183472 · focus · HN ↗
  Historically the ad was in a newspaper and you would sit and circle them with your breakfast.
  Companies didnt pay to put the ad in the paper every day once the vacancy was filled.
  1. jrochkind1 · 1790184975 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    blitzar · 1790187705 · focus · HN ↗
    HR was much better at "employee retention" historically.
2. rubatrejo · 1790183544 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
3. pixl97 · 1790187048 · focus · HN ↗
  Job postings in the past were made in places with relatively limited space hence higher costs.
  The internet has turned the cost of the vast majority of job postings to almost nothing.
  Based on that information you tell me how you think the incentives will work?
Aurornis · 1790183094 · focus · HN ↗
This statistic constantly confuses people who haven't done hiring.
If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that. At a large or fast growing company, we might never stop interviewing and hiring senior software engineers. The listing stays open for a year or more.
There are also specialty roles where hiring takes months. I've had niche roles open where we didn't get any applicants with any experience on the topic for over 90 days on multiple occasions.
1. prerok · 1790183186 · focus · HN ↗
  That's fair but still indicates shortage, no?
  1. flockonus · 1790183338 · focus · HN ↗
    Not necessarily indicates any 1 thing; it can be fake job posts to signal growth, could be an extra picky hiring manager, even a decrepit company that forgot to close it.
    prerok · 1790183757 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree with that, just responding to the parent who wrote that their company keeps the hiring listed. So, in their case it's true but in other cases it is not.
    I agree, I should have written a bit more, apologies.
  2. firesteelrain · 1790183349 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s a pipeline requisition or feeder requisition. Sometimes companies will close and refresh it. Can’t rely on job listings alone
  3. Bratmon · 1790184040 · focus · HN ↗
    No, the exact opposite! A high percentage of ghost jobs indicates that there are very few actual jobs open in the field, which suggests an oversupply of workers.
    vanuatu · 1790185951 · focus · HN ↗
    if the listings are open for the reasons OP stated, then yes it does indicate a shortage. if companies hired all the SWEs they wanted they wouldn't still have the listings
    pixl97 · 1790186378 · focus · HN ↗
    100% untrue.
    Let's say I have 50 employees working for $100,000 each.
    Why would I not want to replace 25 of them that are willing to work for $50,000 each if they are producing anywhere close to the same quality.
    In a case like this always open job listings are a warning to others.
    Also there is something called market sampling. Where you put up these job openings and look at the quality of applicants in relation to the employees you already have to ensure you're on the right track internally.
    jameshart · 1790188827 · focus · HN ↗
    > In a case like this always open job listings are a warning to others
    ‘Warning this company has management practices oriented around remaining solvent for the long term, rather than providing a sinecure for workers’?
    pixl97 · 1790190002 · focus · HN ↗
    Warning: This company will replace your ass so far without regard to your actual abilities or their current profitability.
    Companies do not have human rights. They are a pleasant fiction the population allows because it's more effective than not having said rules. We the people can revoke those rules the moment the meta-idea of corporations no longer serve the public good.
    In the US at least we seemingly have come to believe the corporation is the ultimate organism and all rights should be sacrificed for its eternal cancerous growth.
    johnnyanmac · 1790190529 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    smcg · 1790190537 · focus · HN ↗
    What if your $100,000 worker is actually more than twice as productive as your $50,000 worker?
    vanuatu · 1790270778 · focus · HN ↗
    because the pie grows, and if you are in a competitive market which most businesses are in, you don't want to lose talent and market prestige to your competitors
    rsynnott · 1790187980 · focus · HN ↗
    Big companies never hire all the SWEs they want, because there is always attrition. At a certain scale, there will always be people leaving and a constant need to backfill.
    vanuatu · 1790270862 · focus · HN ↗
    Exactly, hence why having jobs open indicates a shortage.
    Bratmon · 1790199253 · focus · HN ↗
    > if companies hired all the SWEs they wanted they wouldn't still have the listings
    I honestly can't tell if this a troll or not, but in case it isn't:
    Because "number job openings" are used as a signal of company health, Ghost Jobs are far far more common than job listings which companies intend to hire from!
    vanuatu · 1790270835 · focus · HN ↗
    Is this true? some of the highest aura companies have very limited jobs open to signal exclusivity
    And large cos are always hiring
    johnnyanmac · 1790190105 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
2. alightsoul · 1790183192 · focus · HN ↗
  So you should apply to old job postings? Consensus in LATAM seems to be, they just forgot to take them down and they already have someone or in Latin America if you repost the same opening over and over the consensus seems to be the company is toxic they have a turnover problem, maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people
  1. mixdup · 1790183448 · focus · HN ↗
    > So you should apply to old job postings?
    Yes. I recently got a job (IT infrastructure engineer with a non-tech company) on a posting that was 6 months old. they had filled it, and at the same time got approval for a second headcount so they never pulled it down
  2. Aurornis · 1790183493 · focus · HN ↗
    Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.
    If the listing is generic like "senior software engineer" and all of the requirements are generic like being able to program or do teamwork, it's probably a generic listing.
    Applying anyway is a safe bet, but I wouldn't invest as much energy into tailoring your resume if it's a 6 month old posting from a 50 person company with a website that looks like it's from 2009. That company probably forgot to take the listing down.
    > maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people
    This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
    The target can also change constantly. At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.
    tempest_ · 1790183859 · focus · HN ↗
    Often you pay to have that posting. For a smaller company they def know that posting is still up. Likely they are just getting poor applications (or need to improve their posting because the right people are not seeing it)
    In the age of LLMs every one is "tailoring" their resume to every posting.
    mort96 · 1790184090 · focus · HN ↗
    This depends a ton on if we're talking about a company's own website's job listings or if it's on some dedicated job listing site.
    CharlieDigital · 1790185051 · focus · HN ↗
    Company's own website job listings are likely actually in an applicant tracking system (ATS) like Greenhouse or Ashby because they need to manage the pipeline, not just list the job.
    pluc · 1790246596 · focus · HN ↗
    I found the "AI tailoring" on par with the rest of AI - it's completely untrustworthy. It makes shit up on my resume because it's in the job offer when I have no experience. We've always had this technology, it's called lying. It may be great to get your foot in the door, but once you have to justify it you're gonna have a hard time.
    alightsoul · 1790262288 · focus · HN ↗
    They don't pay for it continuously. They post it once as a LinkedIn post or a recruiter does it
    mort96 · 1790184039 · focus · HN ↗
    > At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.
    As an analogy it's kinda like hard drives: when one of my hard drives dies, it's An Event which I need to deal with specifically; I need to order a replacement for that specific drive. At Google's server farms, hard drives dying is just a statistic, you continuously buy hard drives just because you know existing drives are gonna die at some semi-predictable rate.
    Sharlin · 1790186621 · focus · HN ↗
    Or a more morbid analogy: military casualties in a war.
    evilduck · 1790187366 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not really an analogy, it's just facts of life. In a large enough company or over a long enough time period at a job or in your career, realistically people actually will eventually die and cause vacancies. I've had two coworkers die, one because of illness, the other because of an auto accident. I stopped using the "bus factor of one" phrase as a result even and use "redundancy or succession planning" since it's not outside the realm of possibility that someone might get hit by a vehicle.
    Sharlin · 1790192761 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure, but in one many more people leave the workforce by being killed and maimed than in the other.
    gchamonlive · 1790197637 · focus · HN ↗
    "Lottery factor" works, though it's more of a mouthful
    arcanemachiner · 1790201164 · focus · HN ↗
    That, and nobody knows what you're talking about.
    gchamonlive · 1790207251 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    vkou · 1790188431 · focus · HN ↗
    More morbidly, military casualties in what the military insists isn't war.
    HeyLaughingBoy · 1790190367 · focus · HN ↗
    Even in peacetime, training accidents kill an expected number of military personnel each year.
    vkou · 1790191801 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not talking about training accidents.
    cindyllm · 1790184057 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    alightsoul · 1790184059 · focus · HN ↗
    No this is not common sense. No company in LATAM has 10000 people. Large companies just aren't a thing here. Most companies here are the 50 people companies you mention so the normal thing is to hire occasionally. And LATAM never had an industrial revolution so software positions are just rare unless the company is larger than the local average. If you do find one, it's not a pure one or is service oriented, not to build a product. What I mean is, building a technological product is rare let alone as a product company in LATAM and most technical positions are service or outsourcing oriented. If you find a technical product role like being a mobile developer, it's often not at a company that offers a technological product but a service in another industry like a bank
    alt227 · 1790184241 · focus · HN ↗
    I googled and literally the first result was LATAM Airlines who have 44,000 employees.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LATAM_Airlines" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LATAM_Airlines
    alightsoul · 1790184524 · focus · HN ↗
    Airlines and state owned companies seem to be the exception
    alt227 · 1790185563 · focus · HN ↗
    ok, that statement seems a bit different than your previous one of "No company in LATAM has 10000 people."
    rsynnott · 1790187751 · focus · HN ↗
    Except for the companies who have 10000 people, no companies in LATAM have 10000 people.
    alt227 · 1790188095 · focus · HN ↗
    Love the logic, have an upvote.
    zormino · 1790188781 · focus · HN ↗
    So América Móvil doesn't have nearly 200k? There are plenty of LATAM companies with more than 10k people.
    hatsix · 1790219366 · focus · HN ↗
    This was an intentional fallacy for comedic effect, specifically "No True Scotsman"
    bonesss · 1790190110 · focus · HN ↗
    I think we can all agree No True LATAM company would have 10,000 employees.
    mamcx · 1790195837 · focus · HN ↗
    I think he means "software companies".
