[HN Gopher] 1 in 5 online job postings are either fake or never ...
___________________________________________________________________
1 in 5 online job postings are either fake or never filled, study
finds
Author : belter
Score : 368 points
Date : 2025-01-14 14:44 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| grajaganDev wrote:
| This is clearly fraud and needs to stop.
|
| Companies behaving like this demand regulation. Instead of
| whining about regulation, read the room and don't bring it on
| yourselves.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| The outrage from job seekers is justified but Gizmodo doesn't
| help matters by categorising fraud (fake jobs) with failure
| (never filled). Hiring is hard, as anyone who has ever done it
| will attest, and very many vacancies opened in good faith are not
| filled for a variety of reasons - budget pulled, hiring manager
| won't make a decision, internal candidate appears at late stage
| etc.
|
| We also need to draw a distinction between employers posting jobs
| directly vs 3rd party agencies posting jobs for the company's
| they represent, or purport to represent. There is a disincentive
| for the former to post 'fake jobs' - who wants to deal with the
| applicant flow, but an incentive for the latter to do so -
| harvest resume's, build a database.
|
| Anyways. My point is, there _is_ a problem but mainstream
| magazine treatment like this from Gizmodo serves to add smoke
| when there's already a fire
| reptation wrote:
| Sure, hiring is hard but the factors you mention are rare, and
| teams are extremely motivated to fill vacancies.
| derektank wrote:
| Teams are also strongly motivated to not hire a bad team
| member that drags down morale and wastes resources. I want to
| say this is more true in government hiring, where it's
| difficult to fire people, but I've seen private companies
| hold out for a long time until they find someone with the
| right combination of cultural fit and technical skills.
| spratzt wrote:
| It's extraordinary how frequently companies discuss the
| cost of a bad hire and never consider the opportunity cost
| of a no-hire.
|
| Companies that keep waiting for Mr. Right are really saying
| that the opportunity cost of not completing their project
| is very low. In other words it's not really that important
| at all.
| danaris wrote:
| On the contrary. "Not completing the project" is not an
| option--if they don't hire someone to fill a vacancy on
| the team, the rest of the team will just be expected to
| work extra hours to keep up.
|
| Oh, not with overtime--you're salaried, remember?
| (Alternate version: Oh, no, you can't actually log the
| extra hours; we don't have the budget for overtime, and
| I, the manager, can't be seen asking for more money, or
| it would affect my bonus!)
|
| And you'd _better_ step up and work those hours. You want
| to be seen as a _team player_ , right?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Not completing the project" is not an option--if they
| don't hire someone to fill a vacancy on the team, the
| rest of the team will just be expected to work extra
| hours to keep up.
|
| And that's the opportunity cost we don't talk about. The
| cost isn't "we slow down on a project from a bad hire".
| It's "demoralize/burned out engineers quit to a point
| where the deadline is impossible to reach". You can't
| force overtime to engineers that leave and take their
| institutional knowledge with them
|
| There's also a lot of fake job postings as a sort of
| carrot to overworked engineers that "promise more help is
| coming". Which is just as ingenuous to existing employees
| as it is to applicants.
| NVHacker wrote:
| The way I read it, Gizmodo cannot tell whether those jobs are
| fake or just never filled. How could anyone tell from outside ?
| The visible fact is that no-one is hired for those jobs.
| spandrew wrote:
| Disagree.
|
| If you post a job then reneg on it that still leaves folks out
| in the cold who are, in earnest, looking for work. Mistakes
| happen, and I don't blame hiring managers for the shifting
| financial landscapes they often have to face. But that job
| wasn't solid enough to count as a real position.
|
| Lump them together.
| lazide wrote:
| A posting which was never intended to be filled is still
| different than one that was intended to be filled, but never
| actually happened.
|
| Good luck telling them apart however.
|
| If you make it so every posting has to be filled or it's
| 'fraud', it will be an even bigger mess.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| Maybe, but it's too hard to distinguish between the jobs
| that were posted with intention to not be filled and jobs
| that were posted with intention to be filled but through
| other circumstances weren't. So the distinction is moot.
|
| It's a lot like this website. It used to be pretty obvious
| which comments were trolls and which are real people but
| more and more the people have gotten dumber and the trolls
| gotten smarter so it's almost impossible to tell the
| difference between maliciousness and stupidity and for the
| rest of us it doesn't really matter one way or the other. A
| person wasting our time is a person wasting our time, the
| intentions aren't important.
| Bjartr wrote:
| > So the distinction is moot.
|
| From the perspective of an applicant's emotional
| response, sure, but it's absolutely relevant in order to
| have a conversation about how to solve it since the
| different causes may need different approaches, or may
| occur in sufficiently differing rates to influence which
| should be addressed first.
| grajaganDev wrote:
| The distinction is also moot from perspective of an
| individuals's time being cavalierly wasted by a large
| corporation.
| lazide wrote:
| Just wait until you start thinking about _dating_.
|
| But if we're claiming fraud, either way the intent is
| actually the deciding factor. You can't commit fraud
| without a guilty mind (mens rea)- at least in any
| jurisdiction I'm aware of.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Modern dating sucks, but at least half the time there's a
| real human on the other side that isn't a corporation
| trying to sell me something.
|
| And yes, that's what audits are for. To deduce intent by
| investigating from within, something we could never do.
| lazide wrote:
| nah, fake profiles are a huge problem. depending on the
| site, it could easily be 1 to 5 real:fake or more.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I did say 1 in 2 weren't bots. I wouldn't say that's
| great in any measure when your goal is some form of
| companionship.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| different is a matter of use case. The difference doesn't
| matter to the applicant. It probably does if you propose
| the death penalty for posting fake listings.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| A fine large enough to make bad job postings (genuine or
| not) unprofitable is fine. We don't need reducto ad
| absurdum here.
|
| Just make businesses put thought into their postings and
| not let someone who has no idea of the qualifications
| right them up themselves.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| There is nothing wrong with reductor ad absurdum to make
| a point about dependency and categories. It is the
| primary use case.
|
| I think there are a million practical challenges to
| implementing a fine. I wonder if there is enough
| incentives to draw employers to a verified list service.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Sure there is, it's in the name. We don't need an absurd
| argument for a punishment that is straightforward to
| explain. You usually use absurdum to simplify complex
| topics.
|
| Or I suppose to win a presidential debate, these days.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I brought it up because people seemed genuinely confused
| on the idea that job listing background could matter for
| one person and not for another.
|
| Of course it is subjective until you introduce a context.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's even harder to tell them apart in a bear market where
| the job market is stacked in favor of employers (for the
| moment).
|
| With the current glut of laid off engineering talent in the
| hiring pool, if an employer cannot find a candidate, they
| are not really serious about hiring. Yes, there's more
| filtering involved now, but you can't say that the
| candidates don't exist.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Every posting needs to have an honest attempt to fill it. I
| don't know the exact numbers, but if there 1000 applicants
| per posting and you end up reposting your job 4 times,
| there's clearly something amiss.this overlap of 1-4000
| applications and not one of them are worth a call? Even if
| we accept 90% is spam, that's still hundreds of candidates
| in a "recruiters market" being passed over.
| bdcravens wrote:
| There are job postings out there that are solid, but where
| the company is unwilling to pay the recruiter markup, and
| hiring organically just doesn't result in solid candidates.
| Not every company hiring is a Fortune 500 or Big Tech company
| looking to get over on the world. Many are smaller companies
| looking to fill roles but may be lacking in the bandwidth or
| resources to lower expectations and either pay well over
| market or hire downmarket and train extensively. To say these
| companies are hiring fraudulently is unfair.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >hiring organically just doesn't result in solid
| candidates.
|
| If you get one bad hire, it's probably on them
|
| If you get 20 bad hires, it's probably on the company. At
| some point, no matter the size, people really need to look
| at themselves and say if they are really trying to enhance
| their shop and let talent succeed, or if they are a churn
| shop and don't deserve solid candidates to begin with.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I'm not talking about hires, but candidates. Not all
| markets are awash in talent in every stack.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's the same concept. Even with niche tech. If you can't
| hire a good candidate in a buyers market, and repeatedly
| get bad hires, what's your interview pipeline doing?
| Paying too low, getting reqs wrong in a game of
| telephone? Hiring through nepotism instead of merit?
|
| I'm just a bit tired of the "but we need to avoid bad
| hires" narrative. Especially since a certain blundermouth
| more or less said the quiet part out loud for the
| intentions many have with that. It made sense in 2022,
| but is that really an issue in 2025? If you can't "find
| solid candidates" now, how did you Faire in non-bust
| markets?
| kube-system wrote:
| A small relatively unknown company outside of more
| popular job markets will not get huge numbers of
| applicants to posts on a random job board. That doesn't
| make those posts malicious on the company's part. It's
| just a relatively illiquid market.
|
| They may need other help to find a candidate, e.g.
| recruiters. But that's a different topic than the OP,
| which is about "online job postings"
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You really haven't seen how much of a buyers market this
| is, have you? Even small unknown companies can throw a
| post on and get hundreds of responses in hours. Yes, a
| lot is slop, but we're still talking some dozens of
| genuine candidates that needs any job.
|
| > But that's a different topic than the OP, which is
| about "online job postings"
|
| This whole topic is about online job postings. Smaller
| groups that don't just grab their friends need to find
| talent too.
| kube-system wrote:
| I know -- in popular markets, for more general roles, you
| will get lots of valid candidates.
|
| If you need specific skills in a specific geographic
| area, you probably still get a lot of responses, but the
| vast majority (if not all) aren't going to be suitable.
| Really, these jobs don't have much luck being filled on
| job boards, because it isn't the best medium to hire
| those people, but many companies will put them out there
| anyway to broaden their reach.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Sure, it comes down to your filters at the end. But I
| think legitimately needing a unicorn or domain expert is
| different from the above statement of
|
| > hiring organically just doesn't result in solid
| candidates.
|
| the tech hiring has been a bit annoying for a decade now,
| but this simply sounds like a narrative for someone
| simply wanting an H1B rather than one who is simply bad
| at finding talent.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If you get hundreds of apps and you can't get a single
| qualified candidate, you either have a horribly inefficient
| recruiting system or your job needs are so specific that
| general job boards won't help you anyway. If you have years of
| inefficiencies happening without being addressed, at what point
| to we just call it fraud instead?
|
| Or possibly you highly overestimate your job needs vs. The
| requirements posted. Which is endemic of the above reasons
| anyway.
| juujian wrote:
| That would actually be a surprisingly low figure as far as I'm
| concerned.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| I'm thinking exactly the same. Feel like it's more like 3 in 5,
| if not 4 in 5.
|
| I recently commented on another thread about how I managed 2
| interviews and 1 offer out of ~500 applications. Which is kind
| of telling, since it only took 2 actual interviews to get
| another job (alas for less money that I make right now
| anyway)... If the jobs were real, it should be far easier to
| get them.
| convolvatron wrote:
| The part I don't get is that 6 months later I get responses
| to applications. I've talked to recruiters and the picture
| they paint is hundreds or thousands of resumes in the inbox.
| They keep shuffling their search criteria and sometimes
| someone interesting pops out.
|
| That doesn't entirely make sense to me, but something is
| clearly quite broken, and it seems to be as much due to
| incompetence as fraud
| daseiner1 wrote:
| I'll never forget getting a boilerplate rejection email
| from Lockheed Martin 13 months after I applied for an
| internship for the upcoming summer.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I'll try to upstage that!
|
| 20+ years ago I applied, and interviewed for a Federal
| Gov of Canada job. 18 months later they called me to tell
| me I got the job.
|
| I'd been at another job for 16 months!
|
| Glad I didn't take it. Government and traditional big
| corp are very stodgy, slow to change.
| ryandrake wrote:
| This one's not as bad but still amusing: I applied to a
| well-known telecom company that rhymes with "May Pee and
| Pee" and got to the final onsite interview, after which
| they ghosted me. Afterwards, I did the whole round of
| interviews at a different company, got hired, moved my
| family across the country, and got established in that
| new job. A few months later, I got an E-mail from the
| telecom company saying "We would like to interview you
| one last time. Please let us know when you are free." LOL
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Gov of Canada, famously, has some of the most braindead
| slow hiring practices in the country. Their HR teams are
| incredibly bad at their jobs. It's genuinely astounding.
| Last I checked the time from application to starting your
| job could be anywhere from 9 to 18 months. Everyone,
| including the employees, know it, so everyone gets
| "Bridged In" through an internship or hires internally.
| The rules are totally different with internal postings
| and you can get hired in a week if you're a good
| candidate.
| Cerium wrote:
| If you get an interview you are already on a short list. The
| process I usually see is 100's of applications -> screening
| by recruiter and hiring manager -> phone screen 10-20 ->
| coding challenge 3-7 -> onsite 2-3 -> hire 1.
| Clubber wrote:
| >out of ~500 applications
|
| Yea, the process is eating itself. Recruiters automate
| screening and applications automate submitting, so there is
| so much noise, it's difficult.
|
| I'm not saying there aren't ghost jobs, I'm just saying an
| already arduous process is even more so with automation being
| leveraged on both sides.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I remember a few years ago I posted that throughout my
| career, during market ups and downs, my _average_
| application:interview:offer ratio was around 100:10:1 and
| half of HN thought I was exaggerating, or there was something
| wrong with my interviewing, or that I was shotgunning my
| resume, and so on. We 've got an industry full of young
| employees who are seeing the first bear market of their
| lives.
|
| 500:x:1 doesn't seem outrageous at all in a down market. The
| 2:1 interview:offer ratio is actually outstanding, especially
| where the industry is today.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I guess as a "newer employee" (8 years now) I see that and
| say "yeah, that was pretty much my first job search. Maybe
| a bit better reply rate". I may not have been applying for
| jobs in 2008, but I feel this bust isn't just about low
| hiring. And that's what makes it all the worse.
|
| For reference, these 8 years and 3 jobs later, I'm probably
| around 300-20-0. Or 1 if you the count the part time
| freelancing that just showed up out of the blue. But I
| didn't even apply for that.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| It seems like these numbers are purely based on Greenhouse. I
| bet that many companies use less sophisticated approaches like
| just sending resumes to a mailbox and those have higher fake
| rates.
