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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.

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.

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.

In the public sector, tbh, the quality of candidates is so bad that everyone you get on the first round of applicants can be totally unqualified.

So, you have to reopen the posting or start all over.

And the second set of candidates is just as bad.

So you close it and rewrite the description (not that fucking HR was competent at that in the first place), and go back to step one, which you are highly likely to repeat.

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.

linkedin has one-click applications for many large orgs; in all likelihood they saw something that said "FAANG" and "similar to you skills" and clicked it.

a previous F500 company I worked for and was involved with hiring for was constantly posting jobs but only really took application seriously when they were referrals or through the company job site directly.

By now this seems to be a serious problem. It's too easy to apply for a job. Disincentive all around: it's too easy to be lazy and over-specify or mis-describe a job offer. Then it's too easy for randos to apply because it's just a few clicks at most. Then it's too easy to dismiss with a broad comb because of all the randos. etc, etc. At this point the "job posting to job application" pipeline is completely broken and anyone who cares should rather leverage their network. Both to hire and apply, or use deliberately more obscure pathways such as professional society meetings or company web sites only, or job fairs, etc.

Yes, just go in there, look them in the eye, give them a nice, firm handshake, and don't take no for an answer.

Please.

I went visiting some local businesses in-person the other summer looking for a part-time job. One HR lady seemed annoyed that I showed up, and told me "we don't have a front door", and unironically said "keep checking our web site". She seemed confused when I asked her to hand my resume back to me. One vestibule intercom told me to put my application in the slot. One major international corporation told me that they would give me a decision on the spot, then changed their tune during the interview.

Please.

You're not wrong, but all you've ended up describing to the poster is that you don't actually have a network to leverage for finding work - which is what they're advocating for here, not walking into places to hand physical resumes.

IDK, maybe we should go back to that. At least interaction with a human is guaranteeed.

Netorking has its own problems that are much harder to solve.

Perhaps.

For the time being, leveraging a network is still the best way to get hired.

I think in my career so far in ~8 companies and many clients, I only got one of those jobs From a "cold" job posting application. Everything else was at least a soft referral by an acquaintance.

If the role was advertised on LinkedIn, out of those hundreds of applicants there's probably only a small minority that have appropriate experience and right to work.

I 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".

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.

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.

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.

"what if somebody from Google applies"

I'd be immediately suspicious. Why are they leaving Google to come here?

I mean, Google laid off how many employees these past few years? Nearly million?

I do hate this stigma that clearly being laid of means you're a lesser programmer.

I did get hired like that once. Small company with just 3 other employees not really interested in hiring, but I had some useful experience in their domain so they decided to hire me anyway (and then went bankrupt a few months later, but they probably would have happened anyway).

I 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.

IME it's not that bad. My entire network failed when I was looking for work: either everyone was still at my old employer whom I didn't want to return to or they were also out of work. I don't have much online presence, because that's my preference.

I did ~11 applications (on company websites, tailored resume), of which like 9 were moonshots (NVDA, Valve, etc). I heard back from everyone, and then interviewed and accepted an offer with a smaller international company located locally. This was during the 2023/4 downturn (Dec '23 to be exact).

Caveat: I have 15YoE and work in embedded (especially embedded Linux); it seems this specialization has suffered less than others. I also don't have a degree. I had to accept a slight paycut and hybrid - but I was in office before... and hardware generally just requires you to be present sometimes.

Don't be afraid if you don't have a network, the advice is good, but it doesn't apply to everyone.

I 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.

> If you're applying for a B2B SaaS product manager job there are 50,000 jobs and 200,000 applicants and it's a completely different situation.

B2B SaaS is broad. If you're a generalized you're fucked.

But if you're specialized in a specific B then you should (probably) be doing fine.

That said, most of the new-gen PMs are generalists who drank the "domain experience doesn't matter" koolaid.

My experience is the network typically fails, but it can sometimes work.

Remember with networking there is often only one person in your network of hundreds who can do anything so you need to find that person. Often it will be the guy you just barely talked to who won't think of you at all unless you remind them, but they then know enough to know you are good enough for some position and then they are not interviewing they are convincing you to take the job.