    Large companies exist, but pure software companies or with heavy side of it?
    benjojo12 · 1790184275 · focus · HN ↗
    Petrobras?
    mort96 · 1790184491 · focus · HN ↗
    You don't think MercadoLibre has job postings open all the time just to replace the people who are leaving? They're around 120 000 people, is each of those people hand-picked for a particular position and not just hired because they know they need to replace some percentage of workers who'll leave?
    shagie · 1790185200 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Brazilian_companies" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Brazilian_comp...
    While the 9th largest is 7,777 people reported... all the others are at least 40,000 people and the largest two are over 100,000.
    Itaú Unibanco <a href="https://www.itau.com.br/download-file/v2/d/42787847-4cf6-4461-94a5-40ed237dca33/cd566e80-cd88-2a79-2862-6e39caa2f3f9?origin=2" rel="nofollow">https://www.itau.com.br/download-file/v2/d/42787847-4cf6-446... shows 80,657 employees in Brazil in Q2 of 2026.
    And for tech jobs... <a href="https://carreiras.itau.com.br/busca-de-vagas/software/35299/1" rel="nofollow">https://carreiras.itau.com.br/busca-de-vagas/software/35299/...
    Is it a big list? No. Is it a bank? Yep... but then Capital One is a large employer of tech in the US. Estimates put Walmart (certainly not a "tech" company) at having 20,000 technical roles.
    Discriminating between technology product and technology role at a "regular" industry or service seems a bit biased. I (software developer) haven't worked at a tech company for the past two decades (and frankly, while wages are lower than the tech company jobs my job stability is much higher).
    xtracto · 1790201316 · focus · HN ↗
    Lol
    Bimbo
    Femsa
    Grupo Salinas
    oejxiwjxjwjd · 1790184145 · focus · HN ↗
    > you can assume that they're always hiring.
    You can, but you’re probably wrong and are wasting your time and effort going through lord knows how many hoops to submit a simple CV.
    Were submissions as simple as “here’s my CV, contact me if you like what you see”, then this wouldn’t be a problem. But when you have to sign up to the millionth HR service with the same 50 “please input the info that’s already on the resume you’re submitting” steps over and over again just to never hear back from the company or get rejected 6 months later, “submit away” is not an acceptable answer.
    > This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
    Yes, it would. Even if only 1 of the 10 spots is available, it still is a valid listing. Not knowing if the listing is valid at all is way worse.
    Asking for “common sense” only works if the situation you are in makes sense to begin with. Job listings are a cesspit of bad behaviour, dark patterns, disrespectful processes and incongruous offers.
    What we need is some sort of regulation on how job listings are posted and how candidates can and should apply.
    While we’re at it, it should be utterly ILLEGAL and absolutely liable to have a job listing up with no salary range or a salary range that’s too wide to give a sense of what compensation looks like—lying about it should trigger serious legal consequences as well.
    It’s about time candidates were treated with some dignity.
    alt227 · 1790184285 · focus · HN ↗
    This kind of attitude is why some people cant find jobs. Meanwhile the ones who just emailed their cv and didnt overthink it are happily working.
    oejxiwjxjwjd · 1790184555 · focus · HN ↗
    What kind of attitude? Wanting employers to respect my goddamned time? Wanting to know how much employers are willing to pay for my services?
    Yeah. I want a job listing to actively tell me how much I stand to gain in exchange for my time and skills. How absolutely entitled of me. Imagine that? A potential employee wanting to know upfront how much their time is worth in the eyes of a potential employer? Nonsense! You get what you get and you don’t get upset.
    If that’s your line of reasoning then I can only assume you’re exactly the type of employer that indulges in such practices.
    SoftTalker · 1790185432 · focus · HN ↗
    Good luck on your job hunt.
    oejxiwjxjwjd · 1790185610 · focus · HN ↗
    Very kind of you good stranger. I’m not job hunting at the moment but I appreciate the support!
    alt227 · 1790185665 · focus · HN ↗
    The UK is currently passing laws to make every job listing include salary:
    <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg7gg2zdexo" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg7gg2zdexo
    oejxiwjxjwjd · 1790185745 · focus · HN ↗
    That’s a good start.
    jambalaya8 · 1790218112 · focus · HN ↗
    It would be nice if they passed a law to also make every job listing represent an actual job opening at the actual company (or their representative). There are too many postings that are all about "collecting people", forming candidate algorithms, tracking applicants, and mining. It is really grotesque.
    Avicebron · 1790185105 · focus · HN ↗
    This is not helpful and untrue, if you've tried to apply for jobs within the laat ~6+ years you will know it's screaming into the void. New accounts for the N+ glassdoor/indeed/bamboo/handshake/yougettheidea clones. Poorly pulling information from an uploaded resume, requiring manually editing or adding the info _every_ time. If your dilligent/dumb you writing a cover letter for each one (no AI the signal is too bad), then you submit it and wait an arbitrary amount of time for the rejection. There is a good reason people are complaining, it's asinine to put this on jpb seekers.
    alt227 · 1790185509 · focus · HN ↗
    > if you've tried to apply for jobs within the laat ~6+ years you will know it's screaming into the void
    I have applied for, and got, 3 jobs in the last 8 years. So yeah I think I am allowed an opinion on it without people telling me Im wrong.
    oejxiwjxjwjd · 1790185716 · focus · HN ↗
    Two things can be true. I’ve applied to a few jobs in the last few years and got a few of them as well. Does not mean that the hoops I had to jump through were any less demeaning, disrespectful or downright stupid.
    legitster · 1790189822 · focus · HN ↗
    If OP is a hiring manager, they're on the other side of the job market right now. It can be true that managers have no problems getting jobs and the rest of us do.
    pacija · 1790194790 · focus · HN ↗
    It is even weirder in my case. I am not applying for any jobs, recruiters reach out to me. After exchanging plesantries with HR ladies at video calls they ask me what are my salary expectations. I explain them there are two options. For full time employment I expect them to give me their best offer for me to consider. For consulting I expect them to give me exact goals so I can give them exact quote. I mostly never hear back from them, in rare cases they say their technical colleagues reviewed my resume and decided I am not appropriate candidate. I suspect most of them are just mining data about salary expectations.
    platevoltage · 1790192100 · focus · HN ↗
    Nobody is allowed to do anything without someone telling them they're wrong.
    edoceo · 1790210190 · focus · HN ↗
    Wrong, sometimes you're right.
    ghostly_s · 1790199068 · focus · HN ↗
    Three jobs in 8 years? Seems like a red flag, we want to hire someone who will stick around.[1]
    1. (Actual feedback I got in an interview two weeks ago, for a position no sane person would want to stay in for longer than two years.)
    alt227 · 1790259875 · focus · HN ↗
    Fair enough, dont hire me. There are thousands of jobs out there.
    tayo42 · 1790194191 · focus · HN ↗
    Greenhouse saves your info and auto fills it. Companied that use Ashby are pretty much upload your resume. Only workday sucks or other random small ones that show up.
    ghostly_s · 1790199266 · focus · HN ↗
    Workday is the only one of these I’ve heard of or encountered in the US.
    tayo42 · 1790200667 · focus · HN ↗
    Probably because workday sucks so much that you notice it.
    yuye · 1790195376 · focus · HN ↗
    >then you submit it and wait an arbitrary amount of time for the rejection
    You get rejections? When I was jobhunting, half of the companies I applied to never replied to me.
    LoganDark · 1790189214 · focus · HN ↗
    Two times I posted in the "Who wants to be hired?" HN thread in the past few years, I had a job within the month. But this year, I've been posting there for over 6 months and nothing. Not sure if attitude is such a big factor -- the job market kinda does what it does. You do make a mistake by not putting yourself out there though, because then there's basically no chance that an opportunity will come your way.
    johnnyanmac · 1790189802 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    ghostly_s · 1790195336 · focus · HN ↗
    "Just email your cv" is literally impossible at many employers today. the app process is absolutely far more onerous for the applicant than it was a generation ago. For a bit of silver lining, I have noticed the "auto-populate from my resume" feature actually works reasonably well on some sites, which was not the case just a couple years ago when I was last looking.
    ikr678 · 1790207636 · focus · HN ↗
    Also, in some orgs you physically cannot send the cv.
    I can't send or recieve documents as email attachments anymore to external stakeholders, everything must be via sharepoint link.
