Education roles are also an indication of mandatory listing: they have someone internally in mind for a future vacancy but are legally required to list it.
There are some browser plugins you can use for job sites like LinkedIn to filter out Ghost Jobs. It's been somewhat helpful, but honestly it feels like 90% of tech jobs right now are Ghost jobs.
It's happened so many times. Apply for a job, within an hour get an email that says I am not qualified (not true), and then a week later the same job gets posted again.
I'm normally a pretty free-market guy, but it should be illegal. It's clear-cut fraud - they are advertising something that doesn't exist, specifically to game numbers. And what's more, governments report on these numbers as if they are real job opportunities in the economy.
The job market should be just that, a market, between buyers and sellers, not people who pretend to be buying in order to look like they've got money.
I know this analogy breaks down a little bit since this behavior does actually happen, sort of, in real life p2p markets but the point is, it sucks and if you've ever sold anything on fb marketplace you know how obnoxious it is dealing with people who demand a lot of you but do not intend to actually commit to buying what you're selling.
Investors for one. If these are larger companies, they will often inflate their actual hiring numbers to make it look like they are anticipating more growth than they are actually expecting.
But I certainly feel ripped off applying for jobs they never intended on filling. If they put up a lot of hoops to jump through to apply (submit a portfolio, set up an account, write a cover letter specific to our company), times that by the 1000 people who have applied, and it's an exorbitant amount of human time getting wasted.
The consistent reports I'm getting through friends who have spoken to recruiters is just that standards have increased dramatically. Firms accepting only a single candidate CV from a recruiter instead of 5 or more, and the recruiter downstream working their ass off to ensure it is absolutely the best possible CV, because if it's not then they don't get paid.
> Firms accepting only a single candidate CV from a recruiter instead of 5 or more
Why though? I've done hiring before - it takes less than 30 seconds to skim a resume. The recruiters also have no idea what the responsibility is for the jobs they are hiring for - it's a terrible place to bottleneck candidates on.
It sounds like everyone, including recruiters, are being sent on a snipe hunt.
I would guess that with bots and AI, a lot of resumes are not even from real candidates, and those that are, are AI slop. I don't envy recruiters or hiring managers these days.
Hiring has been crazy for years. It's worse with remote jobs because you get a firehose of applicants everywhere.
When I was doing a lot of hiring I tried to be as responsive as possible because you don't want to lose the best candidates. I would try to review applicants as fast as they came in. You have to understand that in that hour I might get 40 resumes. 1 or 2 are amazing, another 2-3 could be worth a look, and another 5 might have made the cut if I didn't just read those 2-5 much better resumes ahead of them.
If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
The simpler explanation is that a tired hiring manager was just clicking buttons to dismiss applicants who didn't make the cut.
> If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
That assumes that I am writing my resume for just your job posting. If I am just going to copy and paste the job requirement verbatim on my resume, doesn't that make your job screening applicants for actual experience much harder? Often times the difference is splitting hairs anyway ("we're looking for someone who paints brown houses").
But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them, I would just frankly not have the time to do so.
Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody. The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.
Consider the case... I've got a stack of 100 resumes and 2 hours today to select the top 10 candidates from that stack. I'll be ranking those 10 and give them to HR at the end of the day today. Tomorrow, HR will take the top 5 who are available and schedule interviews for next Tuesday. One of them will be selected from those who interview next Tuesday.
What can you do to increase the odds that you're in the top 10 (and preferably top 5)?
It's possible that a superficial reason was used to separate number 10 from number 11 ... and maybe number 11 would have been a great candidate and future employee. What I don't have is three weeks to do all day 9-5 1h long interviews for every candidate.
That makes sense for the opportunities that actually close after they are posted. I'm talking about jobs that disqualify you as a candidate same day, then repost the same listing next week. And next month. And next year. These are clearly ghost jobs.
Regardless - it would be nothing to show some basic human decency and respect:
- Review them more often until you get the 5 quality candidates to interview (there's no way in hell you actually review all 100 resumes fully - quit sitting on them for weeks and weeks)
- Take down the posting after resumes are reviewed
- Submit a basic and honest response for the people who's resumes didn't make the consideration
- A simple human note for the candidates who were considered but didn't make the interview
- Timely closer for the interviewed candidates who didn't get the job
None of these add any substantial time to the hiring process, but can go a long way to remember the human in a job market that's an absolutely brutal and soulless Leviathan right now.
I work in the public sector. There's a requirement (i.e. law) that the job posting is available for the public to read for two weeks. No selection may be made before all applications are received.
After two weeks, the posting is taken down.
> - Submit a basic and honest response for the people who's resumes didn't make the consideration
If you have 200 resumes in the pool and 100 of them weren't passed on for additional consideration because they didn't meet the requirements (education, needing visa sponsorship, outside of the country, not following the instructions for the application), how long will that take?
Furthermore, in the litigious nation we live in, that information when provided honestly has tended to lead to lawsuits ("I wasn't considered because...").
> - A simple human note for the candidates who were considered but didn't make the interview
That's another 100 candidates. Three minutes each to write the email? That's three hours of someone's day. Again, this gets to the litigious situations. It only takes the allegation of bias to lead to a lawsuit - that costs way more than three hours of my day.
This is the public sector, we don't pay a lot - that's why it's only 200 applications. In the private sector it wouldn't be hard to multiply that number by 3 or 4.
> - Timely closer for the interviewed candidates who didn't get the job
This is something that we're good at. The people who were interviewed know by the end of the week. Job posting opening to the selection being made is four weeks.
The simple and honest response can be an automated email that says you didn't meet the requirements - you would be amazed at how many job postings don't even do that.
I can understand the justification for all of the other choices. But it doesn't mean I have to like it. The whole process is degrading and dehumanizing, and it's something that has gotten much, much worse in the last decade.
This isn't really a low trust society, it's a litigious society problem.
These lawsuits aren't a myth, if you hire a lot of people it'll eventually happen, even if you're not violating any laws. The lawsuits, even when you win, waste time and money. Giving reasons, especially customized "human" responses is absolutely going to increase your chances of being sued.
I thought the threat of lawsuits was a lame excuse, so I tried to give good feedback to rejected candidates who asked.
It did not take long for one of them to try to turn it against me with threats. We would have easily won the case, but having a lawsuit hanging over my head and a target on my back as a liability for the company was not a good feeling.
Yeah, that's the product of a low trust society. It's not any single person perpetuating it, but it affects us all. A higher trust society would write it off as a bad outlier and keep going. A low trust society wonders when's the next time you get another person that causes an undue burden.
That's why feedback is important. If the reason was "we are looking for X experience and X is not on your resume" I can adjust that for later. If it was even as honest as "we found enough qualified candidates to interview and didn't look at your resume", that's still semi-actionable feedback. I either apply earlier or just accept that I was unlucky and it was not my ability.
Generic rejections like "we moved with other candidates" tells me nothing. So noise remains because candidates don't have feedback to improve upon. All because HR wants minimize lawsuits through obscurity.
I’m willing to be communicative and try to be helpful right up to the line where it puts me, my family, or my company at risk of some asymmetrically bad outcome.
Regardless of whether it’s a low-trust society, a litigious society, or El Niño, I will refrain from specific feedback if that puts those groups at risk.
> That assumes that I am writing my resume for just your job posting. If I am just going to copy and paste the job requirement verbatim on my resume, doesn't that make your job screening applicants for actual experience much harder?
It doesn't make the hiring manager's job harder if you decline to customize your resume. They press reject and move to the next resume.
> Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody.
If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.
If there was a hidden requirement to know Python but the job listing didn't ask for it, you get a lot of applicants that don't fit. Smart hiring managers will update the job listing as they review candidates. There are some lazy companies that will have secret requirements that they don't put in the job listing, but that only creates more work for everyone involved. It's not a secret trick they're pulling to be mean. They're just bad at their jobs.
> The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.
Unpopular opinion around these parts, but there's a high correlation between the best candidates and people who take the time to review the job posting and customize their resume before submitting.
I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
> But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them,
Complaining about low response rates and refusing to tailor your resume are highly correlated, in my observation.
Probably a dumb question, but when you say "tailor your resume", what kind of tailoring do you mean? I've seen this advice repeated a lot, but I've rarely taken it because I tend to apply to jobs with the same job title and roughly the same responsibilities; in general, I assumed that tailoring is mainly helpful if you have a diverse/generalist skillset.
Like, it's obvious to me why a true Jack of all trades would use different resumes for applying to a plumber role vs a carpenter role, but less clear why a career plumber would tailor resumes for applying to two plumber roles at slightly different companies.
Several months ago, having exhausted all other options in fruitless job search, I asked for assistance of a recruiter who I used to work with some time ago. Just to get some pointers on how I could improve my search, with his experience working on the other side. His advice on "tailoring" was very simple.
Go to the most popular LLM (ie Claude). Give it the job description. Give it your resume. Ask it for percentage match, it will give you a number. Then ask for advice on improving your resume, you can either ask to rework the resume by itself (if you're in a hurry) or you can work with the thing to modify the sections/entries yourself, one by one, if you have time. With each modification you will get better and better percentage match. Ideally you need to get to high 80% or maybe even 90%.