| Havoc wrote:
| That's better than I would have guessed frankly. Internet is
| making it sound like 4 out of 5
| nsagent wrote:
| Well, my recruiter callback ratio is likely 1 out of 5, despite
| having a very VERY niche profile: a PhD focused on NLP for
| creative text generation, especially in video games, and a
| prior career as a game developer.
|
| Needless to say, I've only focused on roles that fit that
| narrow profile. One of the recruiters that contacted me didn't
| even know I worked in games, despite it making up the bulk of
| my work experience (including as a lead developer).
|
| Considering how closely I match this narrow profile, and the
| number of people that likely do, it's weird how low my callback
| ratio has been.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| > One of the recruiters that contacted me didn't even know I
| worked in games
|
| I get that all the time with my setup. "you look like a good
| fit and have lots of experience for XYZ tech". Nowhere on my
| resume does it even mention it. Sometimes I have to look it
| up and see what they are talking about. One of them even went
| on and on about my current job. Despite it only having the
| start date in that spot and no exp on what I do here.
|
| It is blindingly obvious they did not read my resume. They
| are keyword scumming and hoping for the best.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| I think the rate of non-fill is higher. But the reasons for it
| are all over the map. Everything from "we always leave a posting
| up even when we're not really looking just in case the perfect
| candidate happens to walk through the door" but in the mean time
| nobody really pays attention to applicants, to "we weren't
| getting the applicants we wanted with this posting, so we took it
| down and are trying a new posting," to "we're legally obligated
| to post this, but we already have a plan about hiring" whether
| it's someone connected, someone internal, or a preference for H1B
| workers, to all kinds of other scenarios. Anybody who has ever
| applied for a dozen jobs, sent literate applications and
| outreach, and has heard from most of them never to months later
| regardless of actual fit for the job knows this.
| fifilura wrote:
| I think "looking for the perfect candidate" is the most common
| reason by far.
|
| Great developers with domain knowledge are always possible to
| fit in, simply because they are money generators rather than a
| cost.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 100% agree. A big issue with tech is there are so many
| options and domains that for any particular job it can easily
| take even an amazing developer 6-9 months to get up to speed
| if they're unfamiliar with your particular tech stack or
| business area. That's not the case with most other
| professions - if I'm, for example, a professional violin
| player, I can play in basically any orchestra in the world
| and be proficient from day 1.
|
| So if you happen to find that unicorn who is not only a great
| developer but is also expert in the major areas of your tech
| stack _and_ your business domain, you hire them in a
| heartbeat.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Sounds like something many technical professions have to
| deal with. Even with all the licenses and certs in the
| world, very few lawyers or doctors are just walking in and
| learning the process in a week. Other types of engineering
| need to understand the pipeline in another firm compared to
| their old one. A firefighter needs time to mesh with the
| team and figure out what equipment and tools are available
| here.
|
| But then again, I bet most of those also aren't trying to
| rely on AI to find talent.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I can't speak about lawyers, but you're definitely wrong
| about doctors (have a couple in my family). They can and
| do travel to completely new hospital systems and are
| expected to do their normal job immediately (and they
| do).
|
| Even within tech, I think the ramp-up time is faster for
| literally everyone else besides software engineers, just
| because the underlying technology can vary so much more
| (and its more important to be understood at an intimate
| level of detail) than for other roles.
| rors wrote:
| My girlfriend is an Orthopaedic Surgeon. Great when I've
| got a broken arm, or need shelves putting up. I wouldn't
| let her anywhere near my heart or brain. Medicine is
| super specialised.
|
| I hear you on geography though. Luckily the human body
| doesn't change too much between locations.
| Rumudiez wrote:
| I think the point was that an orthopaedic surgeon can
| change hospitals and immediately get to work doing
| orthopaedic surgery. Sure, there might be some difference
| in how to clock in or who to report to, but they aren't
| suddenly working with a different type of human. Their
| job will remain constant despite changing environs,
| whereas moving between software companies could have you
| learning entirely different stacks that affect your
| process in fundamental ways.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'm not going to speak with authority on medicine, but my
| understanding is that residency takes some time if you
| leave your area, and there are various state compliances
| to keep in mind. So it doesn't sound like you can just
| grab any doctor and get them to work after a week.
|
| >because the underlying technology can vary so much more
| (and its more important to be understood at an intimate
| level of detail) than for other roles.
|
| If most jobs needed intimate knowledge of the language
| and constructs and weren't just CRUD apps built upon 3
| frameworks, I'd almost agree with you. There are
| definitely roles that need that expertise, but I'd bet a
| yoke with a solid SWE fundamentals and comletetence in
| one language can ramp up for another stack relatively
| quickly. Nat least, no clowwr than any other engineering
| profession. Companies simply either oversell the work
| they need done or oversell how urgent the work is
| (compared to working the existing staff overtime).
| epolanski wrote:
| I feel so lucky I haven't had to apply anywhere in my entire
| career through postings, the good thing of having a solid
| network is that you get to know who knows a
| consultant/freelancer before any position is created.
|
| I did post my availability few times on HN "who wants to be
| hired" but with poor results and lots of wasted time (as again,
| the person on the other end does not know me or has worked with
| me everything gets bureaucratic again).
|
| Also, all of the people I had hired for my clients came again
| from my network, there was never a public posting.
|
| There's also other benefits, in general, you don't get to do
| silly technical interviews, as you're bringing former coworkers
| you can vouch for.
|
| Not saying this can scale anywhere, but in smaller companies
| with good teams and professionals they always know someone from
| their previous jobs or their online communities (common in open
| source related githubs/discords/slacks) and I like it.
| bearjaws wrote:
| This is really the best career advice.
|
| I was fortunately able to leave a terrible job 2 years ago
| and immediately had contract work, now I run my own business
| and get constant referrals from my network. I make more than
| ever, have incredible work-life balance, and for the most
| part love what I do.
|
| If you don't have a network, the moment you quit/lose a job
| you are dead to the world. Even now I have people approaching
| me for FTE roles, I haven't even worked with them for 2
| years. Am I some god tier programmer? Not really, but I have
| a good track record and people always want to go to someone
| they already trusted.
| Caius-Cosades wrote:
| Yeah if you're not a social butterfly in the modern world
| you're just effed. Or about as good as dead, unless you
| happen to be extremely lucky.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| In academic / white collar work for sure. But if you're
| something like a skilled craftsman whose services are in
| demand, you can probably do fine with less social
| networking.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Carpenters, electricians, and plumbers will be able to
| name their price in the Los Angeles area for the next few
| years.
| bluGill wrote:
| Maybe. All of them have cycles of good and bad times.
| I've known many Electricians and Carpenters who have been
| laid off for years at a time before things come back.
| netruk44 wrote:
| > If you don't have a network, the moment you quit/lose a
| job you are dead to the world.
|
| As someone without a network and left their FAANG-adjacent
| (or whatever the current acronym is) job in 2022, this is
| mostly true.
|
| Amazon still hits up my inbox every month or so, though.
| catwhatcat wrote:
| What sort of business are you running now, if you don't
| mind elaborating?
| recursive wrote:
| It's not advice really. If it were advice, it would be
| something you could do.
| TheGlav wrote:
| Building a network is something anyone can do. Join
| meetups. Find local user groups. Find online groups and
| get active in them. Give talks. Write and publish your
| thoughts locally and/or online. Talk with people. Ask
| (good) questions. Let people get to know you and the way
| you think. Many more ways exist than just these.
|
| Connecting with other professionals in various ways is
| all there is to building a network and anyone can do it.
| They just have to do it.
| hylaride wrote:
| This. I'm still benefiting from being in a BSD users
| group that I went to between 2000-2008 because it was
| filled with passionate/talented tech people, most of whom
| have gone onto other things. Find places to get into
| discussions and show your opinions and have discussions.
| If you are in a group where your mind is never changed,
| then find something else.
| recursive wrote:
| Ok, now that's advice.
| epolanski wrote:
| You definitely can.
|
| I always built my network mostly at local meetups and
| online communities.
|
| It helps if, like in my case, are into functional
| programming, as people into that niche prefer working
| with other functional programmers.
| eulers_secret wrote:
| IME it's not that bad. My entire network failed when I was
| looking for work: either everyone was still at my old
| employer whom I didn't want to return to or they were also
| out of work. I don't have much online presence, because
| that's my preference.
|
| I did ~11 applications (on company websites, tailored
| resume), of which like 9 were moonshots (NVDA, Valve, etc). I
| heard back from everyone, and then interviewed and accepted
| an offer with a smaller international company located
| locally. This was during the 2023/4 downturn (Dec '23 to be
| exact).
|
| Caveat: I have 15YoE and work in embedded (especially
| embedded Linux); it seems this specialization has suffered
| less than others. I also don't have a degree. I had to accept
| a slight paycut and hybrid - but I was in office before...
| and hardware generally just requires you to be present
| sometimes.
|
| Don't be afraid if you don't have a network, the advice is
| good, but it doesn't apply to everyone.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I would say the extended parts of my network are still
| getting the interviews, but I have people I directly
| literally went to school with, and lived in the same dorm
| with turn me flat down for work, which was a real slap in
| the face. I've been applying since April 2020 (with about 7
| interviews so far and 2-3 upcoming interviews total) and
| I'm getting kind of discouraged at this point.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Honestly in this market there is really only so much your
| network can do--at least at a "submit my resume for me"
| level. I'm starting to think I might get a bit more
| aggressive and bold with my network and have them deliver
| paper copies to the hiring manager or something. Because
| even referral submitted applications are black holes at
| this point.
|
| Hang in there and take what you can get. The market is
| super shitty and you are absolutely not alone. It ain't
| you. The market _will_ pick back up again... it always
| does.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| If they won't pay for traveling for on-site interview or
| relocation is that a good sign; when they're demanding
| three days a week in the office hybrid?
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >The market will pick back up again... it always does.
|
| It will, but this time it's probably going to be several
| years. It's the covid lock down train wreck. Most people
| underestimate the cascading damage done by the lock
| downs.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Yup. The damage caused by that nonsense will haunt us for
| decades to come.
|
| "It's what everybody wanted" is something I often say.
| "Everybody was cheering this on".
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >"It's what everybody wanted" is something I often say.
| "Everybody was cheering this on".
|
| Spot on. I read that somewhere that during WWII when
| people were sent to the gas chambers, crowds would be
| cheering on. Common people terrify me.
| alphan0n wrote:
| > I read that somewhere that during WWII when people were
| sent to the gas chambers, crowds would be cheering on.
|
| Citation needed. The execution of Jews by gas chamber
| during the holocaust was not a public event.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| It's when there were being rounded up to be sent. Not
| during the event itself.
| spratzt wrote:
| The market can remain depressed for longer than you can
| remain solvent.
|
| We should be encouraging people to look at alternative
| careers to tech. Life after tech.
|
| We should also be making it clear to students that while
| there are exciting things happening in tech this is not
| going to translate into large scale demand for people.
|
| Large parts of technology are mature, indeed moribund.
| This is not a message that the technology industry wants
| to hear.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > but I have people I directly literally went to school
| with, and lived in the same dorm with turn me flat down
| for work, which was a real slap in the face.
|
| Since referrals became the meta-game, companies have
| adapted their referral process to be more selective. Most
| companies I've worked for have required people to enter
| some basic information about how and where you worked
| with the referral, why you're referring them, and a
| statement that your referral means you are vouching for
| that person's work performance.
|
| It cuts down on the number of people referring people
| they know by happenstance, which defeats the purpose of a
| referral program. I doubt your friends meant it as a
| personal attack. They probably just had referral programs
| that were more rigorous than putting names into a queue.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| They said they hadn't been happy with the last three
| months of candidates, and that I was probably going to be
| it and then rejected me with no feedback and hired some
| ex-SpaceX person as a contractor. It may have been the
| investor playing a role.
| epolanski wrote:
| Maybe you didn't impress them?
|
| Network is important as long as people see you as a
| reliable professional that can help them.
|
| There's lots of skills involved, last but not least soft
| ones.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Well, sure but some feedback would've been nice at least
| - it's not like I was going to sue them.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| 11 apps to one job last year, huh? With a 100% response
| rate. Wish I could have had even a tenth of that luck. Heck
| even during the best booms my response rate was hovering
| around 30%.
|
| I'm just exhausted with the search. I finished yet another
| programming take home only for the company to stop hiring
| at the turn of the quarter.
|
| But yea, my network also failed me. Mostly becsuse 80%+ of
| them were laid off themselves.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Paid off?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| What an unfortunate typo. Luckily I had time to fix that
| one.
|
| But sure, I think almost all of them got severance.
| bluGill wrote:
| Remember when 80% are laid off, they are all looking.
| Whoever finds a job probably has found a place that is
| hiring more than one person. So keep in touch, they don't
| have anything today, but they may have leads. Sometimes
| it is here is a job that you are a closer fit for than me
| so I may as well point you at it even if it hurts my
| already low chances.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Indeed. And my luck continued to fall through the cracks.
|
| Had 3 interviews through contacts that bounced back.
| Failed two interviews, one technical, one cultural. Third
| one never really got off the ground; talked to a
| recruiter and then nothing ever really got arranged. Not
| even a call.
|
| One got a job at a place I previously worked at and had
| no interest in returning to. He's on a different team
| though so I can't say his experience will mirror mine.
|
| One was asking around about any open roles days before he
| got laid off himself.
|
| Asked a few others and no positions are really open as of
| now.
|
| Funnily enough me and another colleague applied to the
| same job and he got it. Right before they invoked a
| hiring freeze.
|
| And those are just referrals. The nightmares from jobs I
| just found myself get even better. I'm just tired. This
| market suuuuuuucks.
| bluGill wrote:
| There have been ups and downs for decades. I'm sorry it
| is happening to you, glad it isn't me this time (so
| far!). I've been there. Hang in, there are always jobs
| though sometimes you need to become a handyman or
| something to get any money for a year.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah, no worries. I'm stable for now, just not full time
| stable. I just gotta survive until the market bounces
| back.
|
| I work in games so I was pre-programmed far in advance to
| expect shakey times. Just not times where I'm ghosted for
| over a year with no sign of anything opening up (quite
| the contrary, still plenty of gaming layoffs!).
