The outrage from job seekers is justified but Gizmodo doesn't help matters by categorising fraud (fake jobs) with failure (never filled). Hiring is hard, as anyone who has ever done it will attest, and very many vacancies opened in good faith are not filled for a variety of reasons - budget pulled, hiring manager won't make a decision, internal candidate appears at late stage etc.
We also need to draw a distinction between employers posting jobs directly vs 3rd party agencies posting jobs for the company's they represent, or purport to represent. There is a disincentive for the former to post 'fake jobs' - who wants to deal with the applicant flow, but an incentive for the latter to do so - harvest resume's, build a database.
Anyways. My point is, there _is_ a problem but mainstream magazine treatment like this from Gizmodo serves to add smoke when there's already a fire
Teams are also strongly motivated to not hire a bad team member that drags down morale and wastes resources. I want to say this is more true in government hiring, where it's difficult to fire people, but I've seen private companies hold out for a long time until they find someone with the right combination of cultural fit and technical skills.
It’s extraordinary how frequently companies discuss the cost of a bad hire and never consider the opportunity cost of a no-hire.
Companies that keep waiting for Mr. Right are really saying that the opportunity cost of not completing their project is very low. In other words it’s not really that important at all.
On the contrary. "Not completing the project" is not an option—if they don't hire someone to fill a vacancy on the team, the rest of the team will just be expected to work extra hours to keep up.
Oh, not with overtime—you're salaried, remember? (Alternate version: Oh, no, you can't actually log the extra hours; we don't have the budget for overtime, and I, the manager, can't be seen asking for more money, or it would affect my bonus!)
And you'd better step up and work those hours. You want to be seen as a team player, right?
>Not completing the project" is not an option—if they don't hire someone to fill a vacancy on the team, the rest of the team will just be expected to work extra hours to keep up.
And that's the opportunity cost we don't talk about. The cost isn't "we slow down on a project from a bad hire". It's "demoralize/burned out engineers quit to a point where the deadline is impossible to reach". You can't force overtime to engineers that leave and take their institutional knowledge with them
There's also a lot of fake job postings as a sort of carrot to overworked engineers that "promise more help is coming". Which is just as ingenuous to existing employees as it is to applicants.
The way I read it, Gizmodo cannot tell whether those jobs are fake or just never filled. How could anyone tell from outside ? The visible fact is that no-one is hired for those jobs.
If you post a job then reneg on it that still leaves folks out in the cold who are, in earnest, looking for work. Mistakes happen, and I don't blame hiring managers for the shifting financial landscapes they often have to face. But that job wasn't solid enough to count as a real position.
Maybe, but it's too hard to distinguish between the jobs that were posted with intention to not be filled and jobs that were posted with intention to be filled but through other circumstances weren't. So the distinction is moot.
It's a lot like this website. It used to be pretty obvious which comments were trolls and which are real people but more and more the people have gotten dumber and the trolls gotten smarter so it's almost impossible to tell the difference between maliciousness and stupidity and for the rest of us it doesn't really matter one way or the other. A person wasting our time is a person wasting our time, the intentions aren't important.
From the perspective of an applicant's emotional response, sure, but it's absolutely relevant in order to have a conversation about how to solve it since the different causes may need different approaches, or may occur in sufficiently differing rates to influence which should be addressed first.
But if we’re claiming fraud, either way the intent is actually the deciding factor. You can’t commit fraud without a guilty mind (mens rea)- at least in any jurisdiction I’m aware of.
different is a matter of use case.
The difference doesn't matter to the applicant. It probably does if you propose the death penalty for posting fake listings.
There is nothing wrong with reductor ad absurdum to make a point about dependency and categories. It is the primary use case.
I think there are a million practical challenges to implementing a fine. I wonder if there is enough incentives to draw employers to a verified list service.
Sure there is, it's in the name. We don't need an absurd argument for a punishment that is straightforward to explain. You usually use absurdum to simplify complex topics.
Or I suppose to win a presidential debate, these days.
It's even harder to tell them apart in a bear market where the job market is stacked in favor of employers (for the moment).
With the current glut of laid off engineering talent in the hiring pool, if an employer cannot find a candidate, they are not really serious about hiring. Yes, there's more filtering involved now, but you can't say that the candidates don't exist.
Every posting needs to have an honest attempt to fill it. I don't know the exact numbers, but if there 1000 applicants per posting and you end up reposting your job 4 times, there's clearly something amiss.this overlap of 1-4000 applications and not one of them are worth a call? Even if we accept 90% is spam, that's still hundreds of candidates in a "recruiters market" being passed over.
The challenge of course is that ‘I just didn’t like them’ is a valid form of discrimination.
So while it may be obviously bullshit (what, you can’t find anyone you actually like out of thousands?), it takes a non trivial amount of paperwork right now to prove it’s bullshit to the degree you could actually punish anyone for it. Especially with the recent administration change.
Yeah, the usual product of excessive greed. It's on the exploited to prove stuff with info they don't have access to. At least Lina Khan gave voided non-competes before capitalism took the reigns again.
There are job postings out there that are solid, but where the company is unwilling to pay the recruiter markup, and hiring organically just doesn't result in solid candidates. Not every company hiring is a Fortune 500 or Big Tech company looking to get over on the world. Many are smaller companies looking to fill roles but may be lacking in the bandwidth or resources to lower expectations and either pay well over market or hire downmarket and train extensively. To say these companies are hiring fraudulently is unfair.
>hiring organically just doesn't result in solid candidates.
If you get one bad hire, it's probably on them
If you get 20 bad hires, it's probably on the company. At some point, no matter the size, people really need to look at themselves and say if they are really trying to enhance their shop and let talent succeed, or if they are a churn shop and don't deserve solid candidates to begin with.
It's the same concept. Even with niche tech. If you can't hire a good candidate in a buyers market, and repeatedly get bad hires, what's your interview pipeline doing? Paying too low, getting reqs wrong in a game of telephone? Hiring through nepotism instead of merit?
I'm just a bit tired of the "but we need to avoid bad hires" narrative. Especially since a certain blundermouth more or less said the quiet part out loud for the intentions many have with that. It made sense in 2022, but is that really an issue in 2025? If you can't "find solid candidates" now, how did you Faire in non-bust markets?
A small relatively unknown company outside of more popular job markets will not get huge numbers of applicants to posts on a random job board. That doesn't make those posts malicious on the company's part. It's just a relatively illiquid market.
They may need other help to find a candidate, e.g. recruiters. But that's a different topic than the OP, which is about "online job postings"
You really haven't seen how much of a buyers market this is, have you? Even small unknown companies can throw a post on and get hundreds of responses in hours. Yes, a lot is slop, but we're still talking some dozens of genuine candidates that needs any job.
> But that's a different topic than the OP, which is about "online job postings"
This whole topic is about online job postings. Smaller groups that don't just grab their friends need to find talent too.
I know -- in popular markets, for more general roles, you will get lots of valid candidates.
If you need specific skills in a specific geographic area, you probably still get a lot of responses, but the vast majority (if not all) aren't going to be suitable. Really, these jobs don't have much luck being filled on job boards, because it isn't the best medium to hire those people, but many companies will put them out there anyway to broaden their reach.
Sure, it comes down to your filters at the end. But I think legitimately needing a unicorn or domain expert is different from the above statement of
> hiring organically just doesn't result in solid candidates.
the tech hiring has been a bit annoying for a decade now, but this simply sounds like a narrative for someone simply wanting an H1B rather than one who is simply bad at finding talent.
If you get hundreds of apps and you can't get a single qualified candidate, you either have a horribly inefficient recruiting system or your job needs are so specific that general job boards won't help you anyway. If you have years of inefficiencies happening without being addressed, at what point to we just call it fraud instead?
Or possibly you highly overestimate your job needs vs. The requirements posted. Which is endemic of the above reasons anyway.
I'm thinking exactly the same. Feel like it's more like 3 in 5, if not 4 in 5.
I recently commented on another thread about how I managed 2 interviews and 1 offer out of ~500 applications. Which is kind of telling, since it only took 2 actual interviews to get another job (alas for less money that I make right now anyway)... If the jobs were real, it should be far easier to get them.
The part I don’t get is that 6 months later I get responses to applications. I’ve talked to recruiters and the picture they paint is hundreds or thousands of resumes in the inbox. They keep shuffling their search criteria and sometimes someone interesting pops out.
That doesn’t entirely make sense to me, but something is clearly quite broken, and it seems to be as much due to incompetence as fraud
This one's not as bad but still amusing: I applied to a well-known telecom company that rhymes with "May Pee and Pee" and got to the final onsite interview, after which they ghosted me. Afterwards, I did the whole round of interviews at a different company, got hired, moved my family across the country, and got established in that new job. A few months later, I got an E-mail from the telecom company saying "We would like to interview you one last time. Please let us know when you are free." LOL
Gov of Canada, famously, has some of the most braindead slow hiring practices in the country. Their HR teams are incredibly bad at their jobs. It's genuinely astounding. Last I checked the time from application to starting your job could be anywhere from 9 to 18 months. Everyone, including the employees, know it, so everyone gets "Bridged In" through an internship or hires internally. The rules are totally different with internal postings and you can get hired in a week if you're a good candidate.
If you get an interview you are already on a short list. The process I usually see is 100's of applications -> screening by recruiter and hiring manager -> phone screen 10-20 -> coding challenge 3-7 -> onsite 2-3 -> hire 1.
I remember a few years ago I posted that throughout my career, during market ups and downs, my average application:interview:offer ratio was around 100:10:1 and half of HN thought I was exaggerating, or there was something wrong with my interviewing, or that I was shotgunning my resume, and so on. We've got an industry full of young employees who are seeing the first bear market of their lives.
500:x:1 doesn't seem outrageous at all in a down market. The 2:1 interview:offer ratio is actually outstanding, especially where the industry is today.
I guess as a "newer employee" (8 years now) I see that and say "yeah, that was pretty much my first job search. Maybe a bit better reply rate". I may not have been applying for jobs in 2008, but I feel this bust isn't just about low hiring. And that's what makes it all the worse.
For reference, these 8 years and 3 jobs later, I'm probably around 300-20-0. Or 1 if you the count the part time freelancing that just showed up out of the blue. But I didn't even apply for that.
It seems like these numbers are purely based on Greenhouse. I bet that many companies use less sophisticated approaches like just sending resumes to a mailbox and those have higher fake rates.
Well, my recruiter callback ratio is likely 1 out of 5, despite having a very VERY niche profile: a PhD focused on NLP for creative text generation, especially in video games, and a prior career as a game developer.
Needless to say, I've only focused on roles that fit that narrow profile. One of the recruiters that contacted me didn't even know I worked in games, despite it making up the bulk of my work experience (including as a lead developer).
Considering how closely I match this narrow profile, and the number of people that likely do, it's weird how low my callback ratio has been.
> One of the recruiters that contacted me didn't even know I worked in games
I get that all the time with my setup. "you look like a good fit and have lots of experience for XYZ tech". Nowhere on my resume does it even mention it. Sometimes I have to look it up and see what they are talking about. One of them even went on and on about my current job. Despite it only having the start date in that spot and no exp on what I do here.
It is blindingly obvious they did not read my resume. They are keyword scumming and hoping for the best.
I think the rate of non-fill is higher. But the reasons for it are all over the map. Everything from "we always leave a posting up even when we're not really looking just in case the perfect candidate happens to walk through the door" but in the mean time nobody really pays attention to applicants, to "we weren't getting the applicants we wanted with this posting, so we took it down and are trying a new posting," to "we're legally obligated to post this, but we already have a plan about hiring" whether it's someone connected, someone internal, or a preference for H1B workers, to all kinds of other scenarios. Anybody who has ever applied for a dozen jobs, sent literate applications and outreach, and has heard from most of them never to months later regardless of actual fit for the job knows this.
100% agree. A big issue with tech is there are so many options and domains that for any particular job it can easily take even an amazing developer 6-9 months to get up to speed if they're unfamiliar with your particular tech stack or business area. That's not the case with most other professions - if I'm, for example, a professional violin player, I can play in basically any orchestra in the world and be proficient from day 1.
So if you happen to find that unicorn who is not only a great developer but is also expert in the major areas of your tech stack and your business domain, you hire them in a heartbeat.
Sounds like something many technical professions have to deal with. Even with all the licenses and certs in the world, very few lawyers or doctors are just walking in and learning the process in a week. Other types of engineering need to understand the pipeline in another firm compared to their old one. A firefighter needs time to mesh with the team and figure out what equipment and tools are available here.
But then again, I bet most of those also aren't trying to rely on AI to find talent.
I can't speak about lawyers, but you're definitely wrong about doctors (have a couple in my family). They can and do travel to completely new hospital systems and are expected to do their normal job immediately (and they do).
Even within tech, I think the ramp-up time is faster for literally everyone else besides software engineers, just because the underlying technology can vary so much more (and its more important to be understood at an intimate level of detail) than for other roles.
My girlfriend is an Orthopaedic Surgeon. Great when I've got a broken arm, or need shelves putting up. I wouldn't let her anywhere near my heart or brain. Medicine is super specialised.
I hear you on geography though. Luckily the human body doesn't change too much between locations.
I think the point was that an orthopaedic surgeon can change hospitals and immediately get to work doing orthopaedic surgery. Sure, there might be some difference in how to clock in or who to report to, but they aren't suddenly working with a different type of human. Their job will remain constant despite changing environs, whereas moving between software companies could have you learning entirely different stacks that affect your process in fundamental ways.
I'm not going to speak with authority on medicine, but my understanding is that residency takes some time if you leave your area, and there are various state compliances to keep in mind. So it doesn't sound like you can just grab any doctor and get them to work after a week.