The idea is that automated ranking tools used by recruiters/HR are ultimately use the very same LLM, so you are improving your ranking assigned to your resume by those ranking systems.
I have to add that now this advice is mostly useless as everybody's using the same technique so you won't be standing up against others but merely be on the same level.
Add to it the fact that many job descriptions are inaccurate and sometimes downright misleading, and hiring managers use their own criteria, and you will understand why connections/referrals is probably the only way to get hired now.
Plumbing for new construction, plumbing for HVAC retrofit (even boilers and heat pumps might be further split), and emergency plumbing service tech (for leaks, water heater replacements, and blocked sewer lines) all seem different enough to me to make making clear what experience you had relevant in plumbing.
> If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.
The thing though is it's a bad requirement. There are any number of great candidates who could be proficient in Python - the skills are very transferrable. (It's like trying to find a painter and filtering out people who have never painted a brown houses)
The thing you're screening for by being so specific is not finding the most qualified person, you're going to end up with the person with the most time and patience to fib or lie on their resume.
> I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
That's exactly wrong - the best candidates are going to be busy people who are great at their job - the people jumping through HR hoops to get hired are by nature going to be worse candidates.
So, I recently got about 600 resumes for a senior Python backend position.
Out of those about half had no experience in backend or python, plus weren't senior enough for us to consider. Or forgot to include all that in their CV. They get filtered out in the first filter phase.
While I'm sure a portion of those could do the job, I can't realistically interview those 300 people when there are other 300 who happen to have at least written that in their CV.
> There are any number of great candidates who could be proficient in Python -
I don't think you understand.
You have to prioritize. You can't interview everyone.
There may be someone in the rejection pool who might be able to pick up Python quickly and enjoy it. It does not matter if I have 10 people who can bring 5 years of Python experience to the first day on the job, and 1-2 more people who can bring 10+ years and probably teach us something about Python.
> the skills are very transferrable. (It's like trying to find a painter and filtering out people who have never painted a brown houses)
I've painted houses. I've done programming. This analogy is not good at all. Some people don't adapt well to new programming languages. Some people try, then decide they hate the new language and start looking for new jobs. You don't have to risk any of this when you already have more Python applicants than interview slots.
>I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
Do you really think the best candidates are ones who are bothering to cold apply through hiring portals to begin with? The best interviewers, sure.
For people who are actively searching, 10 minutes for 100 applications is 15 hours of work. Reply rates can be as bad as 1 in 500. In this kind of market you want to get that application rate down to 2-3 minutes. There's no time nor point to tailoring towards dream jobs; oods are you dreams were crushed 200 applications ago.
There's no particular reason your time is more valuable. We're all just trying to survive in these tumultuous times.
I've done volunteer resume review and interview coaching in the past.
The only people getting response rates that low either had the most awful resumes you've ever seen, or they were applying for jobs completely out of their league.
Like the 23 year old applying for Staff Software Engineer jobs as the next step up from his junior position (which he was laid off from) with 6 typos in his resume and an e-mail address of ninjadude69@hotmail.com at the top of his resume.
>Unpopular opinion around these parts, but there's a high correlation between the best candidates and people who take the time to review the job posting and customize their resume before submitting.
There's also a high correlation between matching the job description perfectly and the resume being AI generated and/or dishonest. Doubly so if the requirements are overly specific or contain pure nonsense as some do (saw "Must have 5 years experience with Claude Code" recently). You can filter out people who blatantly don't match the job and those who obviously just copied the job description. Never seen much correlation between the quality of resumes in the middle (ok to great) and how well they do in interviews.
Not to mention at many places "requirements" are mere suggestions or a low-effort list of technologies taken from the resume of the person who quit. Everybody has their own filtering rules and hiring managers rarely agree with each other much less the HR people usually doing the first round of filtering. The true requirements come out only at the resume filtering or interview stage.
>I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
The "best candidate" a lot of times doesn't mean the best able to do the job. It often means the ones who 1. makes the hiring manager feel good by being enthusiastic about their (statistically) average job for average pay and 2. minimizes their perceived risk of looking bad for their hiring choice.
>If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.
If you're not a FAANGMULA type place then sure. But also if your job posting lists something like "Python 3.14" or "7+ years Python" I know the hiring manager probably doesn't know the first thing about python. In that case I think it's fair for any decent programmer to lie because they will likely surpass the hiring managers knowledge by studying python a bit before the interview.
At this point why don't you try to go out and contact candidates yourself or via a recruiter rather than posting jobs? It seems to me that with LLM-based tools you are going to find it increasingly difficult to get those 2-3 out of the 40; all 40 will be LLM-written to perfect match your posting.
I do reach out to LinkedIn profiles and some social media accounts, but I'd never use LLM-written text to do so.
You have to appear like a real human. The candidates in demand get recruiter spam all week long. If you go LLM slop canon on their inbox they're not going to respond.
Cold outreach has a low response rate. It's worth doing, but you can't rely on it. You have to go through all angles.
Typically I'd be doing a mix of my own cold outreach, public job postings, an internal company referral program, and for difficult roles a trusted external recruiter who I know is good for candidates.
Yeah, I’ve never understood this - earlier in my career this was the standard to have technically skilled hiring managers look for and contact people.
Now people act like they must have this ridiculous firehose of resumes to sort through, then have non-technical HR gals sort and filter out based on whatever random criteria they use, and then by the time it gets to the hiring managers - they still have no idea if this person is a complete idiot or has any skills at all. The qualified people you actually want to hire don’t want to be treated like idiots or liars either.
I just don’t feel it has to be this way - there is zero value in a firehose unless you were looking for desperate and cheap people.
AI tools have devalued resumes and cover letters, personal repos, leet code scores, etc...
It's always been the case, but now it's more true than ever: your professional network is super important. If somebody on the inside can recommend you, your chances of getting an offer are good compared to throwing your resume on the pile.
Even for non-inside hires, I feel like it's more efficient for me as a hiring manager to go out and look for candidates rather than triage some AI-generated pile of crap.
> You have to understand that in that hour I might get 40 resumes. 1 or 2 are amazing, another 2-3 could be worth a look, and another 5 might have made the cut if I didn't just read those 2-5 much better resumes ahead of them.
This sounds like a dream. We posted a job a couple of weeks ago and had 1200 applications in around 2 days. Most are complete garbage. I'm confused why they took the time to apply at all, even if AI did it for them.
If you go through "Show HN" posts you will see multiple projects that partially or completely automate both search and application process. Just set up a bot that searches for newly posted positions matching whatever criteria, customizes the resume, applies. Probably costs a few cents for the applicant, but increases their chances somewhat. And the rest of us deal with the consequences.
Some fraction of applications that don’t really fit are submitted by people trying to keep their unemployment benefits. You have to keep applying to continue to qualify, but the jobs don’t have to be a perfect fit.
Being unemployed is hard and can be really demoralizing. Try thinking “I’m probably helping someone pay rent until they find a job listing that works for them” when you’re rejecting obviously unsuitable applications. It at least makes the “wtf”-ness of some of them seem a little less weird.
> Try thinking “I’m probably helping someone pay rent until they find a job listing that works for them” when you’re rejecting obviously unsuitable applications
I could believe this if you were in a population 5,000 town with few employers and the person applying had to work in person.
In our industry, where there are 1000 different remote job listings available to anyone at any time, there is no justification for this.
> In our industry, where there are 1000 different remote job listings available to anyone at any time, there is no justification for this.
Do you mean that there's no reason to send resumes or to wherever or that there's no reason to be unemployed given the theoretically endless number of postings?
>You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
Resumes are only a 1 page summary (2 if you're really experienced) and this kind of market has you doing hundreds of submissions if you lack connections (or your connections are also job searching). You don't have the time to tailor every application for every role.
A shame because LLMs should really be perfect at this. Most current tools are too obsessed with writing for you (and creating a blander resume) instead of just taking a master CV and drag and dropping the most applicable roles/projects/experiences in.
There are also a lot of reposts coming from recruiting companies.
I see a position getting posted for a local company, and within hours the same requirements are showing up for 10 new postings with vague company names like "... is wanted for a local manufacturer" etc.
After I scheduled an appointment which I realized was a "recruiter" the zoom link showed the local time zone for the recruiter was from some West African country. I cancelled the appointment.
This. I can't tell you how many times I've been contacted by a recruiter looking to fill a job that I myself am the hiring manager for or is within my reporting line. When recruiters can't even be bothered to look at the job, company and potentially hiring manager before contacting someone, the system is broken.
This kind of stuff wouldn't be happening if we regulated jobs like we regulate banks.
Those regulations aren't perfect, but after working at one it became pretty clear that a lot of these things wouldn't fly if a bank did them.
Falsely advertise a financial offering? Pretty clearly actionable.
Ghost someone after they inquire about one? Deny them for some vague reason? Even just give them an unfavorable rate without specifying as much? None of those things would hold up. You have to send notices of any adverse action you take, not just providing clear communication that you're taking some kind of action against them, but giving a clear and objective reason why.
Call around to everyone someone might have worked for or with for references, without their knowledge or consent? See "clear and objective reason why." Also, if you use a third party to do this there are a whole collection of responsibilities under the Fair Credit Reporting Act -- you have to provide people with copies of the information gathered on request, inform them anytime it's used against them, offer some process for disputing incorrect details... And that threshold is from gathering the data, not from scoring it.