    That, plus a decade of compulsory anti phishing training means no half competent HR person should be blind opening an attachment that says 'CV'.
    Telaneo · 1790196150 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know a single person who's got a job by just emailing their CV. In fact, it reads as asinine as the idea that you can get a job by just showing up in person with a good handshake.
    ikr678 · 1790207378 · focus · HN ↗
    Taking time off your existing role to do multiple interviews for something that turns out to pay 10-15% less than you are currently on is insulting.
    red-iron-pine · 1790271206 · focus · HN ↗
    how are you getting to multiple interviews without having a concrete-ish idea of what the pay will be?
    literally the first thing I talk about with recruiters during an initial phone screen.
    yeah okay there may be a ~5-10k, maybe even a little more, bit of wiggle-room but if I can't make a reasonable guess where I'll land why would I even consider interview #2 when I already have an existing role?
    bee_rider · 1790192203 · focus · HN ↗
    It is required to post a salary range in some states. Sometimes they are quite wide, but realistically in the posting I see the posters seem to be taking the rule in good faith.
    Signing up for another page is a bit annoying (especially for places that are all using the same platform, like Workday—I understand these are probably self-hosted or kept disconnected on purpose, but still it could be nice if there was a separate global space for applicants, then we could just be imported in).
    To some extent it would be nice if it was harder to apply. Like I used to be happy to see a cover letter required, as that’d filter out some of the competition. Now people can just AI generate their cover letters I guess, so I mostly avoid postings that require them unless I’m really excited. (I think LLMs mostly review the applicants these days as well, and I’m pretty sure LLMs prefer LLM-speak, so it’s a losing proposition).
    locknitpicker · 1790184558 · focus · HN ↗
    > Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.
    Common sense would dictate that a company with 10,000 people has a need for a diverse set of roles, and it would be completely stupid to recycle the same template pretending the role was always the same. In fact, repeating a stale advert suggests the company does in fact not have positions opened and either forgot to pull an old advert or some recruiter is trawling for applications to pretend to be productive.
    Sharlin · 1790187209 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t think common sense suggests that at all. It’s like saying that the US armed forces requires soldiers with many specialized skillsets (which is true) so clearly it should recruit to every individual role and post separately.
    A large company may have a few actually-very-special-role positions open for every hundred generic "our tech stack is this and isn’t going to change" developer roles.
    platevoltage · 1790192479 · focus · HN ↗
    Perhaps the armed forces are doing something right, and the tech industry is not.
    shagie · 1790194453 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    platevoltage · 1790196659 · focus · HN ↗
    People used to spend their entire careers at a single company. Something changed, and it wasn't worker attitude.
    shagie · 1790198051 · focus · HN ↗
    One of the biggest changes since then is that there are companies that a different scale of revenue per employee ( <a href="https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28google%2C+meta%29+revenue+per+employee" rel="nofollow">https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28google%2C+meta%29+re... ) and pay accordingly.
    While there's nothing wrong with those companies paying such, it drastically changes the incentives for the regular employee. Going to work in Big Tech can be like winning the lottery (in the dot com boom, I had about 6 million on paper... that I didn't sell before the crash).
    That there is drastically different industries with correspondingly different levels of compensation has incentivized the person who can change jobs to move from a $60k job to a $120k job to a $250k job to do so.
    In the 90s I was making $50k/year ($50k '95 -> $109k '26 <a href="https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm ).
    The companies where people used to work a decade or two or three are still there and in many cases, largely unchanged.
    bluecheese452 · 1790209134 · focus · HN ↗
    This is so out of touch
    shagie · 1790212307 · focus · HN ↗
    There are companies out there where managers, mechanical engineers, marketing, and all the other non-technology roles work at for a decade or two. It's the software developers and IT people who switch jobs after two years working there.
    What's the difference between those job types? It's that software development and IT have a multimodal salary with much greater discrepancy between the companies that fall into the distribution around the lowest mode and the highest mode.
    <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal" rel="nofollow">https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal
    If you switch from working at a local area company to Big Tech, you significantly increase your salary. For other careers, going from the local job to the national big company will likely give a much smaller boost.
    Here are the stats for tenure: <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf
    Table 6 (last page) shows the median tenure by job classification. Computer and mathematical occupations are the ones that were going down between 2014 and 2020. The others were holding fairly constant.
    Table 2 shows 21% of people 35 and older have 10 years or more of tenure at their employer. At 45 years old, it's 45%.
    I still hold that software development is the outlier for shorter tenure and the largest factor driving that is that you can quit your job and get a new one that pays twice as much.
    Do you have an alternate explanation for this data or published data that contradicts this?
    braj0 · 1790284866 · focus · HN ↗
    What an incredible contribution to the discussion!
    locknitpicker · 1790231195 · focus · HN ↗
    > People used to spend their entire careers at a single company. Something changed, and it wasn't worker attitude.
    The US-style neoliberal attitude towards decimating the workforce at a drop of a hat for PR purposes does have a chilling effect on any employee's trust.
    But don't fool yourself: one of the most important tools anyone has to improve their life and wellbeing is the ability to switch jobs.
    red-iron-pine · 1790271588 · focus · HN ↗
    > unblock career progression by sidestepping your current job's corporate constraints
    no shit I work with multiple people that dipped out of their old gig, did 2 years somewhere else, and came back at a much more senior level to their old job because HR limits how often you can get promoted or increases inside a bracket.
    jumping matters, as does the potential threat of jumping.
    locknitpicker · 1790230885 · focus · HN ↗
    > Perhaps the armed forces are doing something right, and the tech industry is not.
    This shows some ignorance on the history of work relations. The bad old days of industrial guilds and company towns are not renowned for quality of life and independence. Your life was tied to the company, and all you could aspire to do in your life would be to toil in the same low paying job while mixing up your corporate structure with your life's social structure. If god forbid you lost your job, you and your family you'd also lose your whole life.
    Tell me how this is doing things right.
    johnnyanmac · 1790189161 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    Gattopardo · 1790191566 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't believe this matters all that much any more. Greenhouse for example has a dashboard feature that basically acts as a firehose for jobs posted through the platform, and it's had zero impact on my ability to get interviews even if I'm applying within the first hour or less. Things are just worse than ever.
    ElProlactin · 1790227288 · focus · HN ↗
    > If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring.
    Perhaps true in the most literal sense, but you cannot assume that it's true in the practical sense.
    Lots of companies have laid off significant numbers of people, particularly in certain roles. There will always be some turnover that requires hiring at a large company but this does not mean that you should assume there are always open positions for your role.
    Submitting to a large company for roles that are in secular decline within that company is mostly a waste of time.
    It's also not uncommon for natural turnover to be used as an organic way to downsize, with a role for a person who just left remaining unfilled.
  3. maccard · 1790184412 · focus · HN ↗
    You should, but you should always apply as early as possible.
    The main reason the jobs are reposted are to get them to the top of the feed
  4. CharlieDigital · 1790184953 · focus · HN ↗
    You pay for job listings so it would be silly to not take them down.
  5. rudedogg · 1790186872 · focus · HN ↗
    Lots of startups keep listings open to imply growth, which is lame/gross
  6. rsynnott · 1790187649 · focus · HN ↗
    If it’s a big company, anyway, then yeah. A FAANG type hires thousands of engineers a year. They are not going to have a bespoke ad per position.
  7. aDyslecticCrow · 1790191933 · focus · HN ↗
    I got a job by applying to an old listing, for the wrong city.
    Small companies may look to fill a certain set of skill-sets, and if that is filled by one person or three doesn't matter much; can puzzle around to make the workload fit what is found. large companies may hire 10 people generically, but may stop at 5 if they don't like the candidates, or hire 16 after a good set of resumes.
    Forcing companies to be overly specific in the roles is just making it harder to apply.
  8. jimbob45 · 1790192594 · focus · HN ↗
    Been awhile since I’ve been in the job hunt but doesn’t Indeed at least have an option to display the number of roles open on each posting? Wouldn’t that solve this issue pretty easily?
  9. j45 · 1790197499 · focus · HN ↗
    It seems like if you're interested in a role it's ok to apply and be in their system and that much more discoverable.
    Being able to reach out and have a chat with the HR manager either way also makes a candidate more human.
3. tayo42 · 1790183279 · focus · HN ↗
  I think people just latch onto ideas that try to simplify and make sense of frustrating situations where they dont have control. "Ghost jobs" are thing to blame now, for a while is was that taxcode thing for software engineers.
  1. johnnyanmac · 1790190810 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
4. guywithahat · 1790183302 · focus · HN ↗
  I see this for experienced roles too, especially where pay isn't super competitive. If you need a lead software engineer in a certain city for a certain salary, that often means waiting months for them to come across it. 10 junior engineers may apply but ultimately they just can't perform the role required
5. rubatrejo · 1790183515 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
6. nitwit005 · 1790185176 · focus · HN ↗
  Then you'd still only have a small number of roles up, not the thousands of positions the article is showing for some companies. They'd be hiring hundreds of thousands a year if they were constantly interviewing for all of them, and I don't believe O'Reilly Auto Parts is recruiting people as quickly as a nation at war.