>because the underlying technology can vary so much more (and its more important to be understood at an intimate level of detail) than for other roles.
If most jobs needed intimate knowledge of the language and constructs and weren't just CRUD apps built upon 3 frameworks, I'd almost agree with you. There are definitely roles that need that expertise, but I'd bet a yoke with a solid SWE fundamentals and comletetence in one language can ramp up for another stack relatively quickly. Nat least, no clowwr than any other engineering profession. Companies simply either oversell the work they need done or oversell how urgent the work is (compared to working the existing staff overtime).
I feel so lucky I haven't had to apply anywhere in my entire career through postings, the good thing of having a solid network is that you get to know who knows a consultant/freelancer before any position is created.
I did post my availability few times on HN "who wants to be hired" but with poor results and lots of wasted time (as again, the person on the other end does not know me or has worked with me everything gets bureaucratic again).
Also, all of the people I had hired for my clients came again from my network, there was never a public posting.
There's also other benefits, in general, you don't get to do silly technical interviews, as you're bringing former coworkers you can vouch for.
Not saying this can scale anywhere, but in smaller companies with good teams and professionals they always know someone from their previous jobs or their online communities (common in open source related githubs/discords/slacks) and I like it.
I was fortunately able to leave a terrible job 2 years ago and immediately had contract work, now I run my own business and get constant referrals from my network. I make more than ever, have incredible work-life balance, and for the most part love what I do.
If you don't have a network, the moment you quit/lose a job you are dead to the world. Even now I have people approaching me for FTE roles, I haven't even worked with them for 2 years. Am I some god tier programmer? Not really, but I have a good track record and people always want to go to someone they already trusted.
In academic / white collar work for sure. But if you're something like a skilled craftsman whose services are in demand, you can probably do fine with less social networking.
Maybe. All of them have cycles of good and bad times. I've known many Electricians and Carpenters who have been laid off for years at a time before things come back.
Building a network is something anyone can do. Join meetups. Find local user groups. Find online groups and get active in them. Give talks. Write and publish your thoughts locally and/or online. Talk with people. Ask (good) questions. Let people get to know you and the way you think. Many more ways exist than just these.
Connecting with other professionals in various ways is all there is to building a network and anyone can do it. They just have to do it.
This. I'm still benefiting from being in a BSD users group that I went to between 2000-2008 because it was filled with passionate/talented tech people, most of whom have gone onto other things. Find places to get into discussions and show your opinions and have discussions. If you are in a group where your mind is never changed, then find something else.
IME it's not that bad. My entire network failed when I was looking for work: either everyone was still at my old employer whom I didn't want to return to or they were also out of work. I don't have much online presence, because that's my preference.
I did ~11 applications (on company websites, tailored resume), of which like 9 were moonshots (NVDA, Valve, etc). I heard back from everyone, and then interviewed and accepted an offer with a smaller international company located locally. This was during the 2023/4 downturn (Dec '23 to be exact).
Caveat: I have 15YoE and work in embedded (especially embedded Linux); it seems this specialization has suffered less than others. I also don't have a degree. I had to accept a slight paycut and hybrid - but I was in office before... and hardware generally just requires you to be present sometimes.
Don't be afraid if you don't have a network, the advice is good, but it doesn't apply to everyone.
I would say the extended parts of my network are still getting the interviews, but I have people I directly literally went to school with, and lived in the same dorm with turn
me flat down for work, which was a real slap in the face. I’ve been applying since April 2020 (with about 7 interviews so far and 2-3 upcoming interviews total) and I’m getting kind of discouraged at this point.
Honestly in this market there is really only so much your network can do—at least at a “submit my resume for me” level. I’m starting to think I might get a bit more aggressive and bold with my network and have them deliver paper copies to the hiring manager or something. Because even referral submitted applications are black holes at this point.
Hang in there and take what you can get. The market is super shitty and you are absolutely not alone. It ain’t you. The market will pick back up again… it always does.
If they won’t pay for traveling for on-site interview or relocation is that a good sign; when they’re demanding three days a week in the office hybrid?
>The market will pick back up again… it always does.
It will, but this time it's probably going to be several years. It's the covid lock down train wreck. Most people underestimate the cascading damage done by the lock downs.
The market can remain depressed for longer than you can remain solvent.
We should be encouraging people to look at alternative careers to tech. Life after tech.
We should also be making it clear to students that while there are exciting things happening in tech this is not going to translate into large scale demand for people.
Large parts of technology are mature, indeed moribund. This is not a message that the technology industry wants to hear.
> but I have people I directly literally went to school with, and lived in the same dorm with turn me flat down for work, which was a real slap in the face.
Since referrals became the meta-game, companies have adapted their referral process to be more selective. Most companies I've worked for have required people to enter some basic information about how and where you worked with the referral, why you're referring them, and a statement that your referral means you are vouching for that person's work performance.
It cuts down on the number of people referring people they know by happenstance, which defeats the purpose of a referral program. I doubt your friends meant it as a personal attack. They probably just had referral programs that were more rigorous than putting names into a queue.
They said they hadn’t been happy with the last three months of candidates, and that I was probably going to be it and then rejected me with no feedback and hired some ex-SpaceX person as a contractor. It may have been the investor playing a role.
11 apps to one job last year, huh? With a 100% response rate. Wish I could have had even a tenth of that luck. Heck even during the best booms my response rate was hovering around 30%.
I'm just exhausted with the search. I finished yet another programming take home only for the company to stop hiring at the turn of the quarter.
But yea, my network also failed me. Mostly becsuse 80%+ of them were laid off themselves.
Remember when 80% are laid off, they are all looking. Whoever finds a job probably has found a place that is hiring more than one person. So keep in touch, they don't have anything today, but they may have leads. Sometimes it is here is a job that you are a closer fit for than me so I may as well point you at it even if it hurts my already low chances.
Indeed. And my luck continued to fall through the cracks.
Had 3 interviews through contacts that bounced back. Failed two interviews, one technical, one cultural. Third one never really got off the ground; talked to a recruiter and then nothing ever really got arranged. Not even a call.
One got a job at a place I previously worked at and had no interest in returning to. He's on a different team though so I can't say his experience will mirror mine.
One was asking around about any open roles days before he got laid off himself.
Asked a few others and no positions are really open as of now.
Funnily enough me and another colleague applied to the same job and he got it. Right before they invoked a hiring freeze.
And those are just referrals. The nightmares from jobs I just found myself get even better. I'm just tired. This market suuuuuuucks.
There have been ups and downs for decades. I'm sorry it is happening to you, glad it isn't me this time (so far!). I've been there. Hang in, there are always jobs though sometimes you need to become a handyman or something to get any money for a year.
Yeah, no worries. I'm stable for now, just not full time stable. I just gotta survive until the market bounces back.
I work in games so I was pre-programmed far in advance to expect shakey times. Just not times where I'm ghosted for over a year with no sign of anything opening up (quite the contrary, still plenty of gaming layoffs!).
Try getting a single board computer such as a raspberry pi, and see if you can get it to do stuff! Hook it up to some SPI or I2C peripheral boards to read temperature or light. Stream data to a cloud.
Another big part of embedded Linux is managing the OS itself and updates. Things like Yocto handle building an OS image
I think that's relevant if you have a highly specialized skillset like embedded Linux. People don't make embedded Linux job postings to "test the waters" or "see if the perfect candidate applies." If the listing is up, they're probably hiring an embedded Linux developer, and while there will be a lot of resume frauds applying, they actually need to make the hire.
If you're applying for a B2B SaaS product manager job there are 50,000 jobs and 200,000 applicants and it's a completely different situation.
> My entire network failed when I was looking for work
That's been my consistent experience as well. Conventional wisdom is that you only get good jobs through referrals, but about half of the companies I've worked for have been through referrals and half "cold" through monster or linkedin, etc. and BY FAR the worst working experiences of my life have been the internal referral ones. The last time I was looking for work was 2017, though - I get the impression that things have gotten really, really bad in the past year or so.
My experience is the network typically fails, but it can sometimes work.
Remember with networking there is often only one person in your network of hundreds who can do anything so you need to find that person. Often it will be the guy you just barely talked to who won't think of you at all unless you remind them, but they then know enough to know you are good enough for some position and then they are not interviewing they are convincing you to take the job.
Those cases where the network ensures you are the only candidate are one of the reasons why they work well. My current company doesn't work that way, it doesn't matter how good you are, all I can do is put your resume in the HR stack (unless it is for my department in which case my boss might ask me about a couple resumes). I'd be considered a conflict of interest so I couldn't interview you.
I posted once with a seconds account on who is hiring, the amount of spam and fishing attempts received is crazy, 10-50 DocuSign and the like a day since then.
I decided I wanted a better job in 2025 after being at my company for 6ish years. I started applying to 2-3 jobs a day starting in december and reaching out to old contacts. Complete ghost silence and bullshit. Managed to get 2 leetcode screens that went nowhere even after doing alright on them.
Hit up an old college buddy on linked in, got a referral, went through a ton of interviews (6) and got a job in two weeks. It's nuts how far a referral will get you.
Having interviewed candidates for full-stack positions, and actually asked them about the entire stack (instead of just the backend), I'm surprised the number isn't higher.
I always wonder how much that is influenced by the blog / social media world where a few (or even one) neat features in a product or language produces "I love this". So yeah they love it ... in so far as the social media expression goes.
I feel that’s more of an artifact of American culture. I remember discussions where the stakeholder declined to use a technology, and said something like “we love X, but are concerned about Y.”
Perhaps there's a reason why. The market generally doesn't need people who can do it all. In the same way it doesn't need people writing C++ or Rust to know how to write machine code or assembly. Sure, the ones that can are probably more knowledgable, but their experience with the high level language is more important.
I've done full-stack with no frameworks or non-std libraries (aside from PDO and OpenSSL, the limitations set by CEO decree) for about 8 years now.
I write my own schemas in IBM Db2. Hell, I wrote small application databases in IBM DDS in the AS400's SEU while I was still under the legal drinking age. I've always written our stylesheets from scratch, using SCSS. I've written C++ APIs that run in PASE, talk to the database with ODBC, then send back to a front end through sockets. I do graphic design and photography -- something I started back in middle school and took some formal classes on -- and have led the creation of marketing materials for multiple subsidiaries. I've spent 40 hour weeks working on sysadmin tasks in vim, 40 hour weeks writing libraries in JetBrains and VSCode, and 40 hour weeks working running around with my DSLR or working in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.
But when I look for full-stack jobs, most of them actually want somebody who is well versed in a framework. There's not much point in doing all of this from scratch. It's more tedious, more error prone, and it takes longer to get to market. Some interviewers have given the impression that I'm a little "less than" because I haven't used any major frameworks.
I think that's actually a valid take, and it's something I've started doing side projects to address. Frameworks improve velocity. Frameworks improve reliability. They reduce the risk of a developer coming up with an out-in-the-weeds solution to a problem they didn't properly understand. They make it easier to maintain the code. They make it easier to onboard new developers who are familiar with that tech.
I once did a take-home project for a full stack role that proclaimed any language/framework could be used to build a browser-based application that satisfied a particular task. I opted to use golang and its standard library to produce an application with no external dependencies and no javascript. In the rejection email they stated the use of outdated development methods was a point of disqualification. I'm sure other reasons for disqualification were present, I wasn't a great candidate in retrospect, but I'll never forget the naivety and hubris of their framing.
They were of course a NextJS shop.
Ultimately disregard role titles. It's a people problem that you have to pull teeth to find out what they really want, and what they really want they often won't say out loud. That's fine, it's their money (and usually a lot of it!) and they should be able to dictate the services that they want.
Really sucks for people new to the industry trying to learn the song and dance.
Sounds like you dodged a bullet in terms of culture mismatch. I think a good number of these mismatches could be mitigated by having some in-depth conversations about the job, team, interactions with other teams, and problem scope, before getting into any technical interviewing.
I think it is valid to expect some experience with major frameworks, but framework experience without understanding the underlying concepts usually indicates someone who is pretty limited in being able to solve more difficult problems.
I guess larger organizations have a role for these kinds of workers, but they’re not the kind of people I want on my team.
This is an exceptionally good question to identify people who have actually used a technology for real. I've used merely the second part ("what gripes do you have about X") in interviews successfully for nearly two decades.
If you've used a tool long enough, you've identified warts and misfeatures. And you will have opinions about them.
1. With the current AI bots, likely not. And that basically shows how inefficient these systems currently are.
2. The hiring manager does. The bot certainly does not. The odds of someone able to please the latter while meeting the former is low odds, for a candidate that's already low odds to begin with.
3. Not impossible. And that's all the justification they need as long as they aren't penalized for what basically a ghost job.
From my experience this is one of the ways it might work.
Recruiting (company's internal function, which is part of HR) is tasked with soliciting profiles to see what's available on the market. There's no real position but the recruiter(s) invent one according to what the business told them they would eventually need. There's no hiring manager behind it (as there's no position to be be filled). Recruiter either periodically meets with the business group that requested the research or prepares a report on the results (number of resumes that came in, salary requirements, etc) and presents to the business group that requested it.
So there's a reason these resumes are being solicited, it's just the reason is not to hire somebody. Sometimes it is done to justify business decision (ie to move to a different technology, or to expand to a new geographical area). Sometimes the business group _might_ be willing to open a new req if "the right candidate" comes up, but it's not guaranteed.
It also allows HR and recruiting to justify their presence (they are busy despite the fact that the company might not be hiring at all currently).
So there's reasons why these positions are posted and virtually none to prevent the company from doing that.
I think the answers to these is usually no, but there's one (questionable) person in leadership who's like "what if somebody from Google applies?" (or whatever equivalent). Never seen it work. Encountered it a few times. It tends to be magical thinking embellished by narratives around 10x engineers.
