Well I opened the article, near the beginning I saw the text: "81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled."
Instantly that felt completely insane to me, my bullshit detector went off the chart, so since they provided a source, I followed up on the source to see the evidence for myself.
What do you know, the source is from a "my perfect resume" website that apparently conducted a study on the issue, but they aren't providing the details of the study, aren't providing a paper , aren't providing the methodology or questions asked, aren't providing any details whatsoever, the only thing they provide is the "conclusions" of their study.
So, apparently because this random website supposedly conducted a study, and they say the result was "81% posted fake jobs", that makes it true.
Hey, I also conducted a study, and 14% posted fake jobs. There, my claim has just as much backing as theirs does.
Instantly lost interest in the "study" and the article based on it.
I've done tech interviewing for years. Job listing that are to various degree fake are quite common. Of course, fakeness comes in many flavor, from listings posted just to "see if there's anyone out there" (I had a boss who did this regularly) to jobs a supervisor really does want to fill but which they know they won't because the bureaucracy has forced impossible requirements on them. An example: "Junior programmer, 10 years experience in language X" (that's existed for five years).
This is another personal anecdote, but I had an interview earlier this year for a database related role. The job ad had a huge salary range and the interview had nothing to do with the role. I wasn't asked any behavioral or technical questions. The two people on the call just wanted to get to know me. We probably spent several minutes talking about sports. A few days later I got rejected. What the hell?
One of the reasons might be that you belong to a protected category (by gender, age, race, etc). These interviews are sometimes referred to as "compliance interviews". These candidates will be reported on the HR diversity metrics to prove that the company made an effort to reach out to diverse candidates (even though no actual effort was made). A few companies (Wells Fargo I believe was one) were fined by the Feds for these practices.
I've also been hired after similar "non-interviews". Sometimes it's hard to know if it's just disorganisation/incompetence or if there's outright fakery going on.
Most likely a green card application related sham job posting where they already have someone working in that position on a work visa for several years with experience with their internals and doing a good job, but the regulations force the company to post their job at several places, interview people and reject them for some plausible reason, while applying for a green card for that person. All this needs to be documented properly.
It's extremely common at most companies, including MFAANG, because it makes zero sense to layoff the incumbent and hire a brand new person.
Perhaps a higher layer of management had a headcount target they wanted to fill for some reason, but this team didn't actually want or need new people but were forced to go through the process anyway.
Oh, he never interviewed, just posted on craigslist and collected resumes. But the impact on us was important. One of the purposes of the exercise for him was being able to show me a list of people could supposedly do my job better, faster and cheaper.
He was a friend of a friend and one of the most unprincipled people I've ever gotten to actually know. But I assume there are many similar people higher in corporate hierarchies that I wouldn't ever know.
devaluation, but also just knowing if we could replace people.
I have 5 Sr. Devs and if any of them split, how long would it take me to replace them? and at what rate? and what skillsets will they have and not have?
Just to note. 80% of recruiters doesn't mean 80% of ads. A recruiter that has posted thousands of legitimate ads in their career, technically only needs to have posted 1 fake one to be eligible for inclusion in the 80%.
Although I understand, and to some extent share, your skepticism regarding the "study", I have no problem conceiving that a trend might currently be setting around the practice of posting fake ads, for whatever reason. It doesn't require much. In an unregulated playing field, simple peer pressure and survival is all you need to drive everyone to shady practices.
So, the study might be moot, but the number isn't so surprising.
You probably need to pay to see their surveys, but even if you don't trust that: the bureau of labor has had to make huge adjustments all this year and last year. This isn't just some bad optics.
Unless I misunderstand you, you're citing a completely irrelevant factoid. Employment statistics are based on actual people working, not job ads posted. And the revisions [1] (which sometimes are upward) have nothing to do with ghost jobs, but are due to additional data coming in over time, leading to refinements of the original estimate[2].
My implications are that companies are either lying and being readjusted from later audits, or government is choosing not to take data into account until later, where impact is lessened. It's not a "ghost job" in the modern meaning, but it does seem to be pretending there are a lot more jobs than in reality.
Seems perfectly plausible that the phenomenon of ghost jobs is real and it may be getting worse.
But this SF Gate piece is dumb. The article has one source for its data points and the author does nothing to investigate or challenge the quality of that data. This is not journalism. It looks like a PR piece for resume builder.
The Forbes article you linked is much more informative.
> Well I opened the article, near the beginning I saw the text: "81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled."
I love San Francisco to death, but there's no reliable local newspaper. It drives me nuts.
The really common reason in my experience is there is a job that is made to fit a specific internal applicant but it has to advertised “because of process”. Often the manager is not even telling recruiting that they have already picked the candidate.
What about job postings for a position already held by an H1B visa holder?
What about job postings that are not taken down until a new hire is given the offer, agrees verbally, signs the paperwork, relocates and actually shows up on the job?
Many companies have policies requiring that all jobs have to be posted both internally and externally before being filled. The intent is to prevent Sam the VP from just slotting his buddy into the job. At the end of the day, Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them.
Same thing happens with H1B/PERM, except now it's the law requiring it rather than company policy. The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it.
> The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it.
Posted obscurely in a corner of the cafeteria, but exposing my salary to anyone who cared to look. They were never going to hire someone else, and we all knew it, but the charade had to be played.
Very much so - I worked at a place that tried to make all testers easily transferable between teams because apparently testing is testing. Except they didn't go so far as to do it for the team that tested some ancient Fortran application running on obscure hardware because it turns out that testers can be specialised.
In Europe jobs have to be published. Even if there is no intention of filling it from the public. And companies also publish bullshit jobs which are used to manipulate regulatory requirements if needed (eg. if you want to hire a foreigner, you must prove you couldn't fill the position locally - by publishing it for 3 months).
No. If you publish it, you have to give an estimation of the salary, but that's the only limitation, at least in my country. Companies have internal guidelines, like in mine, you can't hire a relative to your own department, but the job i got wasn't on a public listing, it's my agent who gave my CV to my current team leader, he was interested, organized an itw, then 3 month later i hoped to my current job (and i am way better for it).
It is law, just not in every European country, but it's definitely not unusual.
And yes, companies often go with the lowest common denominator across Europe to avoid any doubt when dealing with multinational people. In my personal case it could be reasonably claimed that laws of 5 different countries apply to me based on citizenship, registered residence, actual places of work... Of course my employer wants to be covered.
I've recently witnessed a situation where VP hired someone he used to work with This VP is not the best judge of talent. The guy barely does any work, and rarely responds to messages. He'll send me a scheduled slack at 8 AM. I reply. I don't hear from him all day. It's incredibly frustrating, since we had better candidates.
> At the end of the day, Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them.
Nowadays, in tech, it's all about who you know rather than what you know.
This has been true in any area of human activity since forever. If you have a choice to work with someone you know/worked with previously and someone completely new, who may or may not be as good as advertised... Who would you hire? When your future bonuses/promotions and maybe job itself depends on it?
This is all a function of interviews sucking right? Leet code is essentially completely independent from dev skill. Projects take too much commitment and time from the team and devs.
So, what option do teams have? Just hire the people that your good devs say are good is honestly the most effective practice that I've seen.
Honestly, even referrals are sucking for me in 2023/4. Referral would almost always mean I at least talk to someone on the hiring team
. Now it's been maybe a 40% chance I even get a recruiter call?
For H1B/PERM, I remember they had to post it on the wall in a public place. Our company posted the jobs on the wall in the lunch room at our office. It has every information including the salary. I guess things have changed a bit since the early 2000s?
H1B has evolved into a bizarre collaborative scam between the government and tech corporations; there is, in fact, a US citizen who can fill any software engineering role a US company has.
It's an outrage once you work at these companies and behold the sheer dysfunction and they're all getting paid wages native American citizens would take.
It's also an outrage how much leverage companies have over their H1B employees (especially from India, etc).
If you have any long-term H1B coworkers from less-favored nations, I guarantee you there's a heartbreaking story they have to tell you if you ask.
I work with a super high-performing guy with a Masters degree who has been at my company for 15 years and gets treated super poorly by the company. He still is probably 10 years away from getting a naturalization interview and has no hope of switching jobs in the meantime (and has children that are citizens...).
If they have direct family members that are citizens they should skip the wait apply through the family path, although they would need to be on good terms with said family member as they have to vouch for their welfare payments for 10 years
At least it that way about a decade ago, as I’m realizing things might have changed since then
The model that Americans would take any job if the wages were high enough is simple but obviously false. For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers. For desk jobs there's no amount that'll overcome Americans' cultural belief that you can't do math unless you were born as a special sort of person who is "good at math".
> For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers.
If you don't think Americans are willing to pick fruits and vegetables, go find a farmer, have him put a sign at the edge of his property that says "Free fruits and vegetables, you pick them yourself" and watch how quickly the field is emptied.
This is obnoxious pedantry which is ignoring the parent's obvious actual point: food obeys a demand curve just like every other product, and what the parent clearly meant was that, at the labor price native Americans would want for these jobs, the resulting food price would be such that not enough people would buy the food to make it worthwhile.
And while this may have been idle speculation a few years ago, we now have pretty solid empirical evidence: when food prices increased by 10-20%, even in the middle of the fastest-growing wages in decades, the country had a collective temper tantrum.
Well that's probably part of the problem. You have to live within commute range of the work to do it, and people don't want to live in small towns or Central Valley CA unless they're in the respected local landowner class.
I know there are people who do part-time work in oil fields or fishing ships, so that's always possible if you want to move to North Dakota or Alaska temporarily.
I see. Yeah, that's tricky. It's less of "I don't want to" moreso than "I literally* cannot move". I'm paying off a house and moving to another state to pay rent on top of that mortgage ruins the point. For 200k, sure. But I know that's not realistic even if I was the best farmhand.
*Okay, I can "literally" talk with family about selling the home. But I do just need some steady work during the downtimes. I'm not at a point where I feel I want to uproot my entire lifestyle, career, and livlihood just to do blue collar work.
I don't know about the rest of the nation, but in the American Southwest, there's a distinct socio-economic class of "migrant farmworker" with a long tradition. And it's a Hispanic cultural tradition.
There would be basically zero chance of anyone in my urban high school, or circle of friends, to turn around and say "I'm going to be a migrant farmworker when I graduate!" and it's unclear whether any non-Latino could even achieve such a career. GP indicated that urban/suburban living wouldn't be possible. You'd certainly need to move around, and you'd be an outcast if you didn't speak Spanish, if you weren't nominally Catholic, or celebrate holidays like a Hispanic. Your children would come to learn Spanish and cultural customs, but they'd still be outcast because of racism. You'd have a weird relationship with the overseers, because they'd be more like you, so neither side would really accept you.
(Sub)urban White kids are usually groomed to go to college and get a white-collar or office job, and the dropouts do some kind of tech vocational path, or end up doing clerking minimum-wage to get by. So you have a spectrum of white/blue collar, but there's no path to "migrant farmworker" or other sort of laborer, because my people Just Don't Do That. It's unthinkable.
Even agrarian Native American communities have a huge problem with "brain drain" there, because the opportunities on the Reservation are zilch, unless you want to work at a casino? So young Natives dream of leaving at the first chance, going into the city, and assimilating, losing their culture, because it's a survival thing. Their agriculture isn't sustainable, no matter how you slice it--what are they going to do, hire from outside?
Since the 80s we've had White people who said that migrants come to steal our jobs. Or they say they're taking jobs no American wants. But realistically, even if American wanted those jobs at those wages, they couldn't have them, because of the ethnic hegemony in certain industries.
1 million/year? There’s definitely an amount that’d allow to find enough workers locally. The other question is how much would the produce cost and how many people would be willing to pay.
I know a fair number of Silicon Valley "townies" and they are not trying and failing to get into tech companies. Only the Asian ones with tiger parents are even considering it.
The hippie aligned ones just want to get infinite degrees in something natural like forestry management. The rest are nurses or civil servants if they want a career, or real estate agents or artists or game streamers otherwise.
If anything I think younger Americans tend to go for the kind of vulgar Marxism where everything bad is caused by "corporations", and women in strongly prefer work that comes off as being good for society, which means they won't even consider it.
Same for me of course; I work in tech because I was on the computer too much, not because I was greedy and looked up good careers.
that may be manual labor but it requires skills, and comes with real risks.
and mines have a lot, like a LOT, of labor laws behind them. you know, the whole sending 10 year olds down the shaft thing and then literally covering up what went wrong.
100% on your last sentence. There is a massive misplacement of ego in our fellow countrymen that loves to posture as an arbiter of morality and rationality, but has no pomp left over for their individual upward mobility. Very very bizarre and self defeating.
> there is, in fact, a US citizen who can fill any software engineering role a US company has.
Right now I suspect you're probably right. But 2 or 3 years ago?
If you're right then why would companies want to go through all of the extra paperwork and hoops to hire an H1B right now? Maybe the answer is "they can pay less"? But I'm not sure if it's actually all that much less than they could pay someone who's been looking for work for six months to a year or more.
You would be surprised how hard can some managers negotiate 10% salary change during hiring, despite the fact its not their own money, or anyhow useful for their work. I talk multinational mega corporations here. People just want to be good employees(TM) or at least seen as such.
At large tech companies, the pay is entirely driven by level and rating; so there's no savings in salary; just added costs to comply with the directive.
It's endlessly frustrating that the US government wants to centrally plan my hiring decisions.
Bizarre? Supporting business's whims is mostly what the government has existed to do for the last forty years. What's bizarre is that people expect our country to function normally when this is so blatant.
Yes, there's been mild movement away from this insanity, but we're still miles to the right of what actually supports the people who live here.
H1b isn't about "experts", there are other visas for that (eb1 or o1). H1b's purpose it to find talent after search has been "exhausted" locally. That is rarely done in good faith.
Also back in the day, we would say we need X new staff, corporate would encourage us to advertise and interview, but when it came to extending and offer they would tell us we can't increase head count. Happened over and over till I left.
I have never started the interview process before there was a headcount approved[1]. I have never had anyone push back when I said "I'll worry about that when the headcount is approved, because I got things to do"; but then I can't recall more than a handful of times anyone wanted me to front-run the recruiting process with a fishing expedition. Have things really become that shitty?
[1] To be fair, sometimes the headcount disappeared for various reasons, but that's not the same as "meh...just have a look around and jerk some peoples chains".
> Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them.
...except now the recruiting and HR can report these candidates and interviews on their metrics, candidates had a hope of finding a job, and Sam has a bulletproof explanation in case if anybody asks why his buddy was hired. Win-win-win.
> but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it
I've got my first job after moving countries in Europe, despite this (very similar but it was 6 weeks IIRC) limitation being in place by law, within a week. Consulting body shop through which I was billing per day, and the umbrella company took 20% cut.
It seems its trivial to circumvent this kind of rule across the globe, and TBH what kind of state employee team would go over every single foreign first hire in given region, all the evidence and check its validity, gather all the details. Heck police ignore smaller crimes below certain threshold, states have no real processing power to handle this well.
I’m not shocked at all. Another issue is recruiters posting fake jobs and asking for references as step one. Soon as I say “I don’t provide references until the last step, and only to the company hiring” they hang up on me
Yea this is a weird one. Some job applications actually require me to fill in reference contact information. I can't submit the application without that detail. Of course, I try to skirt it.
By chance I saw it recently; I remember because it stood out. And the job application seemed genuine as the poster was engaging on the "who's hiring" thread here.
I would never fill that in, because I wouldn't want to bother my references. I know some of them don't really like doing it, but do it as a favour because we're on good terms. Probably not a rare scenario. I'm okay asking in a "if you provide me a reference, I will get a new job" as the final stage, but not as a "just checking in case I might land a job".
It’s kind of rare but it happens, I’ve definitely seen it AND been asked up front. I tell them that I don’t “burn” my references on any jobs except those I’m pretty sure I have a great chance and after some interviewing has happened.
Had one group request references at the beginning, checked them, then my references got to infer that I didn't get the job offer. In fact if I recall, that group ghosted me, leaving me to infer as well.
But then later another group asked me for references at the beginning, I declined to provide them, and then they were okay with proceeding through the interview process.
Maybe it would work in the general case to always reply to such a request with "some previous group ghosted me, and so I've vowed to withhold the references until later in the process."?
Governments are one of the worst offenders when it comes to posting jobs which have already been basically handed to internal candidates. They do it for the same reason as everyone else: compliance with external regulations or internal rules.
Personally, I find needing to provide references at all to be akin to me needing to get my parents permission. It makes my skin crawl and I will actively screen jobs that require them. The process feels demeaning and dehumanizing. Then you have to bother people who don't really know you anymore and beg them to waste their time on someone else's BS.
i have friends that i worked with, who would gladly be a reference, and i would not mind them doing it, but really, at best they could confirm that i am a nice person to work with. and i would never use anyone as a reference who would not do that. so the whole thing feels rather meaningless.
but that's not the only thing. in germany it is common to ask for written reference letters which are called "arbeitszeugnis" (work report card, like the report card you get from school). that term makes me feel like i was a kid. it clearly establishes a hierarchy. i am the lowly subordinate employee and you are the superior employer that i am to look up to. it gets really wierd when i consider that i have been on the other side as an employer myself. (and by law these letters must be honest and may not contain unfounded negative statements which makes employers avoid writing anything negative because they could get sued.)
and then there are places who ask for actual school report cards or at least grade averages or want to know how i did in math in school, as if that was in any way useful to understand how i would do as a programmer decades later.
