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

302 points · 364 comments · rubatrejo

  1. legitster · · 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. Aurornis · · 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 · · 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.

        1. Aurornis · · 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.

          1. cryzinger · · 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.

            1. shagie · · 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.

              1. whstl · · 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.

                1. shagie · · focus · HN ↗
                  If I have 100 resumes, and 50 of them list Java first, and 50 of them list Java last, which pool of 50 am I most likely to find someone who knows and doesn't hate working in Java?

                  You're going to select 10 people out of that list of 100 because you don't have time to call everyone for three weeks to evaluate their skill.

                  You've also got only two hours to look through all 100 of those resumes today. You're spending about a minute and a half looking at each resume. How are you going to evaluate someone for a Java backend position who's last job was in C# and they list Java last in the list of languages they know?

                  1. rendaw · · 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.

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