I did get hired like that once. Small company with just 3 other employees not really interested in hiring, but I had some useful experience in their domain so they decided to hire me anyway (and then went bankrupt a few months later, but they probably would have happened anyway).
I think another very common scenario is just eliminating the headcount. Companies cut headcount at a small scale all the time and the first one to go is usually the unhired.
> we always leave a posting up even when we're not really looking just in case the perfect candidate happens to walk through the door
I've seen one that remained up after the company itself was closed down… which I knew about by having been in it when it closed; even before that, it was so out of date the salary offered was about 60% of what they'd paid me when I joined.
I was a contractor at a FAANG for a few years, and they handed me a job. In the few weeks of transition between the two (some paperwork, etc.) a job posting and req ID was created and posted on their jobs site. I freaked out for a bit, but everything worked out so I can only presume (in California) that was a requirement.
What amazed me was it said (maybe on LinkedIN?) how many poor souls actually took the time to apply to the position. It was in the hundreds. I can't help but feel bad knowing they never had a chance.
In the public sector, tbh, the quality of candidates is so bad that everyone you get on the first round of applicants can be totally unqualified.
So, you have to reopen the posting or start all over.
And the second set of candidates is just as bad.
So you close it and rewrite the description (not that fucking HR was competent at that in the first place), and go back to step one, which you are highly likely to repeat.
linkedin has one-click applications for many large orgs; in all likelihood they saw something that said "FAANG" and "similar to you skills" and clicked it.
a previous F500 company I worked for and was involved with hiring for was constantly posting jobs but only really took application seriously when they were referrals or through the company job site directly.
By now this seems to be a serious problem. It's too easy to apply for a job. Disincentive all around: it's too easy to be lazy and over-specify or mis-describe a job offer. Then it's too easy for randos to apply because it's just a few clicks at most. Then it's too easy to dismiss with a broad comb because of all the randos. etc, etc. At this point the "job posting to job application" pipeline is completely broken and anyone who cares should rather leverage their network. Both to hire and apply, or use deliberately more obscure pathways such as professional society meetings or company web sites only, or job fairs, etc.
Yes, just go in there, look them in the eye, give them a nice, firm handshake, and don't take no for an answer.
Please.
I went visiting some local businesses in-person the other summer looking for a part-time job. One HR lady seemed annoyed that I showed up, and told me "we don't have a front door", and unironically said "keep checking our web site". She seemed confused when I asked her to hand my resume back to me. One vestibule intercom told me to put my application in the slot. One major international corporation told me that they would give me a decision on the spot, then changed their tune during the interview.
You're not wrong, but all you've ended up describing to the poster is that you don't actually have a network to leverage for finding work - which is what they're advocating for here, not walking into places to hand physical resumes.
For the time being, leveraging a network is still the best way to get hired.
I think in my career so far in ~8 companies and many clients, I only got one of those jobs From a "cold" job posting application. Everything else was at least a soft referral by an acquaintance.
I've seen similar things happen. This is a great example of the unintended second order effects of regulation. Good intentions don't ensure good outcomes.
If the role was advertised on LinkedIn, out of those hundreds of applicants there's probably only a small minority that have appropriate experience and right to work.
I once got a developer position through a professional group on Facebook. My soon-to-be manager had to have HR create a job posting on a public facing portal so I could apply through it, despite already essentially giving me the position.
I wonder how many people applied for that job before it was taken down.
I think you're right. Speaking from current personal experience, it's not unusual to get 500 applications for a job, especially higher-level jobs like Principal engineer (where people are chasing the title and salary). I would guess 90% of them are clearly underqualified. Of the other 10%, nearly half will never respond to a follow-up email to schedule interviews. Of those that do, 3/4 of them will reject the offer for various reasons. Given I have a lot of other duties beyond hiring, spending the hours upon hours it takes to sort through that only to have it yield no fruit is ... demoralizing at best.
It seems to me that if somebody can actually solve the problem of increasing signal-to-noise ratio, they could do very well.
At one of my previous companies, I recall suggesting to my CEO that we open some job postings "just in case" the right person comes along. He candidly noted that we already have open job postings, and gave me access to the email they all went to.
I saw over 3,000 applications made over the last 2-3 years. Tailored resumes. Cover letters. This wasn't some LinkedIn "quick apply", these were direct "Fill out the form" on our website. Not a single one of these applications got read.
If 500 people apply for a fake job and don’t get to an interview or personal response stage, then when they need a real job filling they’ve already wiped out a lot of applicants who won’t bother applying next time.
Well those are 3000 resumes that won't be resubmitted when you actually want to hire. Many of those resumes will belong to people who since found work. Weeding through that would be a nightmare, so you'd have to toss it and write it off as a loss.
Or you could just post jobs when you're actually interested in hiring and turn it off when you have enough applications to process. Super interested candidates can always cold email.
They don't care about those 3k and they could reach out.
And maybe next round they do apply again. I sure don't remember when I last was applying who I applied for except some big names that ... yeah I'd submit it again if I was looking.
I don't like the system, but I don't think they're hurt by it.
Awful company. They could post “here are our standard job roles, we aren’t actively hiring but if you’re the perfect match please tell us why”, which warns the prospective applicant.
When I was in uni, I found that just having a boring cover letter drastically increased the odds of an interview (for internships and post grad work). I bet a lot of places just have a filter that adds you as a higher priority purely on the existence of a cover letter.
I've never read a cover letter that I found valuable for hiring anyone, though. And I'm sure mine were never of any actual value either.
I like that insight and should I ever be back in the kafkaesque nightmare of blind online job applications, I will take your advice. As you point out, barring typographical mistakes a cover letter being too generic isn’t likely to result in a rejection, but not “checking the box” very well might.
May you never have to write one again, but if you do, it might be helpful to think of the cover letter as a reflective writing exercise. You might be able to gauge your level of interest in a particular role by how easy it is to write about, for example. Or it could just be some practice at communicating your strengths and abilities (this would definitely apply to me).
IMO it's too disheartening to put effort into such personal writing without the awareness of some kind of direct value or benefit, since chances are it's going straight into the void.
I like writing them when I think there are aspects to why I'd be a good fit for the role that don't get revealed sufficiently by listing skills on a resume or I have questions that can save everyone a ton of time. It seems like people do at least read them before interviews most of the time so I think there's some value.
> This wasn't some LinkedIn "quick apply", these were direct "Fill out the form" on our website. Not a single one of these applications got read.
Surely this would basically immediately backfire as people would presume a rejection and not apply when you actually wanted to hire. Why would you do this?
With BS postings, low response rates, and the effect of having to apply to many jobs at once, how else can applicants manage their many applications but write things down?
The last time I did ran the job search, I needed a spreadsheet to keep track of things. When a recruiter reaches out to me, I'm going to see if their company is in there, and what my notes say about my last experience with them.
If I'm anything like the trend, I just move on. If a posting comes up and it's been more than a few weeks I apply anyway. All such a spreadsheet would show for 90% of my apps is "applied, never got a response". In both good and bad markets.
If anything I'd only remember postings I actually interviewed and was rejected for. Which is sadly a small enough number to keep in my head.
I completely understand why you would behave this way, but I would absolutely not apply to the same place. I've never hired someone I've seen twice. I'm sure it could theoretically happen (hell, it's likely to happen for a certain pair of personality and company) but the first rejection is generally a precedent for the second.
>I completely understand why you would behave this way, but I would absolutely not apply to the same place.
Well that's exactly why I apply multiple times.
Had an example last year. I applied once, got rejected, coincidentally met someone at that same company and team later in the week. They sent me a referral, and then boom, recruiter call the next day. My resume was the same. It's just the referral pile got me visiable.
I'm pretty convinced even pre-AI that there are so many times when I'm simply not seen. Getting no response or an automated response just tells me these days "okay, I didn't make it to a human. Maybe next time" instead of "welp, I'm not good enough right now".
Also note that those kinds of companies are pretty big with hundreds of roles for software. The hiring culture between each team may as well make it a few dozen companies. I'm not trying to re-apply (on purpose) to a small group of a a few dozen after one rejection from the exact same role.
> It's so common place that few are going to remember they applied to a specific company years ago to begin with.
Additionally, it take a single lazily-managed spreadsheet to identify this dysfunction. Surely any positive effect from doing this would be muted (again, likely into the negative) because the company doesn't want to hire you.
>Surely any positive effect from doing this would be muted (again, likely into the negative) because the company doesn't want to hire you.
In my experience, it's because they didn't actually see you (or they were never hiring anyone to begin with. Hence the article). If I don't get to a step where I speak to a human, I don't really count it as a rejection. Just a filtering.
Rejection implies that my skillset was not fit to the role, or that someone else was better than me and selected. Definitely not the vibes I get in this current market.
> In my experience, it's because they didn't actually see you
Are we supposed to simply assume that nobody ever reads any application we send in? I don't see how this works out anyway but negatively for the company. If I don't hear back from you, I'll just assume you don't want to hire me. There's no semantic difference in my mind between this and sending me a note that you've read and rejected my resume—especially in an industry where it's normal to simply ghost someone rather than issue a formal rejection.
I see we're talking in circles. I'll drop the conversation.
In this modern market? Yes. Hence the article. It's the Tree falls metaphor in my eyes, and in this specific case it does not make a sound as far as I'm concerned.
But if you're taking my "assumption" as an absolute, I don't know what to say. An assumption based on this precise slice of time. Not something that will always be true in all contexts. It's not even always true in this context.
>There's no semantic difference in my mind between this and sending me a note that you've read and rejected my resume
Bots don't send hand written notes. They can, but the costs are a much higher margin than an auto reject email.
You're pretty close to what my main point is, though. Bots aren't an automatic bad, but there feels to be zero effort on the recruiting end this day to try and get quality candidates. That lack of care means I shouldn't spend any energy regarding their (lack of) feedback if all I'm getting back is slop. So I'll just spin the AI roulette again.
I remember a post here where some recruitment manager (at a company) said "Always write a cover letter, which is not generated by AI, otherwise you're an automatically trashed".
I rolled my eyes.
Although this might be sound advice, it's not the reality of a lot of people looking for work.
Yes, they might do this for the few months, but after what 6 months+ of no or canned responses (even though you have ALL the skills they want) it gets tiresome and you just say F-it, copy-paste a canned cover letter.
You can't even be sure a cover letter is read. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are skipped. When I have 100 applicants I don't have time to read cover letters, I'm looking for the first bullet that suggests you can do the job otherwise I'm trashing your application (The goal is to get down to 10-20 resumes that I then spend a minute on to see if you go into the interview or not pile). I'm only going to read that cover letter if something suggests you despite lack of the experience I'm looking for you might have a different background and so be worth hiring anyway.
Remember I have lots of more interesting things to do than read your application. When we are hiring (like many we are not today) I take time to do the process, but I really want to be doing the more interesting work.
This is a spam problem. Spam problems are easily solved by simply charging for attention. Job postings should pay me to view them, and I should pay job postings to apply to them. The only reason why ghost postings exist is because the marginal cost to the company is so incredibly low to do it.
In demand people should get paid for their attention.
What I don't understand is why are there no systems that actually implement this? Most likely because the user education problem of cryptocurrency wallets and the various UI/UX issues it presents, but there's no mainstream apps that I can think of that actually try this.
Seems like it would work in dating apps, in advertising, in CRMs, in social networks of all types. Why hasn't it been done?
My guess is because we've only solved half of the problem with crypto. We have the cheap value exchange, but we don't have identity figured out quite yet.
I really wish that's how (a subset of) the internet worked. Not for replies, but for quality website access. Think newspapers and other primary sources of information. Fill up your browser tank and go visit these websites. The site then gets paid per view, or per duration of stay. Details are tricky though.
In my opinion a big barrier to the success of such systems is that newspapers often aren't primary sources. Most outsource the reporting to press agencies and (increasingly) to social media. Press agencies usually do sell individual stories with primary reporting, but not at the prices you and I can afford.
For mainstream press though, is it worth the pennies of a microtransaction to read someone's re-hashing of public records and social media posts? That is very much dependent on both the reader's personal expertise and the author's, and if they are mismatched the article becomes worthless to the reader. An article explaining what HN is would be illuminating to many, but entirely unworthy even of pennies to you and I.
Other way around. You should paypal them $0.01 if your reply is worth viewing.
But Hacker News already has a cost to posting replies: you can only post a few (I think 5 replies every 4 hours) and although you can make more accounts, there's a limit to that too. So I know this was one of your top 5 in this 4-hour period.
Morality aside, the logistics of this means you cannot literally PayPal someone 10 cents. The processing cost isn't worth transferring such a small amount.
So the answer to this is to pay $5 and be able to see 50 replies. But what if you're unsure you want to even see that many replies? It's now a steep cost to consider.
I suspect they want to do a side-channel payment system.
So you pay X $100 or w/e and they increase your account by 96.50 or w/e it is after fees and X pocket that 96.50 into X's own bank account. Then when you have to pay 10 cents to somebody they move 10 cents in X's ledger while the 96.50 never moves between bank accounts.
Eventually whoever's article you read (Y) will want to withdrawal what the ledger has but ideally at that point it will be a higher value like $100 so they'd get $96.50 of that but individually each reader only paid 10 cents.
Recruiters and agents have been solving this problem for years. Firms hire a recruiter for jobs that they actively want to fill. Applicants hire a job agent. Those two meet. Very little incentive for spam in this relationship.
The problem, of course, is mismatched incentives for the middlemen versus the clients, particularly at the margins. Similar to real-estate brokers. They may be effective in many ways, but they are looking for pareto-efficiency, where they get you 80% of the match (or 80% of the pay) or whatever for 20% of their effort.
It's hard to imagine any incentive scheme between buyers (hiring managers) and sellers (applicants) that wouldn' be subject to the same market mechanics, even if at lesser scales when done through more automated means.