Never mind equity compensation, which is somehow special in terms of financial disclosures -- whether that's relative to the same company later offering the same stock to the public, or just more generally to any kind of investment offer.
None of this is any less unreasonable on the employer side.
I was under the impression a large % of jobs posted on jobs sites are done simply for compliance reasons and because HR has some "bullshit jobs" parts to it and the companies will usually simply hire from within the company itself.
It would be genuinely shocking to me if someone came up with evidence that the majority of jobs on job sites were made by companies that actually intended to hire the best candidate that applied through that site!
Surely you should be looking for evidence of the opposite. Why would a company create a job listing if they aren’t hiring? You are supposing there’s a global conspiracy to create fake job listings.
Every company I’ve worked at, from startups to big tech have had job listings open when they want to hire someone. Sometimes a job post will stay open for months or even years, not because it is fake but because finding the right candidate is far more important than finding a candidate.
I empathize with the frustrating experience of seeing job listings that you’re qualified for and not being hired, and certainly a lot of companies half-ass their hiring and do not review every applicant, but fake job listings make very little sense. When they do occur, it’s for obscure reasons, not because that is standard operating procedure.
The whoishiring thread here on HN regularly sees candidates accuse regularly posting companies of not actually hiring, even though there’s ample evidence these companies are hiring.
Re: the original claim about job posts being created when the company already has an internal candidate, there are very few organizations where that is necessary. A private company rarely has an obligation to consider outside candidates, it is mostly seen in government recruitment. Job sites charge lots of money to list, a company wouldn’t waste money advertising a job they don’t intend to hire for.
Did you read the Clarify Capital article? The definition of “ghost job” does not support the point you’re trying to make. The definition of “ghost job” in that article is so broad it includes pretty much every job post. A job post being open for 30 days does not make it a “ghost job” by any reasonable definition. The Congress publication includes no evidence or conclusion and even notes that the issue of ghost jobs is disputed. Did you just google ghost jobs and copy the first 2 links without reading them?
I rcently joined a hiring process for a role. I think a majority of the jobs will NOT be filled in 30 days, given how the process and coordination works.
n of 1 and all, but most jobs I've gotten that were worth getting were from personal reference. To the extent that applying through job sites seems like a real waste of time unless I'm really desperate.
And to reflect that, the jobs I've gotten were the ones you'd only accept if you were really desperate.
At least in my country, a job posting that stays up forever isn't a ghost job. It's a company that can't keep people. Either the conditions are brutal or the pay is garbage.
Heh, this sounds like the more human case where if you see a person that is single you don't want to go out with them as there's a rather serious reason why they are single.
This statistic constantly confuses people who haven't done hiring.
If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that.
There are also specialty roles where hiring takes months. I've had niche roles open where we didn't get any applicants with any experience on the topic for over 90 days on multiple occasions.
Then you'd still only have a small number of roles up, not the thousands of positions the article is showing for some companies. They'd be hiring hundreds of thousands a year if they were constantly interviewing for all of them, and I don't believe O'Reilly Auto Parts is recruiting people as quickly as a nation at war.
When I lived in the area about 6 years ago, I had 3rd party recruiters reach out to me about roles that they don't list. The whole region it felt like was 70% contractors (W-2 with the contracting firm), until the company really liked you and bought out your contract and converted you to an actual employee.
Surprisingly I had better benefits at the two contracting firms than what employees were getting.
I'm curious, for the niche or senior roles, have you personally read through the resumes or do you depend on the recruiter? I hear you on the entry and early-career jobs, but I see Director and VP roles also open for months. With all the layoffs, it's hard to belief there is not SOME talent in there worth hiring or at least training up.
As someone with a niche job and title (and comes pretty decorated), I would expect to hear back on my applications more often and yet I get nothing either. There are some prominent companies (cough Figma, Smartsheet, Stripe cough) who literally have had an open role for exactly my job for nearly 3+ years without filling it.
Maybe I'm thinking a bit too much of myself, but it doesn't seem like they are that interested in really filling it.
This is probably too broad a category for anecdata to mean much, but just to balance the scales I've recently started looking in a job category that I thought was niche, but not that niche. I've heard back from something like 11/13 applications, often the same or next day.
This is exactly why hiring is such a mess, lazy managers who don't want to repost job listings or put any effort into hiring. Job seekers need to apply to thousands of jobs because they have no way of knowing if a company is actually hiring. Which means hiring managers (who we have already established are lazy) now are incentivised to find ways to not look at resumes.
Your response tells me you haven’t done much hiring, if at all, or, even if you have, you haven’t done it very well. You’re being unnecessarily defensive. Someone who actually knows what they’re doing, when hiring multiple people, keeps a count of the positions and, if they want to be transparent, updates it as people are hired and onboarded. It’s not that hard.
You also have to deal with delusional hiring managers. A few months ago I remember seeing a comment on here from someone who had kept job listings up for years while hiring because he couldn't find anyone with the "right experience". Clearly there was no actual imminent need to fill the role and he was just hoping that some superstar would stumble across it, but he kept insisting that this counted as "really hiring for the role".
agree. am working somewhere that does the same. we can't find enough of the right engineers to join and it's been a long/slow journey. hiring can be tough for both sides (speaking of those looking for the other side).
Another confounder is the opposite. When I've been hiring I'd often open up different public recs for the same role to cast a broader net. Some people self identify with certain terms and may not realize they'd be a fit.
So what would happen is I'd have say 10 real openings, I may have 5 different job postings, and all of them would stay open until I filled all 10 openings.
I was recently job searching and roughly 50% of all jobs ghosted me. Just an automated email and then... silence. And when applying via LinkedIn only ~5% of companies even opened my application.
I can believe that your company has a good reason for keeping the job up, but I also know that some job ads are black holes were no one bothers to do the bare minimum including taking the posting down. I have no idea how to differentiate one from the other.
50% is a pretty damn good response rate! I wouldn't complain about that.
It's not surprising about LinkedIn. They've made applying for jobs too easy so there's too much noise. I wouldn't bother applying for jobs there. LinkedIn is great for recruiters though - just put some effort into your profile, set it to "looking for work", and then reply to interesting recruiter spam. That's how I got my last 3 jobs.
Large companies have teams, and every team puts out a different job description based on their particular requirements, stack, desired experience, etc.
I've never encountered a scenario where someone wants engineers in bulk and then they'll decide where to put them in the org.
Multiple big tech companies have historically done exactly this. I got hired at a public tech company as an iOS engineer in 2020 and they made an offer, I accepted, and then I got to meet with the managers of several teams and pick the one I wanted to work with. Single job posting.
Almost every place when I’ve done campus recruiting treats it like bulk hiring of good raw talent. I hated it when I first saw it on the employer side, but it’s pretty practical.
> If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that. At a large or fast growing company, we might never stop interviewing and hiring senior software engineers. The listing stays open for a year or more.
How on earth am I, a potential job seeker, supposed to be able to figure out if your year-old job posting is still up because you: couldn't find anyone after a year, are constantly hiring and never take it down, actually hired your quota six months ago and HR forgot to take the listing down, the job listing isn't for a real job and is just a trap to collect resumes, the listing is for a ghost job to placate the overworked current staff, some other reason?
having experienced the UK & US markets - I can tell you within the startup cohort those using lever / Ashby etc - it's not that they have multiple positions - but they're tryna pull an illusion of growth specially in the UK market.
because luckily in the UK market - companies books are open to the public.
This is not done everywhere. I've never hired in the US, but worked for companies in Europe and JP, from <100 people companies to FAANG, and all of them opened dedicated listing for every position we had to fill.
Umm...why? Consider the alternate approach. What if I listed 10 Sr Software Eng roles. What would job seekers do? If you said 'apply to all of them', you'd be right. In general, the same recruiter will be responsible for all applications for the same role (e.g. all sr software engineers). There is no benefit to anyone in having the same resume in there 10 times.
I conduct interviews pretty often for various levels. Interviews seems so broken from both sides. Hard to find jobs that aren’t ghost jobs. Hard to find candidates that won’t cheat using AI and actually know their stuff. Just feels like AI has made hiring in tech even more inefficient which says a lot.
If I were in a meeting with a current employee, and discovered that they were reading an LLM script at me instead of considering and responding to my questions, I would definitely tell them and their manager that this is unacceptable.
I've been asked to do take homes for different companies recently. Each time I was very confused whether using AI is acceptable, desirable, required or unacceptable. One time I asked just in time, the other time I wasn't sure if even using Google was okay.
I mean in University there were tests where you were allowed to bring a cheat sheet, or even a bag full of books. So called bag tests. And people were still able to fail. Although I never had the latter in my curriculum.
I think it's necessary that teams for which people are hired for brainstorm up-to-date tests. Just recycling the same challenge from 3 years ago isn't good enough.
if its remote initially, closed eye interviews where you just have a discussion might be easiest way. Pretty easy to tell if someone is bullshitting if they can't discuss topics that likely should excite them somewhat, or at the very least topics they've been around for years.