Those cases where the network ensures you are the only candidate are one of the reasons why they work well. My current company doesn't work that way, it doesn't matter how good you are, all I can do is put your resume in the HR stack (unless it is for my department in which case my boss might ask me about a couple resumes). I'd be considered a conflict of interest so I couldn't interview you.

I 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.

> but I have people I directly literally went to school with, and lived in the same dorm with turn me flat down for work, which was a real slap in the face.

Since referrals became the meta-game, companies have adapted their referral process to be more selective. Most companies I've worked for have required people to enter some basic information about how and where you worked with the referral, why you're referring them, and a statement that your referral means you are vouching for that person's work performance.

It cuts down on the number of people referring people they know by happenstance, which defeats the purpose of a referral program. I doubt your friends meant it as a personal attack. They probably just had referral programs that were more rigorous than putting names into a queue.

They said they hadn’t been happy with the last three months of candidates, and that I was probably going to be it and then rejected me with no feedback and hired some ex-SpaceX person as a contractor. It may have been the investor playing a role.

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.

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.

>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.

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”.

>“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.

> 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.

It's when there were being rounded up to be sent. Not during the event itself.

Cheering on deportation.. I wonder what modern parallels we can draw from that.

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?

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.

Well, sure but some feedback would’ve been nice at least - it’s not like I was going to sue them.

> 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.

11 apps to one job last year, huh? With a 100% response rate. Wish I could have had even a tenth of that luck. Heck even during the best booms my response rate was hovering around 30%.

I'm just exhausted with the search. I finished yet another programming take home only for the company to stop hiring at the turn of the quarter.

But yea, my network also failed me. Mostly becsuse 80%+ of them were laid off themselves.

Remember when 80% are laid off, they are all looking. Whoever finds a job probably has found a place that is hiring more than one person. So keep in touch, they don't have anything today, but they may have leads. Sometimes it is here is a job that you are a closer fit for than me so I may as well point you at it even if it hurts my already low chances.

Indeed. And my luck continued to fall through the cracks.

Had 3 interviews through contacts that bounced back. Failed two interviews, one technical, one cultural. Third one never really got off the ground; talked to a recruiter and then nothing ever really got arranged. Not even a call.

One got a job at a place I previously worked at and had no interest in returning to. He's on a different team though so I can't say his experience will mirror mine.

One was asking around about any open roles days before he got laid off himself.

Asked a few others and no positions are really open as of now.

Funnily enough me and another colleague applied to the same job and he got it. Right before they invoked a hiring freeze.

And those are just referrals. The nightmares from jobs I just found myself get even better. I'm just tired. This market suuuuuuucks.

There have been ups and downs for decades. I'm sorry it is happening to you, glad it isn't me this time (so far!). I've been there. Hang in, there are always jobs though sometimes you need to become a handyman or something to get any money for a year.

Yeah, no worries. I'm stable for now, just not full time stable. I just gotta survive until the market bounces back.

I work in games so I was pre-programmed far in advance to expect shakey times. Just not times where I'm ghosted for over a year with no sign of anything opening up (quite the contrary, still plenty of gaming layoffs!).

Paid off?

What an unfortunate typo. Luckily I had time to fix that one.

But sure, I think almost all of them got severance.

How would I recommend I get into embedded Linux as a total newbie with only Node/Ruby experience? :^)

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. :)

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.

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

Curious, what do you earn?

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.

It's not advice really. If it were advice, it would be something you could do.

Building a network is something anyone can do. Join meetups. Find local user groups. Find online groups and get active in them. Give talks. Write and publish your thoughts locally and/or online. Talk with people. Ask (good) questions. Let people get to know you and the way you think. Many more ways exist than just these.

Connecting with other professionals in various ways is all there is to building a network and anyone can do it. They just have to do it.

This. I'm still benefiting from being in a BSD users group that I went to between 2000-2008 because it was filled with passionate/talented tech people, most of whom have gone onto other things. Find places to get into discussions and show your opinions and have discussions. If you are in a group where your mind is never changed, then find something else.