| keb_ wrote:
| How would I recommend I get into embedded Linux as a total
| newbie with only Node/Ruby experience? :^)
| TheGlav wrote:
| No joke: just start!
|
| Learn C and C++. Find a cheap micro pc board, pick one of
| the embedded linux distros that run on it, and make
| something with it.
|
| Repeat until you get bored, exhausted, or a job. :)
| bluGill wrote:
| Make sure you touch a little rust too. C and C++ are
| still big, but embedded is interested in Rust as a
| potential mitigation for issues they have.
| roland35 wrote:
| Try getting a single board computer such as a raspberry
| pi, and see if you can get it to do stuff! Hook it up to
| some SPI or I2C peripheral boards to read temperature or
| light. Stream data to a cloud.
|
| Another big part of embedded Linux is managing the OS
| itself and updates. Things like Yocto handle building an
| OS image
| qq66 wrote:
| I think that's relevant if you have a highly specialized
| skillset like embedded Linux. People don't make embedded
| Linux job postings to "test the waters" or "see if the
| perfect candidate applies." If the listing is up, they're
| probably hiring an embedded Linux developer, and while
| there will be a lot of resume frauds applying, they
| actually need to make the hire.
|
| If you're applying for a B2B SaaS product manager job there
| are 50,000 jobs and 200,000 applicants and it's a
| completely different situation.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| Curious, what do you earn?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > My entire network failed when I was looking for work
|
| That's been my consistent experience as well. Conventional
| wisdom is that you only get good jobs through referrals,
| but about half of the companies I've worked for have been
| through referrals and half "cold" through monster or
| linkedin, etc. and BY FAR the worst working experiences of
| my life have been the internal referral ones. The last time
| I was looking for work was 2017, though - I get the
| impression that things have gotten really, really bad in
| the past year or so.
| bluGill wrote:
| My experience is the network typically fails, but it can
| sometimes work.
|
| Remember with networking there is often only one person in
| your network of hundreds who can do anything so you need to
| find that person. Often it will be the guy you just barely
| talked to who won't think of you at all unless you remind
| them, but they then know enough to know you are good enough
| for some position and then they are not interviewing they
| are convincing you to take the job.
|
| Those cases where the network ensures you are the only
| candidate are one of the reasons why they work well. My
| current company doesn't work that way, it doesn't matter
| how good you are, all I can do is put your resume in the HR
| stack (unless it is for my department in which case my boss
| might ask me about a couple resumes). I'd be considered a
| conflict of interest so I couldn't interview you.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| I posted once with a seconds account on who is hiring, the
| amount of spam and fishing attempts received is crazy, 10-50
| DocuSign and the like a day since then.
| xeromal wrote:
| I decided I wanted a better job in 2025 after being at my
| company for 6ish years. I started applying to 2-3 jobs a day
| starting in december and reaching out to old contacts.
| Complete ghost silence and bullshit. Managed to get 2
| leetcode screens that went nowhere even after doing alright
| on them.
|
| Hit up an old college buddy on linked in, got a referral,
| went through a ton of interviews (6) and got a job in two
| weeks. It's nuts how far a referral will get you.
| kube-system wrote:
| Having interviewed candidates for full-stack positions, and
| actually asked them about the entire stack (instead of just the
| backend), I'm surprised the number isn't higher.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| I've been amazed by how many times I've had this
| conversation:
|
| Applicant: "I love ${LANGUAGE} so much! It's amazing! I'm
| super passionate about it!"
|
| Me: "Oh that's great! What are some things you like about
| ${LANGUAGE}, and one or two things you wish the language
| designers had done differently?"
|
| Silence.
|
| (Replace language with database, framework, etc. as needed).
| duxup wrote:
| I always wonder how much that is influenced by the blog /
| social media world where a few (or even one) neat features
| in a product or language produces "I love this". So yeah
| they love it ... in so far as the social media expression
| goes.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| I feel that's more of an artifact of American culture. I
| remember discussions where the stakeholder declined to
| use a technology, and said something like "we love X, but
| are concerned about Y."
| kube-system wrote:
| Too often I find "full-stack" developers who only know how
| frameworks operate, but have no idea about how the computer
| actually works.
|
| "How do you do [x] in SQL?" > "I've always had the ORM
| handle that"
|
| "How do you do [x] in CSS" > "I use this CSS framework and
| it will do it for me"
|
| "How does a packet get between the front end and back end
| of your solution" > "I update the object state using [x] in
| the [y] framework"
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| Perhaps there's a reason why. The market generally
| doesn't need people who can do it all. In the same way it
| doesn't need people writing C++ or Rust to know how to
| write machine code or assembly. Sure, the ones that can
| are probably more knowledgable, but their experience with
| the high level language is more important.
|
| I've done full-stack with no frameworks or non-std
| libraries (aside from PDO and OpenSSL, the limitations
| set by CEO decree) for about 8 years now.
|
| I write my own schemas in IBM Db2. Hell, I wrote small
| application databases in IBM DDS in the AS400's SEU while
| I was still under the legal drinking age. I've always
| written our stylesheets from scratch, using SCSS. I've
| written C++ APIs that run in PASE, talk to the database
| with ODBC, then send back to a front end through sockets.
| I do graphic design and photography -- something I
| started back in middle school and took some formal
| classes on -- and have led the creation of marketing
| materials for multiple subsidiaries. I've spent 40 hour
| weeks working on sysadmin tasks in vim, 40 hour weeks
| writing libraries in JetBrains and VSCode, and 40 hour
| weeks working running around with my DSLR or working in
| Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.
|
| But when I look for full-stack jobs, most of them
| actually want somebody who is well versed in a framework.
| There's not much point in doing all of this from scratch.
| It's more tedious, more error prone, and it takes longer
| to get to market. Some interviewers have given the
| impression that I'm a little "less than" because I _haven
| 't_ used any major frameworks.
|
| I think that's actually a valid take, and it's something
| I've started doing side projects to address. Frameworks
| improve velocity. Frameworks improve reliability. They
| reduce the risk of a developer coming up with an out-in-
| the-weeds solution to a problem they didn't properly
| understand. They make it easier to maintain the code.
| They make it easier to onboard new developers who are
| familiar with that tech.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| I once did a take-home project for a full stack role that
| proclaimed any language/framework could be used to build
| a browser-based application that satisfied a particular
| task. I opted to use golang and its standard library to
| produce an application with no external dependencies and
| no javascript. In the rejection email they stated the use
| of outdated development methods was a point of
| disqualification. I'm sure other reasons for
| disqualification were present, I wasn't a great candidate
| in retrospect, but I'll never forget the naivety and
| hubris of their framing.
|
| They were of course a NextJS shop.
|
| Ultimately disregard role titles. It's a people problem
| that you have to pull teeth to find out what they really
| want, and what they really want they often won't say out
| loud. That's fine, it's their money (and usually a lot of
| it!) and they should be able to dictate the services that
| they want.
|
| Really sucks for people new to the industry trying to
| learn the song and dance.
| kube-system wrote:
| Sounds like you dodged a bullet in terms of culture
| mismatch. I think a good number of these mismatches could
| be mitigated by having some in-depth conversations about
| the job, team, interactions with other teams, and problem
| scope, before getting into any technical interviewing.
| kube-system wrote:
| I think it is valid to expect some experience with major
| frameworks, but framework experience without
| understanding the underlying concepts usually indicates
| someone who is pretty limited in being able to solve more
| difficult problems.
|
| I guess larger organizations have a role for these kinds
| of workers, but they're not the kind of people I want on
| my team.
| bostik wrote:
| This is an exceptionally good question to identify people
| who have actually used a technology for real. I've used
| merely the second part ("what gripes do you have about X")
| in interviews successfully for nearly two decades.
|
| If you've used a tool long enough, you've identified warts
| and misfeatures. And you _will_ have opinions about them.
| duxup wrote:
| I always wonder about the gathering resumes "just in case the
| perfect person applies" kind of idea.
|
| 1. Would anyone notice if the perfect candidate applied?
|
| 2. Does anyone even know what the perfect candidate's resume
| would look like / are those qualities on a resume / captured by
| a resume system?
|
| 3. Is the perfect candidate actually cold submitting resume to
| you?
|
| It feels like almost certainly these are all "no".
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| 1. With the current AI bots, likely not. And that basically
| shows how inefficient these systems currently are.
|
| 2. The hiring manager does. The bot certainly does not. The
| odds of someone able to please the latter while meeting the
| former is low odds, for a candidate that's already low odds
| to begin with.
|
| 3. Not impossible. And that's all the justification they need
| as long as they aren't penalized for what basically a ghost
| job.
| drillsteps5 wrote:
| From my experience this is one of the ways it might work.
|
| Recruiting (company's internal function, which is part of HR)
| is tasked with soliciting profiles to see what's available on
| the market. There's no real position but the recruiter(s)
| invent one according to what the business told them they
| would eventually need. There's no hiring manager behind it
| (as there's no position to be be filled). Recruiter either
| periodically meets with the business group that requested the
| research or prepares a report on the results (number of
| resumes that came in, salary requirements, etc) and presents
| to the business group that requested it.
|
| So there's a reason these resumes are being solicited, it's
| just the reason is not to hire somebody. Sometimes it is done
| to justify business decision (ie to move to a different
| technology, or to expand to a new geographical area).
| Sometimes the business group _might_ be willing to open a new
| req if "the right candidate" comes up, but it's not
| guaranteed.
|
| It also allows HR and recruiting to justify their presence
| (they are busy despite the fact that the company might not be
| hiring at all currently).
|
| So there's reasons why these positions are posted and
| virtually none to prevent the company from doing that.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| I think the answers to these _is_ usually no, but there 's
| one (questionable) person in leadership who's like "what if
| somebody from Google applies?" (or whatever equivalent).
| Never seen it work. Encountered it a few times. It tends to
| be magical thinking embellished by narratives around 10x
| engineers.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| "what if somebody from Google applies"
|
| I'd be immediately suspicious. Why are they leaving Google
| to come _here_?
| bluGill wrote:
| I did get hired like that once. Small company with just 3
| other employees not really interested in hiring, but I had
| some useful experience in their domain so they decided to
| hire me anyway (and then went bankrupt a few months later,
| but they probably would have happened anyway).
| dcdc123 wrote:
| I think another very common scenario is just eliminating the
| headcount. Companies cut headcount at a small scale all the
| time and the first one to go is usually the unhired.
| ben_w wrote:
| > we always leave a posting up even when we're not really
| looking just in case the perfect candidate happens to walk
| through the door
|
| I've seen one that remained up after the company itself was
| closed down... which I knew about by having been in it when it
| closed; even before that, it was so out of date the salary
| offered was about 60% of what they'd paid me when I joined.
| Miserlou57 wrote:
| I was a contractor at a FAANG for a few years, and they handed
| me a job. In the few weeks of transition between the two (some
| paperwork, etc.) a job posting and req ID was created and
| posted on their jobs site. I freaked out for a bit, but
| everything worked out so I can only presume (in California)
| that was a requirement.
|
| What amazed me was it said (maybe on LinkedIN?) how many poor
| souls actually took the time to apply to the position. It was
| in the hundreds. I can't help but feel bad knowing they never
| had a chance.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Happens in public/gov sector regularly.
|
| PT role turning into FT... it's going to the PTer.
|
| Temporary budget allocation became permanent and determinate
| spot becoming indeterminate? Same.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| linkedin has one-click applications for many large orgs; in
| all likelihood they saw something that said "FAANG" and
| "similar to you skills" and clicked it.
|
| a previous F500 company I worked for and was involved with
| hiring for was constantly posting jobs but only really took
| application seriously when they were referrals or through the
| company job site directly.
| creer wrote:
| By now this seems to be a serious problem. It's too easy to
| apply for a job. Disincentive all around: it's too easy to
| be lazy and over-specify or mis-describe a job offer. Then
| it's too easy for randos to apply because it's just a few
| clicks at most. Then it's too easy to dismiss with a broad
| comb because of all the randos. etc, etc. At this point the
| "job posting to job application" pipeline is completely
| broken and anyone who cares should rather leverage their
| network. Both to hire and apply, or use deliberately more
| obscure pathways such as professional society meetings or
| company web sites only, or job fairs, etc.
| emchammer wrote:
| Yes, just go in there, look them in the eye, give them a
| nice, firm handshake, and don't take no for an answer.
|
| Please.
|
| I went visiting some local businesses in-person the other
| summer looking for a part-time job. One HR lady seemed
| annoyed that I showed up, and told me "we don't have a
| front door", and unironically said "keep checking our web
| site". She seemed confused when I asked her to hand my
| resume back to me. One vestibule intercom told me to put
| my application in the slot. One major international
| corporation told me that they would give me a decision on
| the spot, then changed their tune during the interview.
|
| Please.
| caprock wrote:
| I've seen similar things happen. This is a great example of
| the unintended second order effects of regulation. Good
| intentions don't ensure good outcomes.
| samaltmanfried wrote:
| If the role was advertised on LinkedIn, out of those hundreds
| of applicants there's probably only a small minority that
| have appropriate experience and right to work.
| devmor wrote:
| I once got a developer position through a professional group on
| Facebook. My soon-to-be manager had to have HR create a job
| posting on a public facing portal so I could apply through it,
| despite already essentially giving me the position.
|
| I wonder how many people applied for that job before it was
| taken down.
| freedomben wrote:
| I think you're right. Speaking from current personal
| experience, it's not unusual to get 500 applications for a job,
| especially higher-level jobs like Principal engineer (where
| people are chasing the title and salary). I would guess 90% of
| them are clearly underqualified. Of the other 10%, nearly half
| will never respond to a follow-up email to schedule interviews.
| Of those that do, 3/4 of them will reject the offer for various
| reasons. Given I have a lot of other duties beyond hiring,
| spending the hours upon hours it takes to sort through that
| only to have it yield no fruit is ... demoralizing at best.
|
| It seems to me that if somebody can actually solve the problem
| of increasing signal-to-noise ratio, they could do very well.
| creer wrote:
| > I think the rate of non-fill is higher.
|
| I suspect far higher. Largely because there is no serious
| disincentive.
|
| The "study" may have assertained 1 in 5 but that doesn't mean
| there isn't much more.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| You also have companies like mine (very large) where we don't
| even post job descriptions online but just hire through internal
| referrals.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| At one of my previous companies, I recall suggesting to my CEO
| that we open some job postings "just in case" the right person
| comes along. He candidly noted that we already have open job
| postings, and gave me access to the email they all went to.
|
| I saw over 3,000 applications made over the last 2-3 years.
| Tailored resumes. Cover letters. This wasn't some LinkedIn "quick
| apply", these were direct "Fill out the form" on our website. Not
| a single one of these applications got read.
| f1shy wrote:
| This is making that company not look very good, is it?!
| grajaganDev wrote:
| It is not making that company look very good.
|
| Enticing job seekers to waste their very precious time is not
| ethical.
|
| Edit: fix double negative.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Just an FYI.. the double negative means you said it makes
| the company look good.
|
| (I don't think you intended that)
| grajaganDev wrote:
| Thank you - fixed it.
| duxup wrote:
| Doesn't hurt them either I don't think. Nobody knows. It
| sucks because the whole job hunting system is borked.
| chgs wrote:
| If 500 people apply for a fake job and don't get to an
| interview or personal response stage, then when they need a
| real job filling they've already wiped out a lot of
| applicants who won't bother applying next time.
| duxup wrote:
| I doubt that's how it works out. Last time I was looking
| I applied so many places I can't remember most of them.
| chgs wrote:
| Presumably you're not putting much effort then?