Feel like any test nowadays should INCLUDE ai, but you likely just want insight into how they are getting from A to B. I don't wanna assume what you mean by cheating with AI, could be as simple as answering live questions with cheating software or whatever, which is obviously a huge issue. I wanna respond and say it should be expected for any take home type stuff, and be rolled into the expectations if anything, but that could be way off of what you mean.
both sides of the entire process is just a nightmare now, one side has all this noise to sift through, and the other side is pressured to mass apply because of all the competing noise they can't be seen through. I was listening to something about AI generated responses, and they seemed to have no empathy for the people who gave human responses, but used AI to give them an overview of the company and what it does for the question "why do you want to work at x?", and sorta mocked the person because they can tell they asked for a generic description of what the company does.
There has to be some give and take, initial applications if you are spending hours researching a single company, you are setting yourself up to be absurdly let down if that same company sends you an automated rejection within a day. A reasonable person will only do that so many times, before just giving up and waiting for the other side to be the first mover instead.
Is 28% a lot? Every time I've hired someone at a big company, it's taken multiple months to get candidates through the pipeline, sometimes with restarts when a candidate would accept an offer and change their mind before starting. 90 days seems relatively quick.
Remember that the average job candidate is absolutely clueless about how positions are created and filled in real life, so seeing bad assumptions like “most positions are filled in under ninety days” shouldn’t be surprising.
IME (hiring, not interviewing) it's always been 3-4 rounds. First is an HR phone screen (usually 20-30 minutes on the phone), 2nd with hiring manager, 3rd with a senior engineer/architect, and a 4th with the hiring VP. And those are almost always combined into a single morning or afternoon(2+3 or 3+4) and the final round doesn't always happen (VP's choice).
7-9 rounds just means 7-9 conversations. Just talking to a recruiter and the manager are 2 rounds. So 5-7 interviews that evaluate competency. You usually get the lower end unless you ended up giving mixed signals.
Sounds like asking a lot from candidates but unfortunately candidates lie a lot and the cost of hiring candidates that don’t match up to the requirements when paying $300k-$500k/year is just too high. Firing people is hard and takes a long time, especially in management roles. My personal guidance to managers is to have rounds match the level and experience required for the job. You can hire an intern with 2 rounds after the hiring manager conversation but a staff IC probably needs 5, directors need 7.
It's an effect of "once burned twice shy". Every time there was a "bad" hire they had to change things. People add to the list but no one ever wants to advocate for a lighter process since they might be blamed for it.
What an absolutely insane way to do business. Everybody is out here trying to squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of software teams to the point of shipping garbage. Meanwhile managers, executives, and hr are operating under the belief that taking literal months to move "candidates through the pipeline" is eminently reasonable.
Most tech companies have a:
- recruiter screen
- tech screen
- multiple interviews during an "onsite" round
Job is posted. You apply along with hundreds of other people. The recruiter/hiring manager needs to spend some time sifting through them along with juggling all the other tasks they have going on. Let's say that this takes 1-2 weeks. Some places may let the opening sit longer to get more applicants.
Several candidates are identified as possible fits. Recruiter reaches out to them to schedule the recruiter screen. Schedules need to line up. This likely takes 1-2 weeks until the recruiter screen happens.
The recruiter needs to schedule the tech screen after a successful recruiter screen. Again, schedules need to line up. This could take another 1-2 weeks.
Feedback needs to be submitted and then the onsite round is scheduled. This could take another 1-2 weeks.
The onsite round will have multiple interviewers. This means more people to collect feedback from which likely increases delays in getting that. A debrief is normally scheduled with everyone who interviewed them. But let's say one week to gather this and make a decision.
An offer is made. It takes some time to prepare and get sign off. There will be time to discuss with the recruiter to explain the details, plus some time needed for negotiation and thinking it over. This could be another 1-2 weeks.
Additionally, some candidates may want to ask for more time during these phases in order to prepare better or align their schedules. This pushes back the process for all other candidates if the company is hiring for a specific job in order to give all candidates a fair assessment against the pool.
The person I responded to said that filling a role in 90 days would be "relatively quick" so you've already improved theoretical hiring efficiency by up to 50%.
But it still doesn't sound like a very effective process typed out like this.
I can't speak to their experience but the bigger the company, the more process and people involved usually. That causes delays here and there that add up. It's also a matter of how much of a priority the company makes it. If they're large and well-known there's really no incentive to change anything. They'll always have a stream of candidates applying and being available to hire.
So it's not that they can't, it's that they won't. Seems crazy to me.
>What would you do to make it more effective?
I'd ask companies who have managed to get the process down to 2-3 weeks what they're doing, and then do that. It sounds like you're saying they don't actually care to, though.
> If they're large and well-known there's really no incentive to change anything.
Well there it is. Suggestions don't matter if there's no one in power who cares. Have them care and suddenly we'd be able to get people hired in 2-4 weeks.
Otherwise it's not rocket science. And you're not hiring rocket scientists. It shouldn't take more than 3 stages to know if a candidate can do the job:recruiter screen, main interview, negotiation meeting. If you need more people in the know, they join on the main day. If they can't, it clearly isn't important enough for their scope of responsibilities (does a skip manager 3 levels up really need to personally meet a candidate?)
This absolutely sucks if you don't have networking skills, but this is exactly why it pays of to network. You're basically able to skips 50 - 90% of the recruitment "pipeline" is you know the right people and they want you specifically.
In 2019, when I applied to the company I still work for, I went to the interview, waited chit chatting with the manager because the other interviewing manager was 20min late, and when he came in he asked few questions and said “Ok, I don’t think we need to interview anyone else, when can you start?” They find it funny I had a cat and that I asked for way too little money.
Last place I applied to, one screening and two interviews, took several months, and in the end came second even though I was ready to take 700€ paycut. The job was basic AV&network upkeep, felt like I was applying to become an astronaut.
Hiring the wrong person in corporate roles is very, very, very expensive. New hires are expected to be unproductive right out the gate, and it's hard to measure productivity in general, so you can easily end up in scenarios where it takes months to notice there's an issue and a year or more before you can get the person back out the door. So you really do have to double and triple check that a prospective hire is the right choice.
It can move faster than months, of course, when everyone's willing to prioritize it. But as anyone who's worked in hiring can tell you, the set of people who want hiring to move faster is much larger than the set of people who are willing to accept inconvenient interviews and fill out their feedback promptly.
True. But if your job is HR taking a long time to hire people and maintaining a high level of turnover is probably good for your job security. I don't think it is overt, but I have noticed that large orgs have a lot of HR process, small companies just try hard to maintain staff.
Companies feel like they have no choice, for two reasons:
1. Jurisdictions where workers must give minimum notice periods before leaving their prior employer - the worker accepts a competing offer, gives notice, waits out the notice period, then starts. And many workers often ask for additional unpaid time between jobs before starting (since no vacation days have been accrued yet at the new job).
2. Hiring happens by committee. In most companies, job candidates must be interviewed by, at the absolute minimum, an HR screener, the hiring manager, and the hiring skip-level; and usually also by people who will be peer teammates, plus an HR "culture" interview. If you need to pass a committee of 3-6 people, interviews must be scheduled with each member of the committee; at one committee member per week, that is 3-6 weeks.
6 weeks (1.5 months) plus background checks plus getting pay packages approved plus 30 day notice periods plus two weeks unpaid vacation is, yes, a multiple month endeavor at minimum to fill a role. The only way to fill a role within a week is to grant full hiring autonomy to the hiring manager and only hire people who are currently unemployed (and therefore have no notice period or desire to take more unpaid time before starting), which in most companies beyond early startup size, is a complete non-starter.
A lot of it has to do with how long it takes to find the right candidate. As someone who has been involved in a lot of hiring over the last 20 years, I can say there's been a huge shift within the last couple of years and open reqs get 10-25x the number of applicants, which instead of increasing choice in a positive way has just resulted in the average applicant quality decreasing. That means recruiters and hiring managers spend a LOT more time vetting and also invest in parallel candidates to try to hedge, because so many candidates applying are legitimately unqualified.
It may sound like I'm blaming candidates, and sometimes it might be fair to, but this is also a problem caused by companies not investing in training and hiring junior level employees, which means that people who are unqualified feel forced to apply for more senior roles, as those are the only roles hiring. It's honestly shocking how many candidates I've interviewed in my career who don't even meet the basic bar for the role they've applied for, and are essentially just hoping to get lucky and snag a high-paying tech job even if it ultimately results in them being terminated, they can collect a check for 3-9 months without delivering.
Mass applications, AI cheating, fraudulent representation (e.g. saying you are person X but are actually interviewing on behalf of person X who you are not), lying on resumes and in screeners, and even nation state attacks on hiring (see North Korea trying to farm tech jobs for money to get around sanctions), it's not great on the hiring side either.
We are at the moment hiring for a L3 (no fresh graduate but someone with 3-5 years of experience). The role has been open for two months now (it was a backfill). I personally am in charge of the technical screen which is the second interview after the hiring manager. I am already getting a filtered set of candidates after the recruiter and the hiring manager review candidates. Of the 5 that have come my way, I’ve said yes to 1 person and 1 as a yes, pending another technical screen. We are not even wanting an exact match, nor are we expecting cure for cancer. Yes there are a lot of people looking for jobs but you don’t realize how many candidates are just not what their resumes portray. It takes forever to get someone competent in the pipeline and even then, you know nothing about their work ethic. The reason the pipeline is slow is because the candidate pool is flooded with over the top resumes that are not backed by actual talent and once you hire a wrong candidate it is extremely difficult to fire them, even with at will employment contracts.