  1. shagie · 1790187337 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    georgel · 1790194284 · focus · HN ↗
    When I lived in the area about 6 years ago, I had 3rd party recruiters reach out to me about roles that they don't list. The whole region it felt like was 70% contractors (W-2 with the contracting firm), until the company really liked you and bought out your contract and converted you to an actual employee.
    Surprisingly I had better benefits at the two contracting firms than what employees were getting.
    bluecheese452 · 1790209291 · focus · HN ↗
    That is point, these are fake roles.
7. mindtricks · 1790185321 · focus · HN ↗
  I'm curious, for the niche or senior roles, have you personally read through the resumes or do you depend on the recruiter? I hear you on the entry and early-career jobs, but I see Director and VP roles also open for months. With all the layoffs, it's hard to belief there is not SOME talent in there worth hiring or at least training up.
8. legitster · 1790185407 · focus · HN ↗
  As someone with a niche job and title (and comes pretty decorated), I would expect to hear back on my applications more often and yet I get nothing either. There are some prominent companies (cough Figma, Smartsheet, Stripe cough) who literally have had an open role for exactly my job for nearly 3+ years without filling it.
  Maybe I'm thinking a bit too much of myself, but it doesn't seem like they are that interested in really filling it.
  1. ak6te · 1790189302 · focus · HN ↗
    This is probably too broad a category for anecdata to mean much, but just to balance the scales I've recently started looking in a job category that I thought was niche, but not that niche. I've heard back from something like 11/13 applications, often the same or next day.
    smcg · 1790190492 · focus · HN ↗
    That's unusual. Most applicants are sending out dozens or hundreds of applications for a sub-20% response rate.
9. thesuitonym · 1790186355 · focus · HN ↗
  This is exactly why hiring is such a mess, lazy managers who don't want to repost job listings or put any effort into hiring. Job seekers need to apply to thousands of jobs because they have no way of knowing if a company is actually hiring. Which means hiring managers (who we have already established are lazy) now are incentivised to find ways to not look at resumes.
10. mandeepj · 1790186420 · focus · HN ↗
  Your response tells me you haven’t done much hiring, if at all, or, even if you have, you haven’t done it very well. You’re being unnecessarily defensive. Someone who actually knows what they’re doing, when hiring multiple people, keeps a count of the positions and, if they want to be transparent, updates it as people are hired and onboarded. It’s not that hard.
  1. mjr00 · 1790186648 · focus · HN ↗
    I've done hiring at AWS and many other companies and the OP is 100% accurate, so I don't know why you speak with such confidence
    You could argue that AWS doesn't know what they're doing but they also hire way more software developers than all but a handful of other companies
11. ndiddy · 1790186847 · focus · HN ↗
  You also have to deal with delusional hiring managers. A few months ago I remember seeing a comment on here from someone who had kept job listings up for years while hiring because he couldn't find anyone with the "right experience". Clearly there was no actual imminent need to fill the role and he was just hoping that some superstar would stumble across it, but he kept insisting that this counted as "really hiring for the role".
  1. ghostly_s · 1790199943 · focus · HN ↗
    aka the person willing to work for a fraction of their worth.
12. juneyi · 1790189684 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
13. jghn · 1790189891 · focus · HN ↗
  Another confounder is the opposite. When I've been hiring I'd often open up different public recs for the same role to cast a broader net. Some people self identify with certain terms and may not realize they'd be a fit.
  So what would happen is I'd have say 10 real openings, I may have 5 different job postings, and all of them would stay open until I filled all 10 openings.
14. robotpepi · 1790190006 · focus · HN ↗
  This doesn't make any sense. You try to explain a 28% by arguing based on edge cases.
15. probably_wrong · 1790191287 · focus · HN ↗
  I was recently job searching and roughly 50% of all jobs ghosted me. Just an automated email and then... silence. And when applying via LinkedIn only ~5% of companies even opened my application.
  I can believe that your company has a good reason for keeping the job up, but I also know that some job ads are black holes were no one bothers to do the bare minimum including taking the posting down. I have no idea how to differentiate one from the other.
  1. IshKebab · 1790198649 · focus · HN ↗
    50% is a pretty damn good response rate! I wouldn't complain about that.
    It's not surprising about LinkedIn. They've made applying for jobs too easy so there's too much noise. I wouldn't bother applying for jobs there. LinkedIn is great for recruiters though - just put some effort into your profile, set it to "looking for work", and then reply to interesting recruiter spam. That's how I got my last 3 jobs.
    juneyi · 1790259892 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    perganomoly · 1790274800 · focus · HN ↗
    You mean “Open to Work”? If yes, did you turn on the green ring around your profile pic?
    IshKebab · 1790282972 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah exactly. I don't know what the green ring is so.. no!
16. moralestapia · 1790191982 · focus · HN ↗
  I don't think you've actually done any hiring.
  Companies don't need a "software engineer" x100.
  Large companies have teams, and every team puts out a different job description based on their particular requirements, stack, desired experience, etc.
  I've never encountered a scenario where someone wants engineers in bulk and then they'll decide where to place them within the organization.
  1. senordevnyc · 1790208832 · focus · HN ↗
    Multiple big tech companies have historically done exactly this. I got hired at a public tech company as an iOS engineer in 2020 and they made an offer, I accepted, and then I got to meet with the managers of several teams and pick the one I wanted to work with. Single job posting.
  2. sokoloff · 1790249610 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
17. basscomm · 1790192085 · focus · HN ↗
  > If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that. At a large or fast growing company, we might never stop interviewing and hiring senior software engineers. The listing stays open for a year or more.
  How on earth am I, a potential job seeker, supposed to be able to figure out if your year-old job posting is still up because you: couldn't find anyone after a year, are constantly hiring and never take it down, actually hired your quota six months ago and HR forgot to take the listing down, the job listing isn't for a real job and is just a trap to collect resumes, the listing is for a ghost job to placate the overworked current staff, some other reason?
  1. bartread · 1790192457 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean, in 26 years in the industry I’ve never worked anywhere that kept ads up for jobs that had already been filled. Not even on their own websites where hosting those ads is effectively free (as opposed to LinkedIn et al where you have to pay).
    I’m not saying there are no companies that keep non-live job ads up purely for fishing purposes but, in my experience, it’s not the norm. It would really piss jobseekers off and that’s the kind of word that tends to get around and make it harder to hire in future. Maybe not if you’re a FAANG, because so many people want to work for you anyway, but it’s going to cause problems for “normal” companies.
    basscomm · 1790193454 · focus · HN ↗
    Anecdotes are not data, etc, but several years ago I worked for a mom & pop company that conducted interviews with people for a job that didn't exist 'just to see what was out there', so stuff like that definitely does happen. (That place eventually went out of business for unrelated reasons)
    Telaneo · 1790196650 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://www.resumebuilder.com/3-in-10-companies-currently-have-fake-job-posting-listed/" rel="nofollow">https://www.resumebuilder.com/3-in-10-companies-currently-ha...
    2024.
    lokar · 1790197102 · focus · HN ↗
    I worked at several FAANG and similar companies for 20 years. We were always hiring from new grad up to principal. Just a handful of generic position descriptions.
    ghostly_s · 1790199857 · focus · HN ↗
    I think the more common case is listings that are technically "open" but due to slow internal processes, repositioning, etc etc, no work is being done towards filling them that is visible to candidates.
    For example, I've personally witnessed situations where the funding for a role gets postponed to next quarter, but my manager just kept it open anyway, either out of fear of missing out on the perfect candidate if they stopped accepting apps, or because it's simply easier than going through the HR process to re-post it in a month.
18. dzonga · 1790194845 · focus · HN ↗
  having experienced the UK & US markets - I can tell you within the startup cohort those using lever / Ashby etc - it's not that they have multiple positions - but they're tryna pull an illusion of growth specially in the UK market.
  because luckily in the UK market - companies books are open to the public.
19. devy · 1790195093 · focus · HN ↗
  The article is a content marketing piece. The goal is to attract attention, not necessarily to be precise or accurate
20. throwaway27448 · 1790195750 · focus · HN ↗
  > We leave it open and collect resumes through that.
  This is really shitty behavior. If you aren't hiring, remove the posting.
  1. shaewest · 1790195860 · focus · HN ↗
    How is it shitty behaviour. "I are hiring 10 people, we won't remove the job listing until 10 people are hired."
    throwaway27448 · 1790234202 · focus · HN ↗
    If I apply to a job, I expect you to get back to me within the week. Anything else is just disrespectful to me and wasting my time.
    sokoloff · 1790249433 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
21. harry8 · 1790198933 · focus · HN ↗
  Can’t be bothered to update a job ad on your own websites. Can’t be bothered to respond to applicants.
  WTF do these people doing hiring actually do?
  I mean, naievly you’d think encouraging more higher quality applicants would be important somehow, but no.