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > Doesn't hurt them either I don't think.
|
| Well those are 3000 resumes that won't be resubmitted when
| you actually want to hire. Many of those resumes will
| belong to people who since found work. Weeding through that
| would be a nightmare, so you'd have to toss it and write it
| off as a loss.
|
| Or you could just post jobs when you're actually interested
| in hiring and turn it off when you have enough applications
| to process. Super interested candidates can always cold
| email.
| duxup wrote:
| They don't care about those 3k and they could reach out.
|
| And maybe next round they do apply again. I sure don't
| remember when I last was applying who I applied for
| except some big names that ... yeah I'd submit it again
| if I was looking.
|
| I don't like the system, but I don't think they're hurt
| by it.
| chgs wrote:
| Awful company. They could post "here are our standard job
| roles, we aren't actively hiring but if you're the perfect
| match please tell us why", which warns the prospective
| applicant.
| fullshark wrote:
| What do you mean? They have open roles so they must be
| growing? Seems like a good investment.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| Unless I have an "in" and can directly send/hand a cover letter
| to the opening's hiring manager, I can't imagine ever writing a
| cover letter again.
| jjice wrote:
| When I was in uni, I found that just having a boring cover
| letter drastically increased the odds of an interview (for
| internships and post grad work). I bet a lot of places just
| have a filter that adds you as a higher priority purely on
| the existence of a cover letter.
|
| I've never read a cover letter that I found valuable for
| hiring anyone, though. And I'm sure mine were never of any
| actual value either.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| I like that insight and should I ever be back in the
| kafkaesque nightmare of blind online job applications, I
| will take your advice. As you point out, barring
| typographical mistakes a cover letter being too generic
| isn't likely to result in a rejection, but not "checking
| the box" very well might.
|
| cheers
| sctb wrote:
| May you never have to write one again, but if you do, it
| might be helpful to think of the cover letter as a
| reflective writing exercise. You might be able to gauge
| your level of interest in a particular role by how easy
| it is to write about, for example. Or it could just be
| some practice at communicating your strengths and
| abilities (this would definitely apply to me).
|
| IMO it's too disheartening to put effort into such
| personal writing without the awareness of some kind of
| direct value or benefit, since chances are it's going
| straight into the void.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| Nicely put.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| I like writing them when I think there are aspects to why I'd
| be a good fit for the role that don't get revealed
| sufficiently by listing skills on a resume or I have
| questions that can save everyone a ton of time. It seems like
| people do at least read them before interviews most of the
| time so I think there's some value.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > This wasn't some LinkedIn "quick apply", these were direct
| "Fill out the form" on our website. Not a single one of these
| applications got read.
|
| Surely this would basically immediately backfire as people
| would presume a rejection and not apply when you actually
| wanted to hire. Why would you do this?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's so common place that few are going to remember they
| applied to a specific company years ago to begin with.
| sangnoir wrote:
| With BS postings, low response rates, and the effect of
| having to apply to many jobs at once, how else can
| applicants manage their many applications but write things
| down?
|
| The last time I did ran the job search, I needed a
| spreadsheet to keep track of things. When a recruiter
| reaches out to me, I'm going to see if their company is in
| there, and what my notes say about my last experience with
| them.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If I'm anything like the trend, I just move on. If a
| posting comes up and it's been more than a few weeks I
| apply anyway. All such a spreadsheet would show for 90%
| of my apps is "applied, never got a response". In both
| good and bad markets.
|
| If anything I'd only remember postings I actually
| interviewed and was rejected for. Which is sadly a small
| enough number to keep in my head.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| I completely understand why you would behave this way,
| but I would absolutely not apply to the same place. I've
| never hired someone I've seen twice. I'm sure it could
| theoretically happen (hell, it's likely to happen for a
| certain pair of personality and company) but the first
| rejection is generally a precedent for the second.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >I completely understand why you would behave this way,
| but I would absolutely not apply to the same place.
|
| Well that's exactly why I apply multiple times.
|
| Had an example last year. I applied once, got rejected,
| coincidentally met someone at that same company and team
| later in the week. They sent me a referral, and then
| boom, recruiter call the next day. My resume was the
| same. It's just the referral pile got me visiable.
|
| I'm pretty convinced even pre-AI that there are so many
| times when I'm simply not seen. Getting no response or an
| automated response just tells me these days "okay, I
| didn't make it to a human. Maybe next time" instead of
| "welp, I'm not good enough right now".
|
| Also note that those kinds of companies are pretty big
| with hundreds of roles for software. The hiring culture
| between each team may as well make it a few dozen
| companies. I'm not trying to re-apply (on purpose) to a
| small group of a a few dozen after one rejection from the
| exact same role.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > It's so common place that few are going to remember they
| applied to a specific company years ago to begin with.
|
| Additionally, it take a single lazily-managed spreadsheet
| to identify this dysfunction. Surely any positive effect
| from doing this would be muted (again, likely into the
| negative) because the company doesn't want to hire you.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Surely any positive effect from doing this would be
| muted (again, likely into the negative) because the
| company doesn't want to hire you.
|
| In my experience, it's because they didn't actually see
| you (or they were never hiring anyone to begin with.
| Hence the article). If I don't get to a step where I
| speak to a human, I don't really count it as a rejection.
| Just a filtering.
|
| Rejection implies that my skillset was not fit to the
| role, or that someone else was better than me and
| selected. Definitely not the vibes I get in this current
| market.
| vlod wrote:
| I remember a post here where some recruitment manager (at a
| company) said "Always write a cover letter, which is not
| generated by AI, otherwise you're an automatically trashed".
|
| I rolled my eyes.
|
| Although this might be sound advice, it's not the reality of a
| lot of people looking for work.
|
| Yes, they might do this for the few months, but after what 6
| months+ of no or canned responses (even though you have ALL the
| skills they want) it gets tiresome and you just say F-it, copy-
| paste a canned cover letter.
| bluGill wrote:
| You can't even be sure a cover letter is read. Sometimes they
| are, sometimes they are skipped. When I have 100 applicants I
| don't have time to read cover letters, I'm looking for the
| first bullet that suggests you can do the job otherwise I'm
| trashing your application (The goal is to get down to 10-20
| resumes that I then spend a minute on to see if you go into
| the interview or not pile). I'm only going to read that cover
| letter if something suggests you despite lack of the
| experience I'm looking for you might have a different
| background and so be worth hiring anyway.
|
| Remember I have lots of more interesting things to do than
| read your application. When we are hiring (like many we are
| not today) I take time to do the process, but I really want
| to be doing the more interesting work.
| robcohen wrote:
| This is a spam problem. Spam problems are easily solved by simply
| charging for attention. Job postings should pay me to view them,
| and I should pay job postings to apply to them. The only reason
| why ghost postings exist is because the marginal cost to the
| company is so incredibly low to do it.
|
| In demand people should get paid for their attention.
|
| What I don't understand is why are there no systems that actually
| implement this? Most likely because the user education problem of
| cryptocurrency wallets and the various UI/UX issues it presents,
| but there's no mainstream apps that I can think of that actually
| try this.
|
| Seems like it would work in dating apps, in advertising, in CRMs,
| in social networks of all types. Why hasn't it been done?
|
| My guess is because we've only solved half of the problem with
| crypto. We have the cheap value exchange, but we don't have
| identity figured out quite yet.
| shultays wrote:
| (paypal me 0.1$ to see this reply)
| airstrike wrote:
| I really wish that's how (a subset of) the internet worked.
| Not for replies, but for quality website access. Think
| newspapers and other primary sources of information. Fill up
| your browser tank and go visit these websites. The site then
| gets paid per view, or per duration of stay. Details are
| tricky though.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| In my opinion a big barrier to the success of such systems
| is that newspapers often aren't primary sources. Most
| outsource the reporting to press agencies and
| (increasingly) to social media. Press agencies usually _do_
| sell individual stories with primary reporting, but not at
| the prices you and I can afford.
|
| For mainstream press though, is it worth the pennies of a
| microtransaction to read someone's re-hashing of public
| records and social media posts? That is very much dependent
| on both the reader's personal expertise and the author's,
| and if they are mismatched the article becomes worthless to
| the reader. An article explaining what HN is would be
| illuminating to many, but entirely unworthy even of pennies
| to you and I.
| immibis wrote:
| Other way around. You should paypal them $0.01 if your reply
| is worth viewing.
|
| But Hacker News already has a cost to posting replies: you
| can only post a few (I think 5 replies every 4 hours) and
| although you can make more accounts, there's a limit to that
| too. So I know this was one of your top 5 in this 4-hour
| period.
| esafak wrote:
| Who would say their reply is not worth viewing?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Your account is being rate limited because your replies
| were repeatedly against the "rules". Been there done that
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Morality aside, the logistics of this means you cannot
| literally PayPal someone 10 cents. The processing cost isn't
| worth transferring such a small amount.
|
| So the answer to this is to pay $5 and be able to see 50
| replies. But what if you're unsure you want to even see that
| many replies? It's now a steep cost to consider.
| lesuorac wrote:
| I suspect they want to do a side-channel payment system.
|
| So you pay X $100 or w/e and they increase your account by
| 96.50 or w/e it is after fees and X pocket that 96.50 into
| X's own bank account. Then when you have to pay 10 cents to
| somebody they move 10 cents in X's ledger while the 96.50
| never moves between bank accounts.
|
| Eventually whoever's article you read (Y) will want to
| withdrawal what the ledger has but ideally at that point it
| will be a higher value like $100 so they'd get $96.50 of
| that but individually each reader only paid 10 cents.
| ryanianian wrote:
| Recruiters and agents have been solving this problem for years.
| Firms hire a recruiter for jobs that they actively want to
| fill. Applicants hire a job agent. Those two meet. Very little
| incentive for spam in this relationship.
|
| The problem, of course, is mismatched incentives for the
| middlemen versus the clients, particularly at the margins.
| Similar to real-estate brokers. They may be effective in many
| ways, but they are looking for pareto-efficiency, where they
| get you 80% of the match (or 80% of the pay) or whatever for
| 20% of their effort.
|
| It's hard to imagine any incentive scheme between buyers
| (hiring managers) and sellers (applicants) that wouldn' be
| subject to the same market mechanics, even if at lesser scales
| when done through more automated means.
|
| I don't think crypto really has anything to do this.
| lazide wrote:
| I've never heard of, or met, a job agent. More info?
| airstrike wrote:
| You ask someone to land you interviews and, if you get
| hired, you pay them a fee. Usually some (fat) percentage of
| your first couple paychecks.
| lazide wrote:
| I was asking for specific people.
| airstrike wrote:
| The power dynamics between employee and employer are such
| that the employer ought to foot the bill for that on their
| own. Candidates really shouldn't have to go to an agent to
| find a job.
|
| The employer doesn't need to hire an external recruiter
| either. They just need an HR team that actually _does_
| anything other than protecting against liabilities and
| aggressively managing labor costs down. Most of HR is a
| practical joke of questionable taste.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > Candidates really shouldn't have to go to an agent to
| find a job.
|
| Do you know how much the last candidate got hired for? An
| agent probably does.
| airstrike wrote:
| I know how much I'm willing to accept after doing my own
| diligence, and I'd rather not shell out tens of thousands
| of dollars to an agent. There are also jurisdictions
| where the salary must be disclosed. Hiring an agent
| introduces the principal-agent problem, so they cost more
| than just their fees.
| robcohen wrote:
| Yes, you can absolutely add a middle man to sort through the
| spam for you, and that "solves" the problem in the sense that
| you are trading money for time. It's no different than paying
| for a personal assistant to collect your mail for you and
| pass along the valuable stuff. That said, it's incredibly
| inefficient and most people, for most interactions, cannot
| hire a third party to handle those interactions for them.
|
| So no, I don't think adding layers of middle men really
| solves the problem for most people.
| hansvm wrote:
| > "solves" ... money for time
|
| The proposal was two middlemen. It's just an inefficient
| way to, as you (or somebody up the chain) said, charge for
| attention to reduce spam. Since the middlemen are being
| paid, most spammers won't hire them.
|
| > incredibly inefficient
|
| In practice, yes. In theory, it could be fantastic.
| Imagine, as a simple example, you have two early-career
| backend developers. They could each do the same search, or
| a middleman could do one search and share the highlights
| with each developer. The fact that you have overlapping
| demands and information opens up the potential for the work
| to be amortized, even if you're not adding any value as a
| middleman other than trading time for money.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I've heard that one of tricks recruiting agents use is to
| maximize mismatch without breaking the illusion of a
| perfect match, so that victim companies has to come back as
| often as possible, each time rewarding them with
| commissions. Value alignment is definitely going to be a
| problem.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Unfortunately there are good and bad agents out there, and
| the bad ones absolutely do have an incentive to spam. I
| remember one place I worked at maintained a blacklist of bad
| recruitment firms.
| NAHWheatCracker wrote:
| Micropayment systems don't work well because there are free
| options. Convincing people to pay any amount of money is
| incredibly hard.