Yeah, I'll provide peers, but absolutely not seniors/management references. One of them very purposefully has no social media footprint and I'm not going to cross that line because of some recruiter call that almost never goes nowhere.
I'd love to go back to times where it was fine for a candidate not to have a LinkedIn. Currently, regardless of your blog, or your multiple StackOverflow answers, or your GitHub, or your posts on any of the other tech-focused communities, if HR doesn't see your LinkedIn, it's as if you're off-planet.
The tech field is centered around skills. You're under pressures to keep them sharp and up to date. When you're looking for work and you're done polishing the resume, updating the blog posts, doing your leetcode drills, do you really want to add playing LinkedIn games to the mix?
It seems to me that tech workers would benefit from having really tech-focused job networks. Not these hybrid platforms. LinkedIn, Indeed, and friends. They don't particularly care about you as a tech worker. They don't even understand you or your skillset. You're a backend dev with many years of OOP, FP, Agile, Kanban, Python, Go, SQL, JavaScript, and a slew of other relevant skills for the job, but they'll gladly inform you that you're missing a few skills to better match the list in the ad: go-getter, team-player, positive-attitude. Ok, sure, whatever...
Another thing, seeing an ad that asks for Python, Go, Node.js, SQL, React, Terraform, Kubernetes as an "Intermediate position" just tells me that no one in charge cares.
Hi, I never had a LinkedIn account or profile. Been working professionally for more than 15 years. It’s a good way to avoid distractions. You might miss on being told about opportunities, but other than that, are you sure you’re being cancelled for not having one?
When I interview, I often ask the recruiter to share the cv, portfolio, and GitHub/other. As they often just share a LinkedIn URL but that’s up to the interviewer and team to decide if enough to compromise theirs and the candidates time.
Absolutely. And a lot of spam. A few months ago there was a little flame war between a few people. Company posted an ad and someone replied "this is spam, and you don't respond, just keep posting the same ad", and the company replied "no, I own the company and hand write this job ad every month to fit our future needs" which was patently a lie (exact same headcount, exact same three positions, every month for the last eight months, and usually a byte-accurate copy of each posting), and several similar.
Not to mention it's "discouraged" to call employers out on poor behavior. I know of at least three companies who post pretty steadily who ghosted at final rounds or in one case, "We intend to present a written offer" (though in "fairness", they did eventually inform me that they'd decided to freeze hiring, well, nearly three months later).
It's against the rules to call out hiring companies in the thread, primarily because we don't want off-topic arguments and because it would be too easy to exploit it for shenanigans.
But since people have been increasingly saying that this is a problem, let's do something about it. My current thought is to add a new instruction at the top asking companies to please only post in the thread if they're committed to responding to every applicant. Other suggestions for addressing this issue are welcome!
Edit: since the next Who Is Hiring day is tomorrow, let's get precise. I'm including this text at the top of the thread:
NEW RULE: Please only post a job in this thread if you are committed to responding to everyone who applies.
Great idea. Do you also want to address some more root problems of job postings:
* done for optics, to look like growth or doing well, or just to have their name out there.
* to fill the pipeline for future needs
* to assess the hiring market, for planning
* (for reasons mentioned in article) to light fire under current employees, or see how replaceable they are
* only for a serendipitous unicorn hire, not commodity developer
* for training in their hiring process
I know all these are things that happen in general with startup job posts, though not necessarily on HN.
None of those reasons preclude "responding", but responding doesn't solve the real problem, it's only a PR sugar coating on it.
An example of disclosure on the unicorn hire one would be to simply state the truth about it. That's fine, so long as you're not pretending to grow. It could even be good optics, about hiring standards.
Disclosure of some of the other intent would preclude it (e.g., probably nobody is going to state the goal of threatening or replacing current employees). Maybe those posts shouldn't be done at all, or maybe they can at least say that this is a speculative post, not for a currently open position.
I'd say job posts have to be truthful, and it's by default implied that they actually good faith intend to fill the position as described, in a timely manner, and that interviews will only be conducted in good faith. If the default isn't true, they should disclose that.
> I'd say job posts have to be truthful, and it's by default implied that they actually good faith intend to fill the position as described, in a timely manner, and that interviews will only be conducted in good faith. If the default isn't true, they should disclose that.
Very few people would disagree with that premise.
The thing is that bad faith actors doing bad faith things are not going to abide by the rules on their own accord, on account of being bad faith actors. So you need enforcement, and I don't really see how HN can enforce any of the things you posted. They're not really in a position to vet anything more than you or I can.
Maybe the initial "who is hiring" post should be more explicit about the lack of moderation and vetting instead.
There's definitely a chunk of bad-faith people, who'll lie, cheat, and steal, but I think it's the minority.
There's a lot of questionable things that decent people do, in good faith, because they consider it normal and OK. If you tell people "actually, the convention here on that is something different", then I think most will respect that.
One way this doesn't work is if there's a lack of trust. For example, if an employer claims it values X, but actually behaves like Y, employees are less likely to do X, and also less likely to trust or respect the company on anything else.
Another way the HN example doesn't work as well is if the person has strong motivation otherwise. For example, if their boss told them to post a fake job on HN, and they really don't want to come back and say they can't because they just saw a new rule. But a lot of other times, the person doing the posting has more autonomy, or a more decent work environment.
A lot of guessing here, but I think stating a convention would help significantly.
Maybe; I don't want too be too cynical about it, but I suspect many people don't really read it in the first place, and if you're the sort of person posting fake jobs then I don't expect you're really deterred by this.
Good point about not many people reading it, but there was a nice all-caps "NEW RULE" at the top today, so we'll see.
Definitely some people who will disregard rules they know are rules, but I think there's also a lot of people who just thought fake job posts were the convention, and now they'll change behavior.
Two questions:
1) How would the feedback loop work from users who do not receive a response?
2) Are you concerned about a possible "chilling effect" for startups that don't want to post for fear of being spammed?
As an aside, been browsing HN for years and always wanted to say that you're doing the Lord's work.
Presumably you guys don’t want to create a report button for just this situation. I never know what to think when I see downvotes in the Who’s Hiring thread. There’s no way for me to tell if someone hates the CEO (eg, if Twitter posted job openings), or they’ve noticed the same position filed three months in a row. I’ve seen a few of those before you got around to detaching them.
I think it's going to be hard to enforce that, unless you go through ycombinator.com/jobs
But I agree that's fair to expect from companies. Yes, they have potentially hundreds of applicants, but writing "We're sorry to inform that you have not been selected to interview" probably takes less than a minute, so spending less than an hour rejecting every applicant seems in line with the time I'd expect each candidate to spend preparing and submitting their application. Plus you can always automate a list of emails to send rejection messages to...
It's also a nice way to differentiate the Who's hiring? from all other job boards out there
Maybe make the "flag" feature work for users to "report" non-responsive employers. On repeat offenses, reach out to them saying they've been repeatedly reported? Just brainstorming
Perhaps the monthly postings should be handled via ycombinator.com/jobs and the thread here is just a dump of this month's new openings with links to applications there but not direct posts by companies?
There's little enforcement happening in those threads anyway—they're too free-form, and manual intervention is too expensive. But adding a rule should hopefully still make a difference.
Maybe add the flag|vouch to the comments for those threads? Not entirely sure how it works (or if its possible), but it seems to work pretty well. I am guessing there is a filter for bad actors, even if not, the few that would be affected would maybe end up with positive comments from long aged accounts.
Thats a lot of maybes, but my impression of the flag|vouch feature is as a first step community moderation and guessing it works well? The job thread being jobs targeting the community, I would think it would as well, or at a minimum help.
I had a little side project I was working on a while ago that would ingest "Who's Hiring" posts every month through the HN API and analyze month to month when each one came and went, in order to call out the companies posting the (according to some heuristic) same ad for months and months, never actually hiring anyone. I was going to snarkily call the tool "Who's Not Hiring?"
Obviously a company -actually- hiring the same kind of person month after month would be a false positive, but I thought it might help to catch some of these companies abusing "Who's Hiring"
Good luck! I still wonder if you can't you sidestep the free-form and manual intervention stuff by giving those threads some shape via a monthly posting feature on ycombinator.com/jobs?
At the end of the day the challenges likely stem from "Who's hiring?" being just a thread with comments on a very spartan message board. I would have said you can solve these issues with an app or website, but you already have one, so it would be easier to just leverage that and then the sky is the limit–add any features you want!
ycombinator/jobs would presumably not be the right venue for an open job board but yes we could build software to better support Who Is Hiring threads. I've always resisted doing so but maybe we eventually will. I'm not sure how that would help with the ghosting problem though...
Would you be open to having people email if they send an application and get ghosted so that you can potentially take action on future hiring threads? (or stuff like the mentioned copy-pasted job posting that got caught in an argument) Since I know that emailing you is already the best way to ask for moderation help.
I like your suggesting actual features/systems, and the idea that we can make hn/jobs the better job board, but I think this targets the wrong problem:
I don’t care if a company ghosts me b/c they hired someone else—I care that/if I spent the time applying to a role for which there was no intent to hire.
How can we mandate that only roles that are actually open get posted? Does hn/jobs require confirmation that a hire was made within a certain timeframe? (say, 3-6 months?). It may be non-solvable as you obviously can’t mandate that a company hires, but if we can mandate that a company not advertise unless they’re going to hire it is certainly non-solved.
I don't love this idea. I feel like it's just going to force even more busybody work into the process - now companies will need to "respond" to every applicant, no matter how irrelevant, so that response isn't going to be high-information anyway.
Someone else suggested a good idea - make companies link to their previous request. Or even better - don't allow companies to post the exact same listing for months in a row. The actual behavior you're trying to root out is a company listing a position that isn't real - so just don't allow them to list the same not-real position over and over.
I don't know if that can be enforced, though it should be easy to script up something that checks this. But you're not going to enforce anything anyway, and I think this gets closer to actually what we want to achieve.
What is this confusing sentence suppose to communicate? That you adore the idea? Or like it? Or hate it? Or are neutral? Or are indifferent? Or any other thousands of options? Nobody knows.
I'm sorry, I certainly don't mean to be off-putting.
The way I parse a sentence like "I don't love this idea", and the way I meant it, is that I think the idea has some merit, it's not terrible, but I'm not fully on board, it has more work to do. It's not all the way to "I don't like it" but it's not great yet.
In any case I elaborated in the rest of the post a bit more on this so I think you can see from the context what I meant.
Yes, if you consider #1 an issue, then you're right. But I'm not sure that's an issue that should actually be addressed, because:
1. It's not anything new, unlike this "ghost jobs" thing which is a supposed new phenomenon. This makes it less likely that the status quo can be improved.
2. I believe the reason the status quo is as it is is because most companies are inundated with job applicants, many of them not even passing a basic qualifying test (e.g. people with no FE experiecnce applying to FE positions with min. required experience of 5 years).
I don't know if this is true for the HN thread, having never posted to it. It's possible it's much higher signal here so this issue becomes less relevant.
Anyway, just my 2 cents, mostly as an outsider to these threads.
Everyone? Applicants are using AI to mass apply for jobs. Not everyone deserves a response.
Why not: Please only post jobs if you are committed to interviewing and filling the position in the next 3 months. Accounts posting the same job opening for 6 months may be banned.
In this market if it takes 6+ months to find someone there is a fundamental problem with the opening.
At the very least it should be: "Please only post a job in this thread if you are committed to responding to all qualified applicants."
You are making good points but now I'm wondering if we should just drop the idea.
Every applicant is going to classify themselves as "qualified"; and every applicant that a company doesn't respond to, they will classify as "unqualified"; so if we modify the rule in this way, we may as well have no rule at all.
(Edit: I just noticed johnnyanmac already made this point in an earlier reply)
Since we're on HN, I think using LLMS instead of humans to talk is a bigger issue than whether an applicant is mass applying outside the site with LLMS. We should address that first and that will fix the issue anyway.
>At the very least it should be: "Please only post a job in this thread if you are committed to responding to all qualified applicants."
Too easy a loophole. I think we should just stick to the spirit of the rule and see if they make an honest gesture not make it literally 100% of applicants (ofc of they want a principal and a student in school applies they shouldn't expect a response).
What if the new rule required a company to link to their last "who's hiring" posting if it was within, say, the last 3 months?
That makes it easy, within HN, to see if a company is just doing copy/paste spam, or if they're posting new/updated info each month. It also has the advantage of being easily verifiable (and enforceable? not sure what the enforcement actions would be...) here on HN versus random anecdotes of "I applied but never heard back", which I doubt would have enough weight for anyone to do anything about.
Users here could help police/moderate by simply replying with a link to last month's posting if there is one and the posting omitted it. That would somewhat-gently "call out" the company for not reading/following the rules, without users leaving negative comments on the thread.
(Just thoughts from a user skimming by, I'm not in the market for a new job at the moment so I have little skin in the game)
I had a plan[1] to use the HN API to try to suss out companies spamming month after month without hiring, but it never went anywhere. This article is motivating me to pick up the 1/4-finished code and have another look at it.
How about mentioning in the who's hiring post that people can email HN if they think someone posted in bad faith. The slight inconvenience should turn off people who complain just for the sake of it, and other readers won't be discouraged by seeing the complaints. The downside is extra admin for you, of course.
I don't think I can handle many more emails*. But beyond that—what would we do? We don't have the cycles to arbitrate these things; nor the skill; nor the interest.
* was going to make a Mr. Creosote reference but thought better of it
Hn/jobs may not have the interest, sure. Job posters in general may not have an interest. I think monetization here comes from candidates. As a job seeker I would be willing to pay for access to a job board where listings/posters are somehow vetted to protect me from filling out ghost applications.
The problem isn't that the rules arent well specified enough. The problem is that too many agents with the most power in this exchange (ie employers) just violate people's trust. Dishonest agents need to be visibly held to account, and right now the only way that happens is by calling them out. But since that's forbidden, there's a conundrum.
I’m not defending companies here, but what I’ve seen happen sometimes is a well-meaning engineering manager will post openings on this or other forums, and then the resumes end up in black holes like Greenhouse where the HR/non-technical types filter out applications without even looking at or responding to many of them.
I wouldn’t always blame the poster, and appreciate them letting us know.
That seems too restrictive to me. Some positions don't fill up quickly and some companies are growing and hiring over long stretches. I am completely unqualified to make these calls.
I'm not saying there aren't abuses taking place but in my experience people are far too quick to jump to such conclusions on the internet, and the jumping-to-conclusions is actually the much bigger problem. Just speaking generally here–not about the Who Is Hiring threads.
Another potential way to at least surface dodgy behaviour perhaps: Automatically append to a poster's comment links to all their previous comments in Who's Hiring threads in the past twelve months.
I can foresee posters then creating throwaway accounts to avoid this, but the green username would be a give-away (or restrict new accounts from posting on these threads).
> It's against the rules to call out hiring companies in the thread, primarily because we don't want off-topic arguments
All due respect: if an employer posts here offering for people to apply, that the employer in question is bad in some way, I don't see why that's considered "off topic." If a company sucks, we owe it to our fellow engineers to get the word out until they improve. A perfect example being the sorts that don't have any intention of filling the jobs they post.
In my mind the only sort of company that would avoid posting here due to the potential of being criticized by the HN userbase are exactly the sorts you don't want posting, so that seems like a win/win.
> we don't want off-topic arguments and because it would be too easy to exploit it for shenanigans.
Are there any other reasons you mentioned? I only found this one.
Thinking about it, people replying to the post stake their reputation too in whatever they post. If we see a throwaway or newish account causing shenanigans, people interested in the job post can form their own opinion of the nature of the comment? (isn't that what downvoting is for too?).
Since threads have this nice toggle feature you can always click [-] to ignore whatever people is saying about a job posting.
That's two reasons! (1) It's offtopic, which is especially bad given that the threads are so comment-heavy; and (2) it's too easy to exploit.
I suppose exploit is not the right word, because a lot of it is people posting their grudges or bad feelings that they probably have perfectly legit reasons for, and yet are not the full story. We're not going to get the full story, or even a fair assessment, from a distracting back-and-forth in the middle of a job ads thread; and that's ignoring the point that most people posting to Who Is Hiring aren't in a position to respond to such complaints in the first place.
It seems to me easy to see that if we allowed it, there would be no limit to it, and the end result would be a bad scene indeed.
Wouldn't any company unscrupulous enough to advertise a job opening without a genuine intention to hire simply disregard such a rule?
Thinking out loud:
* What if there were a bit more restrictions to posting on Who's hiring? Perhaps a counter of how many times a profile has posted, with a max of N posts allowed per M months, or something.