Ok, now that's advice.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Carpenters, electricians, and plumbers will be able to name their price in the Los Angeles area for the next few years.

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.

What sort of business are you running now, if you don't mind elaborating?

I have two, one is a dev shop for LMS software, mainly working in custom AI solutions now.

The other is a consultancy where I help resolve tech debt and put out fires at SMB's, which I get most of my work from referrals.

I posted once with a seconds account on who is hiring, the amount of spam and fishing attempts received is crazy, 10-50 DocuSign and the like a day since then.

I decided I wanted a better job in 2025 after being at my company for 6ish years. I started applying to 2-3 jobs a day starting in december and reaching out to old contacts. Complete ghost silence and bullshit. Managed to get 2 leetcode screens that went nowhere even after doing alright on them.

Hit up an old college buddy on linked in, got a referral, went through a ton of interviews (6) and got a job in two weeks. It's nuts how far a referral will get you.

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.

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.

100% agree. A big issue with tech is there are so many options and domains that for any particular job it can easily take even an amazing developer 6-9 months to get up to speed if they're unfamiliar with your particular tech stack or business area. That's not the case with most other professions - if I'm, for example, a professional violin player, I can play in basically any orchestra in the world and be proficient from day 1.

So if you happen to find that unicorn who is not only a great developer but is also expert in the major areas of your tech stack and your business domain, you hire them in a heartbeat.

Sounds like something many technical professions have to deal with. Even with all the licenses and certs in the world, very few lawyers or doctors are just walking in and learning the process in a week. Other types of engineering need to understand the pipeline in another firm compared to their old one. A firefighter needs time to mesh with the team and figure out what equipment and tools are available here.

But then again, I bet most of those also aren't trying to rely on AI to find talent.

I can't speak about lawyers, but you're definitely wrong about doctors (have a couple in my family). They can and do travel to completely new hospital systems and are expected to do their normal job immediately (and they do).

Even within tech, I think the ramp-up time is faster for literally everyone else besides software engineers, just because the underlying technology can vary so much more (and its more important to be understood at an intimate level of detail) than for other roles.

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).

My girlfriend is an Orthopaedic Surgeon. Great when I've got a broken arm, or need shelves putting up. I wouldn't let her anywhere near my heart or brain. Medicine is super specialised.

I hear you on geography though. Luckily the human body doesn't change too much between locations.

I think the point was that an orthopaedic surgeon can change hospitals and immediately get to work doing orthopaedic surgery. Sure, there might be some difference in how to clock in or who to report to, but they aren't suddenly working with a different type of human. Their job will remain constant despite changing environs, whereas moving between software companies could have you learning entirely different stacks that affect your process in fundamental ways.

I think another very common scenario is just eliminating the headcount. Companies cut headcount at a small scale all the time and the first one to go is usually the unhired.

> we always leave a posting up even when we're not really looking just in case the perfect candidate happens to walk through the door

I've seen one that remained up after the company itself was closed down… which I knew about by having been in it when it closed; even before that, it was so out of date the salary offered was about 60% of what they'd paid me when I joined.

I once got a developer position through a professional group on Facebook. My soon-to-be manager had to have HR create a job posting on a public facing portal so I could apply through it, despite already essentially giving me the position.

I wonder how many people applied for that job before it was taken down.

> I think 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.

Having interviewed candidates for full-stack positions, and actually asked them about the entire stack (instead of just the backend), I'm surprised the number isn't higher.

I'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).

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"

Perhaps there's a reason why. The market generally doesn't need people who can do it all. In the same way it doesn't need people writing C++ or Rust to know how to write machine code or assembly. Sure, the ones that can are probably more knowledgable, but their experience with the high level language is more important.

I've done full-stack with no frameworks or non-std libraries (aside from PDO and OpenSSL, the limitations set by CEO decree) for about 8 years now.