Any manager will tell you, they’d rather not go through the long hiring process.
I live in a country where the probational period is 6 months (Germany), so the law says people can get fired without cause or justification, just give them 2 weeks notice or 2 weeks garden leave.
Even with that, it's a very arduous process to fire people. Even in cases where they refuse to show up for work, I've seen HR departments asking managers to "try harder".
The reason is simply that HR departments are extremely inefficient machines.
From what I've heard from other fields it seems as though this is somewhat unique to the tech industry. I share your belief that it's ridiculous. Companies somehow got along fine pre-FAANG with a few interview rounds before Google and Amazon convinced everyone that you need to have five rounds, a panel, a take home assessment, and a slate of brain teasers to pick out the true worthy 10x engineer.
Grow some balls, do a couple interviews, and just pick the candidate you like the most. You're hiring for a glorified IT guy, not a NASA astronaut. Companies that stretch out the process to a ridiculous degree need to get over themselves.
I did that with one of the faangs. Congrats you passed hiring committee! Oops no open roles!
2 months later recruiter from the same company hit me up. Told them I already passed the interview just give me the job already. Oops no roles, you just have to wait! So why are you reaching out? Couldn’t give me an answer.
> From what I've heard from other fields it seems as though this is somewhat unique to the tech industry.
At least in (Northen) Europe ghost jobs are a pain on the ass in most industries, even for low-skilled labour. Hiring companies - not the actual companies that need a worker, but an intermediate - try to just amass a database of workers so they can say to their client that we have hundreds of people with these qualifications ready to come to work for you. It’s not even legal, but they still do it.
I think a lot of these problems are created by the companies themselves, and to lesser degree by candidates. Posting ghost jobs, asking for insane qualifications to run a simple website, interview process lasting 3 months… And candidates firehosing the job ads with bs CV’s generated by LLMs does not help. Currently I think you need to know somebody inside the company pretty well to get hired.
The fix would be pretty simple:
> Grow some balls, do a couple interviews, and just pick the candidate you like the most.
Maybe I'm an old fart, but I've never had a job take over 14 days to get. Stringing people along for 3 months is absolute insanity. This is what happens when people get turned into numbers instead of actual beings with needs and emotions.
IMO the reason it takes longer now is because multiple people are getting interviewed simultaneously.
Considering job postings are getting 10x more resumes than before, I'm not surprised companies are hedging their bets and interviewing way more people for the same position.
You’re not even hearing back from the recruiter for 14 days if the job posting just went up. I mean it takes 1-2 weeks from the day you got told that you’re getting an offer to the day when you sign it.
It is clear signal but its causes are multiple and I am not sure what percent attribution each one has:
1) Roles with high turnover. Likely the posting stays always on.
2) The pay is bad and nobody takes the job.
3) The role is too niche and the candidates in the market with visibility to the role are very few.
4) Aggressive hiring. Candidates have many options and until they actually show up at work, you keep interviewing other candidates.
5) Forgotten posts / ghost posts (my gut feeling says that this is the lowest contributor to the spike we observe, as likely it should be flat over time)
As someone that's currently looking (with plenty of experience, corporate, startup, and contract), can confirm it's pretty rough out there. I think the application process is just becoming enshittified: because HR uses AI to filter, applicants are starting to use AI to apply, so we have volumes and volumes of nonsense flowing back and forth.
Been working professionally for ~15 years or so, and it's never been this bad. Other than "knowing someone" (i.e. a referral, and even that falls through routinely), not sure what the best way to snag a position is these days.
“US business continues to boom,” S&P Global Market Intelligence chief business
economist Chris Williamson said in a statement. “To put the growth surge in
context, barring the spike in demand following the opening up of the economy
after the COVID-19 lockdowns, the latest improvement in business activity
is the greatest recorded since early 2015. Business is clearly booming now in
both manufacturing and services.”
Is it booming for everyone except software developers? I keep hearing about developers who have been looking for a job for 6 months or longer and don't get responses to applications.
Or is it some process failure (which you hint at) that is making it difficult to capitalize on that boom?
Most job growth for the past several years has been in the healthcare, leisure and hospitality, and construction sectors. Removing these sectors makes job growth negative for 2024 and 2025, and wipes out the majority of job growth in 2026. See https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/economy/spotl...
Speculation, but: if tech over hired during COVID our section of the market could be experiencing a corrective slowdown while others are booming in aggregate.
The article is talking about "The Economy" (read: stocks and bonds), not employment numbers. The market can both be awful for job seekers and great for capital owners.
I've been hearing people looking for jobs with (to me) weird theories about fake/ghost job postings, that the employer never plans to fill... they have various theories of why (hypothetical) employers would do this that I don't quite follow.
Has anyone else heard of/seen this, or can explain where it's coming from or if it means anything?
It is absolutely and undeniably a real phenomenon. Take your pick of explanations, nobody actually knows for sure, but you have to tell yourself something or you’d toss your phone out the window when you get the 40th notification that you might be interested in the exact same job that auto-rejected you the previous 39 times. Speaking from personal experience over the last year.
The simple explanation is incompetence: the ratio of false negatives is too high, so everyone has a story of being rejected from jobs they could perfectly fulfil. The ratio of false positives is also high, so jobs remain open for longer they should.
I recently met the CTO of a unicorn in a social function, and they urged me to apply, he would fast track. I interviewed there before, got an offer but decided to go somewhere else. Even with a face-to-face invitation from the CTO and obviously having passed an interview in the past, they rejected me.
There is no end to incompetence in modern business.
Earlier this summer I applied for a job at a local startup that I had all the qualifications for and quite a bit of relevant experience. I got a rejection email within 48 hours. Eventually I happened to meet with one of the founders through a connection and had a chat, he said how amazing it was that someone local had worked on similar problems in the past. In the end he said that unfortunately they don't have the capacity to expand the team right now.
Their job postings are currently still up on their site and linkedin.
I at least was pretty disappointed to scroll down and discover this is a self-promotion. I'm willing to accept some level of slop for an interesting analysis, but an AI-generated report to promote your AI-generated product with AI-generated copy is too much.
Probably a lot of those that have remained open will also stay that way, because they are (1) fake job ads, or (2) job ads of companies, where you don't even reach a human soul during the application process, and the companies don't realize how broken their hiring process really is, or (3) job ads of companies, who have so unrealistic idea about what they are looking for and what they themselves are actually offering to attract whomever they are looking for, that almost no one applying meets the criteria.
Probably I also forgot some more categories of crazy hiring processes in my enumeration.
I've about given up looking for a remote job even as a software engineer with over 20+ years of experience especially with macOS since I never seem to get a reply or "no longer accepting applicants".
I talked to a hiring manager friend at a big company you've definitely heard of. I was looking for a job so I sent him a link to one of his jobs and said "can I interview for this?"
He said: Oh, I have 23 recs on the job site but none of them are open. They just keep them there to make us look like we're still hiring like crazy.
Yeah, common knowledge sadly. Can get even worse, a friend had recently an interview with a, not-so-well-known, but you heard of them company and they didn't do any face to face interview, just AI driven via email, all steps. When he failed a step: they offered him some credits on the platform, literally a funnel via a job post (it's a dev platform).
I sent a few CVs recently trying to get a fully remote job and the experience has been miserable.
From what I can tell the job posting have been opened for a while, companies are inundated with CVs thanks to them offering remote and form the screening feedback I had (when I was lucky to get any feedback) it was basically that they can be as picky as they want and hire people who matches every single one of their requirements.
On the flip side at my work (FAANG, not remote) we barely get any CVs from people who can pass the technical screening. Most the candidate fail so badly it’s not even funny
> On the flip side at my work (FAANG, not remote) we barely get any CVs from people who can pass the technical screening. Most the candidate fail so badly it’s not even funny
Same experience in multiple YC startups whose payment isn't even that competitive. Half of the resumes don't match the qualification, and on top of that the freelancing recruiter doesn't even seem to care. Lately I resorted to hiring from my own network.
How do you build a network? I have a few previous employers, but they don't have any help for me directly, and I haven't had any luck by applying or reaching out to recruiters or agencies.
If you're an individual contributor: keep in touch with colleagues, especially senior level and technical managers, or people going to other companies.
Managers: keep in touch with the best people and just hire them on your next job for more than they were getting paid. Win-win.
It's not easy for everyone, if you don't interact with colleagues outside the job it's probably impossible.
We need to make a law making it punishable to jailtime for posting fake, ghost, harvesting job postings. The proof is things like this - a posting for longer than 90 days.
Sounds like there are too many white collar employees and not enough white collar jobs. The market can pick and choose, wait for the perfect candidate to pop up.
Could also mean 28% of "job" postings are not functioning as described.
Whenever you hear of labor shortages, it is almost always a euphemism for a shortage of people not desperate enough to tolerate a terrible working arrangement.