* Would also be nice to have some feedback from HN profiles on outcome of the job posting. Add a link to the job posting to your about page:
... this way you can attempt to disregard the feedback if the profile posting it seems bogus. Posters wouldn't want to hurt their own reputation by lying about the quality of a job posting.
Anyway, maybe something like that would be out of scope for HN, but just thinking out loud here :-).
I like it! Frankly, it should be something that hiring companies do anyways.
Perhaps extend it to something like everyone who applies, or responds to your comment”
Practically speaking, enforcement will be difficult/impossible for actions off HN - if someone claims a company isn’t responding, or using a templated email, how would you verify that?
By enforcing the same rule for a job thread, there’s a very clear location where the behavior of the company can be observed.
I think that's a great start. I mean for me, I'm realistic - if it's a pre-first round or first round exit so to speak, I don't expect anything substantive, a canned response is acceptable. I get that it's a pain when you have hundreds of applicants, but it should also be trivial.
It is nice to expect something a bit more involved if it's a final round thing, but still. No-one likes the ghost.
What I would really like to see is for employers to give actual feedback to the rejected candidates at any stage of the interview process. I am sure that employers can find a way to share constructive feedback without the fear of any legal implications. And I am sure most candidates will really appreciate a meaningful feedback instead of an automated rejection email. This would also have the side effect of having only serious candidates and employers engage in the process and should go a long way of getting rid of these ghost jobs. I would love to see a job board which only post jobs where the employers promises to share a feedback with any candidate they interview. I am sure it will be a hit.
I would suggest that there be a way to report bad-faith job postings in some way or there are consequences. anyone can claim they applied with no response. Someone who reports actual evidence like "this account has posted this exact listing for the last 4 months and the company size hasn't changed a bit" may justify e.g. removing listings.
What about all of the YC companies posting comment-free ads for founding engineers offering 1/2 market wages and next-to-no equity in person in SF?
Honestly it's practically a joke to look at and it starting to make YC itself look bad. Seriously there is no value prop to these postings unless you are jobless, desperate and living in your car.
perhaps upvotes and downvotes can be subtly weighed by karma? This would give proven contributors more trust. In the case of job posts, it would enlist them in zapping the spam they recognise month after month?
And beyond that, beyond applicability to job posts, perhaps voting can be a collaborative filtering bubble instead of absolutes? This makes spammers and voting rings end up in an echo chamber? And perhaps for normal posts instead of there being an early top level comment that gets to the top and stays there and monopolises the conversation, you get more variety and people more easily find the conversation they come for?
We've experimented with vote weighting over the years but the results have been disappointing. It's not easy to come up with criteria for users whose votes are more reliable.
If companies receive comments saying i never heard back (at least they need to generate an email saying application was received and later your not a good fit, if not) and they keep posting this same or similar job. Well then they should warned about losing their HN job listing priviligies. Put them on a list that a bot notifies you and or downvotes them a lot.
Those who comment and are to be taken seriously will have a certain amount of karma and or history on HN.
"Dear [applicant name], thank you for sending us your application.
We have decided not to progress your application further.
While making our decision we've noted your extensive experience at [previous company] and feel that your skillsets are highly valuable in the industry and hope you find success in your job search soon."
I actually received that from a major tech company, unfilled mail merge aliases included.
Tangentially-related: I see postings for jobs specifically in states that require pay transparency (posting the pay range in job announcements), but they do not include a pay range in their announcements. While this is primarily an issue for companies that are illegally posting announcements without the required pay range, it might be helpful to include a statement in the rules at the top of the page. This statement could remind posters that if they are in a state with a pay transparency law, they need to include the pay range in their job postings.
Could also make it a site rule that _all_ jobs postings should include a pay range. Shouldn't have to waste your time applying to a job that has a pay range you would never accept.
Could this be a case where companies have a "people-ops" person who needs to justify their position even though the company hasn't hired anyone in months? So they create some new OKRs like: "Get 20 qualified candidates vetted and ranked in case we do decide to hire someone.", "Create 40 job ads" or something?
It wasn't just them, but another dozen or so YC startups who've been around for many years and always keep a job ad in the queue. It's not their fault for doing that—it's my fault for neglecting the HN job ad system for too long. I get that the community doesn't like seeing the same ads over and over for the same few, long-established companies.
We recently changed the HN /jobs page to gradually reduce the frequency of those. Newer startups, who by definition haven't been around long enough to have had many posts, should be significantly better represented. The system has been designed to favor them for a long time, but it's favoring them more now.
>it's my fault for neglecting the HN job ad system for too long.
If it helps, the system works great on an honor system. Have a community of passionate hackers, a site encouraging those hackers (some of which may be part of the community) to start up their own business and realize their ides, and the ad system would have good actors on both sides the pipeline. Interesting jobs for a community of passionate people.
I feel like that "honor" comes and goes with the economy though. Anything for an applicant to survive, anything for a job poster to make the company look good for investors.
Last I applied to a job posted on Who's Hiring, they had me fill a self recorded video interview on some platform. And do some coding exercise with screen sharing. Then send it to them. I've never gotten any sort of reply back, positive or negative. Felt like a clown. Won't be using that again.
Also along with ghost jobs do we have ghost candidates? Every job posting on LinkedIn have hundred plus applicants within the first two hours. Maybe many of the applicants are not eligible but this phenomenon points to a massive increase in labor supply for tech jobs. Automation and opening up competition globally is gutting out most of the tech jobs it seems.
The candidates are real. But The qualifications often aren't. Even if you post a job being full time on-site, you'll get applicants who are not even in the same country looking for remote work.
I feel that was the natural conclusion of a system where "requirements" are as realistic as a unicorn. But we're all suffering from that
Don’t use LinkedIn or Monster or Indeed. You’re better off searching on Google with “ inurl:careers” and finding positions these companies are directly hiring for.
Agree. Plus recruiters also sometimes reach out. There is quite a high signal to noise as always, but, it can be worth it. You don't need to engage in all the influencer crap at all, just ignore that and use it to be found by recruiters and to see some open positions.
I've gotten 3 separate jobs from linkedin recruiters approaching me cold.
I dont engage with the platform, I don't post, I won't connect with recruiters, and yet still... they find you, and inmail you. It's usually local jobs with humane commutes and decent pay.
By contrast, I've never gotten a single interview for an application submitted via linkedin, and I've put out hundreds.
There is benefit to being an active participant in your job search. I don't depend on anyone for employment, as self-employment is ALWAYS an option if you're serious about longevity and profit ($$$).
Honestly, the ideal approach if you're going for traditional W-2 steady paycheck employment job is:
- recruiters/people already approach you. This works when you build your network and reputation.
- use your network of trusted/worked-with-previously recruiters for leads.
- fend for yourself in the murky depths of the scummy internet full of low-life tactics reference farming, resume scraping, and G*d knows else happens when you participate in a public forum.
Real question: did you really want that job or was this just a +1 for your gamified job search? I think quality searches yield quality results.
Did you have previous experience when you became self-employed? I'm strongly considering this but I feel that I haven't had enough experience in the 9-5s. I also really need steady income in the near future to pay off loans.
Or Dice. Dice is just a spam magnet for "I know you're a PM in Washington looking for remote roles, but we have this two month onsite Kubernetes contract in Indiana, can we talk?"
I got one the other day asking if I'd take a down leveling and move to Korea for a six month contract even though my profile says I only accept permanent remote roles
This wasn't thought of when false advertising laws were drafted. California:
17500. It is unlawful for any person, firm, corporation or association, or any employee thereof with intent directly or indirectly to dispose of real or personal property or to perform services, professional or otherwise, or anything of any nature whatsoever or to induce the public to enter into any obligation relating thereto, to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated before the public in this state, or to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated from this state before the public in any state, in any newspaper or other publication, or any advertising device, or by public outcry or proclamation, or in any other manner or means whatever, including over the Internet, any statement, concerning that real or personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, or concerning any circumstance or matter of fact connected with the proposed performance or disposition thereof, which is untrue or misleading, and which is known, or which by the exercise of reasonable care should be known, to be untrue or misleading, or for any person, firm, or corporation to so make or disseminate or cause to be so made or disseminated any such statement as part of a plan or scheme with the intent not to sell that personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, so advertised at the price stated therein, or as so advertised. Any violation of the provisions of this section is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or by both that imprisonment and fine.
The language is broad, but they didn't cover the case of ads where no transaction was even contemplated. This is a bug.
I wonder how demoralizing this must be on HR workers, having to post a job, screen CV's, trying to stay professional while knowing that the hiring manager actually doesn't care, having to constantly put people with hopes off, and ultimately let people feel they are not good enough just because some C-hole wants to bring in his buddy who's most likely not half as competent as the people who were rejected.
Recruiting (which is typically part of HR) lives and dies by the need to search for candidates for open positions. No open positions - they're out of a job. So I very much doubt they feel bad doing the job they were hired to do.
I'll bite my tongue on my HR thoughts, but AFAIK HR incentives are saving a company money, or making the company a lot of money. You don't necessarily need to hire people if you're focused on cost saving measures.
I agree with others that this can be seen as market abuse since it disrupts the essential functioning of our labor markets. After completing my Master's, I've since struggled to find a job, only signing a contract yesterday thanks to my past connections and proven work from before I returned to academia. The current job market in my country has been absolutely brutal. I've applied to hundreds of roles. For many interviews, I traveled to other cities only to learn later that the positions I was being interviewed for were canceled entirely, with no one hired.
But the real issue are these "ghost" job postings where there's no intention to hire anyone at all in the first place. Some companies use them to, I guess, just gather some data and CVs + salary expectations, while others want to appear active and growing to investors, but don’t engage whatsoever when people spend time and apply. This distorts the job market and creates a lot of frustration in applicants. 90% of people I know here and more broadly in Europe have gotten their jobs via connections and people they know. I wouldn’t be surprised if some regulation comes soon, as I doubt I'm the only one impacted by this situation.
Well I think the person quoted is suggesting you work on your network now, presumably before you are looking for a job. But I could see an argument that even going to meetups and just talking to people while you're actively looking is more likely to be successful than emailing resumes. That is to say, even the act of building a network from the ground up could be highly effective.
"Knowing people" seem to have become even more important. But I feel that is a really long term thing. It is really hard to get into a position where you get valuable contacts or do interesting stuff. And your contacts more or less need some power.
It is just that, I feel it is like telling some lonely child "so get friends". For most programmers trying to get a job, I think "just keep the grind up, champ! I'll buy you some ice cream if you give it your best" is more helpful.
These "ghost jobs" the article writes about is poisoning the well. Applicants need to spam even more. Employers get more half hearted applications.
I've noticed these probably fake job ads for years, but it seem to have escalated.
It wouldn't surprise me that we will end up in the straw man "first man or woman through the door with a firm handshake that looks the boss in the eyes gets the job" hiring process as the current formal one gets totally dysfunctional.
So, this is the problem. We are doing a Kabuki dance where there is an illusion of good faith and meritocracy, when really, it's just a brutalist labor order book between employers and employees, unless you have a network (which takes years to build and might still prove useless if you can't refer someone into your org because blah blah hiring pipeline that is really just garbage anyway). For example, someone at the VP level at Slack recently posted on LinkedIn for a job req that all candidates have to go through the formal process to avoid unfairness (no informal resume reviews or interviews would be had).
If you offer up a job req, there should be punitive consequences if it is not legitimate. You are incurring cost and harm on job seekers spending time engaging with said post, at no cost to the employer. This is to be solved for, just as pay transparency is slowly being solved for with regulation and statute. If you have policy suggestions, I'm interested, as someone who engages with policymakers.
Talent acquisition is the cost of being in business. Hiring is hard, I admit. Being efficient while remaining within legal and regulatory frameworks is fine and expected, fraud and misrepresentation through job postings with no intent to hire is not.
it does, but the damage isn't proportional to job seekers and there can even be malicious incentives to do this. That should be punished and discouraged.
We've seen for a long time now that companies will put up with a lot of inefficiencies for various other bottom lines.
But how do you punish this without making it even worse in some other way?
Much of the current situation stems from fairness-minded regulations forcing companies to post jobs they already have a candidate for, wasting everybody’s time.
I guess our opinion will vary on "worse", but the worst case for a job seeker is less jobs to click on. I don't see that as worse than applying to a bunch of jobs thst don't exist or are otherwise exploiting the idea of a job posting.
>Much of the current situation stems from fairness-minded regulations forcing companies to post jobs they already have a candidate for, wasting everybody’s time.
Yes, I do believe we should repeal those regulations. Someone who wants to hire a friend of family member will figure out how to do it.
H1bs are a more complex matter. They should ironically enough strengthen those so an H1b isn't held hostage by an employer who can lay them off on thr drop of a hat. They should have more protections as they are a sponsored guest and not yet an American citizen.
It is quite common with some sort of time consuming application process before interviews, where only the applicant waste time. Like, the employers seem to use "willing to waste time" as some sort of filter.
E.g. my brother applied for a job this summer and was pre-screened by some sort of chat bot, which I guess will become way more common.
>Any smallish 1-2 hour meeting with a couple of people on it can easily cost thousands if you work out people’s hourly wage.
Companies expect employees to work late, for free, to get their duties done, so time spent on time-wasting hiring meetings only affect the employees, not the company's finances.
Embarrassing admission: I don't really understand how "networking" works when it comes to getting a job. It's always just stated: "Go network, bro!" but without any explanation of how it is supposed to work. I wish someone could pretend I was a dummy, and explain the process to me using simple words. From start (you don't know anyone working at company X) to finish (you accept a job at company X).
I remember long ago the career development people at my university would tell us to all go out and "network" company representatives when they come during career week. The way it was explained to me was to go up to them and pretend to be their friend, talk about sportsball, drink alcohol with them, gain some rapport or something... It was never really clear what the right magical incantation was. All I know was some people were really good at it and got invited to interview at dozens of companies, and other had no luck at all.
But, just for argument's sake, let's say I go out and successfully manage to "network" you. You now know me and think I would be a good employee. What now? I guess I say "Hey, rightbyte, I'm looking for a job at your company. Do you know of any roles that are hiring?" You say "Sure, here's job position XYZ, and the link to go apply. Good luck!" And now I'm back where I started. Or if I'm lucky, you will refer me in your company's HR system, giving your digital "thumbs up" in that system, and that referral will send me... an E-mail with the link where I should go apply. I'm still not that much better off. Is that thumbs up going to let me skip rounds of interviews or give me extra points when the yes/no decision happens? How does it help me break through the hundreds of other candidates that are cold-applying?
I've had people reach out to me and ask me to refer them for a job with my employer, and in most companies, all I can do is point them to a job link. I'm lowly worker-bee number 52231, I don't have some kind of hiring boost I can hand out to people.
The whole 'networking' enterprise seems like a bizarre, opaque process where nobody can explain how it works, but everyone's advice is that we should all somehow "go do it" as it's an important component of a job search.
That’s the gold digger’s approach. It’s quite saddening! When I find myself looking for a new job, I do my best to look for open opportunities shared to everybody, not through obscure connections. I like to imagine that everyone should have access to the same opportunities. Of course that if somebody gets in touch based on past experiences or circumstances that’s fair!
Maybe some of these networking people are the same that force others to come to the office to entertain them?
The main (and possibly only) benefit of networking is that hiring manager will look at your resume. Without networking, your resume may never even been seen by the hiring manager. But beyond that networking does not matter for the candidate. In fact, FAANG companies go out of their way to make sure that the person who referred the candidate is excluded from having any involvement in the interview process. The days where you get to skip rounds just because you know someone are gone.
>I don't really understand how "networking" works when it comes to getting a job. It's always just stated: "Go network, bro!" but without any explanation of how it is supposed to work
There's two methodologies.
1. you work with peers (can be in school, work, or even a hobby if you're lucky), be a good person and provide good work. Years later you reach out and see how they are doing (ideally you keep good tabs on them, but let's be real. Men can just kinda disappear for years and resume a conversation with no tension nor animosity. So just reach out). They may or may not have something to refer you for. And ideally it's vice versa if they reach out to you. This method is organic but takes months, years of contact.
2. You're extremely specialized and you're your own business. Networking for future leads is part of your job. This will yield faster effects but mostly because you're already offering something of value.
of course, most people are stuck in the first bucket, especially early in your career.
>The way it was explained to me was to go up to them and pretend to be their friend, talk about sportsball, drink alcohol with them, gain some rapport or something... It was never really clear what the right magical incantation was.
Yeah, that's schmoozing networking. If a person likes you, it opens doors. This is just a universal sensation. it's the "dirty networking", but also the "classic networking". How you meet mates, how you make a good impression among socialites, etc.
This method relies less on your skills as a prospective. employee and more on your ability to quickly hit it off with a new person to the point where you're memorable. It's a way, but definitely not one everyone can do (nor wants to do). It's an entirely different skillset so you really have to train that muscle (and given your participation here, you may need to adjust your "likes" to more mainstream stuff. Or at least "tolerances". Sportsball discussion can open new doors if you really want to go that route).