I don't think crypto really has anything to do this.
The power dynamics between employee and employer are such that the employer ought to foot the bill for that on their own. Candidates really shouldn't have to go to an agent to find a job.
The employer doesn't need to hire an external recruiter either. They just need an HR team that actually does anything other than protecting against liabilities and aggressively managing labor costs down. Most of HR is a practical joke of questionable taste.
I know how much I'm willing to accept after doing my own diligence, and I'd rather not shell out tens of thousands of dollars to an agent. There are also jurisdictions where the salary must be disclosed. Hiring an agent introduces the principal-agent problem, so they cost more than just their fees.
Yes, you can absolutely add a middle man to sort through the spam for you, and that "solves" the problem in the sense that you are trading money for time. It's no different than paying for a personal assistant to collect your mail for you and pass along the valuable stuff. That said, it's incredibly inefficient and most people, for most interactions, cannot hire a third party to handle those interactions for them.
So no, I don't think adding layers of middle men really solves the problem for most people.
The proposal was two middlemen. It's just an inefficient way to, as you (or somebody up the chain) said, charge for attention to reduce spam. Since the middlemen are being paid, most spammers won't hire them.
> incredibly inefficient
In practice, yes. In theory, it could be fantastic. Imagine, as a simple example, you have two early-career backend developers. They could each do the same search, or a middleman could do one search and share the highlights with each developer. The fact that you have overlapping demands and information opens up the potential for the work to be amortized, even if you're not adding any value as a middleman other than trading time for money.
I've heard that one of tricks recruiting agents use is to maximize mismatch without breaking the illusion of a perfect match, so that victim companies has to come back as often as possible, each time rewarding them with commissions. Value alignment is definitely going to be a problem.
Unfortunately there are good and bad agents out there, and the bad ones absolutely do have an incentive to spam. I remember one place I worked at maintained a blacklist of bad recruitment firms.
Also, free applications systems are so common that I'd simply see any system that I, the applicant, needs to pay for as a scam. Much more different than a paid forum or news site. I pay $10 for those and I get exactly what on the site, even if the news updates slowly or the forum is empty.
If I had to pay $100 for 10 applications and still get ghosted or auto rejected, I don't know what I'd do. That's just theft at that point.And the incentives for recruitment are just perverse at that point. Don't hire, just make a good job app.
It would be worth it to build a highly refined and moderated "free tier", with a paid option that is even better. From what I noticed during my last job hunt, all the big platforms could vet their submissions better.
If we assume that a posting costs $1 in either direction, the $100 cost to a company of any significant size of posting a single job to 100 sites is pretty negligible.
On the other hand, to someone who has no job, paying $100 to apply to 100 jobs might be pretty harsh—and there isn't the remotest guarantee that this would actually result in getting contacted, let alone getting a job.
Going one step further, paying that kind of money to apply also means you'd be expected to have a credit card or something similar. At the very least a bank account. And someone who's got excellent qualifications, but had a medical disaster cost them their previous job and home, and has been spending time on the streets, is going to have a very hard time maintaining a bank account or obtaining a credit card without an income.
Basically, any time you make a proposal to "solve" the problems with hiring/job searching, you need to ask yourself, "Is this going to nontrivially exacerbate existing class divides?" If the answer is "yes", that's a) probably why it hasn't been done already, and b) why anyone with any compassion (or understanding of the long-term consequences of inequality in society) should reject such a solution.
The problem is, as I noted, spending $100 to post a completely bogus job 100 times is basically nothing to even a medium-sized company.
The asymmetry in power & wealth means that if you want the $1 spent by a job-seeker to even come close to the guarantees you describe, you'll probably need to make the company pay $100 per posting or more. And that would effectively require some pretty widespread and strictly-enforced regulation/legislation.
If you're going to have to get that just for this middleman solution, why not go all the way and have the regulation mandate that any job that a company posts has to be real, with full intent to hire, and every single applicant must get a timely, non-canned response?
The issue is thst we both know those won't happen. Even if it's just scam shops that abuse it and everyone else plays the honor code. Rotten apples and all that.
> someone who... has been spending time on the streets, is going to have a very hard time maintaining a bank account or obtaining a credit card without an income.
Slightly tangential to your main point, but in this day and age electronic transfers are money; cash is in effect just a fallback option for situations where there's no connection to the Internet. I believe that, in the absence of central bank digital currency, banks should be required to have a process for issuing current accounts to homeless people (albeit not necessarily with credit, just like customers who do have fixed homes). That measure alone would immediately fix a range of issues that homeless people face, wouldn't it?
It absolutely would, as would Postal Banking, which there's already a movement afoot to bring back(? I think it was around before? I'm not super up on it).
I thought Indeed charge companies for posting and per applicant clicks? That combined with near 100% university graduate capture is what Japanese job market is like, where their current owner's corporate HQ resides.
In that environment, the agency maximizes clicks and matches because that earns them most. Applicants are lured to maximize numbers of applications and qualifications(and failed matches), hiring companies go FOMO mode, hype up themselves and tighten up requirements. Everyone's paperclipping everything and producing clinically depressed graduates in big batches. It's a huge resource sink. Then of course fake posting problem isn't even remotely gets solved because the power structure builds up in the background in uncaptured dimensions, parallel to the system. You wouldn't want that.
I've been on a career break / job search for about a year. I used to work in "AI" before it became fashionable, here are some observations of the tech job market:
1) There are so much BS jobs in BS companies it's hard to understand if those are even companies doing real thing (cf. David Graeber)
2) 80% of jobs in my field are about LLMs and technology no one understand or in companies that don't even know if they need it but are just following the trend
3) I've seen big and small companies posting over and over the same job ad. For example a big consulting group has been posting the exact same job for more than a year (really) on linkedin and elsewhere - each time there are more than 100+ applicants on linkedin.
4) Recruiters from 'serious' agencies told me it was the worst job market they know of
5) There is also a rise of fake recruitement agencies, it's very easy and quick to set up a page on Linkedin now with fake workers, fake images, fake jobs, etc.
6) The supply demand imbalance allows some small companies (startups) to ask for insane technical assignement that takes hours, which at the end looked like free consultancy. I had one that did not even provide feedback after a rejection, and when asked said "because we don't"
7) The increase of centralised platform such as Linkedin has increased competition. Everyone is applying to the same jobs, and many candidates uses AI to beat the HR platform. [This has been reported by FT - https://www.ft.com/content/1429fcb2-e0ef-4e47-b2b8-8bd225ac2... ]. Same problem as in the online dating market.
8) There is so much ghosting, that can happen at any stage of the process. Again, same problem as in the online dating market.
What is the point of a fake recruiting agency? I've heard claim of this but I wonder what the endgame is. Is it to harvest contacts? Scam people? Waste people's time?
My bet is the collection and reselling of personal information, legally or illegally. Many (most?) people do put their real name, real address, real phone number and real email on their resume. You automate this on linkedin and can get a lot of CVs, I don't think this is a crazy idea.
The same vendors that sell Linkedin data in bulk include this level of personal information (phones, personal/work emails, addresses). Perhaps this is how they mine the data they sell, but I think it's more likely they take use the information scraped from Linkedin and send it to other vendors to enrich it with personal information.
One of the endgames is scamming. One that's been around for a few years, seemingly getting bigger as time goes on, goes something like:
1. Slurp up contact information, focusing on people trying to break into a cushier lifestyle (data entry, entry level analysts, LLM evaluation in some specialized domain, ...).
2. Cold-contact them about being eligible for one of many possible remote jobs, with high hourly rates listed (something specify, like a "salary" of $38.51/hr). They'll either have a legitimate-at-first-glance looking website (usually the ownership has been transferred a few days prior, sometimes a few months, but one of the operators seemed to have a pool of domains they'd been letting age for years to throw you off a bit more), or they'll spoof the spelling of a real company when they text/email you.
3. Go through some form of hiring process. It's as little effort as they can put in on their end to keep the semblance of them being a real company.
4. Then this turns into normal check fraud. Your cushy remote job requires expensive office supplies, so they "provide" those. A local member of the gang delivers fake equipment in real boxes. You pay $5k or something out of the $7k fake check they previously sent, the rest supposedly being a signing bonus.
AFAICT, many tens of thousands of people have gotten as far as step 4, and a decent fraction have fallen for the whole charade. If you're struggling to get a real job out of college and haven't seen what the normal interview process looks like, the confirmation bias (and desperation) combined with lack of real-world experience can cloud your judgement.
There are tons of other endgames. Not all are quite that nefarious, but none are good.
> 3) I've seen big and small companies posting over and over the same job ad. For example a big consulting group has been posting the exact same job for more than a year (really) on linkedin and elsewhere - each time there are more than 100+ applicants on linkedin.
At the same time I’ve seen on the other end just endless unqualified applicants. Dozens and dozens of people who don’t pass a phone screening. Some jobs are tough to find the right applicant, or you’re looking in an area of high competition for a specific talent.
The issue with that response is that a random posting on LinkedIn isn't how you fill those positions though. Cookie cutter jobs sites are for cookie cutter jobs.
The question then becomes "how are applicants getting to the phone screening to begin with?"
Because from what I can tell, it seems like a complete toss up whether a qualified/unqualified applicant will even get that far, let alone how much further in the progress they'll get. I get the distinct feeling that most filtering systems are just dropping a lot of great candidates at the first hurdle, and then letting a bunch of unqualified ones through to the later rounds.
Have you ever had a stack for 100 resumes and had to figure out who to interview for the one position? You need to get rid of at least 80% quickly before it is worth your while to read them in more detail - that still leaves 20 to read, but that is way too much, now you are just looking for people who can probably do the job or meets any diversity requirements HR might have (and would be better, but you will interview anyone who lets you prove to HR you tried before hiring whoever comes out on top).
Years ago, when I was heavily involved in hiring, I asked our CTO whether we can provide feedback to rejected candidates, because it could benefit them. The CTO answered that it may become a legal quagmire if a candidate decides to sue due to perceived discrimination, or something, based on the feedback, even without any merit. The probability is very low but the downside is very bad. So we had to abstain from giving feedback :(
How can you be discriminated on a technical level?
Is there even a case of a candidate who sued a company at a technical stage we are aware of? This seems like a weak argument considering the hassle of time and potential legal fees, especially for someone who is looking for a job? Although I could understand why a candidate would try to bring a case like this in the US.
Anyhow, it's not even the feedback the problem, it is that I have enough work experience to understand some of those startups seem to operate on a thin line between what is a technical assignment related directly to their core tech and getting free consultancy. The least they could provide to candidates who have involved time is what was expected.
Just because it never happened doesn't mean it cannot.
Sure it is a weak argument, but when you get to cite that possibility and thus save 10 minutes of time creating more detailed feedback (which may or may not be used).
Yeah it's a variant on "anything you say can be used against you."
Any feedback you give can potentially be twisted to support some argument of unfair treatment. Even if it's frivolous, employers don't want to spend time dealing with that. So they just say nothing.
>1) There are so much BS jobs in BS companies it's hard to understand if those are even companies doing real thing (cf. David Graeber)
This time last year I was searching for a new job, something I've done a few times at this point in my career, and this was such a pronounced thing that I had not experienced in any of my previous searches. It felt so strange, like walking through some funhouse where I had to be skeptical of every turn and decision lest I walk face first into a mirror.
I eventually found a great job with a great team at a smaller company that I had some initial reservations about and even held back on applying from at first. Maybe it's just an additional symptom of (4), but if this is the future of finding employment it is a bleak one.
Not sure how old you are but this is all exactly how it was in 2002-2003 for the .com crash, only the # of people who had been laid off was massively larger.
We have HN threads about company "X laid off Y%". Back then it was "Company X has folded and laid off 100%", over and over and over again.
some notes from my ~4 month looking so far (also after a >half-year sabbatical):
* one company (behind 2 levels of middlemen) had "invented" some utopian form of LLMized auto-translate framework X into framework Y AND by-the-way, chop the monolith into microservices - so they needed "software curators", not programmers? But expert ones!
* some middleman company, before anything else, sent me to "AI"-led interview, which asks questions and records my answers. 1-2 minutes per question. Question 1: how would you write a streaming service in python?
* 50% of all job posting are either betting, crypto, or both. Unless something even more bogus
* 75% try to fit "AI", "ML", or "LLM" in the requirements somehow - for the sake of it being there?
* 20% of job postings repeat forever. Biting on them does not do much
* 70% of (my well intended) job applications go unanswered.. cannot know if they are real or not, or is it ageism? or blind keyword-matching? Who-knows..
* only 5% lead to initial interview ;
* one of the hopefuls, went further into tech/coding check, which passed but "we decided to change requirements of the job"
I forgot to make a meme about it but I still get these "We're sorry we went with someone else" months later from jobs I applied to but it's alright I have a job now.
The joke of the meme is I feel ashamed/disappointed but I forget I'm fine.
I have seen that happening inside a company (big one). There is an internal job market, and I would say the ratio is about 20% or more fake. From every 20 applications to postings that seem like a copy of my resume, I get 5 replies (the rest is black hole, or come a reply 10 months later) from the replies, eventually 2 interviews.
One option is HR compliance with some kind or procedure.
One other thing I've seen (many times) is to pacify an over-worked team: the team is working crazy over hours, demotivated, asking for help. The manager knows is impossible to hire (head count / budget limits) and so they open a Job Offer, where they can show "we are searching for help, but nobody comes". How do I know? once I was in such over exploited team, so each of the team made a fake resume that was, of course, like a glove for the position. Nobody got a call back. When we confronted the manager, he had to confess. [in case somebody asks himself, 6 months later the whole team was gone]. Then same company, I applied for a job, where my resume was really perfect for the position. As I received the canned response, I called the manager, pressed a little bit, and also said "we had to do as we are searching, but we are really not".