22. cdavid · 1790204654 · focus · HN ↗
  This is not done everywhere. I've never hired in the US, but worked for companies in Europe and JP, from <100 people companies to FAANG, and all of them opened dedicated listing for every position we had to fill.
  1. sokoloff · 1790205266 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
23. justinator · 1790205575 · focus · HN ↗
  >If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times.
  I'm not confused that's just a red flag not to work for your company.
  1. jarito · 1790206228 · focus · HN ↗
    Umm...why? Consider the alternate approach. What if I listed 10 Sr Software Eng roles. What would job seekers do? If you said 'apply to all of them', you'd be right. In general, the same recruiter will be responsible for all applications for the same role (e.g. all sr software engineers). There is no benefit to anyone in having the same resume in there 10 times.
    justinator · 1790277186 · focus · HN ↗
    If you are, for a year, constantly hiring senior software engineers? That tells me you're just throwing engineers at problems, which is not how problems are solved elegantly. That sliding into Brook's Law.
    jarito · 1790478539 · focus · HN ↗
    A quick google puts the tech annual turnover rate at 13% - 25%. Let's assume 10% just to be safe. Let's also define 'senior' engineer to be a Software Engineer 4 and above (so not 1-3) - that seems pretty common in terms of titles.
    If you have a 100 person eng team split into 10 person teams. You will likely need one to two senior engineers per team. That means you are probably replacing 1-2 a year.
    Now scale this to a larger company. Amazon has 100k engineers, Apple has 40k - 50k. Even outside of tech, Chase bank has 60k, even Target has 5k.
    At the low end of that, a 5k engineering team (still assuming 10 per team and 1-2 of those are seniors) will have 500 - 1000 senior engineers. If they are attriting at 10%, then we would need 50 - 100 senior engineers a year. Hiring senior talent usually takes 3 - 9 months, so you'd easily need 10 open recs all the time just to keep your team at the same size.
    This is pretty generous. Given remote work, the % of senior engineers has gone up, a 10 person average team size is still high, and I used 10% attrit which is low according to the average. Most large companies have large eng teams these days :).
24. ppeetteerr · 1790209247 · focus · HN ↗
  As a hiring manager, I approve this message.
25. chaosharmonic · 1790209755 · focus · HN ↗
  That seems like something you could pretty easily solve for by just specifying that it's for multiple posts, or that it's an evergreen position.
26. kakacik · 1790236847 · focus · HN ↗
  Yeah my hiring into current job (bank) took 6 months. I even quit the previous job, and date of start kept pushing. Job post was still there.
  At one point I flatly threatened to hiring agency I am quitting the process if this goes on further, and all was finished within a week or two.
  Corporations work in mysterious (aka chaotic) ways. Even though it usually boils down to specific manager being lazy ass.
27. rayiner · 1790245641 · focus · HN ↗
  Nobody is confused. It’s propaganda to justify further immigration to flood the labor market and, these days, additionally to quell fears about AI-related job losses.
28. _DeadFred_ · 1790261524 · focus · HN ↗
  Then post a disclaimer that this is a generic position post to gather resumes. Don't publish lies to people that a role is open.
29. red-iron-pine · 1790264024 · focus · HN ↗
  I dispute this. I have done hiring, and each listing was one-to-one tied to a role inside the CRM and talent trackers.
  But to find the actual candidate who fills the role? yeah potentially months.
  Entry to mid level was exploding -- 800+ applicants each time -- but for mid-to-high or manager roles we'd get 40 apps and maybe 2 were fits.
syntaxing · 1790183372 · focus · HN ↗
I conduct interviews pretty often for various levels. Interviews seems so broken from both sides. Hard to find jobs that aren’t ghost jobs. Hard to find candidates that won’t cheat using AI and actually know their stuff. Just feels like AI has made hiring in tech even more inefficient which says a lot.
1. gib444 · 1790186175 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
  1. SpicyLemonZest · 1790187437 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    skeptic_ai · 1790188147 · focus · HN ↗
    Why you don’t make harder questions that would probably require to use ai?
    Real job you have ai, so no point to ask too many things that ai can answer anyway.
    Ok, some big level stuff like node has an event loop.
    SpicyLemonZest · 1790189416 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
  2. whstl · 1790188092 · focus · HN ↗
    If they can't do even a vibe check without reading from a screen, I'd say yeah, it's worse than cheating.
  3. hightrix · 1790201045 · focus · HN ↗
    If I’m asking you about previous projects you’ve worked on using X technology, then yes I would consider it cheating to use AI to answer.
    gib444 · 1790231324 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    hightrix · 1790288335 · focus · HN ↗
    The line is where ever it needs to be for the role and the candidate. Hiring is subjective, using AI to tell me about your previous projects is a signal you are sending. For some roles that may be a positive signal for others it may be negative.
    But if you can’t talk about your personal experience without AI telling you what to say, then I don’t want to hire you.
    gib444 · 1790318575 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
2. blablabla123 · 1790189173 · focus · HN ↗
  I've been asked to do take homes for different companies recently. Each time I was very confused whether using AI is acceptable, desirable, required or unacceptable. One time I asked just in time, the other time I wasn't sure if even using Google was okay.
  I mean in University there were tests where you were allowed to bring a cheat sheet, or even a bag full of books. So called bag tests. And people were still able to fail. Although I never had the latter in my curriculum.
  I think it's necessary that teams for which people are hired for brainstorm up-to-date tests. Just recycling the same challenge from 3 years ago isn't good enough.
3. sidrag22 · 1790191532 · focus · HN ↗
  if its remote initially, closed eye interviews where you just have a discussion might be easiest way. Pretty easy to tell if someone is bullshitting if they can't discuss topics that likely should excite them somewhat, or at the very least topics they've been around for years.
  Feel like any test nowadays should INCLUDE ai, but you likely just want insight into how they are getting from A to B. I don't wanna assume what you mean by cheating with AI, could be as simple as answering live questions with cheating software or whatever, which is obviously a huge issue. I wanna respond and say it should be expected for any take home type stuff, and be rolled into the expectations if anything, but that could be way off of what you mean.
  both sides of the entire process is just a nightmare now, one side has all this noise to sift through, and the other side is pressured to mass apply because of all the competing noise they can't be seen through. I was listening to something about AI generated responses, and they seemed to have no empathy for the people who gave human responses, but used AI to give them an overview of the company and what it does for the question "why do you want to work at x?", and sorta mocked the person because they can tell they asked for a generic description of what the company does.
  There has to be some give and take, initial applications if you are spending hours researching a single company, you are setting yourself up to be absurdly let down if that same company sends you an automated rejection within a day. A reasonable person will only do that so many times, before just giving up and waiting for the other side to be the first mover instead.
jonas21 · 1790183511 · focus · HN ↗
Every time I've hired someone at a big company, it's taken multiple months to get candidates through the pipeline, and it was not uncommon to have to go back to the candidate pool when someone would accept an offer and change their mind before starting. 90 days to fill a role would be considered relatively quick.
1. jt2190 · 1790183944 · focus · HN ↗
  Remember that the average job candidate is absolutely clueless about how positions are created and filled in real life, so seeing bad assumptions like “most positions are filled in under ninety days” shouldn’t be surprising.
2. esseph · 1790183964 · focus · HN ↗
  I am hearing from multiple people in hiring departments at different companies that they are doing 7-9 rounds of interviews for non-coding tech roles.
  These companies have lost their minds.
  1. alistairSH · 1790184982 · focus · HN ↗
    That sounds pretty insane to me.
    IME (hiring, not interviewing) it's always been 3-4 rounds. First is an HR phone screen (usually 20-30 minutes on the phone), 2nd with hiring manager, 3rd with a senior engineer/architect, and a 4th with the hiring VP. And those are almost always combined into a single morning or afternoon(2+3 or 3+4) and the final round doesn't always happen (VP's choice).
  2. gib444 · 1790186010 · focus · HN ↗
    It's just cruel
    pixl97 · 1790186723 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe the cruelty is the point? They are looking for people that will put up with bullshit and suffering?
    whstl · 1790187812 · focus · HN ↗
    I'd say it's more incompetence than cruelty. People (edit: I mean companies) have options and don't know how to filter, so they just go nuts in the worst possible way.
    smcg · 1790190790 · focus · HN ↗
    Or they don't have options and have to put up with it.
    whstl · 1790191503 · focus · HN ↗
    From the candidates point of view, that's definitely the case.
    gib444 · 1790193057 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh absolutely. And psychopaths enjoying inflicting the torture
  3. darth_avocado · 1790194057 · focus · HN ↗
    7-9 rounds just means 7-9 conversations. Just talking to a recruiter and the manager are 2 rounds. So 5-7 interviews that evaluate competency. You usually get the lower end unless you ended up giving mixed signals.