I write my own schemas in IBM Db2. Hell, I wrote small application databases in IBM DDS in the AS400's SEU while I was still under the legal drinking age. I've always written our stylesheets from scratch, using SCSS. I've written C++ APIs that run in PASE, talk to the database with ODBC, then send back to a front end through sockets. I do graphic design and photography -- something I started back in middle school and took some formal classes on -- and have led the creation of marketing materials for multiple subsidiaries. I've spent 40 hour weeks working on sysadmin tasks in vim, 40 hour weeks writing libraries in JetBrains and VSCode, and 40 hour weeks working running around with my DSLR or working in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.

But when I look for full-stack jobs, most of them actually want somebody who is well versed in a framework. There's not much point in doing all of this from scratch. It's more tedious, more error prone, and it takes longer to get to market. Some interviewers have given the impression that I'm a little "less than" because I haven't used any major frameworks.

I think that's actually a valid take, and it's something I've started doing side projects to address. Frameworks improve velocity. Frameworks improve reliability. They reduce the risk of a developer coming up with an out-in-the-weeds solution to a problem they didn't properly understand. They make it easier to maintain the code. They make it easier to onboard new developers who are familiar with that tech.

I once did a take-home project for a full stack role that proclaimed any language/framework could be used to build a browser-based application that satisfied a particular task. I opted to use golang and its standard library to produce an application with no external dependencies and no javascript. In the rejection email they stated the use of outdated development methods was a point of disqualification. I'm sure other reasons for disqualification were present, I wasn't a great candidate in retrospect, but I'll never forget the naivety and hubris of their framing.

They were of course a NextJS shop.

Ultimately disregard role titles. It's a people problem that you have to pull teeth to find out what they really want, and what they really want they often won't say out loud. That's fine, it's their money (and usually a lot of it!) and they should be able to dictate the services that they want.

Really sucks for people new to the industry trying to learn the song and dance.

Sounds like you dodged a bullet in terms of culture mismatch. I think a good number of these mismatches could be mitigated by having some in-depth conversations about the job, team, interactions with other teams, and problem scope, before getting into any technical interviewing.

I think it is valid to expect some experience with major frameworks, but framework experience without understanding the underlying concepts usually indicates someone who is pretty limited in being able to solve more difficult problems.

I guess larger organizations have a role for these kinds of workers, but they’re not the kind of people I want on my team.

[dead]

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.

I always wonder how much that is influenced by the blog / social media world where a few (or even one) neat features in a product or language produces "I love this". So yeah they love it ... in so far as the social media expression goes.

I feel that’s more of an artifact of American culture. I remember discussions where the stakeholder declined to use a technology, and said something like “we love X, but are concerned about Y.”

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.

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.

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?

When they replace you with an H1B, then wages in America go down. I don't want that for my fellow Americans. When they outsource and the worker stays overseas, there's a lot of issues that crop up, and the company can learn to live with the time lag, potential quality or security issues, etc., or they can hire a local worker. As a citizen, my goal is to maximize my standard of living and the SOL for my fellow Americans. If that means a company has to spend more, I'm fine with that. Living is for human beings, not companies. Corporations exist to enrich people, not the other way around. Corporations have no rights we don't give them, and we can take them away at any time.

Is this maybe short-sighted? Wages for one particular role go down when the labor pool is larger, for sure. But how many new companies could exist given cheaper skilled labor, working on new products? I feel like growing the economy like this would, in the long run, be better for all workers' standard of living. This is an observation I've heard about free trade in general, not just for labor, that free trade benefits everyone but nobody in particular, and so is doomed to be unpopular.

> then they'll go for someone overseas, right?

Yea, and those people can stay living overseas.

international companies sometimes relocate their overseas staff to work in the US because a job may require very specialised knowledge difficult to get elsewhere. the worker may not agree to take the L1 visa for various reasons and would ask for H1B.

while such worker is indeed somewhat cheaper, the cost of not filling the position while they go through the legal process of obtaining the visa makes it on par.

so it is not all fraud.