Yet another one I know of, because of reasons: HR consulting companies and also some HR departments want to test if they are paying too much/too little, want to have some "market measurement". They fake jobs, fake interviews, and they would inconspicuously ask "how much are you earning now" and/or "how much do you want to earn" and that is all they want from you really.
Yeah I've heard that angle too. Really nasty. Glad the team wassable to stand up for themselves and walk away from the abuse. Sure wish that could be the outcome more often; it'd fix a lot of things overnight.
At some big companies at least, I think it is a policy to have to post the job publicly even if the person who was waiting in line inside the department for a few years already has it.
I have had two jobs in the past posting inside the department that 2 or 3 people had to waste their time interviewing for with zero chance just as a matter of policy. The manager had to interview x number of people in the name of fairness or something like that.
> At some big companies at least, I think it is a policy to have to post the job publicly even if the person who was waiting in line inside the department for a few years already has it.
This is for PERM, not H1B. Many companies did and still do this. Imo, the concept of PERM is flawed, which causes companies to do this stuff. Some have had to settle with the gov't and can no longer do this (Meta).
Also, the jobs are not fake, they are labor market test jobs, designed to show that no citizen meets the job requirements thus validating a green card for the H1B visa holder. They are "fake" in that they are designed so no one applies for or gets the job. Imo, labor market test should be part of the visa granting process, not the naturalization.
I have been required to create such fake job postings.
From the line manager perspective, how it looks is you have a colleague who has been working with you for several years who is on a H1B visa. They want to get a green card and become a permanent resident. To support this, we are required to post a fake job ad for their position, and invent a reason to reject any US citizens who apply for the position. (Non-US applications are ignored.)
Our legal advice was that the job posting had to be contain only legitimate requirements for the role, so it could not be highly tailored to only match the resume of the employee seeking PERM status. The result was phone screen interviews were required to reject 8-10 on-paper-potentially-qualified US applicants for the fake position.
This is for a highly specialized area within finance, where in real hiring there is an immense effort to find the strongest candidates regardless of nationality.
In hindsight I am confident that earlier in my career I had applied to at least one such fake role. One not-well-known advantage of working with a recruiter as a job seeker in such a field is the recruiter will have back-channel information to know to ignore such fake job postings.
Yep, this is how it is done. I think it really needs to be revisited because everyone is faking the labor test because you have an employee who is great, who's been here for years and years, probably even had kids here, and if in the 10-15 years since the employee was hired, one US citizen could do the same job now, he gets sent back? It should be a requirement for the visa, not the residency. Residency should be done like Canada where you earn points to get it to foster assimilation.
In trading, spoofing[1] is placing insincere orders to generate a signal, and presumably influence other participants' behavior, without an intention of actually having those orders filled. Bad actors spoof trades because it works. Spoofing is illegal, and rightly so, although enforcement may be a bit lax.
I guess, we're now seeing the rise of spoofing in job postings. I, for one, find it quite tiring. I think there's a parallel. Bad actors spoof job postings because it works. What can we do to make it less effective or less worthwhile?
> The job market has become more soul-crushing than ever.
I have often stated that the fact that I was basically evicted from the job market was one of the best things that ever happened to me (I didn't think so, at the time it was happening), and every time I read something like this, it reinforces that.
But I was one of the fairly rare (it seems) people that could afford to have that happen. My heart goes out to the folks that have to endure this stuff.
One of the saddest things, is that really good workers, that would take their job seriously, and be excellent employees, are being knocked out of the game, and the unproductive, disloyal, rapacious sharks that have learned to game the system, are taking all the fish food.
> really good workers, that would take their job seriously, and be excellent employees, are being knocked out of the game, and the unproductive, disloyal, rapacious sharks that have learned to game the system, are taking all the fish food.
This needs to be made illegal or at the very least cost prohibitive.
It's literally why the CEO lost his life. One side is destroying the livlihood of the other and even basic levels of "please stop" are hand waved away by the needs of the shareholders and YOY hockey stick growth. For some reason "it's business" is a valid and ethically clean reason to build an economic model on top of suffering.
Honesty and dignity need to become fashionable and valuable again. Until we can wean people off the cult of personality around narcissists and psychopaths we're just carrying water for the people who do the worst abuse and will never change unless confronted at figurative or literal gunpoint.
>"This needs to be made illegal or at the very least cost prohibitive."
How? Any mechanism to make it illegal will be vigorously fought by the same forces who currently benefit from it. Those forces have unlimited funds to "lobby" lawmakers.
>"hand waved away by the needs of the shareholders and YOY hockey stick growth."
Not needed, but desired. Corporations acting as responsible stewards of capital aren't mandated to grow at a given percentage, just that the capital doesn't decrease. We need to remind corporate America that perpetual double digit growth is impossible, and they can and should be happy with any growth at all.
I applied to some New York City series B start up with a Director literally looking over my shoulder after she assured me the job postings weren’t fake.
Plot twist: they were fake they just weren’t in her department so she didn’t know and the only job they were really hiring for according to LinkedIn was an Azure contractor for $60 an hour
I've found almost all my career positions through recruiters. I find it's about 100x more productive of an experience. You know the job exists because they're paying someone to fill it. You get to talk to someone on the phone about the job before you have to lift a finger. If you sound good on the phone, they just put you right through to the hiring manager/interview process, and also are materially invested in your success. Getting the formatting right on your resume is an afterthought. They'll give you an entire gameplan and tips on this company's specific process.
People hate on LinkedIn but having a presentable profile and using the right keywords is worth it's weight in gold IMO. Even if it doesn't work out, they'll keep you in their rolodex and hit you up for jobs long into the future.
Main issue is that recruiters can get every bit as bougy as applicants can get when the market sways in their favor. So in a market like this, you may have less than a 10% response rare from messaging recruiters. Whereas 2021-2022 you'd almost always at least get a reply when you messaged a human.
Yeah, tried that early on. Messaged 4 recruiters I thought I had food relations with. 2 didn't have any jobs. 2 were no longer working as a recruiter. Oh and one ghosted me for... Almost 2 years.
Same here, but have you looked for a position in the past 2 years? It's dramatically worse than I've experienced in my 20 years as a dev.
I only ever apply to jobs that I know I'm qualified for and know that I can demonstrate it, so my application -> offer ratio was historically pretty high. In my last job search, I sent out 99% of the applications I've ever sent out in my career.
About two years ago, I was looking for a job, and a recruiter reached out about a software engineering position at a prominent newspaper [1].
I told the recruiter to apply me, they did, and they made me sit through a two hour video course on ethics and sexual harassment, which was weird considering that I hadn't even done an interview yet.
About a week later, the recruiter gets back to me, and they declined me because my resume "reads too much like a manager, no hands-on coding experience".
I was extremely confused, because most of the time people say the opposite, that my resume is too in the weeds, and I need to focus on high-level stuff. Moreover, I don't have any managerial experience on my resume...every role says something like "software engineer".
And then it hit me: the hiring manager never read my resume. He already knew who he wanted to hire for the role, and for either legal or compliance or bureaucratic reasons, he had to make it look like he was looking for other candidates, and in the process, he wasted my time and the recruiter's.
[1] Not going to say which one but you've definitely heard of it.
Are there laws against companies committing fraud and false advertising? Job sites are directly evolved from classified ads in which ads stands for Advertisement.
Probably, but good luck getting enough evidence to prove anything. So long as they would hire someone with some unlikely to exist background they can advertise even if they don't hire.
This is extremely common. In fact, it is the rule at universities and government agencies and government contractors, who are required to post every job even when they have a preferred candidate, and many big tech companies do the same thing. It wouldn't matter if you named the company – literally every large organization has done this dozens or hundreds of times.
If they had just blanket-declined me then I don't think I would have cared all that much, it's far from the first (or thousandth) job I've been declined for; what annoyed me is that they made me go through a stupid video seminar thing before they had even read my resume.
They're going to waste two hours of my time and not even give me the courtesy of reading my resume? Pretty douchey, IMO.
Oh, I hear you. In some cases, they may be required to document how many candidates went through the entire process, to "prove" that it was genuinely competitive.
My policy is: no tests, no seminars, no long interviews. Max 2hs before there is a clear sign of real interest.
I’ve seen enough people doing 2hs tests+ 3 2hs interviews + 2hs disertation showing what you can… at the end seems the probability of being hired is inversely proportional to the effort required.
One adtech company I applied to ~10 years ago (Chango - doesn't exist anymore) also put me through the strangest interview I ever had. It was for an SRE role.
There was a fairly standard phone screening interview, but then when I went in-person the CTO, VP of engineering, and somebody else I can't recall made the whole interview about torrents and USENET feeds for TV shows. Not a single serious discussion was had about the business or technology, despite my attempts to bring it up. I left scratching my head and a follow-up email that said "they were going to go in a different direction".
I can only guess that the role was going to somebody else they really wanted, but they needed a "competitive" alternative. I was annoyed that they wasted my time, though.
I've had something similar happen but I was actually hired. One of the rounds was with a super senior CTO-like type, and they questioned me about low level details of building Linux CLI tools, which is something I've never done or really didn't know anything about.
I think the idea was to pick an area the interviewer was super familiar with, and see how you can handle stress, can you say "I don't know", can you make some guesses even in the space you are not familiar with and so on. Is it the most effective way of doing interviews? Probably not. But it's not a terrible screen either for common pitfalls with senior engineers.
Definitely possible, but the recruiter said, and I believe him, that he followed up with the hiring manager and asked him to clarify it, because the recruiter was also confused by the "manager's resume" feedback. The hiring manager doubled down.
It's possible that the hiring manager was just embarrassed and didn't want to admit fault, but I still think they were using me and the recruiter for compliance reasons, especially since I reached out to that recruiter a year later and apparently that role was never filled, at least not from that recruiting agency.
A recruiter called me for a job interview, said I was perfect for the role.
"Sure!", I responded, "Just send me the Job Description, I need it before I interview".
The recruiter was a bit slow on sending the JD through, but eventually did so and organised an interview.
During the interview I was confused as to what the hiring manager was telling me, "I'm confused, the Job Description describes a different role with different technology?", I said while holding the printout in my hand.
"Can I have a look at that?", asked the hiring manager.
"Sure...", I start sliding it across the table when the HR person slams down their hand and snatches it.
"OKAY! MEETING IS OVER!" shrills the HR lady, and we all leave the room in a confused manner.
Afterward, I called the HR lady to follow up on the role, she hangs up, calls the recruiter and angrily tells him to never let interviewees contact the company directly ever again!
...
What happened?!?
I checked the meta-data in the Job Description word document and it was over 3 years old.
I asked another recruiter what they thinked occurred...they replied that the HR lady likely never wrote a Job Description for the role but just called the recruiter asking him to send a body over.
The recruiter, keen to send me through for the interview and collect their payment, found another job description from the company from an old email from the same company and figured it would do.
Probably dodged a bullet there anyway, if they weren't even willing to create a basic job description for the role. It's not like it's that hard to write one; you could pretty easily just find a template online and replace relevant keywords.
The HR lady in question had since left the company.
I kid you not, I later found her in a newspaper article where she was asking advice on her new startup business venture proposal - a clothes shop where people try clothes on and then order online. They included a picture of her in and her business partner in the write-up, but the response the editor provided her was she needed to better understand the risks (understatement of the year).
Why do companies allow these people in such positions, I have no idea.
There is a big gulf between "fake" and "never filled" that I don't like being washed here.
Specifically, there are plenty of reasons you might have a position not get filled that are not nefarious. Could be an aspirational. Could be a company that is so under water that they can't manage a hiring pipeline. Could be one that isn't under water, but doesn't know how to manage a hiring pipeline. Could have been overcome by other events. Plenty of options.
Yes, I'm sure there is some fraud. I'd love to see data that went into that detail. I'm assuming it is rather lower than 1 in 5.
If companies were as honest about "low priority" evergreen work over the constant need help immediately, that may be acceptable. But I've never see anyone say that in a job posting. If you're indistinguishable from the behavior of a fraudster, that still reflects poorly and has the same results on applicants.
(well, okay. Actually honest. How many of those "urgent" postings eve felt urgent?)
In general, some people want ghost-workers for working visa scams.
i.e. some desperate individuals pay to not even work in a country to get around immigration rules.
This scam was outed by some undercover East Indian journalists. Its gross because cons exploit people, and suppress domestic economic reality by bidding down wage rates. Nothing was done about this by the way... nothing... =3
421 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadCompanies behaving like this demand regulation. Instead of whining about regulation, read the room and don't bring it on yourselves.
We also need to draw a distinction between employers posting jobs directly vs 3rd party agencies posting jobs for the company's they represent, or purport to represent. There is a disincentive for the former to post 'fake jobs' - who wants to deal with the applicant flow, but an incentive for the latter to do so - harvest resume's, build a database.
Anyways. My point is, there _is_ a problem but mainstream magazine treatment like this from Gizmodo serves to add smoke when there's already a fire
Companies that keep waiting for Mr. Right are really saying that the opportunity cost of not completing their project is very low. In other words it’s not really that important at all.
Oh, not with overtime—you're salaried, remember? (Alternate version: Oh, no, you can't actually log the extra hours; we don't have the budget for overtime, and I, the manager, can't be seen asking for more money, or it would affect my bonus!)
And you'd better step up and work those hours. You want to be seen as a team player, right?
And that's the opportunity cost we don't talk about. The cost isn't "we slow down on a project from a bad hire". It's "demoralize/burned out engineers quit to a point where the deadline is impossible to reach". You can't force overtime to engineers that leave and take their institutional knowledge with them
There's also a lot of fake job postings as a sort of carrot to overworked engineers that "promise more help is coming". Which is just as ingenuous to existing employees as it is to applicants.