    Sounds like asking a lot from candidates but unfortunately candidates lie a lot and the cost of hiring candidates that don’t match up to the requirements when paying $300k-$500k/year is just too high. Firing people is hard and takes a long time. My personal guidance to managers is to have rounds match the level and experience required for the job. You can hire an intern with 2 rounds after the hiring manager conversation but a staff IC probably needs 5, directors need 7.
    esseph · 1790196282 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm talking about 7-9 rounds for non tech companies, and each round is at least an hour plus interview. These roles aren't even hitting the $200k marker.
  4. Plasmoid · 1790194696 · focus · HN ↗
    It's an effect of "once burned twice shy". Every time there was a "bad" hire they had to change things. People add to the list but no one ever wants to advocate for a lighter process since they might be blamed for it.
3. sporadicism · 1790185455 · focus · HN ↗
  What an absolutely insane way to do business. Everybody is out here trying to squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of software teams to the point of shipping garbage. Meanwhile managers, executives, and hr are operating under the belief that taking literal months to move "candidates through the pipeline" is eminently reasonable.
  1. mattm · 1790186708 · focus · HN ↗
    Most tech companies have a: - recruiter screen - tech screen - multiple interviews during an "onsite" round
    Job is posted. You apply along with hundreds of other people. The recruiter/hiring manager needs to spend some time sifting through them along with juggling all the other tasks they have going on. Let's say that this takes 1-2 weeks. Some places may let the opening sit longer to get more applicants.
    Several candidates are identified as possible fits. Recruiter reaches out to them to schedule the recruiter screen. Schedules need to line up. This likely takes 1-2 weeks until the recruiter screen happens.
    The recruiter needs to schedule the tech screen after a successful recruiter screen. Again, schedules need to line up. This could take another 1-2 weeks.
    Feedback needs to be submitted and then the onsite round is scheduled. This could take another 1-2 weeks.
    The onsite round will have multiple interviewers. This means more people to collect feedback from which likely increases delays in getting that. A debrief is normally scheduled with everyone who interviewed them. But let's say one week to gather this and make a decision.
    An offer is made. It takes some time to prepare and get sign off. There will be time to discuss with the recruiter to explain the details, plus some time needed for negotiation and thinking it over. This could be another 1-2 weeks.
    Additionally, some candidates may want to ask for more time during these phases in order to prepare better or align their schedules. This pushes back the process for all other candidates if the company is hiring for a specific job in order to give all candidates a fair assessment against the pool.
    Adding this all up, we arrive at 6-10 weeks.
    sporadicism · 1790188071 · focus · HN ↗
    The person I responded to said that filling a role in 90 days would be "relatively quick" so you've already improved theoretical hiring efficiency by up to 50%.
    But it still doesn't sound like a very effective process typed out like this.
    mattm · 1790188653 · focus · HN ↗
    I can't speak to their experience but the bigger the company, the more process and people involved usually. That causes delays here and there that add up. It's also a matter of how much of a priority the company makes it. If they're large and well-known there's really no incentive to change anything. They'll always have a stream of candidates applying and being available to hire.
    What would you do to make it more effective?
    sporadicism · 1790189937 · focus · HN ↗
    So it's not that they can't, it's that they won't. Seems crazy to me.
    >What would you do to make it more effective?
    I'd ask companies who have managed to get the process down to 2-3 weeks what they're doing, and then do that. It sounds like you're saying they don't actually care to, though.
    johnnyanmac · 1790218019 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    mrweasel · 1790188114 · focus · HN ↗
    This absolutely sucks if you don't have networking skills, but this is exactly why it pays of to network. You're basically able to skips 50 - 90% of the recruitment "pipeline" is you know the right people and they want you specifically.
    delis-thumbs-7e · 1790230183 · focus · HN ↗
    In 2019, when I applied to the company I still work for, I went to the interview, waited chit chatting with the manager because the other interviewing manager was 20min late, and when he came in he asked few questions and said “Ok, I don’t think we need to interview anyone else, when can you start?” They find it funny I had a cat and that I asked for way too little money.
    Last place I applied to, one screening and two interviews, took several months, and in the end came second even though I was ready to take 700€ paycut. The job was basic AV&network upkeep, felt like I was applying to become an astronaut.
  2. SpicyLemonZest · 1790186767 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    johnnyanmac · 1790218619 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
  3. georgeecollins · 1790188711 · focus · HN ↗
    True. But if your job is HR taking a long time to hire people and maintaining a high level of turnover is probably good for your job security. I don't think it is overt, but I have noticed that large orgs have a lot of HR process, small companies just try hard to maintain staff.
  4. solatic · 1790190076 · focus · HN ↗
    > eminently reasonable
    Companies feel like they have no choice, for two reasons:
    1. Jurisdictions where workers must give minimum notice periods before leaving their prior employer - the worker accepts a competing offer, gives notice, waits out the notice period, then starts. And many workers often ask for additional unpaid time between jobs before starting (since no vacation days have been accrued yet at the new job).
    2. Hiring happens by committee. In most companies, job candidates must be interviewed by, at the absolute minimum, an HR screener, the hiring manager, and the hiring skip-level; and usually also by people who will be peer teammates, plus an HR "culture" interview. If you need to pass a committee of 3-6 people, interviews must be scheduled with each member of the committee; at one committee member per week, that is 3-6 weeks.
    6 weeks (1.5 months) plus background checks plus getting pay packages approved plus 30 day notice periods plus two weeks unpaid vacation is, yes, a multiple month endeavor at minimum to fill a role. The only way to fill a role within a week is to grant full hiring autonomy to the hiring manager and only hire people who are currently unemployed (and therefore have no notice period or desire to take more unpaid time before starting), which in most companies beyond early startup size, is a complete non-starter.
    samspot · 1790266168 · focus · HN ↗
    Immigration red tape and education verification can add even more time on top of all that.
  5. tristor · 1790192331 · focus · HN ↗
    A lot of it has to do with how long it takes to find the right candidate. As someone who has been involved in a lot of hiring over the last 20 years, I can say there's been a huge shift within the last couple of years and open reqs get 10-25x the number of applicants, which instead of increasing choice in a positive way has just resulted in the average applicant quality decreasing. That means recruiters and hiring managers spend a LOT more time vetting and also invest in parallel candidates to try to hedge, because so many candidates applying are legitimately unqualified.
    It may sound like I'm blaming candidates, and sometimes it might be fair to, but this is also a problem caused by companies not investing in training and hiring junior level employees, which means that people who are unqualified feel forced to apply for more senior roles, as those are the only roles hiring. It's honestly shocking how many candidates I've interviewed in my career who don't even meet the basic bar for the role they've applied for, and are essentially just hoping to get lucky and snag a high-paying tech job even if it ultimately results in them being terminated, they can collect a check for 3-9 months without delivering.
  6. darth_avocado · 1790193183 · focus · HN ↗
    We are at the moment hiring for a L3 (no fresh graduate but someone with 3-5 years of experience). The role has been open for two months now (it was a backfill). I personally am in charge of the technical screen which is the second interview after the hiring manager. I am already getting a filtered set of candidates after the recruiter and the hiring manager review candidates. Of the 5 that have come my way, I’ve said yes to 1 person and 1 as a yes, pending another technical screen. We are not even wanting an exact match, nor are we expecting cure for cancer. Yes there are a lot of people looking for jobs but you don’t realize how many candidates are just not what their resumes portray. It takes forever to get someone competent in the pipeline and even then, you know nothing about their work ethic. The reason the pipeline is slow is because the candidate pool is flooded with over the top resumes that are not backed by actual talent and once you hire a wrong candidate it is extremely difficult to fire them, even with at will employment contracts.
    Any manager will tell you, they’d rather not go through the long hiring process.
    whstl · 1790196080 · focus · HN ↗
    I live in a country where the probational period is 6 months (Germany), and even then it's extremely difficult to fire people.
    HR is an extremely inefficient machine.
  7. ipdashc · 1790209440 · focus · HN ↗
    From what I've heard from other fields it seems as though this is somewhat unique to the tech industry. I share your belief that it's ridiculous. Companies somehow got along fine pre-FAANG with a few interview rounds before Google and Amazon convinced everyone that you need to have five rounds, a panel, a take home assessment, and a slate of brain teasers to pick out the true worthy 10x engineer.
    Grow some balls, do a couple interviews, and just pick the candidate you like the most. You're hiring for a glorified IT guy, not a NASA astronaut. Companies that stretch out the process to a ridiculous degree need to get over themselves.
    bluecheese452 · 1790211326 · focus · HN ↗
    I did that with one of the faangs. Congrats you passed hiring committee! Oops no open roles!
    2 months later recruiter from the same company hit me up. Told them I already passed the interview just give me the job already. Oops no roles, you just have to wait! So why are you reaching out? Couldn’t give me an answer.
    delis-thumbs-7e · 1790228300 · focus · HN ↗
    > From what I've heard from other fields it seems as though this is somewhat unique to the tech industry.
    At least in (Northen) Europe ghost jobs are a pain on the ass in most industries, even for low-skilled labour. Hiring companies - not the actual companies that need a worker, but an intermediate - try to just amass a database of workers so they can say to their client that we have hundreds of people with these qualifications ready to come to work for you. It’s not even legal, but they still do it.