>But, just for argument's sake, let's say I go out and successfully manage to "network" you. You now know me and think I would be a good employee. What now? I guess I say "Hey, rightbyte, I'm looking for a job at your company. Do you know of any roles that are hiring?" You say "Sure, here's job position XYZ, and the link to go apply. Good luck!" And now I'm back where I started
not all networks are created equal. Your goal with a job network is to get a referral, if not an outright fast track to an offer. If you got nothing more than a recruiter response, that person either can't do much more or doesn't want to do much more. Don't underestimate the power of a referral though. Those applications go through an entirely different pipeline. Basically the fast line for Disneyland.
That's also why "natural networking " is a long game. Juniors networking with themselves don't yield much. 20 years later, those juniors turned managers/founders/leads might just bring you into a company with the wave of their hand.
>The whole 'networking' enterprise seems like a bizarre, opaque process where nobody can explain how it works, but everyone's advice is that we should all somehow "go do it" as it's an important component of a job search.
That's because relationships are a bizarre opaque process where nobody can explain how it works. Sometimes you just trip into the right person and you're friends for life. Sometimes you are off on the wrong track with someone forever because you remind them of an unrelated person in their life. people on a macro level are a lottery of some sorts.
I think there’s a legitimate market opportunity here. I am seeking a cofounder to build the job board that vets employers, and makes money by charging candidates to access it.
The problem to be solved, imo, is ghost listings.
- I don’t care if a company ghosts me because they hired someone else
- I care if I spend time filling out applications for jobs that don’t exist
I’m not sure how to make participation by the employer tractable. They can’t exactly be mandated to hire, can they? Unless I’m trapped in a prison of the mind that seems like too risky of a proposition for them.
That said, as a candidate I would happily pay $USD/month for access to a job board where I know that the job as posted is definitely for real and definitely getting filled in a certain timeframe. I don’t care if my particular resume gets read, or replied to. I only care that the phenomena of “ghost job” is nonexistent in the walled-garden that I’m paying for access to.
This sounds similar to a problem dating sites face—solving the user's problem leads them away from the service. But you have the added difficulty that people looking for employment may not have the resources to spend on another monthly subscription.
>. I am seeking a cofounder to build the job board that vets employers, and makes money by charging candidates to access it.
Sounds like awful monetization. Dating site issue is right. Your best candidates (so ideally, all the ones you vet) won't be long term subscribers. And sadly, there's way too many grifts in the job system where a candidate paying is a red flag. You'd need to offer the candidates something of value to justify that. Not just "a promise of no ghost jobs").
Is there an issue with the usual recruiter pipeline where you can charge the company some percent of the hire once they get hired? Candidates get hired, company pays a little extra on a successful hire, and your profit incentives come from quality to offer for the companies (hopefully).
The main issue is that it assumes that companies genuinely care about an efficient hiring pipeline. And I've been very cynical in recent times...
What if the employer was charged a subscription fee, instead of waiting until they find a hire to charge? Then the incentive is for the company to find a hire quickly, since they're now paying per month instead of per head. Some companies will balk at this, obviously, since existing services charge them per head and they don't know how fast a viable hire will appear...but I'd guess that this would be highly effective at weeding out 'employers' who have no interest in employing any new hires.
(Also, seconding the part about grifts where a candidate is charged upfront. Charging upfront for access to training materials, equipment, or some kind of licensing agreement is often a sign that you're about to get roped into a multi-level marketing scam.)
Incentivize the employer to only provide real listings by having them pay to advertise a listing. Let them be reimbursed if it's filled via the platform.
You don't need to solve the problem 100%. An employer can still drag their feet and not fill a listing. But by aligning all incentives you can drastically reduce the problem.
My understanding is that employers already do pay to post on LI, indeed, etc. It simply works out that paying for ghost jobs is worth it, so the enforcement mechanism needs to be a ban/other thing that doesn't rely on pricing
Post makes errors around what nonprofits are and can do. (IANAL, but I do set up and run nonprofits for a living.)
Error 1: "In the US, non-profits are heavily regulated in their operations..."
Correction: There are no more or less regulations than other sectors, but there is almost ZERO enforcement, so if anything, the nonprofit sector is more accurately described as very lightly regulated.
Error 2: ", and exempt from income tax."
Correction: Nonprofits are NOT exempt from income tax on revenue from earned activity that is not mission related, known as Unrelated Business Income.
Error 3: "Across the many different structures, though, non-profits have one thing in common: They don't have owners."
Correction: Oversimplification - nonprofits are run and functionally owned by a board of directors, people who hire and fire the CEO, decide how revenue is allocated, and approve any merger or dissolution. Nonprofits can also own for-profit subsidiaries (see OpenAI) so there are a lot of gray areas here.
In sum, nonprofit status is far more complex that OP thinks and there are a ton of opportunities for skulduggery - just because Ghost is a nonprofit does NOT mean it is free of conflicts or other bad things than companies do.
If Ghost really wants to demonstrate its transparency, it should publish its tax returns (IRS form 990) and also an itemized P&L -- then they can stake a claim to being holier than the typical business.
People often think that "non-profit" means that the company can't make a profit. It actually means that the company doesn't have any owners who can personally take the profits. Any revenue earned can only be reinvested.
What we need is, is Job-postings-as-code so that we can automate the deployment of Linkedin postings such that when a recruiter is let go, we can automatically identify their postings and clean them up.
We'll call it DevHiringOps
Seriously tho, always use the companies website instead of believing whatever is on some job posting website.
> We leave this role posted because it's so critical to our operation and onboard as demand requires, however at this time we don't have enough demand to justify another full time hire.
Noticed this trend a few years ago from startups keen to look like they were growing much faster than they really were. Personally I wouldn’t begin the process unless an insider had confirmed that a position was a) Real, and b) I would not be disfavoured somehow, meaning that I would be applying on a level playing field.
Of the obvious fake job postings I've seen, I always assumed they were attempts at Russian or Chinese espionage. Example: for a very brief time I was a US DoD contractor.
Just my own experience but I have never gotten a job with a cold application on a job board. Always been via a recruiter or even better an inside contact.
My experience is completely the opposite: I've always gotten jobs from job boards. In one case, my resume was posted somewhere (monster.com I think, many years ago) and the hiring manager saw it and liked it and called me. In all other cases, I applied myself.
I've tried working with 3rd-party recruiters, and always found them to be a waste of time, because the companies they worked with weren't good and didn't pay very well.
In contrast, I have only once in my career gotten a job via an inside contact. Of the four jobs I've had since school, three of them were with a cold application.
I think my secret is working in a specific niche, but I could be wrong.
Your mileage may vary of course. The jobs I’ve had since an on-campus interview in grad school were all people I had worked with in some capacity. Basically never sent a resume except pro-forma.
I became curious long after the fact if a job description for my last job that was written for me was ever posted.
> They also made ads to “trick overworked employees” into believing that more people would be brought on to alleviate their overwhelming workload.
The part of the picture I'm more interested about is how the managers see it.
There must be a lowly manager actually trying to do something about their overworked team, and I assume they have access to HR and know which positions are real which aren't. And they know the company not only doesn't intend to hire, but is also gaslighting them, and they're made part of it.
It feels so gloom and just depressing beyond words.
The article doesn't really discuss the legality of this, which I'd be curious to hear the opinion of a lawyer.
In other cases, it's considered criminal if a company deliberately puts out false information about itself. E.g., if you lie about your companies products (like Theranos), it's pretty clear that this is not legal.
I don't see why it should be legal to lie about your job opportunities.
ah the ol “Everything is securities fraud”. I could see it. Company posts jobs for department that is being divested/going out of business/etc, this misleads investors, ergo: securities fraud.
This is just one example. While tech jobs are diverse, the well-heeled players substantially set the tone and they have gone berserk: over the last few years they have neutron bombed entire zip codes claiming hard times, then posted record-shattering EPS beats, then hired back a bunch of people at substantially lower compensation in a phenomenon so pervasive to have a catchy name: “boomerang”. It’s not even the first time recently got popped for wage fixing, Don’t Poach Gate was like 15 years ago. They’re giving us all the finger in the Crimson, and we will do nothing because we can do nothing.
It’s a trivial abuse of monopsony pricing power, it’s illegal in the sense that the laws as written prohibit it on a common-sense, “intended by the legislature” sense, a lawyer can tell you if it’s maybe legal via stare decis via activist judges bench legislating.
But more importantly it has destroyed what loose social contract there was: they cannot in fact run these businesses at 60-70% of peak headcount sustainably: they can merely coast on previous investments long enough to crush salaries and then clean up the mess because there isn’t any real competition. They can distort hiring to where McCarthyist vibe checks and loyalty tests hit a precision/recall that is Pareto optimized for the minimum amount of competence that admits an endorsement of their nepo baby “nice trumps kind” mythology.
And they’re going to get away with it at the level that matters: the individual incentives of executives are nothing to do with the long term interests of shareholders or the commons on this: progress is stalling out in a way that will never show up on a quarterly report in time to matter to the executives.
And you can see it in real time: we haven’t had such an embarrassing crop of people who were someone’s roommate at Harvard running the show in at least 30 years, the outcomes are awful, the software sucks, the products suck, and the game is soft communist friction around leaving the platform.
I haven’t had to resort to applying to jobs I couldn’t or wouldn’t do to fulfill unemployment insurance requirements, but who knows what will happen in December if this goes on.
proportions. 1 uninterested candidate wastes maybe 5 hours at best of a million dollar company's time. All the while those doing the interviewing were paid anyway.
1 bad post wastes dozens, hundreds of applicant's time. Especially the damn Workday apps. That time is not compensated and only gets worse the farter in you go.
I mean the reason I can think of off the top of my head is that one is wasting the time of people who are looking for a job so they can continue to live, and the other is wasting the time of a person who's job is reviewing resumes?
I don't agree with the attitude of the grandparent poster either, but work at a small company where I've been on the receiving end of many extremely low-effort applications from ineligible individuals, so it definitely goes both ways. Companies are also bombarded with spam from recruiters, just as candidates are.
There would be less application spam if there were fewer spam job postings.
Because only one in a hundred postings is real, we have to send out hundreds of applications before even getting a rejection. There's no way to tell if a posting is real or if anyone will ever read your application, so the only option available is to apply to everything.
A lot of people pose this as a prisoner's dilemma, but it really is not. This problem is not mutual, it's entirely one sided. If companies would only post jobs they intended to hire for, there would be exponentially fewer spam applications. They've fucked around by posting spam and now they're finding out by receiving even more spam.
When the average applicant has to send literally hundreds of applications to get any response at all, absolutely nobody is going to handcraft a thought out application to any one posting. There's literally not enough hours in the day. Because we don't even get rejection letters back, the only way forward is to firehose as many applications as possible and just hope you win the lottery by getting your resume in front of a human.
It's absolutely terrible for everyone involved and the only ones who can stop it want to act victimized by the problem they created
> "There would be less application spam if there were fewer spam job postings."
I disagree with this; in fact, I think there would be more application spam with fewer postings. Most of the application spam is from people who are either completely unqualified and just pressing the 'apply' button (which is made easy by websites which get paid per application), or people looking to move to a wealthier country (without any pre-qualification). I think both of these groups would actually be more aggressive about applying if they were more likely to be reviewed by a hiring manager.
I think it would bifrucate the obvious spam from the obvious real posters and make your job easier, even if there's more apps to go through. Lot of the worst is that vague middle land of "is this qualified? but it also kind of looks like AI because job applications expect a very specific format of resume".
So you'd win out that way. But I also don't sympathize too much as the "unqualifies just pressing apply" was a natural endstate of years of bad job requirement postings.
Sure but what I'm saying is that the stakes for a company having to go through spam applications are significantly lower than the people trying to find a job who are getting spammed with dead ends while their savings drain lower and lower.
Maybe for a big company, with an HR department and lots of resources, but not for a small company when >>90% of applications are from ineligible individuals.
yeah, but at worst, you waste time on the dime of a company from the recruiter's/hiring manager's POV. on the other side, you're wasting precious capital (time & money) from someone who may instead be hanging out with their kids, or taking care of their sick mother--i understand these are contrived examples. from a pure utalitarian perspective, both are a complete waste of time. but from a moral/ethical perspective, i think there's a clear loser in terms of precious time wasted.
I am an individual who works at a small company, and going through ineligible applications takes away from time I could spend with children or family. I am not an HR professional, but we don't have a massive staff to delegate these matters to. The situations are morally equivalent.
do you do this outside of work hours? sounds more like a failure on how the company operates than the nature of the problem. taking a wild guess that if it weren't for combing through through applications, then those extra hours spent on mindless HR stuff would simply be filled with other work.
It doesn’t matter when you waste someone’s time; work hours are fungible for most professionals. Your ‘wild guess’ seems very convenient with respect to your previous comment, and happens to be incorrect.
Well I opened the article, near the beginning I saw the text: "81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled."
Instantly that felt completely insane to me, my bullshit detector went off the chart, so since they provided a source, I followed up on the source to see the evidence for myself.
What do you know, the source is from a "my perfect resume" website that apparently conducted a study on the issue, but they aren't providing the details of the study, aren't providing a paper , aren't providing the methodology or questions asked, aren't providing any details whatsoever, the only thing they provide is the "conclusions" of their study.
So, apparently because this random website supposedly conducted a study, and they say the result was "81% posted fake jobs", that makes it true.
Hey, I also conducted a study, and 14% posted fake jobs. There, my claim has just as much backing as theirs does.
Instantly lost interest in the "study" and the article based on it.
I've done tech interviewing for years. Job listing that are to various degree fake are quite common. Of course, fakeness comes in many flavor, from listings posted just to "see if there's anyone out there" (I had a boss who did this regularly) to jobs a supervisor really does want to fill but which they know they won't because the bureaucracy has forced impossible requirements on them. An example: "Junior programmer, 10 years experience in language X" (that's existed for five years).
This is another personal anecdote, but I had an interview earlier this year for a database related role. The job ad had a huge salary range and the interview had nothing to do with the role. I wasn't asked any behavioral or technical questions. The two people on the call just wanted to get to know me. We probably spent several minutes talking about sports. A few days later I got rejected. What the hell?
One of the reasons might be that you belong to a protected category (by gender, age, race, etc). These interviews are sometimes referred to as "compliance interviews". These candidates will be reported on the HR diversity metrics to prove that the company made an effort to reach out to diverse candidates (even though no actual effort was made). A few companies (Wells Fargo I believe was one) were fined by the Feds for these practices.
You're supporting the wrong team?
I've also been hired after similar "non-interviews". Sometimes it's hard to know if it's just disorganisation/incompetence or if there's outright fakery going on.
or that they're already confident in technical ability and looking for a culture fit.
Most likely a green card application related sham job posting where they already have someone working in that position on a work visa for several years with experience with their internals and doing a good job, but the regulations force the company to post their job at several places, interview people and reject them for some plausible reason, while applying for a green card for that person. All this needs to be documented properly.
It's extremely common at most companies, including MFAANG, because it makes zero sense to layoff the incumbent and hire a brand new person.
https://old.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/jy5rcw/lpt_bec...
Facebook got caught.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/03/facebook-...
Perhaps a higher layer of management had a headcount target they wanted to fill for some reason, but this team didn't actually want or need new people but were forced to go through the process anyway.
the interviewers are being paid to do interviews
Was your boss aware of the toll it takes to interview (well) on his own teams?
Oh, he never interviewed, just posted on craigslist and collected resumes. But the impact on us was important. One of the purposes of the exercise for him was being able to show me a list of people could supposedly do my job better, faster and cheaper.
He was a friend of a friend and one of the most unprincipled people I've ever gotten to actually know. But I assume there are many similar people higher in corporate hierarchies that I wouldn't ever know.
What is the benefit of knowing "that anybody is out there"? Subjective devaluation of current employees?
I took that to mean ”we don’t really need anyone right now, but if someone who is very good applies, we’ll hire them”.
Edit: Or maybe not, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42012035
devaluation, but also just knowing if we could replace people.
I have 5 Sr. Devs and if any of them split, how long would it take me to replace them? and at what rate? and what skillsets will they have and not have?
Just to note. 80% of recruiters doesn't mean 80% of ads. A recruiter that has posted thousands of legitimate ads in their career, technically only needs to have posted 1 fake one to be eligible for inclusion in the 80%.
Although I understand, and to some extent share, your skepticism regarding the "study", I have no problem conceiving that a trend might currently be setting around the practice of posting fake ads, for whatever reason. It doesn't require much. In an unregulated playing field, simple peer pressure and survival is all you need to drive everyone to shady practices.
So, the study might be moot, but the number isn't so surprising.
This isn't new. Forbes also interviewed someone who made such a study.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/karadennison/2023/11/27/how-gho...
You probably need to pay to see their surveys, but even if you don't trust that: the bureau of labor has had to make huge adjustments all this year and last year. This isn't just some bad optics.
Unless I misunderstand you, you're citing a completely irrelevant factoid. Employment statistics are based on actual people working, not job ads posted. And the revisions [1] (which sometimes are upward) have nothing to do with ghost jobs, but are due to additional data coming in over time, leading to refinements of the original estimate[2].