If you post a job then reneg on it that still leaves folks out in the cold who are, in earnest, looking for work. Mistakes happen, and I don't blame hiring managers for the shifting financial landscapes they often have to face. But that job wasn't solid enough to count as a real position.
Lump them together.
Good luck telling them apart however.
If you make it so every posting has to be filled or it’s ‘fraud’, it will be an even bigger mess.
It's a lot like this website. It used to be pretty obvious which comments were trolls and which are real people but more and more the people have gotten dumber and the trolls gotten smarter so it's almost impossible to tell the difference between maliciousness and stupidity and for the rest of us it doesn't really matter one way or the other. A person wasting our time is a person wasting our time, the intentions aren't important.
From the perspective of an applicant's emotional response, sure, but it's absolutely relevant in order to have a conversation about how to solve it since the different causes may need different approaches, or may occur in sufficiently differing rates to influence which should be addressed first.
But if we’re claiming fraud, either way the intent is actually the deciding factor. You can’t commit fraud without a guilty mind (mens rea)- at least in any jurisdiction I’m aware of.
And yes, that's what audits are for. To deduce intent by investigating from within, something we could never do.
Just make businesses put thought into their postings and not let someone who has no idea of the qualifications right them up themselves.
I think there are a million practical challenges to implementing a fine. I wonder if there is enough incentives to draw employers to a verified list service.
Or I suppose to win a presidential debate, these days.
Of course it is subjective until you introduce a context.
With the current glut of laid off engineering talent in the hiring pool, if an employer cannot find a candidate, they are not really serious about hiring. Yes, there's more filtering involved now, but you can't say that the candidates don't exist.
So while it may be obviously bullshit (what, you can’t find anyone you actually like out of thousands?), it takes a non trivial amount of paperwork right now to prove it’s bullshit to the degree you could actually punish anyone for it. Especially with the recent administration change.
If you get one bad hire, it's probably on them
If you get 20 bad hires, it's probably on the company. At some point, no matter the size, people really need to look at themselves and say if they are really trying to enhance their shop and let talent succeed, or if they are a churn shop and don't deserve solid candidates to begin with.
I'm just a bit tired of the "but we need to avoid bad hires" narrative. Especially since a certain blundermouth more or less said the quiet part out loud for the intentions many have with that. It made sense in 2022, but is that really an issue in 2025? If you can't "find solid candidates" now, how did you Faire in non-bust markets?
They may need other help to find a candidate, e.g. recruiters. But that's a different topic than the OP, which is about "online job postings"
> But that's a different topic than the OP, which is about "online job postings"
This whole topic is about online job postings. Smaller groups that don't just grab their friends need to find talent too.
If you need specific skills in a specific geographic area, you probably still get a lot of responses, but the vast majority (if not all) aren't going to be suitable. Really, these jobs don't have much luck being filled on job boards, because it isn't the best medium to hire those people, but many companies will put them out there anyway to broaden their reach.
> hiring organically just doesn't result in solid candidates.
the tech hiring has been a bit annoying for a decade now, but this simply sounds like a narrative for someone simply wanting an H1B rather than one who is simply bad at finding talent.
Or possibly you highly overestimate your job needs vs. The requirements posted. Which is endemic of the above reasons anyway.
I recently commented on another thread about how I managed 2 interviews and 1 offer out of ~500 applications. Which is kind of telling, since it only took 2 actual interviews to get another job (alas for less money that I make right now anyway)... If the jobs were real, it should be far easier to get them.
That doesn’t entirely make sense to me, but something is clearly quite broken, and it seems to be as much due to incompetence as fraud
20+ years ago I applied, and interviewed for a Federal Gov of Canada job. 18 months later they called me to tell me I got the job.
I'd been at another job for 16 months!
Glad I didn't take it. Government and traditional big corp are very stodgy, slow to change.
Yea, the process is eating itself. Recruiters automate screening and applications automate submitting, so there is so much noise, it's difficult.
I'm not saying there aren't ghost jobs, I'm just saying an already arduous process is even more so with automation being leveraged on both sides.
500:x:1 doesn't seem outrageous at all in a down market. The 2:1 interview:offer ratio is actually outstanding, especially where the industry is today.
For reference, these 8 years and 3 jobs later, I'm probably around 300-20-0. Or 1 if you the count the part time freelancing that just showed up out of the blue. But I didn't even apply for that.
Needless to say, I've only focused on roles that fit that narrow profile. One of the recruiters that contacted me didn't even know I worked in games, despite it making up the bulk of my work experience (including as a lead developer).
Considering how closely I match this narrow profile, and the number of people that likely do, it's weird how low my callback ratio has been.
I get that all the time with my setup. "you look like a good fit and have lots of experience for XYZ tech". Nowhere on my resume does it even mention it. Sometimes I have to look it up and see what they are talking about. One of them even went on and on about my current job. Despite it only having the start date in that spot and no exp on what I do here.
It is blindingly obvious they did not read my resume. They are keyword scumming and hoping for the best.
Great developers with domain knowledge are always possible to fit in, simply because they are money generators rather than a cost.
So if you happen to find that unicorn who is not only a great developer but is also expert in the major areas of your tech stack and your business domain, you hire them in a heartbeat.
But then again, I bet most of those also aren't trying to rely on AI to find talent.
Even within tech, I think the ramp-up time is faster for literally everyone else besides software engineers, just because the underlying technology can vary so much more (and its more important to be understood at an intimate level of detail) than for other roles.
I hear you on geography though. Luckily the human body doesn't change too much between locations.
>because the underlying technology can vary so much more (and its more important to be understood at an intimate level of detail) than for other roles.
If most jobs needed intimate knowledge of the language and constructs and weren't just CRUD apps built upon 3 frameworks, I'd almost agree with you. There are definitely roles that need that expertise, but I'd bet a yoke with a solid SWE fundamentals and comletetence in one language can ramp up for another stack relatively quickly. Nat least, no clowwr than any other engineering profession. Companies simply either oversell the work they need done or oversell how urgent the work is (compared to working the existing staff overtime).
I did post my availability few times on HN "who wants to be hired" but with poor results and lots of wasted time (as again, the person on the other end does not know me or has worked with me everything gets bureaucratic again).
Also, all of the people I had hired for my clients came again from my network, there was never a public posting.
There's also other benefits, in general, you don't get to do silly technical interviews, as you're bringing former coworkers you can vouch for.
Not saying this can scale anywhere, but in smaller companies with good teams and professionals they always know someone from their previous jobs or their online communities (common in open source related githubs/discords/slacks) and I like it.
I was fortunately able to leave a terrible job 2 years ago and immediately had contract work, now I run my own business and get constant referrals from my network. I make more than ever, have incredible work-life balance, and for the most part love what I do.
If you don't have a network, the moment you quit/lose a job you are dead to the world. Even now I have people approaching me for FTE roles, I haven't even worked with them for 2 years. Am I some god tier programmer? Not really, but I have a good track record and people always want to go to someone they already trusted.
As someone without a network and left their FAANG-adjacent (or whatever the current acronym is) job in 2022, this is mostly true.
Amazon still hits up my inbox every month or so, though.
The other is a consultancy where I help resolve tech debt and put out fires at SMB's, which I get most of my work from referrals.
Connecting with other professionals in various ways is all there is to building a network and anyone can do it. They just have to do it.
I always built my network mostly at local meetups and online communities.
It helps if, like in my case, are into functional programming, as people into that niche prefer working with other functional programmers.
I did ~11 applications (on company websites, tailored resume), of which like 9 were moonshots (NVDA, Valve, etc). I heard back from everyone, and then interviewed and accepted an offer with a smaller international company located locally. This was during the 2023/4 downturn (Dec '23 to be exact).
Caveat: I have 15YoE and work in embedded (especially embedded Linux); it seems this specialization has suffered less than others. I also don't have a degree. I had to accept a slight paycut and hybrid - but I was in office before... and hardware generally just requires you to be present sometimes.
Don't be afraid if you don't have a network, the advice is good, but it doesn't apply to everyone.
Hang in there and take what you can get. The market is super shitty and you are absolutely not alone. It ain’t you. The market will pick back up again… it always does.
It will, but this time it's probably going to be several years. It's the covid lock down train wreck. Most people underestimate the cascading damage done by the lock downs.
“It’s what everybody wanted” is something I often say. “Everybody was cheering this on”.
Spot on. I read that somewhere that during WWII when people were sent to the gas chambers, crowds would be cheering on. Common people terrify me.
Citation needed. The execution of Jews by gas chamber during the holocaust was not a public event.
We should be encouraging people to look at alternative careers to tech. Life after tech.
We should also be making it clear to students that while there are exciting things happening in tech this is not going to translate into large scale demand for people.
Large parts of technology are mature, indeed moribund. This is not a message that the technology industry wants to hear.
Since referrals became the meta-game, companies have adapted their referral process to be more selective. Most companies I've worked for have required people to enter some basic information about how and where you worked with the referral, why you're referring them, and a statement that your referral means you are vouching for that person's work performance.
It cuts down on the number of people referring people they know by happenstance, which defeats the purpose of a referral program. I doubt your friends meant it as a personal attack. They probably just had referral programs that were more rigorous than putting names into a queue.
Network is important as long as people see you as a reliable professional that can help them.
There's lots of skills involved, last but not least soft ones.
I'm just exhausted with the search. I finished yet another programming take home only for the company to stop hiring at the turn of the quarter.
But yea, my network also failed me. Mostly becsuse 80%+ of them were laid off themselves.
But sure, I think almost all of them got severance.
Had 3 interviews through contacts that bounced back. Failed two interviews, one technical, one cultural. Third one never really got off the ground; talked to a recruiter and then nothing ever really got arranged. Not even a call.
One got a job at a place I previously worked at and had no interest in returning to. He's on a different team though so I can't say his experience will mirror mine.
One was asking around about any open roles days before he got laid off himself.
Asked a few others and no positions are really open as of now.
Funnily enough me and another colleague applied to the same job and he got it. Right before they invoked a hiring freeze.
And those are just referrals. The nightmares from jobs I just found myself get even better. I'm just tired. This market suuuuuuucks.
I work in games so I was pre-programmed far in advance to expect shakey times. Just not times where I'm ghosted for over a year with no sign of anything opening up (quite the contrary, still plenty of gaming layoffs!).
Learn C and C++. Find a cheap micro pc board, pick one of the embedded linux distros that run on it, and make something with it.
Repeat until you get bored, exhausted, or a job. :)
Another big part of embedded Linux is managing the OS itself and updates. Things like Yocto handle building an OS image
If you're applying for a B2B SaaS product manager job there are 50,000 jobs and 200,000 applicants and it's a completely different situation.
B2B SaaS is broad. If you're a generalized you're fucked.
But if you're specialized in a specific B then you should (probably) be doing fine.
That said, most of the new-gen PMs are generalists who drank the "domain experience doesn't matter" koolaid.
That's been my consistent experience as well. Conventional wisdom is that you only get good jobs through referrals, but about half of the companies I've worked for have been through referrals and half "cold" through monster or linkedin, etc. and BY FAR the worst working experiences of my life have been the internal referral ones. The last time I was looking for work was 2017, though - I get the impression that things have gotten really, really bad in the past year or so.
Remember with networking there is often only one person in your network of hundreds who can do anything so you need to find that person. Often it will be the guy you just barely talked to who won't think of you at all unless you remind them, but they then know enough to know you are good enough for some position and then they are not interviewing they are convincing you to take the job.
Those cases where the network ensures you are the only candidate are one of the reasons why they work well. My current company doesn't work that way, it doesn't matter how good you are, all I can do is put your resume in the HR stack (unless it is for my department in which case my boss might ask me about a couple resumes). I'd be considered a conflict of interest so I couldn't interview you.
Hit up an old college buddy on linked in, got a referral, went through a ton of interviews (6) and got a job in two weeks. It's nuts how far a referral will get you.
Applicant: "I love ${LANGUAGE} so much! It's amazing! I'm super passionate about it!"
Me: "Oh that's great! What are some things you like about ${LANGUAGE}, and one or two things you wish the language designers had done differently?"
Silence.
(Replace language with database, framework, etc. as needed).
"How do you do [x] in SQL?" > "I've always had the ORM handle that"
"How do you do [x] in CSS" > "I use this CSS framework and it will do it for me"
"How does a packet get between the front end and back end of your solution" > "I update the object state using [x] in the [y] framework"
I've done full-stack with no frameworks or non-std libraries (aside from PDO and OpenSSL, the limitations set by CEO decree) for about 8 years now.
I write my own schemas in IBM Db2. Hell, I wrote small application databases in IBM DDS in the AS400's SEU while I was still under the legal drinking age. I've always written our stylesheets from scratch, using SCSS. I've written C++ APIs that run in PASE, talk to the database with ODBC, then send back to a front end through sockets. I do graphic design and photography -- something I started back in middle school and took some formal classes on -- and have led the creation of marketing materials for multiple subsidiaries. I've spent 40 hour weeks working on sysadmin tasks in vim, 40 hour weeks writing libraries in JetBrains and VSCode, and 40 hour weeks working running around with my DSLR or working in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.
But when I look for full-stack jobs, most of them actually want somebody who is well versed in a framework. There's not much point in doing all of this from scratch. It's more tedious, more error prone, and it takes longer to get to market. Some interviewers have given the impression that I'm a little "less than" because I haven't used any major frameworks.
I think that's actually a valid take, and it's something I've started doing side projects to address. Frameworks improve velocity. Frameworks improve reliability. They reduce the risk of a developer coming up with an out-in-the-weeds solution to a problem they didn't properly understand. They make it easier to maintain the code. They make it easier to onboard new developers who are familiar with that tech.