    I think a lot of these problems are created by the companies themselves, and to lesser degree by candidates. Posting ghost jobs, asking for insane qualifications to run a simple website, interview process lasting 3 months… And candidates firehosing the job ads with bs CV’s generated by LLMs does not help. Currently I think you need to know somebody inside the company pretty well to get hired.
    The fix would be pretty simple: > Grow some balls, do a couple interviews, and just pick the candidate you like the most.
4. pixl97 · 1790186669 · focus · HN ↗
  Maybe I'm an old fart, but I've never had a job take over 14 days to get. Stringing people along for 3 months is absolute insanity. This is what happens when people get turned into numbers instead of actual beings with needs and emotions.
  1. esseph · 1790187355 · focus · HN ↗
    3 months? Try 6. 7-9 rounds of interviews over a 6 month period. It's insane.
    newtonianrules · 1790190148 · focus · HN ↗
    People need to stop subjecting themselves to that. Eventually companies would get the message.
    pixl97 · 1790194624 · focus · HN ↗
    This only works in economies where there are far more well paying jobs then there are people that want to fill them.
    Telaneo · 1790197277 · focus · HN ↗
    Tell that to the people sending out hundreds of applications before eventually getting hired.
    Starvation's a very powerful motivator for most people.
  2. whstl · 1790187756 · focus · HN ↗
    Same, in the past it was much faster.
    IMO the reason it takes longer now is because multiple people are getting interviewed simultaneously.
    Considering job postings are getting 10x more resumes than before, I'm not surprised companies are hedging their bets and interviewing way more people for the same position.
  3. darth_avocado · 1790193381 · focus · HN ↗
    You’re not even hearing back from the recruiter for 14 days if the job posting just went up. I mean it takes 1-2 weeks from the day you got told that you’re getting an offer to the day when you sign it.
  4. cj · 1790207329 · focus · HN ↗
    Is that a high paying engineering role at a tech company in the US?
    If so, 14 days is unheard of. Tell us more.
whatever1 · 1790183981 · focus · HN ↗
It is clear signal but its causes are multiple and I am not sure what percent attribution each one has:
1) Roles with high turnover. Likely the posting stays always on. 2) The pay is bad and nobody takes the job. 3) The role is too niche and the candidates in the market with visibility to the role are very few. 4) Aggressive hiring. Candidates have many options and until they actually show up at work, you keep interviewing other candidates. 5) Forgotten posts / ghost posts (my gut feeling says that this is the lowest contributor to the spike we observe, as likely it should be flat over time)
1. MarleTangible · 1790184353 · focus · HN ↗
  Reposts from recruiting agencies or other unrelated companies to resell the candidates or simply farm user details for fraud etc.
2. dgellow · 1790184563 · focus · HN ↗
  So, you’re saying it’s not really a clear signal?
dvt · 1790183993 · focus · HN ↗
As someone that's currently looking (with plenty of experience, corporate, startup, and contract), can confirm it's pretty rough out there. I think the application process is just becoming enshittified: because HR uses AI to filter, applicants are starting to use AI to apply, so we have volumes and volumes of nonsense flowing back and forth.
Been working professionally for ~15 years or so, and it's never been this bad. Other than "knowing someone" (i.e. a referral, and even that falls through routinely), not sure what the best way to snag a position is these days.
1. garciasn · 1790184467 · focus · HN ↗
  I have submitted to well over 200 postings and have had one interview; one. It was already filled but they talked to me anyway because the recruiter didn't know; the hiring manager was clearly perturbed.
  I have 25y experience and I have NEVER had to submit more than 10 applications to get 2-3 offers. This is fucking insane.
2. nabbed · 1790185653 · focus · HN ↗
  I just read this on CNBC:
  “US business continues to boom,” S&P Global Market Intelligence chief business economist Chris Williamson said in a statement. “To put the growth surge in context, barring the spike in demand following the opening up of the economy after the COVID-19 lockdowns, the latest improvement in business activity is the greatest recorded since early 2015. Business is clearly booming now in both manufacturing and services.”
  From <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/23/treasury-yields-oil-inflation-fed.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/23/treasury-yields-oil-inflatio...
  Is it booming for everyone except software developers? I keep hearing about developers who have been looking for a job for 6 months or longer and don't get responses to applications.
  Or is it some process failure (which you hint at) that is making it difficult to capitalize on that boom?
  1. pixl97 · 1790186909 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
    Business doing good doesn't automatically mean populations of humans are doing good themselves.
  2. ndiddy · 1790188620 · focus · HN ↗
    Most job growth for the past several years has been in the healthcare, leisure and hospitality, and construction sectors. Removing these sectors makes job growth negative for 2024 and 2025, and wipes out the majority of job growth in 2026. See <a href="https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/economy/spotlight/private-sector-job-growth.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/economy/spotl...
  3. bonesss · 1790190687 · focus · HN ↗
    Speculation, but: if tech over hired during COVID our section of the market could be experiencing a corrective slowdown while others are booming in aggregate.
  4. xboxnolifes · 1790192190 · focus · HN ↗
    The article is talking about "The Economy" (read: stocks and bond), not employment numbers. The market can both be awful for job seekers and great for capital owners.
fHr · 1790184480 · focus · HN ↗
Yeah because they ask for low level kernel 10yoe specialists AI llm inference training phd people lol
jrochkind1 · 1790184823 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
1. fwlr · 1790185954 · focus · HN ↗
  It is absolutely and undeniably a real phenomenon. Take your pick of explanations, nobody actually knows for sure, but you have to tell yourself something or you’d toss your phone out the window when you get the 40th notification that you might be interested in the exact same job that auto-rejected you the previous 39 times. Speaking from personal experience over the last year.
  1. jrochkind1 · 1790188192 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    whstl · 1790199955 · focus · HN ↗
    The simple explanation is incompetence: the ratio of false negatives is too high, so everyone has a story of being rejected from jobs they could perfectly fulfil. The ratio of false positives is also high, so jobs remain open for longer they should.
    I recently met the CTO of a unicorn in a social function, and they urged me to apply, he would fast track. I interviewed there before, got an offer but decided to go somewhere else. Even with a face-to-face invitation from the CTO and obviously having passed an interview in the past, they rejected me.
    There is no end to incompetence in modern business.
2. JDups · 1790227196 · focus · HN ↗
  Earlier this summer I applied for a job at a local startup that I had all the qualifications for and quite a bit of relevant experience. I got a rejection email within 48 hours. Eventually I happened to meet with one of the founders through a connection and had a chat, he said how amazing it was that someone local had worked on similar problems in the past. In the end he said that unfortunately they don't have the capacity to expand the team right now.
  Their job postings are currently still up on their site and linkedin.
adamrezich · 1790184911 · focus · HN ↗
Why is OP being downvoted to [dead] in every single comment here?
1. SpicyLemonZest · 1790187777 · focus · HN ↗
  I at least was pretty disappointed to scroll down and discover this is a self-promotion. I'm willing to accept some level of slop for an interesting analysis, but an AI-generated report to promote your AI-generated product with AI-generated copy is too much.
  1. pluc · 1790188483 · focus · HN ↗
    These sites are popping up to exploit job seekers because the legit alternatives (linkedin et all) blow.
    <a href="https://basecareer.co/" rel="nofollow">https://basecareer.co/ is basically the same slop.
  2. MattyRad · 1790190696 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah the homepage toplines are pure vibeslop, they didn't even bother touching their own homepage. Trust is instantly vacated. Next.
petcat · 1790185040 · focus · HN ↗
Meaningless stat. My company keeps our website job listings open indefinitely and it's because we're always hiring. We're just extremely selective.
1. mattm · 1790186854 · focus · HN ↗
  Every company is selective
2. platevoltage · 1790198013 · focus · HN ↗
  This stat is meaningless because insert anecdote here.
3. coolThingsFirst · 1790204879 · focus · HN ↗
  What a load of BS, if your churn rate is so high that you always have to hire that's a sign of a terribly toxic workplace.
  1. petcat · 1790251770 · focus · HN ↗
    We don't churn. We are constantly adding more and more develepers
    coolThingsFirst · 1790304325 · focus · HN ↗
    What company is that, are you hiring remote?
zelphirkalt · 1790185213 · focus · HN ↗
Probably a lot of those that have remained open will also stay that way, because they are (1) fake job ads, or (2) job ads of companies, where you don't even reach a human soul during the application process, and the companies don't realize how broken their hiring process really is, or (3) job ads of companies, who have so unrealistic idea about what they are looking for and what they themselves are actually offering to attract whomever they are looking for, that almost no one applying meets the criteria.
Probably I also forgot some more categories of crazy hiring processes in my enumeration.
destitude · 1790185326 · focus · HN ↗
I've about given up looking for a remote job even as a software engineer with over 20+ years of experience especially with macOS since I never seem to get a reply or "no longer accepting applicants".
josefritzishere · 1790185763 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
hn_submit · 1790186552 · focus · HN ↗
This is common everywhere. Employers are leaving open job listings and just wait and see who comes along.