|
| Would micropayments result higher quality? Maybe, but until you
| have a critical mass no one can really tell.
|
| Free options are more likely reach critical mass and dominate.
| Paid options thus die off, starved of attention.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Also, free applications systems are so common that I'd simply
| see any system that I, the applicant, needs to pay for as a
| scam. Much more different than a paid forum or news site. I
| pay $10 for those and I get exactly what on the site, even if
| the news updates slowly or the forum is empty.
|
| If I had to pay $100 for 10 applications and still get
| ghosted or auto rejected, I don't know what I'd do. That's
| just theft at that point.And the incentives for recruitment
| are just perverse at that point. Don't hire, just make a good
| job app.
| ceroxylon wrote:
| It would be worth it to build a highly refined and moderated
| "free tier", with a paid option that is even better. From
| what I noticed during my last job hunt, all the big platforms
| could vet their submissions better.
| danaris wrote:
| If we assume that a posting costs $1 in either direction, the
| $100 cost to a company of any significant size of posting a
| single job to 100 sites is pretty negligible.
|
| On the other hand, to someone who _has no job_ , paying $100 to
| apply to 100 jobs might be pretty harsh--and there isn't the
| remotest guarantee that this would actually result in getting
| _contacted_ , let alone getting a job.
|
| Going one step further, paying that kind of money to apply also
| means you'd be expected to have a credit card or something
| similar. At the very least a bank account. And someone who's
| got excellent qualifications, but had a medical disaster cost
| them their previous job and home, and has been spending time on
| the streets, is going to have a very hard time maintaining a
| bank account or obtaining a credit card without an income.
|
| Basically, any time you make a proposal to "solve" the problems
| with hiring/job searching, you need to ask yourself, "Is this
| going to nontrivially exacerbate existing class divides?" If
| the answer is "yes", that's a) probably why it hasn't been done
| already, and b) why anyone with any compassion (or
| understanding of the long-term consequences of inequality in
| society) should reject such a solution.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| I sympathize but totally disagree, _if_ the $1 I paid
| guarantees:
|
| A) it is an actual job, with intent to hire now B) I will get
| an actual response, from a human, within a few days
|
| Then $100 is completely worth the time saved vs applying to
| ghost jobs.
| danaris wrote:
| The problem is, as I noted, spending $100 to post a
| _completely bogus_ job 100 times is basically nothing to
| even a medium-sized company.
|
| The asymmetry in power & wealth means that if you want the
| $1 spent by a job-seeker to even come _close_ to the
| guarantees you describe, you 'll probably need to make the
| company pay $100 per posting or more. And that would
| effectively require some pretty widespread and strictly-
| enforced regulation/legislation.
|
| If you're going to have to get that just for this middleman
| solution, why not go all the way and have the regulation
| mandate that any job that a company posts has to be real,
| with full intent to hire, and every single applicant must
| get a timely, non-canned response?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The issue is thst we both know those won't happen. Even if
| it's just scam shops that abuse it and everyone else plays
| the honor code. Rotten apples and all that.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| > someone who... has been spending time on the streets, is
| going to have a very hard time maintaining a bank account or
| obtaining a credit card without an income.
|
| Slightly tangential to your main point, but in this day and
| age electronic transfers _are_ money; cash is in effect just
| a fallback option for situations where there 's no connection
| to the Internet. I believe that, in the absence of central
| bank digital currency, banks should be required to have a
| process for issuing current accounts to homeless people
| (albeit not necessarily with credit, just like customers who
| do have fixed homes). That measure alone would immediately
| fix a range of issues that homeless people face, wouldn't it?
| danaris wrote:
| It absolutely would, as would Postal Banking, which there's
| already a movement afoot to bring back(? I think it was
| around before? I'm not super up on it).
| numpad0 wrote:
| I thought Indeed charge companies for posting and per applicant
| clicks? That combined with near 100% university graduate
| capture is what Japanese job market is like, where their
| current owner's corporate HQ resides.
|
| In that environment, the agency maximizes clicks and matches
| because that earns them most. Applicants are lured to maximize
| numbers of applications and qualifications(and failed matches),
| hiring companies go FOMO mode, hype up themselves and tighten
| up requirements. Everyone's paperclipping everything and
| producing clinically depressed graduates in big batches. It's a
| huge resource sink. Then of course fake posting problem isn't
| even remotely gets solved because the power structure builds up
| in the background in uncaptured dimensions, parallel to the
| system. You wouldn't want that.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >but we don't have identity figured out quite yet
|
| Can you explain further? ( btw, your overall analysis is spot
| on)
| CretinDesAlpes wrote:
| I've been on a career break / job search for about a year. I used
| to work in "AI" before it became fashionable, here are some
| observations of the tech job market:
|
| 1) There are so much BS jobs in BS companies it's hard to
| understand if those are even companies doing real thing (cf.
| David Graeber)
|
| 2) 80% of jobs in my field are about LLMs and technology no one
| understand or in companies that don't even know if they need it
| but are just following the trend
|
| 3) I've seen big and small companies posting over and over the
| same job ad. For example a big consulting group has been posting
| the exact same job for more than a year (really) on linkedin and
| elsewhere - each time there are more than 100+ applicants on
| linkedin.
|
| 4) Recruiters from 'serious' agencies told me it was the worst
| job market they know of
|
| 5) There is also a rise of fake recruitement agencies, it's very
| easy and quick to set up a page on Linkedin now with fake
| workers, fake images, fake jobs, etc.
|
| 6) The supply demand imbalance allows some small companies
| (startups) to ask for insane technical assignement that takes
| hours, which at the end looked like free consultancy. I had one
| that did not even provide feedback after a rejection, and when
| asked said "because we don't"
|
| 7) The increase of centralised platform such as Linkedin has
| increased competition. Everyone is applying to the same jobs, and
| many candidates uses AI to beat the HR platform. [This has been
| reported by FT -
| https://www.ft.com/content/1429fcb2-e0ef-4e47-b2b8-8bd225ac2...
| ]. Same problem as in the online dating market.
|
| 8) There is so much ghosting, that can happen at any stage of the
| process. Again, same problem as in the online dating market.
| y-curious wrote:
| What is the point of a fake recruiting agency? I've heard claim
| of this but I wonder what the endgame is. Is it to harvest
| contacts? Scam people? Waste people's time?
| CretinDesAlpes wrote:
| My bet is the collection and reselling of personal
| information, legally or illegally. Many (most?) people do put
| their real name, real address, real phone number and real
| email on their resume. You automate this on linkedin and can
| get a lot of CVs, I don't think this is a crazy idea.
| mywittyname wrote:
| The same vendors that sell Linkedin data in bulk include
| this level of personal information (phones, personal/work
| emails, addresses). Perhaps this is how they mine the data
| they sell, but I think it's more likely they take use the
| information scraped from Linkedin and send it to other
| vendors to enrich it with personal information.
| hansvm wrote:
| One of the endgames is scamming. One that's been around for a
| few years, seemingly getting bigger as time goes on, goes
| something like:
|
| 1. Slurp up contact information, focusing on people trying to
| break into a cushier lifestyle (data entry, entry level
| analysts, LLM evaluation in some specialized domain, ...).
|
| 2. Cold-contact them about being eligible for one of many
| possible remote jobs, with high hourly rates listed
| (something specify, like a "salary" of $38.51/hr). They'll
| either have a legitimate-at-first-glance looking website
| (usually the ownership has been transferred a few days prior,
| sometimes a few months, but one of the operators seemed to
| have a pool of domains they'd been letting age for years to
| throw you off a bit more), or they'll spoof the spelling of a
| real company when they text/email you.
|
| 3. Go through some form of hiring process. It's as little
| effort as they can put in on their end to keep the semblance
| of them being a real company.
|
| 4. Then this turns into normal check fraud. Your cushy remote
| job requires expensive office supplies, so they "provide"
| those. A local member of the gang delivers fake equipment in
| real boxes. You pay $5k or something out of the $7k fake
| check they previously sent, the rest supposedly being a
| signing bonus.
|
| AFAICT, many tens of thousands of people have gotten as far
| as step 4, and a decent fraction have fallen for the whole
| charade. If you're struggling to get a real job out of
| college and haven't seen what the normal interview process
| looks like, the confirmation bias (and desperation) combined
| with lack of real-world experience can cloud your judgement.
|
| There are tons of other endgames. Not all are quite that
| nefarious, but none are good.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| You got the job, but you'll need to pay a $50 fee for a
| background check!
|
| And voila, they have stolen $50.
| azinman2 wrote:
| > 3) I've seen big and small companies posting over and over
| the same job ad. For example a big consulting group has been
| posting the exact same job for more than a year (really) on
| linkedin and elsewhere - each time there are more than 100+
| applicants on linkedin.
|
| At the same time I've seen on the other end just endless
| unqualified applicants. Dozens and dozens of people who don't
| pass a phone screening. Some jobs are tough to find the right
| applicant, or you're looking in an area of high competition for
| a specific talent.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| The issue with that response is that a random posting on
| LinkedIn isn't how you fill those positions though. Cookie
| cutter jobs sites are for cookie cutter jobs.
| CM30 wrote:
| The question then becomes "how are applicants getting to the
| phone screening to begin with?"
|
| Because from what I can tell, it seems like a complete toss
| up whether a qualified/unqualified applicant will even get
| that far, let alone how much further in the progress they'll
| get. I get the distinct feeling that most filtering systems
| are just dropping a lot of great candidates at the first
| hurdle, and then letting a bunch of unqualified ones through
| to the later rounds.
| bluGill wrote:
| Have you ever had a stack for 100 resumes and had to figure
| out who to interview for the one position? You need to get
| rid of at least 80% quickly before it is worth your while
| to read them in more detail - that still leaves 20 to read,
| but that is way too much, now you are just looking for
| people who can probably do the job or meets any diversity
| requirements HR might have (and would be better, but you
| will interview anyone who lets you prove to HR you tried
| before hiring whoever comes out on top).
| nine_k wrote:
| > _did not even provide feedback after a rejection_
|
| Years ago, when I was heavily involved in hiring, I asked our
| CTO whether we can provide feedback to rejected candidates,
| because it could benefit them. The CTO answered that it may
| become a legal quagmire if a candidate decides to sue due to
| perceived discrimination, or something, based on the feedback,
| even without any merit. The probability is very low but the
| downside is very bad. So we had to abstain from giving feedback
| :(
| CretinDesAlpes wrote:
| How can you be discriminated on a technical level? Is there
| even a case of a candidate who sued a company at a technical
| stage we are aware of? This seems like a weak argument
| considering the hassle of time and potential legal fees,
| especially for someone who is looking for a job? Although I
| could understand why a candidate would try to bring a case
| like this in the US.
|
| Anyhow, it's not even the feedback the problem, it is that I
| have enough work experience to understand some of those
| startups seem to operate on a thin line between what is a
| technical assignment related directly to their core tech and
| getting free consultancy. The least they could provide to
| candidates who have involved time is what was expected.
| bluGill wrote:
| Just because it never happened doesn't mean it cannot.
|
| Sure it is a weak argument, but when you get to cite that
| possibility and thus save 10 minutes of time creating more
| detailed feedback (which may or may not be used).
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yeah it's a variant on "anything you say can be used against
| you."
|
| Any feedback you give can potentially be twisted to support
| some argument of unfair treatment. Even if it's frivolous,
| employers don't want to spend time dealing with that. So they
| just say nothing.
| rndmwlk wrote:
| >1) There are so much BS jobs in BS companies it's hard to
| understand if those are even companies doing real thing (cf.
| David Graeber)
|
| This time last year I was searching for a new job, something
| I've done a few times at this point in my career, and this was
| such a pronounced thing that I had not experienced in any of my
| previous searches. It felt so strange, like walking through
| some funhouse where I had to be skeptical of every turn and
| decision lest I walk face first into a mirror.
|
| I eventually found a great job with a great team at a smaller
| company that I had some initial reservations about and even
| held back on applying from at first. Maybe it's just an
| additional symptom of (4), but if this is the future of finding
| employment it is a bleak one.
| ben7799 wrote:
| Not sure how old you are but this is all exactly how it was in
| 2002-2003 for the .com crash, only the # of people who had been
| laid off was massively larger.
|
| We have HN threads about company "X laid off Y%". Back then it
| was "Company X has folded and laid off 100%", over and over and
| over again.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| some notes from my ~4 month looking so far (also after a >half-
| year sabbatical):
|
| * one company (behind 2 levels of middlemen) had "invented"
| some utopian form of LLMized auto-translate framework X into
| framework Y AND by-the-way, chop the monolith into
| microservices - so they needed "software curators", not
| programmers? But expert ones!
|
| * some middleman company, before anything else, sent me to
| "AI"-led interview, which asks questions and records my
| answers. 1-2 minutes per question. Question 1: how would you
| write a streaming service in python?
|
| * 50% of all job posting are either betting, crypto, or both.
| Unless something even more bogus
|
| * 75% try to fit "AI", "ML", or "LLM" in the requirements
| somehow - for the sake of it being there?
|
| * 20% of job postings repeat forever. Biting on them does not
| do much
|
| * 70% of (my well intended) job applications go unanswered..
| cannot know if they are real or not, or is it ageism? or blind
| keyword-matching? Who-knows..
|
| * only 5% lead to initial interview ;
|
| * one of the hopefuls, went further into tech/coding check,
| which passed but "we decided to change requirements of the job"
|
| * etc. Complete mess
|
| Ah. Have fun, i'll keep trying :)
| ge96 wrote:
| I forgot to make a meme about it but I still get these "We're
| sorry we went with someone else" months later from jobs I applied
| to but it's alright I have a job now.
|
| The joke of the meme is I feel ashamed/disappointed but I forget
| I'm fine.
| f1shy wrote:
| I have seen that happening inside a company (big one). There is
| an internal job market, and I would say the ratio is about 20% or
| more fake. From every 20 applications to postings that seem like
| a copy of my resume, I get 5 replies (the rest is black hole, or
| come a reply 10 months later) from the replies, eventually 2
| interviews.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Weird, I really don't see the reason an internal job board does
| this. They know all the people and their experiences.
|
| Is this just some hr compliance so they can search outwards?
| harvodex wrote:
| At some big companies at least, I think it is a policy to have
| to post the job publicly even if the person who was waiting in
| line inside the department for a few years already has it.