The "AI" slop from staffing agencies, lead-generators, applicants, and data scrapers... have dropped the signal to noise ratio into spam number territory. =3
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 16.5 ms ] threadIt's happened so many times. Apply for a job, within an hour get an email that says I am not qualified (not true), and then a week later the same job gets posted again.
I'm normally a pretty free-market guy, but it should be illegal. It's clear-cut fraud - they are advertising something that doesn't exist, specifically to game numbers. And what's more, governments report on these numbers as if they are real job opportunities in the economy.
I know this analogy breaks down a little bit since this behavior does actually happen, sort of, in real life p2p markets but the point is, it sucks and if you've ever sold anything on fb marketplace you know how obnoxious it is dealing with people who demand a lot of you but do not intend to actually commit to buying what you're selling.
But I certainly feel ripped off applying for jobs they never intended on filling. If they put up a lot of hoops to jump through to apply (submit a portfolio, set up an account, write a cover letter specific to our company), times that by the 1000 people who have applied, and it's an exorbitant amount of human time getting wasted.
Why though? I've done hiring before - it takes less than 30 seconds to skim a resume. The recruiters also have no idea what the responsibility is for the jobs they are hiring for - it's a terrible place to bottleneck candidates on.
It sounds like everyone, including recruiters, are being sent on a snipe hunt.
Hiring has been crazy for years. It's worse with remote jobs because you get a firehose of applicants everywhere.
When I was doing a lot of hiring I tried to be as responsive as possible because you don't want to lose the best candidates. I would try to review applicants as fast as they came in. You have to understand that in that hour I might get 40 resumes. 1 or 2 are amazing, another 2-3 could be worth a look, and another 5 might have made the cut if I didn't just read those 2-5 much better resumes ahead of them.
If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
The simpler explanation is that a tired hiring manager was just clicking buttons to dismiss applicants who didn't make the cut.
That assumes that I am writing my resume for just your job posting. If I am just going to copy and paste the job requirement verbatim on my resume, doesn't that make your job screening applicants for actual experience much harder? Often times the difference is splitting hairs anyway ("we're looking for someone who paints brown houses").
But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them, I would just frankly not have the time to do so.
Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody. The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.
What can you do to increase the odds that you're in the top 10 (and preferably top 5)?
It's possible that a superficial reason was used to separate number 10 from number 11 ... and maybe number 11 would have been a great candidate and future employee. What I don't have is three weeks to do all day 9-5 1h long interviews for every candidate.
Regardless - it would be nothing to show some basic human decency and respect:
- Review them more often until you get the 5 quality candidates to interview (there's no way in hell you actually review all 100 resumes fully - quit sitting on them for weeks and weeks)
- Take down the posting after resumes are reviewed
- Submit a basic and honest response for the people who's resumes didn't make the consideration
- A simple human note for the candidates who were considered but didn't make the interview
- Timely closer for the interviewed candidates who didn't get the job
None of these add any substantial time to the hiring process, but can go a long way to remember the human in a job market that's an absolutely brutal and soulless Leviathan right now.
After two weeks, the posting is taken down.
> - Submit a basic and honest response for the people who's resumes didn't make the consideration
If you have 200 resumes in the pool and 100 of them weren't passed on for additional consideration because they didn't meet the requirements (education, needing visa sponsorship, outside of the country, not following the instructions for the application), how long will that take?
Furthermore, in the litigious nation we live in, that information when provided honestly has tended to lead to lawsuits ("I wasn't considered because...").
> - A simple human note for the candidates who were considered but didn't make the interview
That's another 100 candidates. Three minutes each to write the email? That's three hours of someone's day. Again, this gets to the litigious situations. It only takes the allegation of bias to lead to a lawsuit - that costs way more than three hours of my day.
This is the public sector, we don't pay a lot - that's why it's only 200 applications. In the private sector it wouldn't be hard to multiply that number by 3 or 4.
> - Timely closer for the interviewed candidates who didn't get the job
This is something that we're good at. The people who were interviewed know by the end of the week. Job posting opening to the selection being made is four weeks.
I can understand the justification for all of the other choices. But it doesn't mean I have to like it. The whole process is degrading and dehumanizing, and it's something that has gotten much, much worse in the last decade.
These lawsuits aren't a myth, if you hire a lot of people it'll eventually happen, even if you're not violating any laws. The lawsuits, even when you win, waste time and money. Giving reasons, especially customized "human" responses is absolutely going to increase your chances of being sued.
It did not take long for one of them to try to turn it against me with threats. We would have easily won the case, but having a lawsuit hanging over my head and a target on my back as a liability for the company was not a good feeling.
I no longer give specific feedback.
Minor nit, but it’s even worse than that: 300 minutes is five hours of someone’s day.
Generic rejections like "we moved with other candidates" tells me nothing. So noise remains because candidates don't have feedback to improve upon. All because HR wants minimize lawsuits through obscurity.
Regardless of whether it’s a low-trust society, a litigious society, or El Niño, I will refrain from specific feedback if that puts those groups at risk.
It doesn't make the hiring manager's job harder if you decline to customize your resume. They press reject and move to the next resume.
> Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody.
If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.
If there was a hidden requirement to know Python but the job listing didn't ask for it, you get a lot of applicants that don't fit. Smart hiring managers will update the job listing as they review candidates. There are some lazy companies that will have secret requirements that they don't put in the job listing, but that only creates more work for everyone involved. It's not a secret trick they're pulling to be mean. They're just bad at their jobs.
> The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.
Unpopular opinion around these parts, but there's a high correlation between the best candidates and people who take the time to review the job posting and customize their resume before submitting.
I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
> But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them,
Complaining about low response rates and refusing to tailor your resume are highly correlated, in my observation.
Like, it's obvious to me why a true Jack of all trades would use different resumes for applying to a plumber role vs a carpenter role, but less clear why a career plumber would tailor resumes for applying to two plumber roles at slightly different companies.
Go to the most popular LLM (ie Claude). Give it the job description. Give it your resume. Ask it for percentage match, it will give you a number. Then ask for advice on improving your resume, you can either ask to rework the resume by itself (if you're in a hurry) or you can work with the thing to modify the sections/entries yourself, one by one, if you have time. With each modification you will get better and better percentage match. Ideally you need to get to high 80% or maybe even 90%.
The idea is that automated ranking tools used by recruiters/HR are ultimately use the very same LLM, so you are improving your ranking assigned to your resume by those ranking systems.
I have to add that now this advice is mostly useless as everybody's using the same technique so you won't be standing up against others but merely be on the same level.
Add to it the fact that many job descriptions are inaccurate and sometimes downright misleading, and hiring managers use their own criteria, and you will understand why connections/referrals is probably the only way to get hired now.
The thing though is it's a bad requirement. There are any number of great candidates who could be proficient in Python - the skills are very transferrable. (It's like trying to find a painter and filtering out people who have never painted a brown houses)
The thing you're screening for by being so specific is not finding the most qualified person, you're going to end up with the person with the most time and patience to fib or lie on their resume.
> I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
That's exactly wrong - the best candidates are going to be busy people who are great at their job - the people jumping through HR hoops to get hired are by nature going to be worse candidates.
Out of those about half had no experience in backend or python, plus weren't senior enough for us to consider. Or forgot to include all that in their CV. They get filtered out in the first filter phase.
While I'm sure a portion of those could do the job, I can't realistically interview those 300 people when there are other 300 who happen to have at least written that in their CV.
I don't think you understand.
You have to prioritize. You can't interview everyone.
There may be someone in the rejection pool who might be able to pick up Python quickly and enjoy it. It does not matter if I have 10 people who can bring 5 years of Python experience to the first day on the job, and 1-2 more people who can bring 10+ years and probably teach us something about Python.
> the skills are very transferrable. (It's like trying to find a painter and filtering out people who have never painted a brown houses)
I've painted houses. I've done programming. This analogy is not good at all. Some people don't adapt well to new programming languages. Some people try, then decide they hate the new language and start looking for new jobs. You don't have to risk any of this when you already have more Python applicants than interview slots.
Do you really think the best candidates are ones who are bothering to cold apply through hiring portals to begin with? The best interviewers, sure.
For people who are actively searching, 10 minutes for 100 applications is 15 hours of work. Reply rates can be as bad as 1 in 500. In this kind of market you want to get that application rate down to 2-3 minutes. There's no time nor point to tailoring towards dream jobs; oods are you dreams were crushed 200 applications ago.
There's no particular reason your time is more valuable. We're all just trying to survive in these tumultuous times.
I've done volunteer resume review and interview coaching in the past.
The only people getting response rates that low either had the most awful resumes you've ever seen, or they were applying for jobs completely out of their league.
Like the 23 year old applying for Staff Software Engineer jobs as the next step up from his junior position (which he was laid off from) with 6 typos in his resume and an e-mail address of ninjadude69@hotmail.com at the top of his resume.
There's also a high correlation between matching the job description perfectly and the resume being AI generated and/or dishonest. Doubly so if the requirements are overly specific or contain pure nonsense as some do (saw "Must have 5 years experience with Claude Code" recently). You can filter out people who blatantly don't match the job and those who obviously just copied the job description. Never seen much correlation between the quality of resumes in the middle (ok to great) and how well they do in interviews.