[1] https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm [2] https://thedispatch.com/article/jobs-report-revisions-explai...
My implications are that companies are either lying and being readjusted from later audits, or government is choosing not to take data into account until later, where impact is lessened. It's not a "ghost job" in the modern meaning, but it does seem to be pretending there are a lot more jobs than in reality.
Seems perfectly plausible that the phenomenon of ghost jobs is real and it may be getting worse.
But this SF Gate piece is dumb. The article has one source for its data points and the author does nothing to investigate or challenge the quality of that data. This is not journalism. It looks like a PR piece for resume builder.
The Forbes article you linked is much more informative.
> Well I opened the article, near the beginning I saw the text: "81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled."
I love San Francisco to death, but there's no reliable local newspaper. It drives me nuts.
The really common reason in my experience is there is a job that is made to fit a specific internal applicant but it has to advertised “because of process”. Often the manager is not even telling recruiting that they have already picked the candidate.
What about job postings for a position already held by an H1B visa holder?
What about job postings that are not taken down until a new hire is given the offer, agrees verbally, signs the paperwork, relocates and actually shows up on the job?
Many companies have policies requiring that all jobs have to be posted both internally and externally before being filled. The intent is to prevent Sam the VP from just slotting his buddy into the job. At the end of the day, Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them.
Same thing happens with H1B/PERM, except now it's the law requiring it rather than company policy. The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it.
Terrible situation for all involved.
> The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it.
Posted obscurely in a corner of the cafeteria, but exposing my salary to anyone who cared to look. They were never going to hire someone else, and we all knew it, but the charade had to be played.
Written with incredibly specific requirements that might as well have the name of the person they're retaining as one of them.
The ones at Amazon were super generic. SDE skills were supposedly "fungible."
That's such a laugh IRL for a lot of job types. Are surgeons fungible? Need brain surgery?, oh don't worry we'll get the orthopedic surgeon in here.
I feel confident there are software jobs where it's essentially as specialized.
Very much so - I worked at a place that tried to make all testers easily transferable between teams because apparently testing is testing. Except they didn't go so far as to do it for the team that tested some ancient Fortran application running on obscure hardware because it turns out that testers can be specialised.
In Europe jobs have to be published. Even if there is no intention of filling it from the public. And companies also publish bullshit jobs which are used to manipulate regulatory requirements if needed (eg. if you want to hire a foreigner, you must prove you couldn't fill the position locally - by publishing it for 3 months).
> In Europe jobs have to be published
No. If you publish it, you have to give an estimation of the salary, but that's the only limitation, at least in my country. Companies have internal guidelines, like in mine, you can't hire a relative to your own department, but the job i got wasn't on a public listing, it's my agent who gave my CV to my current team leader, he was interested, organized an itw, then 3 month later i hoped to my current job (and i am way better for it).
Yes, just not everywhere.
So we agree it isn't European law? Just practice for some big companies that want to avoid cryonism?
It is law, just not in every European country, but it's definitely not unusual.
And yes, companies often go with the lowest common denominator across Europe to avoid any doubt when dealing with multinational people. In my personal case it could be reasonably claimed that laws of 5 different countries apply to me based on citizenship, registered residence, actual places of work... Of course my employer wants to be covered.
I've recently witnessed a situation where VP hired someone he used to work with This VP is not the best judge of talent. The guy barely does any work, and rarely responds to messages. He'll send me a scheduled slack at 8 AM. I reply. I don't hear from him all day. It's incredibly frustrating, since we had better candidates.
> At the end of the day, Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them.
Nowadays, in tech, it's all about who you know rather than what you know.
This has been true in any area of human activity since forever. If you have a choice to work with someone you know/worked with previously and someone completely new, who may or may not be as good as advertised... Who would you hire? When your future bonuses/promotions and maybe job itself depends on it?
This is all a function of interviews sucking right? Leet code is essentially completely independent from dev skill. Projects take too much commitment and time from the team and devs.
So, what option do teams have? Just hire the people that your good devs say are good is honestly the most effective practice that I've seen.
Honestly, even referrals are sucking for me in 2023/4. Referral would almost always mean I at least talk to someone on the hiring team . Now it's been maybe a 40% chance I even get a recruiter call?
Not only posted, but often they require that several folks are actually interviewed.
When I was doing PERM, I was also WFH. HR told me to put 2 postings up in my apartment.
For H1B/PERM, I remember they had to post it on the wall in a public place. Our company posted the jobs on the wall in the lunch room at our office. It has every information including the salary. I guess things have changed a bit since the early 2000s?
That's what Apple was doing. After their settlement with DOJ, Apple posts jobs on their job board as well.
H1B has evolved into a bizarre collaborative scam between the government and tech corporations; there is, in fact, a US citizen who can fill any software engineering role a US company has.
It's an outrage once you work at these companies and behold the sheer dysfunction and they're all getting paid wages native American citizens would take.
It's also an outrage how much leverage companies have over their H1B employees (especially from India, etc).
If you have any long-term H1B coworkers from less-favored nations, I guarantee you there's a heartbreaking story they have to tell you if you ask.
I work with a super high-performing guy with a Masters degree who has been at my company for 15 years and gets treated super poorly by the company. He still is probably 10 years away from getting a naturalization interview and has no hope of switching jobs in the meantime (and has children that are citizens...).
If they have direct family members that are citizens they should skip the wait apply through the family path, although they would need to be on good terms with said family member as they have to vouch for their welfare payments for 10 years
At least it that way about a decade ago, as I’m realizing things might have changed since then
The model that Americans would take any job if the wages were high enough is simple but obviously false. For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers. For desk jobs there's no amount that'll overcome Americans' cultural belief that you can't do math unless you were born as a special sort of person who is "good at math".
> For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers.
If you don't think Americans are willing to pick fruits and vegetables, go find a farmer, have him put a sign at the edge of his property that says "Free fruits and vegetables, you pick them yourself" and watch how quickly the field is emptied.
cuz they get to keep the fruit.
no one legal is taking this as a job to pay off a mortgage or a car loan.
This is obnoxious pedantry which is ignoring the parent's obvious actual point: food obeys a demand curve just like every other product, and what the parent clearly meant was that, at the labor price native Americans would want for these jobs, the resulting food price would be such that not enough people would buy the food to make it worthwhile.
And while this may have been idle speculation a few years ago, we now have pretty solid empirical evidence: when food prices increased by 10-20%, even in the middle of the fastest-growing wages in decades, the country had a collective temper tantrum.
The country had a collective temper tantrum. They didn't stop buying food, though...
>For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers.
In this market? Throw me a hoe tell me where to dig. I just need to pay rent.
Well that's probably part of the problem. You have to live within commute range of the work to do it, and people don't want to live in small towns or Central Valley CA unless they're in the respected local landowner class.
I know there are people who do part-time work in oil fields or fishing ships, so that's always possible if you want to move to North Dakota or Alaska temporarily.
I see. Yeah, that's tricky. It's less of "I don't want to" moreso than "I literally* cannot move". I'm paying off a house and moving to another state to pay rent on top of that mortgage ruins the point. For 200k, sure. But I know that's not realistic even if I was the best farmhand.
*Okay, I can "literally" talk with family about selling the home. But I do just need some steady work during the downtimes. I'm not at a point where I feel I want to uproot my entire lifestyle, career, and livlihood just to do blue collar work.
I don't know about the rest of the nation, but in the American Southwest, there's a distinct socio-economic class of "migrant farmworker" with a long tradition. And it's a Hispanic cultural tradition.
There would be basically zero chance of anyone in my urban high school, or circle of friends, to turn around and say "I'm going to be a migrant farmworker when I graduate!" and it's unclear whether any non-Latino could even achieve such a career. GP indicated that urban/suburban living wouldn't be possible. You'd certainly need to move around, and you'd be an outcast if you didn't speak Spanish, if you weren't nominally Catholic, or celebrate holidays like a Hispanic. Your children would come to learn Spanish and cultural customs, but they'd still be outcast because of racism. You'd have a weird relationship with the overseers, because they'd be more like you, so neither side would really accept you.
(Sub)urban White kids are usually groomed to go to college and get a white-collar or office job, and the dropouts do some kind of tech vocational path, or end up doing clerking minimum-wage to get by. So you have a spectrum of white/blue collar, but there's no path to "migrant farmworker" or other sort of laborer, because my people Just Don't Do That. It's unthinkable.
Even agrarian Native American communities have a huge problem with "brain drain" there, because the opportunities on the Reservation are zilch, unless you want to work at a casino? So young Natives dream of leaving at the first chance, going into the city, and assimilating, losing their culture, because it's a survival thing. Their agriculture isn't sustainable, no matter how you slice it--what are they going to do, hire from outside?
Since the 80s we've had White people who said that migrants come to steal our jobs. Or they say they're taking jobs no American wants. But realistically, even if American wanted those jobs at those wages, they couldn't have them, because of the ethnic hegemony in certain industries.
I'm not sure how this applies to what I said.
1 million/year? There’s definitely an amount that’d allow to find enough workers locally. The other question is how much would the produce cost and how many people would be willing to pay.
Once it gets that high, they don't need to work because they can retire.
(Or buy the farmland themselves and resume paying migrants to do it.)
More like living costs would balloon. And farm workers would become middle class. Which IMO makes sense, since it’s a damn hard job.
Land price would also balloon.
Or local farming would collapse and 99% of food would be imported. But massive import taxes are more likely since this is national security question.
You wildly underestimate American avarice.
I know a fair number of Silicon Valley "townies" and they are not trying and failing to get into tech companies. Only the Asian ones with tiger parents are even considering it.
The hippie aligned ones just want to get infinite degrees in something natural like forestry management. The rest are nurses or civil servants if they want a career, or real estate agents or artists or game streamers otherwise.
If anything I think younger Americans tend to go for the kind of vulgar Marxism where everything bad is caused by "corporations", and women in strongly prefer work that comes off as being good for society, which means they won't even consider it.
Same for me of course; I work in tech because I was on the computer too much, not because I was greedy and looked up good careers.
If I could make what I make in tech picking fruits I'd be tempted to switch to be honest. At least for awhile. I'm sick of sitting in a chair.
> For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers.
Ever worked a blast furnace? Or a coal mine?
You absolutely can pay enough money to get Americans to do really shitty manual labor.
that may be manual labor but it requires skills, and comes with real risks.
and mines have a lot, like a LOT, of labor laws behind them. you know, the whole sending 10 year olds down the shaft thing and then literally covering up what went wrong.
100% on your last sentence. There is a massive misplacement of ego in our fellow countrymen that loves to posture as an arbiter of morality and rationality, but has no pomp left over for their individual upward mobility. Very very bizarre and self defeating.
Please don't troll.
> there is, in fact, a US citizen who can fill any software engineering role a US company has.
Right now I suspect you're probably right. But 2 or 3 years ago?
If you're right then why would companies want to go through all of the extra paperwork and hoops to hire an H1B right now? Maybe the answer is "they can pay less"? But I'm not sure if it's actually all that much less than they could pay someone who's been looking for work for six months to a year or more.
Control. Like always. An H1B can't just job hop to the next company without more hoops and strings attached.
You would be surprised how hard can some managers negotiate 10% salary change during hiring, despite the fact its not their own money, or anyhow useful for their work. I talk multinational mega corporations here. People just want to be good employees(TM) or at least seen as such.
At large tech companies, the pay is entirely driven by level and rating; so there's no savings in salary; just added costs to comply with the directive.
It's endlessly frustrating that the US government wants to centrally plan my hiring decisions.
> It's endlessly frustrating that the US government wants to centrally plan my hiring decisions
What's the alternative - the government outsources visa issuance to the companies employing foreign labor?
Ok, so why are you hiring H1B's at this point then if there's "just added costs to comply with the directive"?
Because sometimes we fail to find a qualified American candidate.
Bizarre? Supporting business's whims is mostly what the government has existed to do for the last forty years. What's bizarre is that people expect our country to function normally when this is so blatant.
Yes, there's been mild movement away from this insanity, but we're still miles to the right of what actually supports the people who live here.
Not really. You can't get an expert in most recent European or Asian technology (for example 5G mobile network backbone) in the US.
H1b isn't about "experts", there are other visas for that (eb1 or o1). H1b's purpose it to find talent after search has been "exhausted" locally. That is rarely done in good faith.
Agreed, you're really reaching if your company implies that it needs to search abroad to find a dev who's proficient with react...
Also back in the day, we would say we need X new staff, corporate would encourage us to advertise and interview, but when it came to extending and offer they would tell us we can't increase head count. Happened over and over till I left.
I have never started the interview process before there was a headcount approved[1]. I have never had anyone push back when I said "I'll worry about that when the headcount is approved, because I got things to do"; but then I can't recall more than a handful of times anyone wanted me to front-run the recruiting process with a fishing expedition. Have things really become that shitty?
[1] To be fair, sometimes the headcount disappeared for various reasons, but that's not the same as "meh...just have a look around and jerk some peoples chains".
> Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them.
...except now the recruiting and HR can report these candidates and interviews on their metrics, candidates had a hope of finding a job, and Sam has a bulletproof explanation in case if anybody asks why his buddy was hired. Win-win-win.
> but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it
I've got my first job after moving countries in Europe, despite this (very similar but it was 6 weeks IIRC) limitation being in place by law, within a week. Consulting body shop through which I was billing per day, and the umbrella company took 20% cut.
It seems its trivial to circumvent this kind of rule across the globe, and TBH what kind of state employee team would go over every single foreign first hire in given region, all the evidence and check its validity, gather all the details. Heck police ignore smaller crimes below certain threshold, states have no real processing power to handle this well.
I’m not shocked at all. Another issue is recruiters posting fake jobs and asking for references as step one. Soon as I say “I don’t provide references until the last step, and only to the company hiring” they hang up on me
Yea this is a weird one. Some job applications actually require me to fill in reference contact information. I can't submit the application without that detail. Of course, I try to skirt it.
Is this normal?
I don't think I've ever encountered that in the U.S.
By chance I saw it recently; I remember because it stood out. And the job application seemed genuine as the poster was engaging on the "who's hiring" thread here.
I would never fill that in, because I wouldn't want to bother my references. I know some of them don't really like doing it, but do it as a favour because we're on good terms. Probably not a rare scenario. I'm okay asking in a "if you provide me a reference, I will get a new job" as the final stage, but not as a "just checking in case I might land a job".
It’s kind of rare but it happens, I’ve definitely seen it AND been asked up front. I tell them that I don’t “burn” my references on any jobs except those I’m pretty sure I have a great chance and after some interviewing has happened.
Had one group request references at the beginning, checked them, then my references got to infer that I didn't get the job offer. In fact if I recall, that group ghosted me, leaving me to infer as well.
But then later another group asked me for references at the beginning, I declined to provide them, and then they were okay with proceeding through the interview process.
Maybe it would work in the general case to always reply to such a request with "some previous group ghosted me, and so I've vowed to withhold the references until later in the process."?
Not only fake job postings, it's also companies posting fake jobs when they already have an internal or external candidate all but signed.
The amount of spam and fake jobs on LI + other major sites is just disgusting and is ripe for government to come in and crack some heads.
Governments are one of the worst offenders when it comes to posting jobs which have already been basically handed to internal candidates. They do it for the same reason as everyone else: compliance with external regulations or internal rules.
Personally, I find needing to provide references at all to be akin to me needing to get my parents permission. It makes my skin crawl and I will actively screen jobs that require them. The process feels demeaning and dehumanizing. Then you have to bother people who don't really know you anymore and beg them to waste their time on someone else's BS.
i have friends that i worked with, who would gladly be a reference, and i would not mind them doing it, but really, at best they could confirm that i am a nice person to work with. and i would never use anyone as a reference who would not do that. so the whole thing feels rather meaningless.
but that's not the only thing. in germany it is common to ask for written reference letters which are called "arbeitszeugnis" (work report card, like the report card you get from school). that term makes me feel like i was a kid. it clearly establishes a hierarchy. i am the lowly subordinate employee and you are the superior employer that i am to look up to. it gets really wierd when i consider that i have been on the other side as an employer myself. (and by law these letters must be honest and may not contain unfounded negative statements which makes employers avoid writing anything negative because they could get sued.)
and then there are places who ask for actual school report cards or at least grade averages or want to know how i did in math in school, as if that was in any way useful to understand how i would do as a programmer decades later.
Yeah, I'll provide peers, but absolutely not seniors/management references. One of them very purposefully has no social media footprint and I'm not going to cross that line because of some recruiter call that almost never goes nowhere.
I'd love to go back to times where it was fine for a candidate not to have a LinkedIn. Currently, regardless of your blog, or your multiple StackOverflow answers, or your GitHub, or your posts on any of the other tech-focused communities, if HR doesn't see your LinkedIn, it's as if you're off-planet.
The tech field is centered around skills. You're under pressures to keep them sharp and up to date. When you're looking for work and you're done polishing the resume, updating the blog posts, doing your leetcode drills, do you really want to add playing LinkedIn games to the mix?