They were of course a NextJS shop.
Ultimately disregard role titles. It's a people problem that you have to pull teeth to find out what they really want, and what they really want they often won't say out loud. That's fine, it's their money (and usually a lot of it!) and they should be able to dictate the services that they want.
Really sucks for people new to the industry trying to learn the song and dance.
I guess larger organizations have a role for these kinds of workers, but they’re not the kind of people I want on my team.
If you've used a tool long enough, you've identified warts and misfeatures. And you will have opinions about them.
1. Would anyone notice if the perfect candidate applied?
2. Does anyone even know what the perfect candidate's resume would look like / are those qualities on a resume / captured by a resume system?
3. Is the perfect candidate actually cold submitting resume to you?
It feels like almost certainly these are all "no".
2. The hiring manager does. The bot certainly does not. The odds of someone able to please the latter while meeting the former is low odds, for a candidate that's already low odds to begin with.
3. Not impossible. And that's all the justification they need as long as they aren't penalized for what basically a ghost job.
Recruiting (company's internal function, which is part of HR) is tasked with soliciting profiles to see what's available on the market. There's no real position but the recruiter(s) invent one according to what the business told them they would eventually need. There's no hiring manager behind it (as there's no position to be be filled). Recruiter either periodically meets with the business group that requested the research or prepares a report on the results (number of resumes that came in, salary requirements, etc) and presents to the business group that requested it.
So there's a reason these resumes are being solicited, it's just the reason is not to hire somebody. Sometimes it is done to justify business decision (ie to move to a different technology, or to expand to a new geographical area). Sometimes the business group _might_ be willing to open a new req if "the right candidate" comes up, but it's not guaranteed.
It also allows HR and recruiting to justify their presence (they are busy despite the fact that the company might not be hiring at all currently).
So there's reasons why these positions are posted and virtually none to prevent the company from doing that.
I'd be immediately suspicious. Why are they leaving Google to come here?
I do hate this stigma that clearly being laid of means you're a lesser programmer.
I've seen one that remained up after the company itself was closed down… which I knew about by having been in it when it closed; even before that, it was so out of date the salary offered was about 60% of what they'd paid me when I joined.
What amazed me was it said (maybe on LinkedIN?) how many poor souls actually took the time to apply to the position. It was in the hundreds. I can't help but feel bad knowing they never had a chance.
PT role turning into FT… it’s going to the PTer.
Temporary budget allocation became permanent and determinate spot becoming indeterminate? Same.
So, you have to reopen the posting or start all over.
And the second set of candidates is just as bad.
So you close it and rewrite the description (not that fucking HR was competent at that in the first place), and go back to step one, which you are highly likely to repeat.
a previous F500 company I worked for and was involved with hiring for was constantly posting jobs but only really took application seriously when they were referrals or through the company job site directly.
Please.
I went visiting some local businesses in-person the other summer looking for a part-time job. One HR lady seemed annoyed that I showed up, and told me "we don't have a front door", and unironically said "keep checking our web site". She seemed confused when I asked her to hand my resume back to me. One vestibule intercom told me to put my application in the slot. One major international corporation told me that they would give me a decision on the spot, then changed their tune during the interview.
Please.
Netorking has its own problems that are much harder to solve.
For the time being, leveraging a network is still the best way to get hired.
I think in my career so far in ~8 companies and many clients, I only got one of those jobs From a "cold" job posting application. Everything else was at least a soft referral by an acquaintance.
I wonder how many people applied for that job before it was taken down.
It seems to me that if somebody can actually solve the problem of increasing signal-to-noise ratio, they could do very well.
I suspect far higher. Largely because there is no serious disincentive.
The "study" may have assertained 1 in 5 but that doesn't mean there isn't much more.
I saw over 3,000 applications made over the last 2-3 years. Tailored resumes. Cover letters. This wasn't some LinkedIn "quick apply", these were direct "Fill out the form" on our website. Not a single one of these applications got read.
Enticing job seekers to waste their very precious time is not ethical.
Edit: fix double negative.
(I don't think you intended that)
Well those are 3000 resumes that won't be resubmitted when you actually want to hire. Many of those resumes will belong to people who since found work. Weeding through that would be a nightmare, so you'd have to toss it and write it off as a loss.
Or you could just post jobs when you're actually interested in hiring and turn it off when you have enough applications to process. Super interested candidates can always cold email.
And maybe next round they do apply again. I sure don't remember when I last was applying who I applied for except some big names that ... yeah I'd submit it again if I was looking.
I don't like the system, but I don't think they're hurt by it.
I've never read a cover letter that I found valuable for hiring anyone, though. And I'm sure mine were never of any actual value either.
cheers
IMO it's too disheartening to put effort into such personal writing without the awareness of some kind of direct value or benefit, since chances are it's going straight into the void.
Surely this would basically immediately backfire as people would presume a rejection and not apply when you actually wanted to hire. Why would you do this?
The last time I did ran the job search, I needed a spreadsheet to keep track of things. When a recruiter reaches out to me, I'm going to see if their company is in there, and what my notes say about my last experience with them.
If anything I'd only remember postings I actually interviewed and was rejected for. Which is sadly a small enough number to keep in my head.
Well that's exactly why I apply multiple times.
Had an example last year. I applied once, got rejected, coincidentally met someone at that same company and team later in the week. They sent me a referral, and then boom, recruiter call the next day. My resume was the same. It's just the referral pile got me visiable.
I'm pretty convinced even pre-AI that there are so many times when I'm simply not seen. Getting no response or an automated response just tells me these days "okay, I didn't make it to a human. Maybe next time" instead of "welp, I'm not good enough right now".
Also note that those kinds of companies are pretty big with hundreds of roles for software. The hiring culture between each team may as well make it a few dozen companies. I'm not trying to re-apply (on purpose) to a small group of a a few dozen after one rejection from the exact same role.
Additionally, it take a single lazily-managed spreadsheet to identify this dysfunction. Surely any positive effect from doing this would be muted (again, likely into the negative) because the company doesn't want to hire you.
In my experience, it's because they didn't actually see you (or they were never hiring anyone to begin with. Hence the article). If I don't get to a step where I speak to a human, I don't really count it as a rejection. Just a filtering.
Rejection implies that my skillset was not fit to the role, or that someone else was better than me and selected. Definitely not the vibes I get in this current market.
Are we supposed to simply assume that nobody ever reads any application we send in? I don't see how this works out anyway but negatively for the company. If I don't hear back from you, I'll just assume you don't want to hire me. There's no semantic difference in my mind between this and sending me a note that you've read and rejected my resume—especially in an industry where it's normal to simply ghost someone rather than issue a formal rejection.
I see we're talking in circles. I'll drop the conversation.
But if you're taking my "assumption" as an absolute, I don't know what to say. An assumption based on this precise slice of time. Not something that will always be true in all contexts. It's not even always true in this context.
>There's no semantic difference in my mind between this and sending me a note that you've read and rejected my resume
Bots don't send hand written notes. They can, but the costs are a much higher margin than an auto reject email.
You're pretty close to what my main point is, though. Bots aren't an automatic bad, but there feels to be zero effort on the recruiting end this day to try and get quality candidates. That lack of care means I shouldn't spend any energy regarding their (lack of) feedback if all I'm getting back is slop. So I'll just spin the AI roulette again.
Take care.
I rolled my eyes.
Although this might be sound advice, it's not the reality of a lot of people looking for work.
Yes, they might do this for the few months, but after what 6 months+ of no or canned responses (even though you have ALL the skills they want) it gets tiresome and you just say F-it, copy-paste a canned cover letter.
Remember I have lots of more interesting things to do than read your application. When we are hiring (like many we are not today) I take time to do the process, but I really want to be doing the more interesting work.
In demand people should get paid for their attention.
What I don't understand is why are there no systems that actually implement this? Most likely because the user education problem of cryptocurrency wallets and the various UI/UX issues it presents, but there's no mainstream apps that I can think of that actually try this.
Seems like it would work in dating apps, in advertising, in CRMs, in social networks of all types. Why hasn't it been done?
My guess is because we've only solved half of the problem with crypto. We have the cheap value exchange, but we don't have identity figured out quite yet.
For mainstream press though, is it worth the pennies of a microtransaction to read someone's re-hashing of public records and social media posts? That is very much dependent on both the reader's personal expertise and the author's, and if they are mismatched the article becomes worthless to the reader. An article explaining what HN is would be illuminating to many, but entirely unworthy even of pennies to you and I.
But Hacker News already has a cost to posting replies: you can only post a few (I think 5 replies every 4 hours) and although you can make more accounts, there's a limit to that too. So I know this was one of your top 5 in this 4-hour period.
So the answer to this is to pay $5 and be able to see 50 replies. But what if you're unsure you want to even see that many replies? It's now a steep cost to consider.
So you pay X $100 or w/e and they increase your account by 96.50 or w/e it is after fees and X pocket that 96.50 into X's own bank account. Then when you have to pay 10 cents to somebody they move 10 cents in X's ledger while the 96.50 never moves between bank accounts.
Eventually whoever's article you read (Y) will want to withdrawal what the ledger has but ideally at that point it will be a higher value like $100 so they'd get $96.50 of that but individually each reader only paid 10 cents.
The problem, of course, is mismatched incentives for the middlemen versus the clients, particularly at the margins. Similar to real-estate brokers. They may be effective in many ways, but they are looking for pareto-efficiency, where they get you 80% of the match (or 80% of the pay) or whatever for 20% of their effort.
It's hard to imagine any incentive scheme between buyers (hiring managers) and sellers (applicants) that wouldn' be subject to the same market mechanics, even if at lesser scales when done through more automated means.
I don't think crypto really has anything to do this.
The employer doesn't need to hire an external recruiter either. They just need an HR team that actually does anything other than protecting against liabilities and aggressively managing labor costs down. Most of HR is a practical joke of questionable taste.
Do you know how much the last candidate got hired for? An agent probably does.
So no, I don't think adding layers of middle men really solves the problem for most people.
The proposal was two middlemen. It's just an inefficient way to, as you (or somebody up the chain) said, charge for attention to reduce spam. Since the middlemen are being paid, most spammers won't hire them.
> incredibly inefficient
In practice, yes. In theory, it could be fantastic. Imagine, as a simple example, you have two early-career backend developers. They could each do the same search, or a middleman could do one search and share the highlights with each developer. The fact that you have overlapping demands and information opens up the potential for the work to be amortized, even if you're not adding any value as a middleman other than trading time for money.
Would micropayments result higher quality? Maybe, but until you have a critical mass no one can really tell.
Free options are more likely reach critical mass and dominate. Paid options thus die off, starved of attention.
If I had to pay $100 for 10 applications and still get ghosted or auto rejected, I don't know what I'd do. That's just theft at that point.And the incentives for recruitment are just perverse at that point. Don't hire, just make a good job app.
On the other hand, to someone who has no job, paying $100 to apply to 100 jobs might be pretty harsh—and there isn't the remotest guarantee that this would actually result in getting contacted, let alone getting a job.
Going one step further, paying that kind of money to apply also means you'd be expected to have a credit card or something similar. At the very least a bank account. And someone who's got excellent qualifications, but had a medical disaster cost them their previous job and home, and has been spending time on the streets, is going to have a very hard time maintaining a bank account or obtaining a credit card without an income.
Basically, any time you make a proposal to "solve" the problems with hiring/job searching, you need to ask yourself, "Is this going to nontrivially exacerbate existing class divides?" If the answer is "yes", that's a) probably why it hasn't been done already, and b) why anyone with any compassion (or understanding of the long-term consequences of inequality in society) should reject such a solution.
A) it is an actual job, with intent to hire now B) I will get an actual response, from a human, within a few days
Then $100 is completely worth the time saved vs applying to ghost jobs.
The asymmetry in power & wealth means that if you want the $1 spent by a job-seeker to even come close to the guarantees you describe, you'll probably need to make the company pay $100 per posting or more. And that would effectively require some pretty widespread and strictly-enforced regulation/legislation.
If you're going to have to get that just for this middleman solution, why not go all the way and have the regulation mandate that any job that a company posts has to be real, with full intent to hire, and every single applicant must get a timely, non-canned response?
Slightly tangential to your main point, but in this day and age electronic transfers are money; cash is in effect just a fallback option for situations where there's no connection to the Internet. I believe that, in the absence of central bank digital currency, banks should be required to have a process for issuing current accounts to homeless people (albeit not necessarily with credit, just like customers who do have fixed homes). That measure alone would immediately fix a range of issues that homeless people face, wouldn't it?
In that environment, the agency maximizes clicks and matches because that earns them most. Applicants are lured to maximize numbers of applications and qualifications(and failed matches), hiring companies go FOMO mode, hype up themselves and tighten up requirements. Everyone's paperclipping everything and producing clinically depressed graduates in big batches. It's a huge resource sink. Then of course fake posting problem isn't even remotely gets solved because the power structure builds up in the background in uncaptured dimensions, parallel to the system. You wouldn't want that.
Can you explain further? ( btw, your overall analysis is spot on)
1) There are so much BS jobs in BS companies it's hard to understand if those are even companies doing real thing (cf. David Graeber)
2) 80% of jobs in my field are about LLMs and technology no one understand or in companies that don't even know if they need it but are just following the trend
3) I've seen big and small companies posting over and over the same job ad. For example a big consulting group has been posting the exact same job for more than a year (really) on linkedin and elsewhere - each time there are more than 100+ applicants on linkedin.
4) Recruiters from 'serious' agencies told me it was the worst job market they know of
5) There is also a rise of fake recruitement agencies, it's very easy and quick to set up a page on Linkedin now with fake workers, fake images, fake jobs, etc.