Not to mention at many places "requirements" are mere suggestions or a low-effort list of technologies taken from the resume of the person who quit. Everybody has their own filtering rules and hiring managers rarely agree with each other much less the HR people usually doing the first round of filtering. The true requirements come out only at the resume filtering or interview stage.
>I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
The "best candidate" a lot of times doesn't mean the best able to do the job. It often means the ones who 1. makes the hiring manager feel good by being enthusiastic about their (statistically) average job for average pay and 2. minimizes their perceived risk of looking bad for their hiring choice.
>If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.
If you're not a FAANGMULA type place then sure. But also if your job posting lists something like "Python 3.14" or "7+ years Python" I know the hiring manager probably doesn't know the first thing about python. In that case I think it's fair for any decent programmer to lie because they will likely surpass the hiring managers knowledge by studying python a bit before the interview.
If the resume is dishonest we find out in the phone screens or first interview rounds, and the candidate is tossed.
While not as bad as applying yourself, they can be pretty damned awful.
You have to appear like a real human. The candidates in demand get recruiter spam all week long. If you go LLM slop canon on their inbox they're not going to respond.
Cold outreach has a low response rate. It's worth doing, but you can't rely on it. You have to go through all angles.
Typically I'd be doing a mix of my own cold outreach, public job postings, an internal company referral program, and for difficult roles a trusted external recruiter who I know is good for candidates.
Now people act like they must have this ridiculous firehose of resumes to sort through, then have non-technical HR gals sort and filter out based on whatever random criteria they use, and then by the time it gets to the hiring managers - they still have no idea if this person is a complete idiot or has any skills at all. The qualified people you actually want to hire don’t want to be treated like idiots or liars either.
I just don’t feel it has to be this way - there is zero value in a firehose unless you were looking for desperate and cheap people.
It's always been the case, but now it's more true than ever: your professional network is super important. If somebody on the inside can recommend you, your chances of getting an offer are good compared to throwing your resume on the pile.
This sounds like a dream. We posted a job a couple of weeks ago and had 1200 applications in around 2 days. Most are complete garbage. I'm confused why they took the time to apply at all, even if AI did it for them.
Being unemployed is hard and can be really demoralizing. Try thinking “I’m probably helping someone pay rent until they find a job listing that works for them” when you’re rejecting obviously unsuitable applications. It at least makes the “wtf”-ness of some of them seem a little less weird.
I could believe this if you were in a population 5,000 town with few employers and the person applying had to work in person.
In our industry, where there are 1000 different remote job listings available to anyone at any time, there is no justification for this.
Do you mean that there's no reason to send resumes or to wherever or that there's no reason to be unemployed given the theoretically endless number of postings?
Resumes are only a 1 page summary (2 if you're really experienced) and this kind of market has you doing hundreds of submissions if you lack connections (or your connections are also job searching). You don't have the time to tailor every application for every role.
A shame because LLMs should really be perfect at this. Most current tools are too obsessed with writing for you (and creating a blander resume) instead of just taking a master CV and drag and dropping the most applicable roles/projects/experiences in.
I see a position getting posted for a local company, and within hours the same requirements are showing up for 10 new postings with vague company names like "... is wanted for a local manufacturer" etc.
Those regulations aren't perfect, but after working at one it became pretty clear that a lot of these things wouldn't fly if a bank did them.
Falsely advertise a financial offering? Pretty clearly actionable.
Ghost someone after they inquire about one? Deny them for some vague reason? Even just give them an unfavorable rate without specifying as much? None of those things would hold up. You have to send notices of any adverse action you take, not just providing clear communication that you're taking some kind of action against them, but giving a clear and objective reason why.
Call around to everyone someone might have worked for or with for references, without their knowledge or consent? See "clear and objective reason why." Also, if you use a third party to do this there are a whole collection of responsibilities under the Fair Credit Reporting Act -- you have to provide people with copies of the information gathered on request, inform them anytime it's used against them, offer some process for disputing incorrect details... And that threshold is from gathering the data, not from scoring it.
Never mind equity compensation, which is somehow special in terms of financial disclosures -- whether that's relative to the same company later offering the same stock to the public, or just more generally to any kind of investment offer.
None of this is any less unreasonable on the employer side.
It would be genuinely shocking to me if someone came up with evidence that the majority of jobs on job sites were made by companies that actually intended to hire the best candidate that applied through that site!
Every company I’ve worked at, from startups to big tech have had job listings open when they want to hire someone. Sometimes a job post will stay open for months or even years, not because it is fake but because finding the right candidate is far more important than finding a candidate.
I empathize with the frustrating experience of seeing job listings that you’re qualified for and not being hired, and certainly a lot of companies half-ass their hiring and do not review every applicant, but fake job listings make very little sense. When they do occur, it’s for obscure reasons, not because that is standard operating procedure.
The whoishiring thread here on HN regularly sees candidates accuse regularly posting companies of not actually hiring, even though there’s ample evidence these companies are hiring.
Re: the original claim about job posts being created when the company already has an internal candidate, there are very few organizations where that is necessary. A private company rarely has an obligation to consider outside candidates, it is mostly seen in government recruitment. Job sites charge lots of money to list, a company wouldn’t waste money advertising a job they don’t intend to hire for.
2024.
https://clarifycapital.com/job-seekers-beware-of-ghost-jobs-...
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12977
I'm still waiting for they evidence they don't exist, which was conspicuously absent from your post despite its length.
Even within this HN post there are people claiming that almost 100% of the whoishiring jobs are fake which is demonstrably untrue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49823091
And to reflect that, the jobs I've gotten were the ones you'd only accept if you were really desperate.
(Covid Times, man: Covid Times.)
The internet has turned the cost of the vast majority of job postings to almost nothing.
Based on that information you tell me how you think the incentives will work?
If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that.
There are also specialty roles where hiring takes months. I've had niche roles open where we didn't get any applicants with any experience on the topic for over 90 days on multiple occasions.
They've got a few open spots if you're interested in relocating to Springfield, MO (and even some entry level IT positions https://careers.oreillyauto.com/us/en/job/R203370/IT-Support... - that one was posted 09/21/2026)
Surprisingly I had better benefits at the two contracting firms than what employees were getting.
Maybe I'm thinking a bit too much of myself, but it doesn't seem like they are that interested in really filling it.
So what would happen is I'd have say 10 real openings, I may have 5 different job postings, and all of them would stay open until I filled all 10 openings.
I can believe that your company has a good reason for keeping the job up, but I also know that some job ads are black holes were no one bothers to do the bare minimum including taking the posting down. I have no idea how to differentiate one from the other.
It's not surprising about LinkedIn. They've made applying for jobs too easy so there's too much noise. I wouldn't bother applying for jobs there. LinkedIn is great for recruiters though - just put some effort into your profile, set it to "looking for work", and then reply to interesting recruiter spam. That's how I got my last 3 jobs.
Companies don't need a "software engineer" x100.
Large companies have teams, and every team puts out a different job description based on their particular requirements, stack, desired experience, etc.
I've never encountered a scenario where someone wants engineers in bulk and then they'll decide where to put them in the org.
How on earth am I, a potential job seeker, supposed to be able to figure out if your year-old job posting is still up because you: couldn't find anyone after a year, are constantly hiring and never take it down, actually hired your quota six months ago and HR forgot to take the listing down, the job listing isn't for a real job and is just a trap to collect resumes, the listing is for a ghost job to placate the overworked current staff, some other reason?
because luckily in the UK market - companies books are open to the public.
This is really shitty behavior. If you aren't hiring, remove the posting.
WTF do these people doing hiring actually do?
I mean, naïvely you’d think encouraging more higher quality applicants would be important somehow, but no.
I'm not confused that's just a red flag not to work for your company.
At one point I flatly threatened to hiring agency I am quitting the process if this goes on further, and all was finished within a week or two.
Corporations work in mysterious (aka chaotic) ways. Even though it usually boils down to specific manager being lazy ass.
I mean in University there were tests where you were allowed to bring a cheat sheet, or even a bag full of books. So called bag tests. And people were still able to fail. Although I never had the latter in my curriculum.
I think it's necessary that teams for which people are hired for brainstorm up-to-date tests. Just recycling the same challenge from 3 years ago isn't good enough.
Feel like any test nowadays should INCLUDE ai, but you likely just want insight into how they are getting from A to B. I don't wanna assume what you mean by cheating with AI, could be as simple as answering live questions with cheating software or whatever, which is obviously a huge issue. I wanna respond and say it should be expected for any take home type stuff, and be rolled into the expectations if anything, but that could be way off of what you mean.
both sides of the entire process is just a nightmare now, one side has all this noise to sift through, and the other side is pressured to mass apply because of all the competing noise they can't be seen through. I was listening to something about AI generated responses, and they seemed to have no empathy for the people who gave human responses, but used AI to give them an overview of the company and what it does for the question "why do you want to work at x?", and sorta mocked the person because they can tell they asked for a generic description of what the company does.
There has to be some give and take, initial applications if you are spending hours researching a single company, you are setting yourself up to be absurdly let down if that same company sends you an automated rejection within a day. A reasonable person will only do that so many times, before just giving up and waiting for the other side to be the first mover instead.
These companies have lost their minds.