It seems to me that tech workers would benefit from having really tech-focused job networks. Not these hybrid platforms. LinkedIn, Indeed, and friends. They don't particularly care about you as a tech worker. They don't even understand you or your skillset. You're a backend dev with many years of OOP, FP, Agile, Kanban, Python, Go, SQL, JavaScript, and a slew of other relevant skills for the job, but they'll gladly inform you that you're missing a few skills to better match the list in the ad: go-getter, team-player, positive-attitude. Ok, sure, whatever...
Another thing, seeing an ad that asks for Python, Go, Node.js, SQL, React, Terraform, Kubernetes as an "Intermediate position" just tells me that no one in charge cares.
Hi, I never had a LinkedIn account or profile. Been working professionally for more than 15 years. It’s a good way to avoid distractions. You might miss on being told about opportunities, but other than that, are you sure you’re being cancelled for not having one?
When I interview, I often ask the recruiter to share the cv, portfolio, and GitHub/other. As they often just share a LinkedIn URL but that’s up to the interviewer and team to decide if enough to compromise theirs and the candidates time.
A tech focused network who have zero HR people so it wouldn’t help
On this topic, do y'all think the HN Who's Hiring thread has ghost jobs? I know I've applied to one and never had back (a few years ago).
Absolutely. And a lot of spam. A few months ago there was a little flame war between a few people. Company posted an ad and someone replied "this is spam, and you don't respond, just keep posting the same ad", and the company replied "no, I own the company and hand write this job ad every month to fit our future needs" which was patently a lie (exact same headcount, exact same three positions, every month for the last eight months, and usually a byte-accurate copy of each posting), and several similar.
Not to mention it's "discouraged" to call employers out on poor behavior. I know of at least three companies who post pretty steadily who ghosted at final rounds or in one case, "We intend to present a written offer" (though in "fairness", they did eventually inform me that they'd decided to freeze hiring, well, nearly three months later).
It's against the rules to call out hiring companies in the thread, primarily because we don't want off-topic arguments and because it would be too easy to exploit it for shenanigans.
But since people have been increasingly saying that this is a problem, let's do something about it. My current thought is to add a new instruction at the top asking companies to please only post in the thread if they're committed to responding to every applicant. Other suggestions for addressing this issue are welcome!
Edit: since the next Who Is Hiring day is tomorrow, let's get precise. I'm including this text at the top of the thread:
NEW RULE: Please only post a job in this thread if you are committed to responding to everyone who applies.
Thoughts?
Edit per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42011360: "Please only post a job if you intend to fill a position and are committed to responding to everyone who applies."
Great idea. Do you also want to address some more root problems of job postings:
* done for optics, to look like growth or doing well, or just to have their name out there.
* to fill the pipeline for future needs
* to assess the hiring market, for planning
* (for reasons mentioned in article) to light fire under current employees, or see how replaceable they are
* only for a serendipitous unicorn hire, not commodity developer
* for training in their hiring process
I know all these are things that happen in general with startup job posts, though not necessarily on HN.
None of those reasons preclude "responding", but responding doesn't solve the real problem, it's only a PR sugar coating on it.
An example of disclosure on the unicorn hire one would be to simply state the truth about it. That's fine, so long as you're not pretending to grow. It could even be good optics, about hiring standards.
Disclosure of some of the other intent would preclude it (e.g., probably nobody is going to state the goal of threatening or replacing current employees). Maybe those posts shouldn't be done at all, or maybe they can at least say that this is a speculative post, not for a currently open position.
I'd say job posts have to be truthful, and it's by default implied that they actually good faith intend to fill the position as described, in a timely manner, and that interviews will only be conducted in good faith. If the default isn't true, they should disclose that.
> I'd say job posts have to be truthful, and it's by default implied that they actually good faith intend to fill the position as described, in a timely manner, and that interviews will only be conducted in good faith. If the default isn't true, they should disclose that.
Very few people would disagree with that premise.
The thing is that bad faith actors doing bad faith things are not going to abide by the rules on their own accord, on account of being bad faith actors. So you need enforcement, and I don't really see how HN can enforce any of the things you posted. They're not really in a position to vet anything more than you or I can.
Maybe the initial "who is hiring" post should be more explicit about the lack of moderation and vetting instead.
There's definitely a chunk of bad-faith people, who'll lie, cheat, and steal, but I think it's the minority.
There's a lot of questionable things that decent people do, in good faith, because they consider it normal and OK. If you tell people "actually, the convention here on that is something different", then I think most will respect that.
One way this doesn't work is if there's a lack of trust. For example, if an employer claims it values X, but actually behaves like Y, employees are less likely to do X, and also less likely to trust or respect the company on anything else.
Another way the HN example doesn't work as well is if the person has strong motivation otherwise. For example, if their boss told them to post a fake job on HN, and they really don't want to come back and say they can't because they just saw a new rule. But a lot of other times, the person doing the posting has more autonomy, or a more decent work environment.
A lot of guessing here, but I think stating a convention would help significantly.
Maybe; I don't want too be too cynical about it, but I suspect many people don't really read it in the first place, and if you're the sort of person posting fake jobs then I don't expect you're really deterred by this.
Good point about not many people reading it, but there was a nice all-caps "NEW RULE" at the top today, so we'll see.
Definitely some people who will disregard rules they know are rules, but I think there's also a lot of people who just thought fake job posts were the convention, and now they'll change behavior.
Two questions: 1) How would the feedback loop work from users who do not receive a response? 2) Are you concerned about a possible "chilling effect" for startups that don't want to post for fear of being spammed?
As an aside, been browsing HN for years and always wanted to say that you're doing the Lord's work.
(1) I don't know, and (2) I am now. That would be bad!
But presumably they have to deal with that problem already anyway.
Presumably you guys don’t want to create a report button for just this situation. I never know what to think when I see downvotes in the Who’s Hiring thread. There’s no way for me to tell if someone hates the CEO (eg, if Twitter posted job openings), or they’ve noticed the same position filed three months in a row. I’ve seen a few of those before you got around to detaching them.
I think it's going to be hard to enforce that, unless you go through ycombinator.com/jobs
But I agree that's fair to expect from companies. Yes, they have potentially hundreds of applicants, but writing "We're sorry to inform that you have not been selected to interview" probably takes less than a minute, so spending less than an hour rejecting every applicant seems in line with the time I'd expect each candidate to spend preparing and submitting their application. Plus you can always automate a list of emails to send rejection messages to...
It's also a nice way to differentiate the Who's hiring? from all other job boards out there
Maybe make the "flag" feature work for users to "report" non-responsive employers. On repeat offenses, reach out to them saying they've been repeatedly reported? Just brainstorming
Perhaps the monthly postings should be handled via ycombinator.com/jobs and the thread here is just a dump of this month's new openings with links to applications there but not direct posts by companies?
There's little enforcement happening in those threads anyway—they're too free-form, and manual intervention is too expensive. But adding a rule should hopefully still make a difference.
Maybe add the flag|vouch to the comments for those threads? Not entirely sure how it works (or if its possible), but it seems to work pretty well. I am guessing there is a filter for bad actors, even if not, the few that would be affected would maybe end up with positive comments from long aged accounts.
Thats a lot of maybes, but my impression of the flag|vouch feature is as a first step community moderation and guessing it works well? The job thread being jobs targeting the community, I would think it would as well, or at a minimum help.
I had a little side project I was working on a while ago that would ingest "Who's Hiring" posts every month through the HN API and analyze month to month when each one came and went, in order to call out the companies posting the (according to some heuristic) same ad for months and months, never actually hiring anyone. I was going to snarkily call the tool "Who's Not Hiring?"
Obviously a company -actually- hiring the same kind of person month after month would be a false positive, but I thought it might help to catch some of these companies abusing "Who's Hiring"
Good luck! I still wonder if you can't you sidestep the free-form and manual intervention stuff by giving those threads some shape via a monthly posting feature on ycombinator.com/jobs?
At the end of the day the challenges likely stem from "Who's hiring?" being just a thread with comments on a very spartan message board. I would have said you can solve these issues with an app or website, but you already have one, so it would be easier to just leverage that and then the sky is the limit–add any features you want!
ycombinator/jobs would presumably not be the right venue for an open job board but yes we could build software to better support Who Is Hiring threads. I've always resisted doing so but maybe we eventually will. I'm not sure how that would help with the ghosting problem though...
Would you be open to having people email if they send an application and get ghosted so that you can potentially take action on future hiring threads? (or stuff like the mentioned copy-pasted job posting that got caught in an argument) Since I know that emailing you is already the best way to ask for moderation help.
In principle yes, but I just can't handle many more emails. Also, it's not clear how we would respond. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42011354.
I like your suggesting actual features/systems, and the idea that we can make hn/jobs the better job board, but I think this targets the wrong problem:
I don’t care if a company ghosts me b/c they hired someone else—I care that/if I spent the time applying to a role for which there was no intent to hire.
How can we mandate that only roles that are actually open get posted? Does hn/jobs require confirmation that a hire was made within a certain timeframe? (say, 3-6 months?). It may be non-solvable as you obviously can’t mandate that a company hires, but if we can mandate that a company not advertise unless they’re going to hire it is certainly non-solved.
I think the rule should be something kind of like, do not post a job ad unless you actually intend to fill the position.
And then if a company posts the exact same ad for an excessive number of months and their headcount hasn't changed, they're clearly breaking the rule.
Ok, we can make it like this:
NEW RULE: Please only post a job if you intend to fill a position and are committed to responding to everyone who applies.
That's a good rule, the followup question is what does feedback for and enforcement of this rule look like?
Not much—but see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42011089
I don't love this idea. I feel like it's just going to force even more busybody work into the process - now companies will need to "respond" to every applicant, no matter how irrelevant, so that response isn't going to be high-information anyway.
Someone else suggested a good idea - make companies link to their previous request. Or even better - don't allow companies to post the exact same listing for months in a row. The actual behavior you're trying to root out is a company listing a position that isn't real - so just don't allow them to list the same not-real position over and over.
I don't know if that can be enforced, though it should be easy to script up something that checks this. But you're not going to enforce anything anyway, and I think this gets closer to actually what we want to achieve.
> I don't love this idea.
What is this confusing sentence suppose to communicate? That you adore the idea? Or like it? Or hate it? Or are neutral? Or are indifferent? Or any other thousands of options? Nobody knows.
Why being so incredibly vague and off-putting?
I'm sorry, I certainly don't mean to be off-putting.
The way I parse a sentence like "I don't love this idea", and the way I meant it, is that I think the idea has some merit, it's not terrible, but I'm not fully on board, it has more work to do. It's not all the way to "I don't like it" but it's not great yet.
In any case I elaborated in the rest of the post a bit more on this so I think you can see from the context what I meant.
Aren't there two distinct issues?
(1) I applied for a job from $Company and never got a response.
(2) I don't believe $Company is really hiring.
I'm hearing both of these concerns from users. They overlap but aren't the same. Linking a job ad to the previous job ad addresses #2 but not #1.
Yes, if you consider #1 an issue, then you're right. But I'm not sure that's an issue that should actually be addressed, because:
1. It's not anything new, unlike this "ghost jobs" thing which is a supposed new phenomenon. This makes it less likely that the status quo can be improved.
2. I believe the reason the status quo is as it is is because most companies are inundated with job applicants, many of them not even passing a basic qualifying test (e.g. people with no FE experiecnce applying to FE positions with min. required experience of 5 years).
I don't know if this is true for the HN thread, having never posted to it. It's possible it's much higher signal here so this issue becomes less relevant.
Anyway, just my 2 cents, mostly as an outsider to these threads.
Everyone? Applicants are using AI to mass apply for jobs. Not everyone deserves a response.
Why not: Please only post jobs if you are committed to interviewing and filling the position in the next 3 months. Accounts posting the same job opening for 6 months may be banned.
In this market if it takes 6+ months to find someone there is a fundamental problem with the opening.
At the very least it should be: "Please only post a job in this thread if you are committed to responding to all qualified applicants."
You are making good points but now I'm wondering if we should just drop the idea.
Every applicant is going to classify themselves as "qualified"; and every applicant that a company doesn't respond to, they will classify as "unqualified"; so if we modify the rule in this way, we may as well have no rule at all.
(Edit: I just noticed johnnyanmac already made this point in an earlier reply)
Since we're on HN, I think using LLMS instead of humans to talk is a bigger issue than whether an applicant is mass applying outside the site with LLMS. We should address that first and that will fix the issue anyway.
>At the very least it should be: "Please only post a job in this thread if you are committed to responding to all qualified applicants."
Too easy a loophole. I think we should just stick to the spirit of the rule and see if they make an honest gesture not make it literally 100% of applicants (ofc of they want a principal and a student in school applies they shouldn't expect a response).
What if the new rule required a company to link to their last "who's hiring" posting if it was within, say, the last 3 months?
That makes it easy, within HN, to see if a company is just doing copy/paste spam, or if they're posting new/updated info each month. It also has the advantage of being easily verifiable (and enforceable? not sure what the enforcement actions would be...) here on HN versus random anecdotes of "I applied but never heard back", which I doubt would have enough weight for anyone to do anything about.
Users here could help police/moderate by simply replying with a link to last month's posting if there is one and the posting omitted it. That would somewhat-gently "call out" the company for not reading/following the rules, without users leaving negative comments on the thread.
(Just thoughts from a user skimming by, I'm not in the market for a new job at the moment so I have little skin in the game)
I had a plan[1] to use the HN API to try to suss out companies spamming month after month without hiring, but it never went anywhere. This article is motivating me to pick up the 1/4-finished code and have another look at it.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42012028
How about mentioning in the who's hiring post that people can email HN if they think someone posted in bad faith. The slight inconvenience should turn off people who complain just for the sake of it, and other readers won't be discouraged by seeing the complaints. The downside is extra admin for you, of course.
I don't think I can handle many more emails*. But beyond that—what would we do? We don't have the cycles to arbitrate these things; nor the skill; nor the interest.
* was going to make a Mr. Creosote reference but thought better of it
Fair enough. I feel you'd face the same issues with the original idea as well. But I can't think of a better solution.
Hn/jobs may not have the interest, sure. Job posters in general may not have an interest. I think monetization here comes from candidates. As a job seeker I would be willing to pay for access to a job board where listings/posters are somehow vetted to protect me from filling out ghost applications.
The problem isn't that the rules arent well specified enough. The problem is that too many agents with the most power in this exchange (ie employers) just violate people's trust. Dishonest agents need to be visibly held to account, and right now the only way that happens is by calling them out. But since that's forbidden, there's a conundrum.
I’m not defending companies here, but what I’ve seen happen sometimes is a well-meaning engineering manager will post openings on this or other forums, and then the resumes end up in black holes like Greenhouse where the HR/non-technical types filter out applications without even looking at or responding to many of them.
I wouldn’t always blame the poster, and appreciate them letting us know.
I like the idea! Possibly add an additional rule that they should stop advertising the same position if they didn't fill it within, say, 4 months.
That seems too restrictive to me. Some positions don't fill up quickly and some companies are growing and hiring over long stretches. I am completely unqualified to make these calls.
I'm not saying there aren't abuses taking place but in my experience people are far too quick to jump to such conclusions on the internet, and the jumping-to-conclusions is actually the much bigger problem. Just speaking generally here–not about the Who Is Hiring threads.
Another potential way to at least surface dodgy behaviour perhaps: Automatically append to a poster's comment links to all their previous comments in Who's Hiring threads in the past twelve months.
I can foresee posters then creating throwaway accounts to avoid this, but the green username would be a give-away (or restrict new accounts from posting on these threads).
> It's against the rules to call out hiring companies in the thread, primarily because we don't want off-topic arguments
All due respect: if an employer posts here offering for people to apply, that the employer in question is bad in some way, I don't see why that's considered "off topic." If a company sucks, we owe it to our fellow engineers to get the word out until they improve. A perfect example being the sorts that don't have any intention of filling the jobs they post.
In my mind the only sort of company that would avoid posting here due to the potential of being criticized by the HN userbase are exactly the sorts you don't want posting, so that seems like a win/win.
Just my 0.02.
It's because of the reasons I already mentioned, which are considerable.
> we don't want off-topic arguments and because it would be too easy to exploit it for shenanigans.
Are there any other reasons you mentioned? I only found this one.
Thinking about it, people replying to the post stake their reputation too in whatever they post. If we see a throwaway or newish account causing shenanigans, people interested in the job post can form their own opinion of the nature of the comment? (isn't that what downvoting is for too?).
Since threads have this nice toggle feature you can always click [-] to ignore whatever people is saying about a job posting.
That's two reasons! (1) It's offtopic, which is especially bad given that the threads are so comment-heavy; and (2) it's too easy to exploit.
I suppose exploit is not the right word, because a lot of it is people posting their grudges or bad feelings that they probably have perfectly legit reasons for, and yet are not the full story. We're not going to get the full story, or even a fair assessment, from a distracting back-and-forth in the middle of a job ads thread; and that's ignoring the point that most people posting to Who Is Hiring aren't in a position to respond to such complaints in the first place.