Career sites would do well to automatically close job listings after 90 days or so.
jedberg · 1790186619 · focus · HN ↗
I talked to a hiring manager friend at a big company you've definitely heard of. I was looking for a job so I sent him a link to one of his jobs and said "can I interview for this?"
He said: Oh, I have 23 recs on the job site but none of them are open. They just keep them there to make us look like we're still hiring like crazy.
1. rad_val · 1790192696 · focus · HN ↗
  Yeah, common knowledge sadly. Can get even worse, a friend had recently an interview with a, not-so-well-known, but you heard of them company and they didn't do any face to face interview, just AI driven via email, all steps. When he failed a step: they offered him some credits on the platform, literally a funnel via a job post (it's a dev platform).
2. diego_moita · 1790200336 · focus · HN ↗
  This is called ghost jobs. More than 90% of posted jobs are like this.
  In HN's Who's Hiring it is very close to 100%, so I don't look at that thread anymore.
  The solution: use AI robots for jobs.
  1. bluecheese452 · 1790211026 · focus · HN ↗
    You are being downvoted but hn is really bad about this. One company posted an advert for their “third engineer” for literally years.
    mixmastamyk · 1790358782 · focus · HN ↗
    Correct, and don't complain about it or you will be lightly punished by the mods.
3. rvba · 1790202442 · focus · HN ↗
  What is a "recs"? Job posting?
4. Baljhin · 1790554268 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
wrxd · 1790187183 · focus · HN ↗
I sent a few CVs recently trying to get a fully remote job and the experience has been miserable.
From what I can tell the job posting have been opened for a while, companies are inundated with CVs thanks to them offering remote and form the screening feedback I had (when I was lucky to get any feedback) it was basically that they can be as picky as they want and hire people who matches every single one of their requirements.
On the flip side at my work (FAANG, not remote) we barely get any CVs from people who can pass the technical screening. Most the candidate fail so badly it’s not even funny
1. whstl · 1790187968 · focus · HN ↗
  > On the flip side at my work (FAANG, not remote) we barely get any CVs from people who can pass the technical screening. Most the candidate fail so badly it’s not even funny
  Same experience in multiple YC startups whose payment isn't even that competitive. Half of the resumes don't match the qualification, and on top of that the freelancing recruiter doesn't even seem to care. Lately I resorted to hiring from my own network.
  1. LoganDark · 1790189870 · focus · HN ↗
    How do you build a network? I have a few previous employers, but they don't have any help for me directly, and I haven't had any luck by applying or reaching out to recruiters or agencies.
    whstl · 1790190476 · focus · HN ↗
    If you're an individual contributor: keep in touch with colleagues, especially senior level and technical managers, or people going to other companies.
    Managers: keep in touch with the best people and just hire them.
    It's not easy for everyone.
    johnnyanmac · 1790285272 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
throwitaway222 · 1790187480 · focus · HN ↗
We need to make a law making it punishable to jailtime for posting fake, ghost, harvesting job postings. The proof is things like this - a posting for longer than 90 days.
remusrm · 1790187510 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
glitchc · 1790187526 · focus · HN ↗
Sounds like there are too many white collar employees and not enough white collar jobs. The market can pick and choose, wait for the perfect candidate to pop up.
Joel_Mckay · 1790188192 · focus · HN ↗
Could also mean 28% of "job" postings are not functioning as described.
Whenever you hear of labor shortages, it is almost always a euphemism for a shortage of people not desperate enough to tolerate a terrible working arrangement.
The "AI" slop from staffing agencies, lead-generators, applicants, and data scrapers... have dropped the signal to noise ratio into spam number territory. =3
1. jnugunknjhgvb · 1790189467 · focus · HN ↗
  =3
  1. Joel_Mckay · 1790190022 · focus · HN ↗
    =3
Rotdhizon · 1790188851 · focus · HN ↗
A small anecdote from the cleared space (security clearance jobs). If you look through websites like clearedjobs, you'll notice that you see the same sets of cyber jobs posted over and over and over. All from the same companies in the same locations. Come to find, it's simply because they can't find people desperate enough with good qualifications to work for low wages in HCOL areas like northern VA and DC. Companies that want unicorn analysts/engineers with 6-10 YOE, TS/SCI, degree, and extensive, specific experience to relocate to northern VA for 130k/yr - 5 days in office - standard crappy contractor benefits. Shocked pickachu face when practically no one will accept those terms who actually qualify.
1. whstl · 1790191894 · focus · HN ↗
  Pretty sure something like this will still get 1000 applicants, nobody will get hired, and a C-Level will blame the hiring manager and HR/recruiter.
2. seany · 1790212761 · focus · HN ↗
  The flip side of this is filtering for "US Persons" (non cleared, but citizenship, located in the US) for remote work at the Sr/Staff level. The amount of BS that I get is astounding.
frank_clover · 1790189297 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
doctorpangloss · 1790189341 · focus · HN ↗
Nobody has a solution for hiring.
We have AGI before we have general purpose hiring.
1. sidrag22 · 1790192318 · focus · HN ↗
  Its the same across the board for everything, no one has an answer for the noise AI creates. Really cool tech, but the timing is so bad because we just can't even fathom what dealing with the surplus of generated garbage looks like.
  The answer is likely moving away from the internet entirely and having actual face to face screening right away. no company wants to commit to that, so its gonna continue to be some weird expectation from both sides where the applicant doesnt wanna be screened with AI, and the hiring team wants X amount of effort put into every initial application.
  I think it just must move entirely offline, until some semblance of an answer exists, because right now like i said, we can't even fathom what a solution looks like online.
2. antisthenes · 1790193975 · focus · HN ↗
  Don't worry, AGI is going to suck at hiring just as much as meatbags suck now.
  You can't solve incentive-incompatibility with technology.
sequoia · 1790191837 · focus · HN ↗
The first thing that strikes me about this site is how Enclaudiated it looks. Claude (or whatever) generated sites displaying data like this have such a consistent look. It makes me feel I should only skip the information as it's likely it was not reviewed (many AI generated documents are not).
Perhaps it's unfair, but my estimation of the value & accuracy of the work immediately drops when I see this. I've just seen too much crap like this.
AngryData · 1790192744 · focus · HN ↗
This has been a problem/norm for many jobs for many years now. If you haven't had to deal with it before now, consider yourself lucky.
jknoepfler · 1790193037 · focus · HN ↗
72% of job postings on company career sites are closed within 90 days. Pretty sweet.
gullywhumper · 1790194031 · focus · HN ↗
I work with US healthcare postings and our numbers are pretty similar: >400k open/active postings, 30% over 90 days, median 44 days. These are direct-hire only postings from the employers (no job boards / aggregators / staffing agencies).
I don't have a hypothesis for why jobs stay posted for so long, other than that employers are always look for a workers, the roles are generally well-defined, and turnover can be pretty high. I don't think there's anything nefarious within healthcare causing so many postings to stay up for so long. Most healthcare employers are generally desperate for workers. So much so that they pay crazy rates for temporary workers (staffing agency / travelers). The company I work for helps systems try to minimize those costs.
ultra_nick · 1790197371 · focus · HN ↗
Applied to over 1,000 jobs on Linkedin last year. Gave up and started using other websites or channels.
It took about 100 apps/interview last year. These ghost jobs wasted about 6 months of my life.
I'd drop $10k+ on a solution to this problem.
1. dprkh · 1790209208 · focus · HN ↗
  What alternatives are you using?
2. john-tells-all · 1790260435 · focus · HN ↗
  Did you apply directly on LinkedIn?
  I've switched to finding companies + jobs on LI, then applying directly on the company's website.
3. punkbit · 1790542787 · focus · HN ↗
  That’s what most people don’t seem to understand, this is wasting peoples life’s. It’s insanity.
0xWTF · 1790215096 · focus · HN ↗
I have to say, as a middle-aged physician in the military, the dynamics of hiring terrify me. I interviewed to get into college, medical school, and residency. At all other times I have been gainfully employed. I hear about people studying for weeks or months for job interviews. What do you do to study?
BobbyTables2 · 1790218796 · focus · HN ↗
What about companies in which managers hold on to requisitions to defer layoffs?
Or companies that are in a perpetual hiring freeze?
shantnutiwari · 1790240352 · focus · HN ↗
Warning: the page has been deleted and Im getting a 404. I wonder why? Its on the HN front page and people are still discussing it, but there is no article
1. Baljhin · 1790660637 · focus · HN ↗
  It was definitely undisclosed self-promotion - and apparently also clickbait and ragebait: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49820340">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49820340. It worked!
  Extra benefit-- is now we cannot remove our upvotes - thanks HN! - so it'll stay high in the ranking, at least for awhile.
mattz56 · 1790270622 · focus · HN ↗
Really interesting report. I didn’t realize ghost jobs were that common. Gonna take a closer look, thanks!

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