|
| I have had two jobs in the past posting inside the department
| that 2 or 3 people had to waste their time interviewing for
| with zero chance just as a matter of policy. The manager had to
| interview x number of people in the name of fairness or
| something like that.
| lambdaone wrote:
| One in five seems to be an under-estimate. Based on my experience
| of Upwork, at least 50% would be a better estimate.
| iknownthing wrote:
| I worked at a company that created fake job postings for H1B
| reasons.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| This is for PERM, not H1B. Many companies did and still do
| this. Imo, the concept of PERM is flawed, which causes
| companies to do this stuff. Some have had to settle with the
| gov't and can no longer do this (Meta).
|
| Also, the jobs are not fake, they are labor market test jobs,
| designed to show that no citizen meets the job requirements
| thus validating a green card for the H1B visa holder. They are
| "fake" in that they are designed so no one applies for or gets
| the job. Imo, labor market test should be part of the visa
| granting process, not the naturalization.
| dzdt wrote:
| I have been required to create such fake job postings.
|
| From the line manager perspective, how it looks is you have a
| colleague who has been working with you for several years who
| is on a H1B visa. They want to get a green card and become a
| permanent resident. To support this, we are required to post
| a fake job ad for their position, and invent a reason to
| reject any US citizens who apply for the position. (Non-US
| applications are ignored.)
|
| Our legal advice was that the job posting had to be contain
| only legitimate requirements for the role, so it could not be
| highly tailored to only match the resume of the employee
| seeking PERM status. The result was phone screen interviews
| were required to reject 8-10 on-paper-potentially-qualified
| US applicants for the fake position.
|
| This is for a highly specialized area within finance, where
| in real hiring there is an immense effort to find the
| strongest candidates regardless of nationality.
|
| In hindsight I am confident that earlier in my career I had
| applied to at least one such fake role. One not-well-known
| advantage of working with a recruiter as a job seeker in such
| a field is the recruiter will have back-channel information
| to know to ignore such fake job postings.
| RainyDayTmrw wrote:
| In trading, spoofing[1] is placing insincere orders to generate a
| signal, and presumably influence other participants' behavior,
| without an intention of actually having those orders filled. Bad
| actors spoof trades because it works. Spoofing is illegal, and
| rightly so, although enforcement may be a bit lax.
|
| I guess, we're now seeing the rise of spoofing in job postings.
| I, for one, find it quite tiring. I think there's a parallel. Bad
| actors spoof job postings because it works. What can we do to
| make it less effective or less worthwhile?
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoofing_(finance)
| esafak wrote:
| Job posting boards can punish them if they detect them as being
| spoofed through response rates.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Can. Won't. If trading has lax enforcement where this can
| cost people millions, why would a job board getting paid to
| post fake jobs care?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> The job market has become more soul-crushing than ever._
|
| I have often stated that the fact that I was basically evicted
| from the job market was one of the best things that ever happened
| to me (I didn't think so, at the time it was happening), and
| every time I read something like this, it reinforces that.
|
| But I was one of the fairly rare (it seems) people that could
| afford to have that happen. My heart goes out to the folks that
| have to endure this stuff.
|
| One of the saddest things, is that _really good workers_ , that
| would take their job seriously, and be excellent employees, are
| being knocked out of the game, and the unproductive, disloyal,
| rapacious sharks that have learned to game the system, are taking
| all the fish food.
| dirtybirdnj wrote:
| > really good workers, that would take their job seriously, and
| be excellent employees, are being knocked out of the game, and
| the unproductive, disloyal, rapacious sharks that have learned
| to game the system, are taking all the fish food.
|
| This needs to be made illegal or at the very least cost
| prohibitive.
|
| It's literally why the CEO lost his life. One side is
| destroying the livlihood of the other and even basic levels of
| "please stop" are hand waved away by the needs of the
| shareholders and YOY hockey stick growth. For some reason "it's
| business" is a valid and ethically clean reason to build an
| economic model on top of suffering.
|
| Honesty and dignity need to become fashionable and valuable
| again. Until we can wean people off the cult of personality
| around narcissists and psychopaths we're just carrying water
| for the people who do the worst abuse and will never change
| unless confronted at figurative or literal gunpoint.
| NickC25 wrote:
| >"This needs to be made illegal or at the very least cost
| prohibitive."
|
| How? Any mechanism to make it illegal will be vigorously
| fought by the same forces who currently benefit from it.
| Those forces have unlimited funds to "lobby" lawmakers.
|
| >"hand waved away by the needs of the shareholders and YOY
| hockey stick growth."
|
| Not _needed_ , but _desired_. Corporations acting as
| responsible stewards of capital aren 't mandated to grow at a
| given percentage, just that the capital doesn't decrease. We
| need to remind corporate America that perpetual double digit
| growth is impossible, and they can and _should_ be happy with
| any growth at all.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I applied to some New York City series B start up with a Director
| literally looking over my shoulder after she assured me the job
| postings weren't fake.
|
| Plot twist: they were fake they just weren't in her department so
| she didn't know and the only job they were really hiring for
| according to LinkedIn was an Azure contractor for $60 an hour
| ulfw wrote:
| Way way way way more than 1 in 5. Honestly.
| smel wrote:
| I would say 4 out of 5 to be honest
| extr wrote:
| I've found almost all my career positions through recruiters. I
| find it's about 100x more productive of an experience. You know
| the job exists because they're paying someone to fill it. You get
| to talk to someone on the phone about the job before you have to
| lift a finger. If you sound good on the phone, they just put you
| right through to the hiring manager/interview process, and also
| are materially invested in your success. Getting the formatting
| right on your resume is an afterthought. They'll give you an
| entire gameplan and tips on this company's specific process.
|
| People hate on LinkedIn but having a presentable profile and
| using the right keywords is worth it's weight in gold IMO. Even
| if it doesn't work out, they'll keep you in their rolodex and hit
| you up for jobs long into the future.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Main issue is that recruiters can get every bit as bougy as
| applicants can get when the market sways in their favor. So in
| a market like this, you may have less than a 10% response rare
| from messaging recruiters. Whereas 2021-2022 you'd almost
| always at least get a reply when you messaged a human.
| extr wrote:
| I never message recruiters cold. Only wait for them to
| message me, or hit up recruiters I have existing relationship
| with.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah, tried that early on. Messaged 4 recruiters I thought
| I had food relations with. 2 didn't have any jobs. 2 were
| no longer working as a recruiter. Oh and one ghosted me
| for... Almost 2 years.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Same here, but have you looked for a position in the past 2
| years? It's dramatically worse than I've experienced in my 20
| years as a dev.
|
| I only ever apply to jobs that I know I'm qualified for and
| know that I can demonstrate it, so my application -> offer
| ratio was historically pretty high. In my last job search, I
| sent out 99% of the applications I've ever sent out in my
| career.
|
| The tech job market enshitified rather quickly.
| bluGill wrote:
| Even if there is a job they will send it out to multiple
| recruiters, only the one who finds a candidate gets paid.
|
| Still in many cases those recruiters are the only way to get
| the job. Just beware that recruiters don't know when a new job
| will open for them either.
| tombert wrote:
| I've posted this story before, but it's relevant.
|
| About two years ago, I was looking for a job, and a recruiter
| reached out about a software engineering position at a prominent
| newspaper [1].
|
| I told the recruiter to apply me, they did, and they made me sit
| through a two hour video course on ethics and sexual harassment,
| which was weird considering that I hadn't even done an interview
| yet.
|
| About a week later, the recruiter gets back to me, and they
| declined me because my resume "reads too much like a manager, no
| hands-on coding experience".
|
| I was extremely confused, because most of the time people say the
| opposite, that my resume is too in the weeds, and I need to focus
| on high-level stuff. Moreover, I don't have any managerial
| experience on my resume...every role says something like
| "software engineer".
|
| And then it hit me: the hiring manager never read my resume. He
| already knew who he wanted to hire for the role, and for either
| legal or compliance or bureaucratic reasons, he had to make it
| _look_ like he was looking for other candidates, and in the
| process, he wasted my time and the recruiter 's.
|
| [1] Not going to say which one but you've definitely heard of it.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > Not going to say which one
|
| Nothing will change until online naming and shaming is not
| considered taboo.
| tombert wrote:
| I just don't want my name ASSOCIATED with that kind of PRESS,
| ok??
| the-chitmonger wrote:
| I'm glad you clarified - I was expecting NYT!
| tombert wrote:
| I don't know what you're talking about :)
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| make an anon account.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Are there laws against companies committing fraud and false
| advertising? Job sites are directly evolved from classified
| ads in which ads stands for Advertisement.
| joelfried wrote:
| You think there's law on the books that forces companies to
| speak honestly? And that someone is going to enforce it?
| bluGill wrote:
| Probably, but good luck getting enough evidence to prove
| anything. So long as they would hire someone with some
| unlikely to exist background they can advertise even if
| they don't hire.
| hilux wrote:
| This is extremely common. In fact, it is the rule at
| universities and government agencies and government
| contractors, who are required to post every job even when they
| have a preferred candidate, and many big tech companies do the
| same thing. It wouldn't matter if you named the company -
| literally every large organization has done this dozens or
| hundreds of times.
| tombert wrote:
| If they had just blanket-declined me then I don't think I
| would have cared all that much, it's far from the first (or
| thousandth) job I've been declined for; what annoyed me is
| that they made me go through a stupid video seminar thing
| before they had even read my resume.
|
| They're going to waste two hours of my time and not even give
| me the courtesy of reading my resume? Pretty douchey, IMO.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Send a bill.
| hilux wrote:
| Oh, I hear you. In some cases, they may be required to
| document how many candidates went through the entire
| process, to "prove" that it was genuinely competitive.
| f1shy wrote:
| My policy is: no tests, no seminars, no long interviews.
| Max 2hs before there is a clear sign of real interest.
|
| I've seen enough people doing 2hs tests+ 3 2hs interviews +
| 2hs disertation showing what you can... at the end seems
| the probability of being hired is inversely proportional to
| the effort required.
| pragma_x wrote:
| Wait, which newspaper did you say you work for again?
|
| > A major one.
| hylaride wrote:
| One adtech company I applied to ~10 years ago (Chango - doesn't
| exist anymore) also put me through the strangest interview I
| ever had. It was for an SRE role.
|
| There was a fairly standard phone screening interview, but then
| when I went in-person the CTO, VP of engineering, and somebody
| else I can't recall made the whole interview about torrents and
| USENET feeds for TV shows. Not a single serious discussion was
| had about the business or technology, despite my attempts to
| bring it up. I left scratching my head and a follow-up email
| that said "they were going to go in a different direction".
|
| I can only guess that the role was going to somebody else they
| really wanted, but they needed a "competitive" alternative. I
| was annoyed that they wasted my time, though.
| codesreallygood wrote:
| I've had something similar happen but I was actually hired.
| One of the rounds was with a super senior CTO-like type, and
| they questioned me about low level details of building Linux
| CLI tools, which is something I've never done or really
| didn't know anything about.
|
| I think the idea was to pick an area the interviewer was
| super familiar with, and see how you can handle stress, can
| you say "I don't know", can you make some guesses even in the
| space you are not familiar with and so on. Is it the most
| effective way of doing interviews? Probably not. But it's not
| a terrible screen either for common pitfalls with senior
| engineers.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| It's fairly likely they just confused about which candidate was
| which. Happens all the time.
| tombert wrote:
| Definitely possible, but the recruiter said, and I believe
| him, that he followed up with the hiring manager and asked
| him to clarify it, because the recruiter was also confused by
| the "manager's resume" feedback. The hiring manager doubled
| down.
|
| It's possible that the hiring manager was just embarrassed
| and didn't want to admit fault, but I still think they were
| using me and the recruiter for compliance reasons, especially
| since I reached out to that recruiter a year later and
| apparently that role was never filled, at least not from that
| recruiting agency.
| bjt12345 wrote:
| I've got one better...
|
| A recruiter called me for a job interview, said I was perfect
| for the role.
|
| "Sure!", I responded, "Just send me the Job Description, I need
| it before I interview".
|
| The recruiter was a bit slow on sending the JD through, but
| eventually did so and organised an interview.
|
| During the interview I was confused as to what the hiring
| manager was telling me, "I'm confused, the Job Description
| describes a different role with different technology?", I said
| while holding the printout in my hand.
|
| "Can I have a look at that?", asked the hiring manager.
|
| "Sure...", I start sliding it across the table when the HR
| person slams down their hand and snatches it.
|
| "OKAY! MEETING IS OVER!" shrills the HR lady, and we all leave
| the room in a confused manner.
|
| Afterward, I called the HR lady to follow up on the role, she
| hangs up, calls the recruiter and angrily tells him to never
| let interviewees contact the company directly ever again!
|
| ...
|
| What happened?!?
|
| I checked the meta-data in the Job Description word document
| and it was over 3 years old.
|
| I asked another recruiter what they thinked occurred...they
| replied that the HR lady likely never wrote a Job Description
| for the role but just called the recruiter asking him to send a
| body over.
|
| The recruiter, keen to send me through for the interview and
| collect their payment, found another job description from the
| company from an old email from the same company and figured it
| would do.
| tombert wrote:
| Probably dodged a bullet there anyway, if they weren't even
| willing to create a basic job description for the role. It's
| not like it's _that_ hard to write one; you could pretty
| easily just find a template online and replace relevant
| keywords.
| bjt12345 wrote:
| I actually got a job there a year later.
|
| The HR lady in question had since left the company.
|
| I kid you not, I later found her in a newspaper article
| where she was asking advice on her new startup business
| venture proposal - a clothes shop where people try clothes
| on and then order online. They included a picture of her in
| and her business partner in the write-up, but the response
| the editor provided her was she needed to better understand
| the risks (understatement of the year).
|
| Why do companies allow these people in such positions, I
| have no idea.