6) The supply demand imbalance allows some small companies (startups) to ask for insane technical assignement that takes hours, which at the end looked like free consultancy. I had one that did not even provide feedback after a rejection, and when asked said "because we don't"
7) The increase of centralised platform such as Linkedin has increased competition. Everyone is applying to the same jobs, and many candidates uses AI to beat the HR platform. [This has been reported by FT - https://www.ft.com/content/1429fcb2-e0ef-4e47-b2b8-8bd225ac2... ]. Same problem as in the online dating market.
8) There is so much ghosting, that can happen at any stage of the process. Again, same problem as in the online dating market.
I've sent out hundreds of applications over my career and never had this problem until now.
1. Slurp up contact information, focusing on people trying to break into a cushier lifestyle (data entry, entry level analysts, LLM evaluation in some specialized domain, ...).
2. Cold-contact them about being eligible for one of many possible remote jobs, with high hourly rates listed (something specify, like a "salary" of $38.51/hr). They'll either have a legitimate-at-first-glance looking website (usually the ownership has been transferred a few days prior, sometimes a few months, but one of the operators seemed to have a pool of domains they'd been letting age for years to throw you off a bit more), or they'll spoof the spelling of a real company when they text/email you.
3. Go through some form of hiring process. It's as little effort as they can put in on their end to keep the semblance of them being a real company.
4. Then this turns into normal check fraud. Your cushy remote job requires expensive office supplies, so they "provide" those. A local member of the gang delivers fake equipment in real boxes. You pay $5k or something out of the $7k fake check they previously sent, the rest supposedly being a signing bonus.
AFAICT, many tens of thousands of people have gotten as far as step 4, and a decent fraction have fallen for the whole charade. If you're struggling to get a real job out of college and haven't seen what the normal interview process looks like, the confirmation bias (and desperation) combined with lack of real-world experience can cloud your judgement.
There are tons of other endgames. Not all are quite that nefarious, but none are good.
And voila, they have stolen $50.
At the same time I’ve seen on the other end just endless unqualified applicants. Dozens and dozens of people who don’t pass a phone screening. Some jobs are tough to find the right applicant, or you’re looking in an area of high competition for a specific talent.
Because from what I can tell, it seems like a complete toss up whether a qualified/unqualified applicant will even get that far, let alone how much further in the progress they'll get. I get the distinct feeling that most filtering systems are just dropping a lot of great candidates at the first hurdle, and then letting a bunch of unqualified ones through to the later rounds.
Years ago, when I was heavily involved in hiring, I asked our CTO whether we can provide feedback to rejected candidates, because it could benefit them. The CTO answered that it may become a legal quagmire if a candidate decides to sue due to perceived discrimination, or something, based on the feedback, even without any merit. The probability is very low but the downside is very bad. So we had to abstain from giving feedback :(
Anyhow, it's not even the feedback the problem, it is that I have enough work experience to understand some of those startups seem to operate on a thin line between what is a technical assignment related directly to their core tech and getting free consultancy. The least they could provide to candidates who have involved time is what was expected.
Sure it is a weak argument, but when you get to cite that possibility and thus save 10 minutes of time creating more detailed feedback (which may or may not be used).
Any feedback you give can potentially be twisted to support some argument of unfair treatment. Even if it's frivolous, employers don't want to spend time dealing with that. So they just say nothing.
This time last year I was searching for a new job, something I've done a few times at this point in my career, and this was such a pronounced thing that I had not experienced in any of my previous searches. It felt so strange, like walking through some funhouse where I had to be skeptical of every turn and decision lest I walk face first into a mirror.
I eventually found a great job with a great team at a smaller company that I had some initial reservations about and even held back on applying from at first. Maybe it's just an additional symptom of (4), but if this is the future of finding employment it is a bleak one.
We have HN threads about company "X laid off Y%". Back then it was "Company X has folded and laid off 100%", over and over and over again.
* one company (behind 2 levels of middlemen) had "invented" some utopian form of LLMized auto-translate framework X into framework Y AND by-the-way, chop the monolith into microservices - so they needed "software curators", not programmers? But expert ones!
* some middleman company, before anything else, sent me to "AI"-led interview, which asks questions and records my answers. 1-2 minutes per question. Question 1: how would you write a streaming service in python?
* 50% of all job posting are either betting, crypto, or both. Unless something even more bogus
* 75% try to fit "AI", "ML", or "LLM" in the requirements somehow - for the sake of it being there?
* 20% of job postings repeat forever. Biting on them does not do much
* 70% of (my well intended) job applications go unanswered.. cannot know if they are real or not, or is it ageism? or blind keyword-matching? Who-knows..
* only 5% lead to initial interview ;
* one of the hopefuls, went further into tech/coding check, which passed but "we decided to change requirements of the job"
* etc. Complete mess
Ah. Have fun, i'll keep trying :)
The joke of the meme is I feel ashamed/disappointed but I forget I'm fine.
Is this just some hr compliance so they can search outwards?
One other thing I've seen (many times) is to pacify an over-worked team: the team is working crazy over hours, demotivated, asking for help. The manager knows is impossible to hire (head count / budget limits) and so they open a Job Offer, where they can show "we are searching for help, but nobody comes". How do I know? once I was in such over exploited team, so each of the team made a fake resume that was, of course, like a glove for the position. Nobody got a call back. When we confronted the manager, he had to confess. [in case somebody asks himself, 6 months later the whole team was gone]. Then same company, I applied for a job, where my resume was really perfect for the position. As I received the canned response, I called the manager, pressed a little bit, and also said "we had to do as we are searching, but we are really not".
Yet another one I know of, because of reasons: HR consulting companies and also some HR departments want to test if they are paying too much/too little, want to have some "market measurement". They fake jobs, fake interviews, and they would inconspicuously ask "how much are you earning now" and/or "how much do you want to earn" and that is all they want from you really.
I have had two jobs in the past posting inside the department that 2 or 3 people had to waste their time interviewing for with zero chance just as a matter of policy. The manager had to interview x number of people in the name of fairness or something like that.
Yes, and that is a BS posting.
Also, the jobs are not fake, they are labor market test jobs, designed to show that no citizen meets the job requirements thus validating a green card for the H1B visa holder. They are "fake" in that they are designed so no one applies for or gets the job. Imo, labor market test should be part of the visa granting process, not the naturalization.
From the line manager perspective, how it looks is you have a colleague who has been working with you for several years who is on a H1B visa. They want to get a green card and become a permanent resident. To support this, we are required to post a fake job ad for their position, and invent a reason to reject any US citizens who apply for the position. (Non-US applications are ignored.)
Our legal advice was that the job posting had to be contain only legitimate requirements for the role, so it could not be highly tailored to only match the resume of the employee seeking PERM status. The result was phone screen interviews were required to reject 8-10 on-paper-potentially-qualified US applicants for the fake position.
This is for a highly specialized area within finance, where in real hiring there is an immense effort to find the strongest candidates regardless of nationality.
In hindsight I am confident that earlier in my career I had applied to at least one such fake role. One not-well-known advantage of working with a recruiter as a job seeker in such a field is the recruiter will have back-channel information to know to ignore such fake job postings.
I guess, we're now seeing the rise of spoofing in job postings. I, for one, find it quite tiring. I think there's a parallel. Bad actors spoof job postings because it works. What can we do to make it less effective or less worthwhile?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoofing_(finance)
I have often stated that the fact that I was basically evicted from the job market was one of the best things that ever happened to me (I didn't think so, at the time it was happening), and every time I read something like this, it reinforces that.
But I was one of the fairly rare (it seems) people that could afford to have that happen. My heart goes out to the folks that have to endure this stuff.
One of the saddest things, is that really good workers, that would take their job seriously, and be excellent employees, are being knocked out of the game, and the unproductive, disloyal, rapacious sharks that have learned to game the system, are taking all the fish food.
This needs to be made illegal or at the very least cost prohibitive.
It's literally why the CEO lost his life. One side is destroying the livlihood of the other and even basic levels of "please stop" are hand waved away by the needs of the shareholders and YOY hockey stick growth. For some reason "it's business" is a valid and ethically clean reason to build an economic model on top of suffering.
Honesty and dignity need to become fashionable and valuable again. Until we can wean people off the cult of personality around narcissists and psychopaths we're just carrying water for the people who do the worst abuse and will never change unless confronted at figurative or literal gunpoint.
How? Any mechanism to make it illegal will be vigorously fought by the same forces who currently benefit from it. Those forces have unlimited funds to "lobby" lawmakers.
>"hand waved away by the needs of the shareholders and YOY hockey stick growth."
Not needed, but desired. Corporations acting as responsible stewards of capital aren't mandated to grow at a given percentage, just that the capital doesn't decrease. We need to remind corporate America that perpetual double digit growth is impossible, and they can and should be happy with any growth at all.
Plot twist: they were fake they just weren’t in her department so she didn’t know and the only job they were really hiring for according to LinkedIn was an Azure contractor for $60 an hour
People hate on LinkedIn but having a presentable profile and using the right keywords is worth it's weight in gold IMO. Even if it doesn't work out, they'll keep you in their rolodex and hit you up for jobs long into the future.
I only ever apply to jobs that I know I'm qualified for and know that I can demonstrate it, so my application -> offer ratio was historically pretty high. In my last job search, I sent out 99% of the applications I've ever sent out in my career.
The tech job market enshitified rather quickly.
Still in many cases those recruiters are the only way to get the job. Just beware that recruiters don't know when a new job will open for them either.
About two years ago, I was looking for a job, and a recruiter reached out about a software engineering position at a prominent newspaper [1].
I told the recruiter to apply me, they did, and they made me sit through a two hour video course on ethics and sexual harassment, which was weird considering that I hadn't even done an interview yet.
About a week later, the recruiter gets back to me, and they declined me because my resume "reads too much like a manager, no hands-on coding experience".
I was extremely confused, because most of the time people say the opposite, that my resume is too in the weeds, and I need to focus on high-level stuff. Moreover, I don't have any managerial experience on my resume...every role says something like "software engineer".
And then it hit me: the hiring manager never read my resume. He already knew who he wanted to hire for the role, and for either legal or compliance or bureaucratic reasons, he had to make it look like he was looking for other candidates, and in the process, he wasted my time and the recruiter's.
[1] Not going to say which one but you've definitely heard of it.
Nothing will change until online naming and shaming is not considered taboo.
They're going to waste two hours of my time and not even give me the courtesy of reading my resume? Pretty douchey, IMO.
I’ve seen enough people doing 2hs tests+ 3 2hs interviews + 2hs disertation showing what you can… at the end seems the probability of being hired is inversely proportional to the effort required.
> A major one.
There was a fairly standard phone screening interview, but then when I went in-person the CTO, VP of engineering, and somebody else I can't recall made the whole interview about torrents and USENET feeds for TV shows. Not a single serious discussion was had about the business or technology, despite my attempts to bring it up. I left scratching my head and a follow-up email that said "they were going to go in a different direction".
I can only guess that the role was going to somebody else they really wanted, but they needed a "competitive" alternative. I was annoyed that they wasted my time, though.
I think the idea was to pick an area the interviewer was super familiar with, and see how you can handle stress, can you say "I don't know", can you make some guesses even in the space you are not familiar with and so on. Is it the most effective way of doing interviews? Probably not. But it's not a terrible screen either for common pitfalls with senior engineers.
It's possible that the hiring manager was just embarrassed and didn't want to admit fault, but I still think they were using me and the recruiter for compliance reasons, especially since I reached out to that recruiter a year later and apparently that role was never filled, at least not from that recruiting agency.
A recruiter called me for a job interview, said I was perfect for the role.
"Sure!", I responded, "Just send me the Job Description, I need it before I interview".
The recruiter was a bit slow on sending the JD through, but eventually did so and organised an interview.
During the interview I was confused as to what the hiring manager was telling me, "I'm confused, the Job Description describes a different role with different technology?", I said while holding the printout in my hand.
"Can I have a look at that?", asked the hiring manager.
"Sure...", I start sliding it across the table when the HR person slams down their hand and snatches it.
"OKAY! MEETING IS OVER!" shrills the HR lady, and we all leave the room in a confused manner.
Afterward, I called the HR lady to follow up on the role, she hangs up, calls the recruiter and angrily tells him to never let interviewees contact the company directly ever again!
...
What happened?!?
I checked the meta-data in the Job Description word document and it was over 3 years old.
I asked another recruiter what they thinked occurred...they replied that the HR lady likely never wrote a Job Description for the role but just called the recruiter asking him to send a body over.
The recruiter, keen to send me through for the interview and collect their payment, found another job description from the company from an old email from the same company and figured it would do.
The HR lady in question had since left the company.
I kid you not, I later found her in a newspaper article where she was asking advice on her new startup business venture proposal - a clothes shop where people try clothes on and then order online. They included a picture of her in and her business partner in the write-up, but the response the editor provided her was she needed to better understand the risks (understatement of the year).
Why do companies allow these people in such positions, I have no idea.
I've not chased down every scraper and submitted a remove request. But I can easily see how 20%+ of job listings are dead-ends.
Specifically, there are plenty of reasons you might have a position not get filled that are not nefarious. Could be an aspirational. Could be a company that is so under water that they can't manage a hiring pipeline. Could be one that isn't under water, but doesn't know how to manage a hiring pipeline. Could have been overcome by other events. Plenty of options.
Yes, I'm sure there is some fraud. I'd love to see data that went into that detail. I'm assuming it is rather lower than 1 in 5.
(well, okay. Actually honest. How many of those "urgent" postings eve felt urgent?)
i.e. some desperate individuals pay to not even work in a country to get around immigration rules.
This scam was outed by some undercover East Indian journalists. Its gross because cons exploit people, and suppress domestic economic reality by bidding down wage rates. Nothing was done about this by the way... nothing... =3