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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. shagie · · 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.

          1. johnnyanmac · · focus · HN ↗
            That's why feedback is important. If the reason was "we are looking for X experience and X is not on your resume" I can adjust that for later. If it was even as honest as "we found enough qualified candidates to interview and didn't look at your resume", that's still semi-actionable feedback. I either apply earlier or just accept that I was unlucky and it was not my ability.

            Generic rejections like "we moved with other candidates" tells me nothing. So noise remains because candidates don't have feedback to improve upon. All because HR wants minimize lawsuits through obscurity.

            1. sokoloff · · focus · HN ↗
              I’m willing to be communicative and try to be helpful right up to the line where it puts me, my family, or my company at risk of some asymmetrically bad outcome.

              Regardless of whether it’s due to a low-trust society, a litigious society, or El Niño, I will refrain from giving specific feedback if that puts those groups at risk.

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