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| Makes me want to use an LLM to apply for a gajillion jobs. See
| how they like their own medicine.
| matchagaucho wrote:
| I've noticed sites like Indeed are still showing job listings
| scraped from our website 5 years ago.
|
| I've not chased down every scraper and submitted a remove
| request. But I can easily see how 20%+ of job listings are dead-
| ends.
| taeric wrote:
| There is a big gulf between "fake" and "never filled" that I
| don't like being washed here.
|
| Specifically, there are plenty of reasons you might have a
| position not get filled that are not nefarious. Could be an
| aspirational. Could be a company that is so under water that they
| can't manage a hiring pipeline. Could be one that isn't under
| water, but doesn't know how to manage a hiring pipeline. Could
| have been overcome by other events. Plenty of options.
|
| Yes, I'm sure there is some fraud. I'd love to see data that went
| into that detail. I'm assuming it is rather lower than 1 in 5.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If companies were as honest about "low priority" evergreen work
| over the constant _need help immediately_ , that may be
| acceptable. But I've never see anyone say that in a job
| posting. If you're indistinguishable from the behavior of a
| fraudster, that still reflects poorly and has the same results
| on applicants.
|
| (well, okay. Actually honest. How many of those "urgent"
| postings eve felt urgent?)
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| In general, some people want ghost-workers for working visa
| scams.
|
| i.e. some desperate individuals pay to not even work in a
| country to get around immigration rules.
|
| This scam was outed by some undercover East Indian journalists.
| Its gross because cons exploit people, and suppress domestic
| economic reality by bidding down wage rates. Nothing was done
| about this by the way... nothing... =3
| maybeculdbeyeah wrote:
| Maybe they are there to fake a good faith effort to justify their
| H1B hires.
| neom wrote:
| I'm starting to wonder if this is something that could/should be
| regulated...? I can't think of a great reason for allowing this
| from industry. It seems least reasonable you could be required to
| go back and remove postings when the position is filled or no
| longer available??
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It absolutely should be regulated. Especially since there's so
| many ways companies exploit this for a variety of factors. I
| can't think of one benefit to applicants. Wastes their time,
| the increasingly AI-submitted rejections are useless noise
| instead of feedback on how to improve, and the rise of "video
| interviews" just give more data than necessary to a company
| without ever needing to send a human to talk to them.
|
| The application market needs an entire overhaul.
| ethin wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me if this was a significant under-count.
| I've been applying for jobs for, what, 3-4 years now, both when I
| was in Uni and after. I don't even know how many job applications
| I've submitted but I think I've gotten maybe 10-15 interviews at
| most? I have of course gotten the typical advice: "Build your
| network", "Submit a cover letter", blah blah blah, but the first
| bit is completely useless to me (I don't have the finances to go
| to conferences for example) and I've tried the second bit and
| haven't gotten anywhere. I've been told to tailor my resume
| but... Yeah, I'm not doing that when I'm supposed to be
| submitting hundreds of applications per day or something.
| Honestly it's hard to muster up the motivation now to apply for
| jobs instead of working on open-source projects and (maybe)
| posting something freelance-ish on fiver or something because at
| least with open-source projects I'll get somewhere and it's
| something I enjoy; with job hunting and all the automation at
| play, and with even more things getting automated, it's a lot
| harder to answer the question of "why should I even bother" when
| companies are slashing headcount like crazy and aren't fined
| heavily by these platforms for posting ghost jobs and wasting my
| time (or some equally as harsh punishment that makes them
| actually pay attention). I still apply occasionally, but given
| how horrible the market is I know my job application count has
| significantly fallen. I just hope the market turns around and we
| see some huge crackdowns on all this automation because it's
| massively disincentivizing applicants (after all, why apply when
| you can only submit an application every 10-30 seconds while a
| bunch of people can submit 10000 applications per minute?).
| Glyptodon wrote:
| If you're submitting a hundred applications a day, you're doing
| it wrong. You should get better results aiming for just a few a
| day, but each tailored. (Though obviously it's just not a great
| time right now, I'd argue not being bot-fodder and obvious
| chaff is extra worth it if any human ever does actually look.)
| indiantinker wrote:
| I have been applying to this job at major brick making toy
| company for the past 3-4 years that is super dope. But i never
| get it and neither does anyone else.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > actually a corporate strategy designed to make the businesses
| posting them seem like they're growing
|
| Assume these companies don't have morals (that should be the
| default, btw) and ask yourself why wouldn't they generate 1000s
| of open job postings? Especially if many steps in the initial
| process can be automated. This makes them look like they are
| growing, and maybe their filter might find some rare great
| candidate and they'll find an opening for them. All upsides and
| almost no downsides. One downside is having to manage
| applications. But that can be outsourced or automated.
|
| It's immoral, disheartening to potential job seekers and skews
| job number stats, but that means nothing unless it's illegal.
| Once they start fearing of getting in legal trouble, they'll keep
| doing the same.
| eterm wrote:
| I got an email from LinkedIn prompting me to "unsubscribe from
| job alert <X> because you haven't viewed it in 3 months".
|
| Indeed I haven't, because every week they email me the same list
| of the same jobs that have been listed since the first week I
| signed up.
|
| And also because setting "remote" effectively turns off the
| radius, even though I ideally want a job that is remote but also
| local if possible.
| CM30 wrote:
| Makes sense. Seen an awful lot of jobs on these sites come up
| time and time again, and it always felt rather suspicious how
| often that happened. If a job can't be filled within a year or
| three, that's a pretty good sign that the company isn't
| particularly interested in filling it.
|
| As you may expect, they also tend to be the jobs that don't even
| respond with a rejection or anything when people apply to them,
| and where anything submitted seemingly just vanishes into the
| ether.
| ricciardo wrote:
| Seriously contemplating if it is even worth applying in this type
| of job market. Being young, would it not be more beneficial to
| just contribute to Open Source projects in which my actual
| passion for the field comes from and additionally find outside
| work to just get by? I guess it all comes down to an individual's
| ambitions and goals in life, but seeing some of my colleagues and
| friends do nothing but apply to jobs for a straight year seems
| extremely unfulfilling (mind you this is a perspective of a new-
| grad in CS).
| InkCanon wrote:
| I have similar thoughts. I'd say one big upshot of working in
| tech was they formed very high talent densities during their
| peak in the 2010s, so you could learn a lot. But now I'm not so
| sure. Plus it's a circus getting hired as a fresh grad. I'm
| largely thinking of masters or PhD - in the right place you get
| that talent density too.
| goredsox wrote:
| There are companies that scrape linkedin job postings for skills
| based workforce analytics. These jobs reports are then sent to
| higher ed institutions to inform classes. So manipulating these
| markets can signal to higher ed what skills they would like to
| devalue in the future
| woofcat wrote:
| You mean Aha! isn't hiring 100 people in 100 locations world wide
| at all times?
| Glyptodon wrote:
| The one person I know who worked there was very disillusioned.
| Aurornis wrote:
| This headline was carefully written to trigger confirmation bias,
| but the phrase "or never filled" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
|
| Most mid-sized companies where I've been a hiring manager haven't
| had a 1:1 relationship between job postings and hires. Some times
| we'd post 1 job posting but hire 2-3 people out of it. Other
| times we'd post 2 or 3 job listings at different levels for 1
| headcount because we were open to candidates of wide skill range
| but a single wide-range posting tends to turn off more
| experienced candidates. We've had situations where an internal
| candidate expresses interest in a public job posting, so we take
| it down without filling it and replace it with a different
| posting for their backfill.
|
| So looking back, several of my job postings would be considered
| "fake or never filled" despite the fact that we were honestly
| hiring and filling roles.
|
| This article and the WSJ article it sources from feel like
| journalists picking up on a social media trend and working
| backward to provide fodder for it. There is no 1:1 relationship
| between a job posting and a hire at many companies, so using job
| posting data to draw conclusions like this isn't good logic. It
| probably feels like vindication to people who are tired of
| applying to jobs, though.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Companies dirty secret: Job postings are an invaluable signal
| generator for companies. Knowing how much demand there is for
| various positions in your company is super helpful to drive
| business decisions. And unfortunately the company loses most of
| the signal when they are candid about just gathering potential
| applicants (because people will not apply and you know a lot less
| about their interest and potential)
|
| Not defending being uncandid, just a heads-up to be realistic
| about what's going on here. Unless it's made outright illegal,
| just assume it's happening _all the time_ , because of how
| fantastic the upside is and how cheap it is to do. The amount of
| work the company has to invests in screening incoming requests is
| entirely variable and scales to 0 if they really don't want to
| hire right now.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Most companies, if not nearly all of them, are just really bad
| at hiring above "entry-level" in general. The practice of
| pushing hiring through HR teams and recruiters often leads to
| the job posting being weird catch-all abstractions because a
| huge funnel brings in lots of resumes, which makes the HR teams
| look busy.
|
| Really, postings should be astoundingly specific --- literally,
| "This is exactly what we are looking for and the problem we
| want to solve. Prove to us you can solve that problem."
| Generalist hiring teams are usually unable to get that
| specific, which is why personal references and recommendations
| are very valuable. The number of applicants you get should be a
| good sign that your posting is too general or just right.
| Positions above the junior level should have _significantly_
| less applicants. If not, then you can probably simply hire a
| junior level.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Can confirm. 90% of L7, L8 hires at AWS between 2021 and 2022
| flopped.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Good opportunity for a fakejobs.fyi site that names and shames
| companies that do this. Send in perfect resumes that 100% match
| the job req with 10+ years of experience and see which get a
| response.
|
| This of course leads to a tragedy of the commons but that is what
| unregulated capitalism demands.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Does cross posted job listing mess up this data?
|
| Because it's common for the same job to be listed on multiple job
| sites.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| The headline could also apply to the 1990s.
|
| I was an employment counselor for a non-profit for a few years. I
| collected employment listings from multiple sources (Bureau of
| Labor was a big one) and printed+sorted them to help job seekers.
|
| I found a high percentage of distinct jobs that were endlessly
| listed. If I sent qualified applicants after them, they
| invariably never got a response. That was just the ghost
| listings. Another large chunk were problematic for reasons that
| had nothing to do with applicant qualifications.
|
| Maybe 2 listings in 5 were reasonable and competent efforts to
| find workers.
| fsndz wrote:
| The ratio is probably 4/5 for YC Startups
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Another 2 in 5 are real, but they're hoping to replace an
| existing employee at a lower rate.
|
| No net new job but net lower income.
| dzdt wrote:
| I have been required to create fake job postings because of US
| immigration policy.
|
| From the line manager perspective, how it looks is you have a
| colleague who has been working with you for several years who is
| on a H1B visa. They want to get a green card and become a
| permanent resident. To support this, we are required to post a
| fake job ad for their position, and invent a reason to reject any
| US citizens who apply for the position. (Non-US applications are
| ignored.)
|
| Our legal advice was that the job posting had to be contain only
| legitimate requirements for the role, so it could not be highly
| tailored to only match the resume of the employee seeking PERM
| status. The result was phone screen interviews were required to
| reject 8-10 on-paper-potentially-qualified US applicants for the
| fake position.
|
| This is for a highly specialized area within finance, where in
| real hiring there is an immense effort to find the strongest
| candidates regardless of nationality.
|
| In hindsight I am confident that earlier in my career I had
| applied to at least one such fake role. One not-well-known
| advantage of working with a recruiter as a job seeker in such a
| field is the recruiter will have back-channel information to know
| to ignore such fake job postings.
| CommanderData wrote:
| Should be illegal but I'm sure tech companies want this
| loophole to remain.
|
| Anyone based in the US/UK should be an advocate for keeping
| jobs local for their own long term job security. Anyone who
| argues the opposite baffles me (sometimes for the sake of it).
| librish wrote:
| While it might be better for your job security to keep your
| own field hiring locally, it could be better for your life if
| all other fields hire the best regardless of nationality.
| deepsun wrote:
| But then I would also argue that work restrictions are
| illegal as well.
|
| Why would we want to restrict any high-skilled already wanted
| candidates from any country in the world? Why we forbid them
| working and paying taxes here? Bums on the streets don't pay
| taxes (for many reasons), but we give them permission to
| work. While we at the same time forbid foreign highly paid
| professionals to pay taxes here?
| eweise wrote:
| I think you know the answer but I can spell it out, if the
| supply of high-skilled workers goes up, then salaries go
| down. Most people would prefer a higher salary. Taxes
| remain the same, whether local or foreign people are doing
| the work.
| deepsun wrote:
| No, that's a common economy thinking flaw -- assuming
| there's a finite amount of work to be done.
|
| Short-term -- yes, but same as with luddites -- everyone
| benefits from the increased productivity of your
| company/city/state/country. New businesses grow, more
| productive companies take over business from others. So
| salaries raise as a whole. I would really want my city to
| have an influx of high-skilled workers. Even if they are
| higher-skilled than me -- my business would serve them
| and make more money.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| What do you think about those people in New York who
| didn't want the Amazon headquarters there then? They were
| probably afraid of rent going up.
| deepsun wrote:
| Rent (and the big real estate problems) are because
| separate awful restrictions on building more properties.
| That's a local problem, created by NIMBY-ism of locals,
| not immigrants.
|
| We mix that with immigration, but there's no reason to.
| Typically workers _love_ new businesses around -- more
| work, more business.
| pedroma wrote:
| Rent is mixed with immigration because housing (extending
| that, physical space) is a limited resource.
|
| If housing is static and never increases, no matter how
| much the Average Joe's pay is increased due to an influx
| of highly paid immigrants, they're still going to lose
| when competing against a highly skilled immigrant for
| limited resources.
|
| In reality housing is not static, but as you mentioned is
| highly regulated. The established wealth have incentive
| to not increase housing supply, especially if they have a
| number of properties in an area with a lot of immigrants
| (one such source of NIMBYism).
| snozolli wrote:
| _No, that 's a common economy thinking flaw -- assuming
| there's a finite amount of work to be done._
|
| Anyone who has tried and failed to find work during a
| recession knows that there _is_ a finite amount of work
| to be done.
| no_wizard wrote:
| If the world worked logically, I'd agree that the
| argument has a realistic premise.
|
| However, it can be argued that it is not logical, and
| there is evidence to demonstrate that. For example, the
| H1B program is rife with abuse and is often used to
| import cheaper labor by corporations to undercut domestic
| labor costs. There is a relatively famous case of this
| happening at Disney for example[0]. This is one example
| of distorting labor market dynamics, there are many
| others. These act as obvious wage suppressors even when
| it results in obvious loss of productivity, the
| suppression of wage growth is more important than
| productivity, and you can only get away with that in a
| flawed system to begin with. By this rationale, this
| should have been an obvious mistake to Disney, yet they
| did it anyway.