IME (hiring, not interviewing) it's always been 3-4 rounds. First is an HR phone screen (usually 20-30 minutes on the phone), 2nd with hiring manager, 3rd with a senior engineer/architect, and a 4th with the hiring VP. And those are almost always combined into a single morning or afternoon(2+3 or 3+4) and the final round doesn't always happen (VP's choice).
Sounds like asking a lot from candidates but unfortunately candidates lie a lot and the cost of hiring candidates that don’t match up to the requirements when paying $300k-$500k/year is just too high. Firing people is hard and takes a long time, especially in management roles. My personal guidance to managers is to have rounds match the level and experience required for the job. You can hire an intern with 2 rounds after the hiring manager conversation but a staff IC probably needs 5, directors need 7.
Job is posted. You apply along with hundreds of other people. The recruiter/hiring manager needs to spend some time sifting through them along with juggling all the other tasks they have going on. Let's say that this takes 1-2 weeks. Some places may let the opening sit longer to get more applicants.
Several candidates are identified as possible fits. Recruiter reaches out to them to schedule the recruiter screen. Schedules need to line up. This likely takes 1-2 weeks until the recruiter screen happens.
The recruiter needs to schedule the tech screen after a successful recruiter screen. Again, schedules need to line up. This could take another 1-2 weeks.
Feedback needs to be submitted and then the onsite round is scheduled. This could take another 1-2 weeks.
The onsite round will have multiple interviewers. This means more people to collect feedback from which likely increases delays in getting that. A debrief is normally scheduled with everyone who interviewed them. But let's say one week to gather this and make a decision.
An offer is made. It takes some time to prepare and get sign off. There will be time to discuss with the recruiter to explain the details, plus some time needed for negotiation and thinking it over. This could be another 1-2 weeks.
Additionally, some candidates may want to ask for more time during these phases in order to prepare better or align their schedules. This pushes back the process for all other candidates if the company is hiring for a specific job in order to give all candidates a fair assessment against the pool.
Adding this all up, we arrive at 6-10 weeks.
But it still doesn't sound like a very effective process typed out like this.
What would you do to make it more effective?
>What would you do to make it more effective?
I'd ask companies who have managed to get the process down to 2-3 weeks what they're doing, and then do that. It sounds like you're saying they don't actually care to, though.
Well there it is. Suggestions don't matter if there's no one in power who cares. Have them care and suddenly we'd be able to get people hired in 2-4 weeks.
Otherwise it's not rocket science. And you're not hiring rocket scientists. It shouldn't take more than 3 stages to know if a candidate can do the job:recruiter screen, main interview, negotiation meeting. If you need more people in the know, they join on the main day. If they can't, it clearly isn't important enough for their scope of responsibilities (does a skip manager 3 levels up really need to personally meet a candidate?)
Last place I applied to, one screening and two interviews, took several months, and in the end came second even though I was ready to take 700€ paycut. The job was basic AV&network upkeep, felt like I was applying to become an astronaut.
It can move faster than months, of course, when everyone's willing to prioritize it. But as anyone who's worked in hiring can tell you, the set of people who want hiring to move faster is much larger than the set of people who are willing to accept inconvenient interviews and fill out their feedback promptly.
Companies feel like they have no choice, for two reasons:
1. Jurisdictions where workers must give minimum notice periods before leaving their prior employer - the worker accepts a competing offer, gives notice, waits out the notice period, then starts. And many workers often ask for additional unpaid time between jobs before starting (since no vacation days have been accrued yet at the new job).
2. Hiring happens by committee. In most companies, job candidates must be interviewed by, at the absolute minimum, an HR screener, the hiring manager, and the hiring skip-level; and usually also by people who will be peer teammates, plus an HR "culture" interview. If you need to pass a committee of 3-6 people, interviews must be scheduled with each member of the committee; at one committee member per week, that is 3-6 weeks.
6 weeks (1.5 months) plus background checks plus getting pay packages approved plus 30 day notice periods plus two weeks unpaid vacation is, yes, a multiple month endeavor at minimum to fill a role. The only way to fill a role within a week is to grant full hiring autonomy to the hiring manager and only hire people who are currently unemployed (and therefore have no notice period or desire to take more unpaid time before starting), which in most companies beyond early startup size, is a complete non-starter.
It may sound like I'm blaming candidates, and sometimes it might be fair to, but this is also a problem caused by companies not investing in training and hiring junior level employees, which means that people who are unqualified feel forced to apply for more senior roles, as those are the only roles hiring. It's honestly shocking how many candidates I've interviewed in my career who don't even meet the basic bar for the role they've applied for, and are essentially just hoping to get lucky and snag a high-paying tech job even if it ultimately results in them being terminated, they can collect a check for 3-9 months without delivering.
Mass applications, AI cheating, fraudulent representation (e.g. saying you are person X but are actually interviewing on behalf of person X who you are not), lying on resumes and in screeners, and even nation state attacks on hiring (see North Korea trying to farm tech jobs for money to get around sanctions), it's not great on the hiring side either.
Any manager will tell you, they’d rather not go through the long hiring process.
Even with that, it's a very arduous process to fire people. Even in cases where they refuse to show up for work, I've seen HR departments asking managers to "try harder".
The reason is simply that HR departments are extremely inefficient machines.
Grow some balls, do a couple interviews, and just pick the candidate you like the most. You're hiring for a glorified IT guy, not a NASA astronaut. Companies that stretch out the process to a ridiculous degree need to get over themselves.
2 months later recruiter from the same company hit me up. Told them I already passed the interview just give me the job already. Oops no roles, you just have to wait! So why are you reaching out? Couldn’t give me an answer.
At least in (Northen) Europe ghost jobs are a pain on the ass in most industries, even for low-skilled labour. Hiring companies - not the actual companies that need a worker, but an intermediate - try to just amass a database of workers so they can say to their client that we have hundreds of people with these qualifications ready to come to work for you. It’s not even legal, but they still do it.
I think a lot of these problems are created by the companies themselves, and to lesser degree by candidates. Posting ghost jobs, asking for insane qualifications to run a simple website, interview process lasting 3 months… And candidates firehosing the job ads with bs CV’s generated by LLMs does not help. Currently I think you need to know somebody inside the company pretty well to get hired.
The fix would be pretty simple: > Grow some balls, do a couple interviews, and just pick the candidate you like the most.
Starvation's a very powerful motivator for most people.
IMO the reason it takes longer now is because multiple people are getting interviewed simultaneously.
Considering job postings are getting 10x more resumes than before, I'm not surprised companies are hedging their bets and interviewing way more people for the same position.
If so, 14 days is unheard of. Tell us more.
1) Roles with high turnover. Likely the posting stays always on. 2) The pay is bad and nobody takes the job. 3) The role is too niche and the candidates in the market with visibility to the role are very few. 4) Aggressive hiring. Candidates have many options and until they actually show up at work, you keep interviewing other candidates. 5) Forgotten posts / ghost posts (my gut feeling says that this is the lowest contributor to the spike we observe, as likely it should be flat over time)
Been working professionally for ~15 years or so, and it's never been this bad. Other than "knowing someone" (i.e. a referral, and even that falls through routinely), not sure what the best way to snag a position is these days.
Is it booming for everyone except software developers? I keep hearing about developers who have been looking for a job for 6 months or longer and don't get responses to applications.
Or is it some process failure (which you hint at) that is making it difficult to capitalize on that boom?
Business doing good doesn't automatically mean populations of humans are doing good themselves.
Has anyone else heard of/seen this, or can explain where it's coming from or if it means anything?
I recently met the CTO of a unicorn in a social function, and they urged me to apply, he would fast track. I interviewed there before, got an offer but decided to go somewhere else. Even with a face-to-face invitation from the CTO and obviously having passed an interview in the past, they rejected me.
There is no end to incompetence in modern business.
Their job postings are currently still up on their site and linkedin.
https://basecareer.co/ is basically the same slop.
Probably I also forgot some more categories of crazy hiring processes in my enumeration.
Career sites would do well to automatically close job listings after 90 days or so.
He said: Oh, I have 23 recs on the job site but none of them are open. They just keep them there to make us look like we're still hiring like crazy.
In HN's Who's Hiring it is very close to 100%, so I don't look at that thread anymore.
The solution: use AI robots for jobs.
From what I can tell the job posting have been opened for a while, companies are inundated with CVs thanks to them offering remote and form the screening feedback I had (when I was lucky to get any feedback) it was basically that they can be as picky as they want and hire people who matches every single one of their requirements.
On the flip side at my work (FAANG, not remote) we barely get any CVs from people who can pass the technical screening. Most the candidate fail so badly it’s not even funny
Same experience in multiple YC startups whose payment isn't even that competitive. Half of the resumes don't match the qualification, and on top of that the freelancing recruiter doesn't even seem to care. Lately I resorted to hiring from my own network.
Managers: keep in touch with the best people and just hire them on your next job for more than they were getting paid. Win-win.
It's not easy for everyone, if you don't interact with colleagues outside the job it's probably impossible.
Whenever you hear of labor shortages, it is almost always a euphemism for a shortage of people not desperate enough to tolerate a terrible working arrangement.
The "AI" slop from staffing agencies, lead-generators, applicants, and data scrapers... have dropped the signal to noise ratio into spam number territory. =3