It seems to me easy to see that if we allowed it, there would be no limit to it, and the end result would be a bad scene indeed.
I like this idea. Perhaps let them self select if they will respond or not, but they have to advertise in the posting which path they chose?
Wouldn't any company unscrupulous enough to advertise a job opening without a genuine intention to hire simply disregard such a rule?
Thinking out loud:
* What if there were a bit more restrictions to posting on Who's hiring? Perhaps a counter of how many times a profile has posted, with a max of N posts allowed per M months, or something.
* Would also be nice to have some feedback from HN profiles on outcome of the job posting. Add a link to the job posting to your about page:
... this way you can attempt to disregard the feedback if the profile posting it seems bogus. Posters wouldn't want to hurt their own reputation by lying about the quality of a job posting.Anyway, maybe something like that would be out of scope for HN, but just thinking out loud here :-).
I like it! Frankly, it should be something that hiring companies do anyways.
Perhaps extend it to something like everyone who applies, or responds to your comment”
Practically speaking, enforcement will be difficult/impossible for actions off HN - if someone claims a company isn’t responding, or using a templated email, how would you verify that?
By enforcing the same rule for a job thread, there’s a very clear location where the behavior of the company can be observed.
I think that's a great start. I mean for me, I'm realistic - if it's a pre-first round or first round exit so to speak, I don't expect anything substantive, a canned response is acceptable. I get that it's a pain when you have hundreds of applicants, but it should also be trivial.
It is nice to expect something a bit more involved if it's a final round thing, but still. No-one likes the ghost.
What I would really like to see is for employers to give actual feedback to the rejected candidates at any stage of the interview process. I am sure that employers can find a way to share constructive feedback without the fear of any legal implications. And I am sure most candidates will really appreciate a meaningful feedback instead of an automated rejection email. This would also have the side effect of having only serious candidates and employers engage in the process and should go a long way of getting rid of these ghost jobs. I would love to see a job board which only post jobs where the employers promises to share a feedback with any candidate they interview. I am sure it will be a hit.
I would suggest that there be a way to report bad-faith job postings in some way or there are consequences. anyone can claim they applied with no response. Someone who reports actual evidence like "this account has posted this exact listing for the last 4 months and the company size hasn't changed a bit" may justify e.g. removing listings.
What about all of the YC companies posting comment-free ads for founding engineers offering 1/2 market wages and next-to-no equity in person in SF?
Honestly it's practically a joke to look at and it starting to make YC itself look bad. Seriously there is no value prop to these postings unless you are jobless, desperate and living in your car.
This is a bigger, longer term thought, but…
perhaps upvotes and downvotes can be subtly weighed by karma? This would give proven contributors more trust. In the case of job posts, it would enlist them in zapping the spam they recognise month after month?
And beyond that, beyond applicability to job posts, perhaps voting can be a collaborative filtering bubble instead of absolutes? This makes spammers and voting rings end up in an echo chamber? And perhaps for normal posts instead of there being an early top level comment that gets to the top and stays there and monopolises the conversation, you get more variety and people more easily find the conversation they come for?
We've experimented with vote weighting over the years but the results have been disappointing. It's not easy to come up with criteria for users whose votes are more reliable.
It’s easy to imagine a dozen ways to weigh things and they can’t all be right…
So perhaps recruit some small group of math minded HNers and see what insights and ideas they wring from access to the fully voting history?
If companies receive comments saying i never heard back (at least they need to generate an email saying application was received and later your not a good fit, if not) and they keep posting this same or similar job. Well then they should warned about losing their HN job listing priviligies. Put them on a list that a bot notifies you and or downvotes them a lot.
Those who comment and are to be taken seriously will have a certain amount of karma and or history on HN.
"Dear [applicant name], thank you for sending us your application.
We have decided not to progress your application further.
While making our decision we've noted your extensive experience at [previous company] and feel that your skillsets are highly valuable in the industry and hope you find success in your job search soon."
I actually received that from a major tech company, unfilled mail merge aliases included.
Haha, at least they told you no. rejection letters are rarely more informative even if they are more verbose
Tangentially-related: I see postings for jobs specifically in states that require pay transparency (posting the pay range in job announcements), but they do not include a pay range in their announcements. While this is primarily an issue for companies that are illegally posting announcements without the required pay range, it might be helpful to include a statement in the rules at the top of the page. This statement could remind posters that if they are in a state with a pay transparency law, they need to include the pay range in their job postings.
Could also make it a site rule that _all_ jobs postings should include a pay range. Shouldn't have to waste your time applying to a job that has a pay range you would never accept.
Could this be a case where companies have a "people-ops" person who needs to justify their position even though the company hasn't hired anyone in months? So they create some new OKRs like: "Get 20 qualified candidates vetted and ranked in case we do decide to hire someone.", "Create 40 job ads" or something?
lol and all those endless "we're hiring" Flexport ads, even after they did layoffs
It wasn't just them, but another dozen or so YC startups who've been around for many years and always keep a job ad in the queue. It's not their fault for doing that—it's my fault for neglecting the HN job ad system for too long. I get that the community doesn't like seeing the same ads over and over for the same few, long-established companies.
We recently changed the HN /jobs page to gradually reduce the frequency of those. Newer startups, who by definition haven't been around long enough to have had many posts, should be significantly better represented. The system has been designed to favor them for a long time, but it's favoring them more now.
>it's my fault for neglecting the HN job ad system for too long.
If it helps, the system works great on an honor system. Have a community of passionate hackers, a site encouraging those hackers (some of which may be part of the community) to start up their own business and realize their ides, and the ad system would have good actors on both sides the pipeline. Interesting jobs for a community of passionate people.
I feel like that "honor" comes and goes with the economy though. Anything for an applicant to survive, anything for a job poster to make the company look good for investors.
Last I applied to a job posted on Who's Hiring, they had me fill a self recorded video interview on some platform. And do some coding exercise with screen sharing. Then send it to them. I've never gotten any sort of reply back, positive or negative. Felt like a clown. Won't be using that again.
Also along with ghost jobs do we have ghost candidates? Every job posting on LinkedIn have hundred plus applicants within the first two hours. Maybe many of the applicants are not eligible but this phenomenon points to a massive increase in labor supply for tech jobs. Automation and opening up competition globally is gutting out most of the tech jobs it seems.
The candidates are real. But The qualifications often aren't. Even if you post a job being full time on-site, you'll get applicants who are not even in the same country looking for remote work.
I feel that was the natural conclusion of a system where "requirements" are as realistic as a unicorn. But we're all suffering from that
Don’t use LinkedIn or Monster or Indeed. You’re better off searching on Google with “ inurl:careers” and finding positions these companies are directly hiring for.
I've gotten 2 good jobs directly or indirectly from LinkedIn. I would argue LinkedIn is probably the one site that you absolutely need to be on.
Agree. Plus recruiters also sometimes reach out. There is quite a high signal to noise as always, but, it can be worth it. You don't need to engage in all the influencer crap at all, just ignore that and use it to be found by recruiters and to see some open positions.
I've gotten 3 separate jobs from linkedin recruiters approaching me cold.
I dont engage with the platform, I don't post, I won't connect with recruiters, and yet still... they find you, and inmail you. It's usually local jobs with humane commutes and decent pay.
By contrast, I've never gotten a single interview for an application submitted via linkedin, and I've put out hundreds.
The difference between LinkedIn and other options is that LinkedIn is also a social platform (in a weird, non-interactive way).
So LinkedIn approximates (lots of people), not just (people hoping to get hired). If you're hiring, the former is a more talented pool to hire from.
I have a good job now and got this one through LinkedIn. I think it is hit or miss. I wish there was a better alternative. I’ll try your tip.
There is benefit to being an active participant in your job search. I don't depend on anyone for employment, as self-employment is ALWAYS an option if you're serious about longevity and profit ($$$).
Honestly, the ideal approach if you're going for traditional W-2 steady paycheck employment job is:
- recruiters/people already approach you. This works when you build your network and reputation. - use your network of trusted/worked-with-previously recruiters for leads. - fend for yourself in the murky depths of the scummy internet full of low-life tactics reference farming, resume scraping, and G*d knows else happens when you participate in a public forum.
Real question: did you really want that job or was this just a +1 for your gamified job search? I think quality searches yield quality results.
Did you have previous experience when you became self-employed? I'm strongly considering this but I feel that I haven't had enough experience in the 9-5s. I also really need steady income in the near future to pay off loans.
Great statement “be an active participant in your job search”. That says everything about the job seeker!
Or Dice. Dice is just a spam magnet for "I know you're a PM in Washington looking for remote roles, but we have this two month onsite Kubernetes contract in Indiana, can we talk?"
I got one the other day asking if I'd take a down leveling and move to Korea for a six month contract even though my profile says I only accept permanent remote roles
You can use the common applicant tracking system URLs as well - like Lever, Greenhouse, or Ashby - if you are targeting startups/tech companies.
Got one good job over Indeed and another one over LinkedIn. Can't confirm.
This wasn't thought of when false advertising laws were drafted. California:
17500. It is unlawful for any person, firm, corporation or association, or any employee thereof with intent directly or indirectly to dispose of real or personal property or to perform services, professional or otherwise, or anything of any nature whatsoever or to induce the public to enter into any obligation relating thereto, to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated before the public in this state, or to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated from this state before the public in any state, in any newspaper or other publication, or any advertising device, or by public outcry or proclamation, or in any other manner or means whatever, including over the Internet, any statement, concerning that real or personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, or concerning any circumstance or matter of fact connected with the proposed performance or disposition thereof, which is untrue or misleading, and which is known, or which by the exercise of reasonable care should be known, to be untrue or misleading, or for any person, firm, or corporation to so make or disseminate or cause to be so made or disseminated any such statement as part of a plan or scheme with the intent not to sell that personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, so advertised at the price stated therein, or as so advertised. Any violation of the provisions of this section is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or by both that imprisonment and fine.
The language is broad, but they didn't cover the case of ads where no transaction was even contemplated. This is a bug.
> [...] the majority of them appeared on LinkedIn and the companies’ websites. [...]
> While some respondents said employers did it to maintain a presence on job boards and build a talent pool, it’s also used [...]
For securities fraud?
https://www.sec.gov/submit-tip-or-complaint/tips-complaints-...
What a colossal waste of everybody's time.
I wonder how demoralizing this must be on HR workers, having to post a job, screen CV's, trying to stay professional while knowing that the hiring manager actually doesn't care, having to constantly put people with hopes off, and ultimately let people feel they are not good enough just because some C-hole wants to bring in his buddy who's most likely not half as competent as the people who were rejected.
Recruiting (which is typically part of HR) lives and dies by the need to search for candidates for open positions. No open positions - they're out of a job. So I very much doubt they feel bad doing the job they were hired to do.
I'll bite my tongue on my HR thoughts, but AFAIK HR incentives are saving a company money, or making the company a lot of money. You don't necessarily need to hire people if you're focused on cost saving measures.
I agree with others that this can be seen as market abuse since it disrupts the essential functioning of our labor markets. After completing my Master's, I've since struggled to find a job, only signing a contract yesterday thanks to my past connections and proven work from before I returned to academia. The current job market in my country has been absolutely brutal. I've applied to hundreds of roles. For many interviews, I traveled to other cities only to learn later that the positions I was being interviewed for were canceled entirely, with no one hired.
But the real issue are these "ghost" job postings where there's no intention to hire anyone at all in the first place. Some companies use them to, I guess, just gather some data and CVs + salary expectations, while others want to appear active and growing to investors, but don’t engage whatsoever when people spend time and apply. This distorts the job market and creates a lot of frustration in applicants. 90% of people I know here and more broadly in Europe have gotten their jobs via connections and people they know. I wouldn’t be surprised if some regulation comes soon, as I doubt I'm the only one impacted by this situation.
Hireing and being hired seem to have devolved into a bilateral spamfest. The more applicants per position, the more applications you need to fill.
“Always, always, always put networking as one of the top components of your job search strategy,”
This is such a strange advice. It is too late when searching for a job.
A 'network' takes year to build.
Well I think the person quoted is suggesting you work on your network now, presumably before you are looking for a job. But I could see an argument that even going to meetups and just talking to people while you're actively looking is more likely to be successful than emailing resumes. That is to say, even the act of building a network from the ground up could be highly effective.
Sure, ye I guess you are right.
"Knowing people" seem to have become even more important. But I feel that is a really long term thing. It is really hard to get into a position where you get valuable contacts or do interesting stuff. And your contacts more or less need some power.
It is just that, I feel it is like telling some lonely child "so get friends". For most programmers trying to get a job, I think "just keep the grind up, champ! I'll buy you some ice cream if you give it your best" is more helpful.
These "ghost jobs" the article writes about is poisoning the well. Applicants need to spam even more. Employers get more half hearted applications.
I've noticed these probably fake job ads for years, but it seem to have escalated.
It wouldn't surprise me that we will end up in the straw man "first man or woman through the door with a firm handshake that looks the boss in the eyes gets the job" hiring process as the current formal one gets totally dysfunctional.
Not sure why this was downvoted. Obviously it is by people like who will keep bending over until they become a circle.
So, this is the problem. We are doing a Kabuki dance where there is an illusion of good faith and meritocracy, when really, it's just a brutalist labor order book between employers and employees, unless you have a network (which takes years to build and might still prove useless if you can't refer someone into your org because blah blah hiring pipeline that is really just garbage anyway). For example, someone at the VP level at Slack recently posted on LinkedIn for a job req that all candidates have to go through the formal process to avoid unfairness (no informal resume reviews or interviews would be had).
If you offer up a job req, there should be punitive consequences if it is not legitimate. You are incurring cost and harm on job seekers spending time engaging with said post, at no cost to the employer. This is to be solved for, just as pay transparency is slowly being solved for with regulation and statute. If you have policy suggestions, I'm interested, as someone who engages with policymakers.
There is a cost to the employer.
Any smallish 1-2 hour meeting with a couple of people on it can easily cost thousands if you work out people’s hourly wage.
Add on the context-switching costs impacting the rest of their workdays.
Then add the reputational damage among jobseekers - when word gets out that a company is a timewaster, qualified people will be less likely to apply.
Talent acquisition is the cost of being in business. Hiring is hard, I admit. Being efficient while remaining within legal and regulatory frameworks is fine and expected, fraud and misrepresentation through job postings with no intent to hire is not.
I know; I’m saying it bites these companies in the ass when their hiring is broken.
it does, but the damage isn't proportional to job seekers and there can even be malicious incentives to do this. That should be punished and discouraged.
We've seen for a long time now that companies will put up with a lot of inefficiencies for various other bottom lines.
That’s true - it’s not in proportion.
But how do you punish this without making it even worse in some other way?
Much of the current situation stems from fairness-minded regulations forcing companies to post jobs they already have a candidate for, wasting everybody’s time.
I guess our opinion will vary on "worse", but the worst case for a job seeker is less jobs to click on. I don't see that as worse than applying to a bunch of jobs thst don't exist or are otherwise exploiting the idea of a job posting.
>Much of the current situation stems from fairness-minded regulations forcing companies to post jobs they already have a candidate for, wasting everybody’s time.
Yes, I do believe we should repeal those regulations. Someone who wants to hire a friend of family member will figure out how to do it.
H1bs are a more complex matter. They should ironically enough strengthen those so an H1b isn't held hostage by an employer who can lay them off on thr drop of a hat. They should have more protections as they are a sponsored guest and not yet an American citizen.
I guess there is some cost for the job ad too.
It is quite common with some sort of time consuming application process before interviews, where only the applicant waste time. Like, the employers seem to use "willing to waste time" as some sort of filter.
E.g. my brother applied for a job this summer and was pre-screened by some sort of chat bot, which I guess will become way more common.
>Any smallish 1-2 hour meeting with a couple of people on it can easily cost thousands if you work out people’s hourly wage.
Companies expect employees to work late, for free, to get their duties done, so time spent on time-wasting hiring meetings only affect the employees, not the company's finances.
Embarrassing admission: I don't really understand how "networking" works when it comes to getting a job. It's always just stated: "Go network, bro!" but without any explanation of how it is supposed to work. I wish someone could pretend I was a dummy, and explain the process to me using simple words. From start (you don't know anyone working at company X) to finish (you accept a job at company X).
I remember long ago the career development people at my university would tell us to all go out and "network" company representatives when they come during career week. The way it was explained to me was to go up to them and pretend to be their friend, talk about sportsball, drink alcohol with them, gain some rapport or something... It was never really clear what the right magical incantation was. All I know was some people were really good at it and got invited to interview at dozens of companies, and other had no luck at all.
But, just for argument's sake, let's say I go out and successfully manage to "network" you. You now know me and think I would be a good employee. What now? I guess I say "Hey, rightbyte, I'm looking for a job at your company. Do you know of any roles that are hiring?" You say "Sure, here's job position XYZ, and the link to go apply. Good luck!" And now I'm back where I started. Or if I'm lucky, you will refer me in your company's HR system, giving your digital "thumbs up" in that system, and that referral will send me... an E-mail with the link where I should go apply. I'm still not that much better off. Is that thumbs up going to let me skip rounds of interviews or give me extra points when the yes/no decision happens? How does it help me break through the hundreds of other candidates that are cold-applying?