|
| Now in terms of even broader business market dynamics
| things like regulatory capture, the tech sectors
| inclination toward harmful monopolization etc. all
| contribute to distortions where more productive companies
| don't actually take over business from others.
| Microsoft's famed "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" is an
| example of this. Big tech buying out competitors is
| another. These become market distorting dynamics as well.
| Its not a level playing field, nor is it a rational
| market.
|
| To that end, businesses using laws and regulation to prop
| up their own self worth isn't talked about enough, yet
| its happening constantly. However when workers want to do
| the same, its a 'thinking flaw'?
|
| If its such a flaw, why are businesses doing it for
| themselves?
|
| [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-
| after-layoff...
| lokar wrote:
| You are arguing that the nation as a whole will benefit,
| not the specific workers who loose a job, can't get one,
| etc in the short run
|
| This approach of optimizing for long term GDP growth
| (most of which goes to the investor class) over the
| interests of workers today is why you see right wing
| populism on the rise in the US.
| deepsun wrote:
| No, I'm arguing that the specific workers won't lose a
| job, but will keep it AND have a higher salary. That's
| what happened historically every time.
|
| Sorry but you seem to got the right-wing populism
| backwards -- right-wing populism wants to restrict and
| stifle any immigration and build a huge wall with
| neighbors. Xenophobia is typical for right-wing in any
| country, not just US.
| lokar wrote:
| Specific American workers (in tech and manufacturing)
| have been loosing specific jobs to people on work visas
| and offshoring for years.
| pedroma wrote:
| Assuming there is an infinite amount of work to be done,
| there are still limited resources in the real world that
| people compete for. Theoretically, we can utilize more
| land, build more dense housing, and so on to offset the
| increase in population density so housing remains
| affordable, but not without changing the physical
| landscape in a way that many would view as negative (i.e.
| a concrete jungle).
| wellbecause wrote:
| Well because they fought so hard for their independence but
| now want to join their colonial forefathers in their
| homeland because home is not providing the independence
| they fought for. It's pretty clear.
| onewouldsay wrote:
| One would say this is reverse colonialism under the cover
| of globalization. Still don't understand why well-off of
| nations are supposed to provide jobs for other nations
| which have growing economies and where the high skilled
| workers already make a very comfortable wage for their
| societies. Can someone explain why the US has to generate
| jobs for foreigners when their own societies can't
| generate them themselves?
| EatDevSlay wrote:
| And it generates literally zero respect. Possibly even
| scorn.
|
| No one knows my friend, no one knows. We must fix it.
| Longlius wrote:
| >But then I would also argue that work restrictions are
| illegal as well.
|
| We have a whole host of work restrictions that we have
| decided are very beneficial for society as a whole. Things
| like minimum wage, maximum working hours, overtime, etc.
|
| Maintaining domestic industries and talent by not selling
| out to foreign mercenary labor is generally quite
| beneficial for the national interest.
| _factor wrote:
| If you take yourself out of the equation, hiring the best
| labor for local jobs, irrespective of location, is more
| effective use of resources and a net benefit over restricting
| employment to a smaller, less qualified field.
|
| It may hurt the individual, but helps the country.
| ethanwillis wrote:
| Is this just a modern spin on trickle down economics?
| downthefoxhole wrote:
| > Anyone based in the US/UK should be an advocate for keeping
| jobs local for their own long term job security. Anyone who
| argues the opposite baffles me
|
| It's the lesser of two evils. Given a choice 1) to let H1B's
| flood the market and produce lower wages, or 2) Have the
| company setup shop in a foreign land, and hire those people
| there locally, which do you think is better?
|
| At least with option 1, the money is still being made in the
| USA, taxes are paid here, and the money is spent here for
| housing, food, cars, etc.. which benefits everyone around.
| EatDevSlay wrote:
| Tariffs and taxes easily solve that issue.
| edc117 wrote:
| Will they? Trump has said he's in favor of the H1-B
| program and has given no indications that he plans to
| lessen or stop it. Tariffs will likely be used as
| bargaining tools - you won't see tariffs directed at a
| country because a US corporation has outsourced labor
| there. There's a lot of noise about changes to
| immigration right now, but I'd be very unsurprised if
| little or nothing changed.
| creer wrote:
| These are not fake. "On paper potentially qualified" has meant
| nothing for a long time. And if truly acceptable candidates do
| show up, that scuttles the immigration application. The ads are
| written so that etc, but they still correspond to an actual job
| that is actually, actively hiring and actually, actively
| paying.
|
| You do learn to recognize them, and then you only need apply if
| you carefully meet all the requirements because THESE job
| postings WERE carefully written. But they are real by
| definition: there is a job and it is carefully spec-ed, as
| opposed to the rest of the garbage. And much effort went into
| the process, as opposed to the rest of the garbage. And someone
| was writing on HN recently about their immigration process
| being scuttled by this.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I want to make something explicit:
|
| The US Labor requirements for PERM merely require the employer
| to make the posting and evaluate the candidates. If they do
| find a US based candidate, the law isn't saying the company has
| to _hire_ them - just that the PERM application for the
| _current_ foreign employee will get rejected. He still gets to
| keep his job as long as his visa is valid.
|
| Yes, companies will play games to ensure he passes the labor
| certification. And yes, it doesn't always work. In a team I was
| in, we had a bunch of Indians who got rejected multiple times
| over the years before they finally got approval. The folks on
| the government side didn't just take the company's word - they
| "randomly" picked a person and would audit all the people who
| had applied and would argue (successfully) with the company
| that some of the US based applicants were actually eligible for
| the role.
| snailmailstare wrote:
| An explanation where companies intentionally didn't follow
| through would be less clearly fake job listings. The jobs are
| 100% fake even if they may be from companies more likely to
| have real listings than average and it is an extravagant
| astroturfing deception coordinated by a government to collect
| market information. If this were done by a University, an
| ethics board would halt it.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >it is an extravagant astroturfing deception coordinated by
| a government to collect market information.
|
| Does a government need to go through these hoops to get
| market information? I thought that past part of the point
| of the Bureau of labor and several other organizations.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| > _I have been required to create fake job postings because of
| US immigration policy._
|
| Your post is useful information and I believe you're telling
| things from your perspective.
|
| But I gotten say _required_ can 't be the right word. A more
| correct to put things is "US immigration policy strongly
| encentivizes broadly dishonest behavior and we go along 'cause
| all other companies do".
|
| If we're talking broad policy, the companies that are doing
| this sell immigration policies as being intended only for
| uniquely skilled individual but support policies that tie H1-b
| holders to a given company _so their salaries are held down_.
| And naturally, the point is that immigration policies broadly
| are aimed for both getting uniquely skilled individuals and to
| create an environment roughly lowering wages, some companies
| leaning on one part, some companies leaning on the other. And
| yeah, managers on the front lines indeed maybe only see the
| seemingly irrational results.
| mike_d wrote:
| > But I gotten say required can't be the right word.
|
| I read it as their boss told them they had to do it.
| uoaei wrote:
| "Required" is not accurate. You are implying that US
| immigration policy mandates the creation of fake job postings.
| Rather, you chose to create those fake job postings in service
| of some arbitrary reason. However justified you think that
| reason is, it is still arbitrary, and that was still a choice.
| snailmailstare wrote:
| https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-6-part-e-
| chapter-...
| burnte wrote:
| Where in there is there something stating "if you don't
| really want a domestic worker, then simply create the job
| advert but then make up reasons not to hire applicants and
| tell us you couldn't find anyone."
|
| It seems as though you read that person's comment as
| "advertising jobs is not required" when what they said was
| "don't pretend your company's effort to skirt regulations
| was actually what's legitimately required to abide by
| them." Regulations DO NOT state you have to go through the
| motions even if your intent is to hire a foreign worker
| anyway. The regulations state that you CAN'T hire a foreign
| worker if you haven't legitimately tried to hire a local
| worker. By going into the process with the INTENT of hiring
| a foreign worker regardless of your local worker search is
| fraud. Regs do not say "You must commit fraud."
| snailmailstare wrote:
| The claim is that the company did this for their own
| random reasons. It is a required market test with
| penalties if you file a petition and had a qualified
| worker you couldn't reject, not filing a petition because
| you do puts you out of their responsibility so whether
| you are hiring after their fraud is your own business.
| uoaei wrote:
| If something is "your own business" until you get caught
| doing it, then the correct label for that thing is
| "illegal".
| snailmailstare wrote:
| Right kind of similar to how the IRS is above fault,
| immigration can make a complex scam where they only take
| the results when there was no harm done.
|
| I have no idea what part of that text you read that made
| you sure you had to hire a qualified candidate or that a
| consequence could exist if you don't let alone that their
| department would look at it. It's my understanding that
| they are not even allowed to consider past behavior of an
| employer.
| uoaei wrote:
| You don't get to just ignore laws because they cut into
| your profit margin.
| bandinobaddies wrote:
| > To support this, we are required to post a fake job ad for
| their position
|
| I believe this would be considered immigration fraud.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Since nobody ever writes "hey John/Mary create a fake job ad
| so that we can do the fraud to help <name>". So the
| company/hiring manager can later say that "Bandinobaddies
| didn't have the X skill, HenryBemis didn't have the Y skill
| but <name> had both skills so we kept him around and offered
| to him as he already knew the company/role/tech/etc."
|
| And good luck proving that on the call (that was never
| recorded I proved/or not about the Y skill).
| leoqa wrote:
| I imagine a couple interviews with HSI agents would get
| someone to cough up a statement that they did not intend to
| fill the role. If I were a line manager, I would not rely
| on the company's lawyers to protect me from prosecution.
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| The company lawyers are just as likely to throw said line
| manager under the bus, should it come to that.
| burnte wrote:
| You were "forced" to create fake job postings because your
| company engaged in immigration visa fraud, not because of
| immigration policy. Immigration policy does NOT state "you must
| put out a job posting and make up reasons you can't hire
| Americans." It states that you must look for Americans, and if
| you can't find them, then you may look at immigration visas.
| What your company decided to do, as many do, is they've already
| decided on getting cheaper immigrant workers, and then go
| through the fraudulent process to get them.
|
| This is why people like me come out so vociferously against H1B
| caps being raised or removed. Fraud is rampant and I personally
| know people, US citizens, who have lost jobs to H1B people who
| get paid half as much.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Well, it wasn't if they'd (the company) create the posting.
| It was whether or not GP would say yes, or say no and get
| fired so someone else can do it. Can't blame the messanger
| too much.
|
| >they've already decided on getting cheaper immigrant
| workers, and then go through the fraudulent process to get
| them.
|
| If it's truly banking talent, it lilely still isn't cheap.
| It's just talent that can't easily job hop in 1-2 years to a
| competing bank. It's a soft form of the anti-poaching
| agreements certain companies had over a decade ago.
|
| Easiest way to mess that up for companies is to simply make a
| Visa applicable as long as that worker stays in the US sector
| of that industry. So the company does the work but gets no
| handcuffs. The idea of H1B's is to attract top talent, not
| hold them hostage at a single company.
| xvedejas wrote:
| If my company has decided to replace me with someone cheaper,
| and they can't get an H1B, then they'll go for someone
| overseas, right? At least for tech jobs, it seems likely.
| With the H1Bs, income taxes are paid in the US, and the
| consumer base grows too. I'd hate to lose my job but why
| shouldn't I still prefer removing the H1B cap?
| Longlius wrote:
| Why would you openly admit to committing a crime (visa fraud)
| on Hacker News?
| dav43 wrote:
| In Singapore it's a lot higher than this. There are government
| mandates that roles must be advertised - so companies planning on
| hiring internally will advertise roles, interview candidates then
| justify why no candidates are good fit then hire the original
| internal candidate.
|
| It's laughable.
| salynchnew wrote:
| One interesting part of this is a small number of companies will
| post multiple job listings with different locations listed for a
| single open headcount, to get maximum expsosure on Indeed and
| LinkedIn (both of which have some sense of geo-based or
| onsite/remote-based recommendations for job seekers).
| esher wrote:
| Not sure if that is mentioned with the comments already. I am
| currently trying to hire a remote developer (real posting) and I
| have to battle with 'fake applications' with super generic CVs
| and intros, individually created by AI for specific jobs [2,3,4].
| I assume that there are humans behind it in most cases.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42655183 - my rant [2]
| https://www.rezi.ai/ [3] https://flowcv.com/ai-resume-builder [4]
| https://www.jobscan.co/
| blobbers wrote:
| At any given time, the PERM process in the greencard system
| creates an inflated number of tech job postings. I'll outline the
| envelope math.
|
| Assuming all H1B slots are filled, that's 85,000 per year based
| on the recent 10 year cap. H1B visas last about 6 years.
|
| In order to get a green card, part of the process is the PERM.
| You post the H1B holder's job in a newspaper or on websites and
| have legal review the applicants and determine why no american
| applicants are suitable.
|
| Assume that all H1B people want to get into the perm process, but
| it can generally take a few years to happen. So at any given
| time, there may be up to 510,000 (85K _6) people applying for
| PERM status. During that time, we can assume about half are in
| the PERM process, meaning we have at least 255,000_ fake*
| postings that are specifically tailored to a candidate in order
| to reject other candidates.
|
| TLDR; PERM process creates at least 0.25M fake job postings at
| any given time, mostly in technology.
| howdoesoneknow wrote:
| How does one know that this is happening so that they are not
| wasting their time applying for positions that they will never
| get?
| jedberg wrote:
| Part of the problem is that investors use "total open job
| listings" as a factor for making an investment decision. If there
| are a lot then the business must be healthy!
|
| VCs actively encourage putting up fake listings, under the guise
| of "opportunistic hiring".
| EatDevSlay wrote:
| I turned down an offer of 500 dollar flat fees for doing a
| successful interview for outsourced developers. Who knows how
| that all technically works out. Surely they couldn't just send
| some completely other dude? Whole thing is pretty scammy.
| yobbo wrote:
| Here is one article stating an estimated 80% of jobs are filled
| through networks:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2020/10/15...
|
| That would be consistent with 4/5 job postings being "fake",
| though the article also says "are 70-80% are never posted". So
| unclear.
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