I've had people reach out to me and ask me to refer them for a job with my employer, and in most companies, all I can do is point them to a job link. I'm lowly worker-bee number 52231, I don't have some kind of hiring boost I can hand out to people.
The whole 'networking' enterprise seems like a bizarre, opaque process where nobody can explain how it works, but everyone's advice is that we should all somehow "go do it" as it's an important component of a job search.
That’s the gold digger’s approach. It’s quite saddening! When I find myself looking for a new job, I do my best to look for open opportunities shared to everybody, not through obscure connections. I like to imagine that everyone should have access to the same opportunities. Of course that if somebody gets in touch based on past experiences or circumstances that’s fair!
Maybe some of these networking people are the same that force others to come to the office to entertain them?
The main (and possibly only) benefit of networking is that hiring manager will look at your resume. Without networking, your resume may never even been seen by the hiring manager. But beyond that networking does not matter for the candidate. In fact, FAANG companies go out of their way to make sure that the person who referred the candidate is excluded from having any involvement in the interview process. The days where you get to skip rounds just because you know someone are gone.
>I don't really understand how "networking" works when it comes to getting a job. It's always just stated: "Go network, bro!" but without any explanation of how it is supposed to work
There's two methodologies.
1. you work with peers (can be in school, work, or even a hobby if you're lucky), be a good person and provide good work. Years later you reach out and see how they are doing (ideally you keep good tabs on them, but let's be real. Men can just kinda disappear for years and resume a conversation with no tension nor animosity. So just reach out). They may or may not have something to refer you for. And ideally it's vice versa if they reach out to you. This method is organic but takes months, years of contact.
2. You're extremely specialized and you're your own business. Networking for future leads is part of your job. This will yield faster effects but mostly because you're already offering something of value.
of course, most people are stuck in the first bucket, especially early in your career.
>The way it was explained to me was to go up to them and pretend to be their friend, talk about sportsball, drink alcohol with them, gain some rapport or something... It was never really clear what the right magical incantation was.
Yeah, that's schmoozing networking. If a person likes you, it opens doors. This is just a universal sensation. it's the "dirty networking", but also the "classic networking". How you meet mates, how you make a good impression among socialites, etc.
This method relies less on your skills as a prospective. employee and more on your ability to quickly hit it off with a new person to the point where you're memorable. It's a way, but definitely not one everyone can do (nor wants to do). It's an entirely different skillset so you really have to train that muscle (and given your participation here, you may need to adjust your "likes" to more mainstream stuff. Or at least "tolerances". Sportsball discussion can open new doors if you really want to go that route).
>But, just for argument's sake, let's say I go out and successfully manage to "network" you. You now know me and think I would be a good employee. What now? I guess I say "Hey, rightbyte, I'm looking for a job at your company. Do you know of any roles that are hiring?" You say "Sure, here's job position XYZ, and the link to go apply. Good luck!" And now I'm back where I started
not all networks are created equal. Your goal with a job network is to get a referral, if not an outright fast track to an offer. If you got nothing more than a recruiter response, that person either can't do much more or doesn't want to do much more. Don't underestimate the power of a referral though. Those applications go through an entirely different pipeline. Basically the fast line for Disneyland.
That's also why "natural networking " is a long game. Juniors networking with themselves don't yield much. 20 years later, those juniors turned managers/founders/leads might just bring you into a company with the wave of their hand.
>The whole 'networking' enterprise seems like a bizarre, opaque process where nobody can explain how it works, but everyone's advice is that we should all somehow "go do it" as it's an important component of a job search.
That's because relationships are a bizarre opaque process where nobody can explain how it works. Sometimes you just trip into the right person and you're friends for life. Sometimes you are off on the wrong track with someone forever because you remind them of an unrelated person in their life. people on a macro level are a lottery of some sorts.
I think there’s a legitimate market opportunity here. I am seeking a cofounder to build the job board that vets employers, and makes money by charging candidates to access it.
The problem to be solved, imo, is ghost listings. - I don’t care if a company ghosts me because they hired someone else - I care if I spend time filling out applications for jobs that don’t exist
I’m not sure how to make participation by the employer tractable. They can’t exactly be mandated to hire, can they? Unless I’m trapped in a prison of the mind that seems like too risky of a proposition for them.
That said, as a candidate I would happily pay $USD/month for access to a job board where I know that the job as posted is definitely for real and definitely getting filled in a certain timeframe. I don’t care if my particular resume gets read, or replied to. I only care that the phenomena of “ghost job” is nonexistent in the walled-garden that I’m paying for access to.
This sounds similar to a problem dating sites face—solving the user's problem leads them away from the service. But you have the added difficulty that people looking for employment may not have the resources to spend on another monthly subscription.
It sounds interesting though, good luck!
>. I am seeking a cofounder to build the job board that vets employers, and makes money by charging candidates to access it.
Sounds like awful monetization. Dating site issue is right. Your best candidates (so ideally, all the ones you vet) won't be long term subscribers. And sadly, there's way too many grifts in the job system where a candidate paying is a red flag. You'd need to offer the candidates something of value to justify that. Not just "a promise of no ghost jobs").
Is there an issue with the usual recruiter pipeline where you can charge the company some percent of the hire once they get hired? Candidates get hired, company pays a little extra on a successful hire, and your profit incentives come from quality to offer for the companies (hopefully).
The main issue is that it assumes that companies genuinely care about an efficient hiring pipeline. And I've been very cynical in recent times...
What if the employer was charged a subscription fee, instead of waiting until they find a hire to charge? Then the incentive is for the company to find a hire quickly, since they're now paying per month instead of per head. Some companies will balk at this, obviously, since existing services charge them per head and they don't know how fast a viable hire will appear...but I'd guess that this would be highly effective at weeding out 'employers' who have no interest in employing any new hires.
(Also, seconding the part about grifts where a candidate is charged upfront. Charging upfront for access to training materials, equipment, or some kind of licensing agreement is often a sign that you're about to get roped into a multi-level marketing scam.)
Incentivize the employer to only provide real listings by having them pay to advertise a listing. Let them be reimbursed if it's filled via the platform.
You don't need to solve the problem 100%. An employer can still drag their feet and not fill a listing. But by aligning all incentives you can drastically reduce the problem.
My understanding is that employers already do pay to post on LI, indeed, etc. It simply works out that paying for ghost jobs is worth it, so the enforcement mechanism needs to be a ban/other thing that doesn't rely on pricing
Post makes errors around what nonprofits are and can do. (IANAL, but I do set up and run nonprofits for a living.)
Error 1: "In the US, non-profits are heavily regulated in their operations..."
Correction: There are no more or less regulations than other sectors, but there is almost ZERO enforcement, so if anything, the nonprofit sector is more accurately described as very lightly regulated.
Error 2: ", and exempt from income tax."
Correction: Nonprofits are NOT exempt from income tax on revenue from earned activity that is not mission related, known as Unrelated Business Income.
Error 3: "Across the many different structures, though, non-profits have one thing in common: They don't have owners."
Correction: Oversimplification - nonprofits are run and functionally owned by a board of directors, people who hire and fire the CEO, decide how revenue is allocated, and approve any merger or dissolution. Nonprofits can also own for-profit subsidiaries (see OpenAI) so there are a lot of gray areas here.
In sum, nonprofit status is far more complex that OP thinks and there are a ton of opportunities for skulduggery - just because Ghost is a nonprofit does NOT mean it is free of conflicts or other bad things than companies do.
If Ghost really wants to demonstrate its transparency, it should publish its tax returns (IRS form 990) and also an itemized P&L -- then they can stake a claim to being holier than the typical business.
People often think that "non-profit" means that the company can't make a profit. It actually means that the company doesn't have any owners who can personally take the profits. Any revenue earned can only be reinvested.
What we need is, is Job-postings-as-code so that we can automate the deployment of Linkedin postings such that when a recruiter is let go, we can automatically identify their postings and clean them up.
We'll call it DevHiringOps
Seriously tho, always use the companies website instead of believing whatever is on some job posting website.
This should be prosecuted. Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.”
Posting ghost jobs is a deceptive act.
I was told earlier this week by an organization
> We leave this role posted because it's so critical to our operation and onboard as demand requires, however at this time we don't have enough demand to justify another full time hire.
99% of HR staff will swear till they're blue in the face that's there's nothing wrong with that lol
HR is just PR with a different audience.
People who work in HR seem to generally lack ethical principles, from what I've seen.
If it’s a publically traded, report them to the SEC for trying to manipulate the market with the illusion of them hiring a lot as in growing
Related discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41714672
Noticed this trend a few years ago from startups keen to look like they were growing much faster than they really were. Personally I wouldn’t begin the process unless an insider had confirmed that a position was a) Real, and b) I would not be disfavoured somehow, meaning that I would be applying on a level playing field.
>81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled
Ah... recruiters at it again.
Posting fake jobs should be illegal.
arguably, since its often used to signal financial health for startups and publicly traded companies, it would be considered fraud by the FTC
> 62% companies posted them specifically to make their employees feel replaceable
wow, HR and management really have a lot of contempt for their staff.
i deleted my ln in 2022. i have a deep mistrust of all web platforms. i know what i do on the UI and what happens in the code are not the same.
Of the obvious fake job postings I've seen, I always assumed they were attempts at Russian or Chinese espionage. Example: for a very brief time I was a US DoD contractor.
Why do they need my home address for an application? I never understand that. Several have asked me for my DL number
Probably background checks.
Just my own experience but I have never gotten a job with a cold application on a job board. Always been via a recruiter or even better an inside contact.
My experience is completely the opposite: I've always gotten jobs from job boards. In one case, my resume was posted somewhere (monster.com I think, many years ago) and the hiring manager saw it and liked it and called me. In all other cases, I applied myself.
I've tried working with 3rd-party recruiters, and always found them to be a waste of time, because the companies they worked with weren't good and didn't pay very well.
In contrast, I have only once in my career gotten a job via an inside contact. Of the four jobs I've had since school, three of them were with a cold application.
I think my secret is working in a specific niche, but I could be wrong.
Your mileage may vary of course. The jobs I’ve had since an on-campus interview in grad school were all people I had worked with in some capacity. Basically never sent a resume except pro-forma.
I became curious long after the fact if a job description for my last job that was written for me was ever posted.
This is not only a problem for tech workers, but for all industries. The stories I hear from non-tech friends are pretty crazy.
burn it all down, start worker coops.
> They also made ads to “trick overworked employees” into believing that more people would be brought on to alleviate their overwhelming workload.
The part of the picture I'm more interested about is how the managers see it.
There must be a lowly manager actually trying to do something about their overworked team, and I assume they have access to HR and know which positions are real which aren't. And they know the company not only doesn't intend to hire, but is also gaslighting them, and they're made part of it.
It feels so gloom and just depressing beyond words.
Par for the course for non-tech years for years...
The article doesn't really discuss the legality of this, which I'd be curious to hear the opinion of a lawyer.
In other cases, it's considered criminal if a company deliberately puts out false information about itself. E.g., if you lie about your companies products (like Theranos), it's pretty clear that this is not legal.
I don't see why it should be legal to lie about your job opportunities.
ah the ol “Everything is securities fraud”. I could see it. Company posts jobs for department that is being divested/going out of business/etc, this misleads investors, ergo: securities fraud.
What kind of political action can we take to stop this infuriating practice?
One approach: https://code-cwa.org/
union
All for unions. But how does a union stop this?
Or this
This is just one example. While tech jobs are diverse, the well-heeled players substantially set the tone and they have gone berserk: over the last few years they have neutron bombed entire zip codes claiming hard times, then posted record-shattering EPS beats, then hired back a bunch of people at substantially lower compensation in a phenomenon so pervasive to have a catchy name: “boomerang”. It’s not even the first time recently got popped for wage fixing, Don’t Poach Gate was like 15 years ago. They’re giving us all the finger in the Crimson, and we will do nothing because we can do nothing.
It’s a trivial abuse of monopsony pricing power, it’s illegal in the sense that the laws as written prohibit it on a common-sense, “intended by the legislature” sense, a lawyer can tell you if it’s maybe legal via stare decis via activist judges bench legislating.
But more importantly it has destroyed what loose social contract there was: they cannot in fact run these businesses at 60-70% of peak headcount sustainably: they can merely coast on previous investments long enough to crush salaries and then clean up the mess because there isn’t any real competition. They can distort hiring to where McCarthyist vibe checks and loyalty tests hit a precision/recall that is Pareto optimized for the minimum amount of competence that admits an endorsement of their nepo baby “nice trumps kind” mythology.
And they’re going to get away with it at the level that matters: the individual incentives of executives are nothing to do with the long term interests of shareholders or the commons on this: progress is stalling out in a way that will never show up on a quarterly report in time to matter to the executives.
And you can see it in real time: we haven’t had such an embarrassing crop of people who were someone’s roommate at Harvard running the show in at least 30 years, the outcomes are awful, the software sucks, the products suck, and the game is soft communist friction around leaving the platform.
Unions
I wish we could do more to disincentivize this kind of blatantly unethical behavior from companies.
Employees look for new jobs they aren't seriously interested in. Why shouldn't employers do the same?
Filtering through a 1000 unemployed people spamming every job listing isn't going to give them useful intel.
I haven’t had to resort to applying to jobs I couldn’t or wouldn’t do to fulfill unemployment insurance requirements, but who knows what will happen in December if this goes on.
>Why shouldn't employers do the same?
proportions. 1 uninterested candidate wastes maybe 5 hours at best of a million dollar company's time. All the while those doing the interviewing were paid anyway.
1 bad post wastes dozens, hundreds of applicant's time. Especially the damn Workday apps. That time is not compensated and only gets worse the farter in you go.
I mean the reason I can think of off the top of my head is that one is wasting the time of people who are looking for a job so they can continue to live, and the other is wasting the time of a person who's job is reviewing resumes?
I don't agree with the attitude of the grandparent poster either, but work at a small company where I've been on the receiving end of many extremely low-effort applications from ineligible individuals, so it definitely goes both ways. Companies are also bombarded with spam from recruiters, just as candidates are.
There would be less application spam if there were fewer spam job postings.
Because only one in a hundred postings is real, we have to send out hundreds of applications before even getting a rejection. There's no way to tell if a posting is real or if anyone will ever read your application, so the only option available is to apply to everything.
A lot of people pose this as a prisoner's dilemma, but it really is not. This problem is not mutual, it's entirely one sided. If companies would only post jobs they intended to hire for, there would be exponentially fewer spam applications. They've fucked around by posting spam and now they're finding out by receiving even more spam.
When the average applicant has to send literally hundreds of applications to get any response at all, absolutely nobody is going to handcraft a thought out application to any one posting. There's literally not enough hours in the day. Because we don't even get rejection letters back, the only way forward is to firehose as many applications as possible and just hope you win the lottery by getting your resume in front of a human.
It's absolutely terrible for everyone involved and the only ones who can stop it want to act victimized by the problem they created
> "There would be less application spam if there were fewer spam job postings."
I disagree with this; in fact, I think there would be more application spam with fewer postings. Most of the application spam is from people who are either completely unqualified and just pressing the 'apply' button (which is made easy by websites which get paid per application), or people looking to move to a wealthier country (without any pre-qualification). I think both of these groups would actually be more aggressive about applying if they were more likely to be reviewed by a hiring manager.
I think it would bifrucate the obvious spam from the obvious real posters and make your job easier, even if there's more apps to go through. Lot of the worst is that vague middle land of "is this qualified? but it also kind of looks like AI because job applications expect a very specific format of resume".
So you'd win out that way. But I also don't sympathize too much as the "unqualifies just pressing apply" was a natural endstate of years of bad job requirement postings.
Sure but what I'm saying is that the stakes for a company having to go through spam applications are significantly lower than the people trying to find a job who are getting spammed with dead ends while their savings drain lower and lower.
Maybe for a big company, with an HR department and lots of resources, but not for a small company when >>90% of applications are from ineligible individuals.
yeah, but at worst, you waste time on the dime of a company from the recruiter's/hiring manager's POV. on the other side, you're wasting precious capital (time & money) from someone who may instead be hanging out with their kids, or taking care of their sick mother--i understand these are contrived examples. from a pure utalitarian perspective, both are a complete waste of time. but from a moral/ethical perspective, i think there's a clear loser in terms of precious time wasted.
I am an individual who works at a small company, and going through ineligible applications takes away from time I could spend with children or family. I am not an HR professional, but we don't have a massive staff to delegate these matters to. The situations are morally equivalent.
do you do this outside of work hours? sounds more like a failure on how the company operates than the nature of the problem. taking a wild guess that if it weren't for combing through through applications, then those extra hours spent on mindless HR stuff would simply be filled with other work.
It doesn’t matter when you waste someone’s time; work hours are fungible for most professionals. Your ‘wild guess’ seems very convenient with respect to your previous comment, and happens to be incorrect.