Any time you go through motions to fulfill regulatory requirements that you have no intention of ACTUALLY abiding by is fraud. "difficult to get elsewhere" is not a sufficient reason to commit fraud. In fact, the regulations are explicitly there to make sure you can't just bring cheap people all around the world and lower wages elsewhere. If it's difficult to drag workers around, that's the entire point.

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.

>It was whether or not GP would say yes, or say no and get fired so someone else can do it

you can rationalize anything with this kind of logic

In a world where we live to work, yes. Not everyone can be a whistleblower

Just following orders

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.

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.

>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.

> To support this, we are required to post a fake job ad for their position

I believe this would be considered immigration fraud.

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).

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.

The company lawyers are just as likely to throw said line manager under the bus, should it come to that.

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).

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?

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.

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.

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...

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 recession was ever caused by influx of foreign workers. But there are examples of the opposite, like USSR -- the most economically active people tried to move out, causing "brain drain" and exacerbating recession.

If anything, an influx of skilled workers is a symptom of growth, not recession.

We all saw through the Great Recession that immigration rises and falls with the economy.

I don't care about the economy as much as I care about my employment. I've directly witnessed the negative effects on American tech employees as a direct result of the rise in off-shoring and H1-B visas.

As an example, virtually everyone on this site should be able to walk into a Java shop and be employed there within a few hours. After all, this is a high-demand technology used by huge corporations. Yet we see people commenting even here about being unable to even get an interview after months of mass-applying.

Also, the US is nothing like the USSR. The US is where you make the most money. There won't be any brain drain from the US.

My point is that if not for extra-competitive market, there would be no companies for you to be employed at, because they would fail international competition. California especially hates any non-compete clauses, which is bad for a particular company, but good for the whole market.

I used to live in a country with high tariffs on imports and bad immigration policies. While sounding good as you describe on paper, the quality keeps dropping, productivity stagnates, and in pretty much every area anything imported means "better". So no one wants to buy local anymore. And it doesn't make sense to export anymore, as outsiders don't have tariffs.

There would be no java shops to walk into. Why create them in low-performance high-wages country if there is now a good amount of highly-educated Java professionals in, say, Lagos, Nigeria?

> The US is where you make the most money.

Because competition. (And oil)

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Specific American workers (in tech and manufacturing) have been loosing specific jobs to people on work visas and offshoring for years.

I’ll add: I have worked with many amazing engineers on visas (in the US) from all over the world (and written letters supporting them). This was at a large company that aimed to pay at top of market, and could never quite get enough people. These engineers were not disadvantaging anyone IMO. In fact, I agree they probably created even more jobs by opening up new areas for the company that it then needed to hire for.

I have also seen much lower skill IT workers on visas (often via the big contractors) that were clearly pushing down wages and causing unemployment for US citizens.

>right-wing populism wants to restrict and stifle any immigration and build a huge wall with neighbors

That's the bailey. The Motte is that right wing wants to empower businesses and love immigrants to sneak in and work below minimum wage to increase profit margins. They want to boast high GPD and slide the homeless Americans they make under the rug.

No need for minimum wage laws then I suppose. Businesses will just keep expanding to keep those salaries high.

>No, that's a common economy thinking flaw -- assuming there's a finite amount of work to be done.

There isn't. But there are a finite amount of companies wanting a finite amount of jobs per company based on budget. Not everyone has the funding, leadership, nor creativity to successfully launch their own business.

>New businesses grow, more productive companies take over business from others.

yup. how's that going for small businesses in most industries? Looks like regulatory capture instead of booming businesses.

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).

90%+ of occupations today is in services sector. Only a small proportion of workers are in mining or agriculture sectors. And the more developed an economy -- the higher proportion is services. We serve each other and create work for each other.

well yes, that's the flaw and why so much "blue collar" sectors have lagged behind in the US. We have the best software in the world, but we are vulnerable to china because everyone decided to let our silicon chips factories erode away.

Turns out relying on a country the US defines as hostile for such vital hardware to power up software was a horrible idea, even if the number did go up.

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.

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?

And it generates literally zero respect. Possibly even scorn.

No one knows my friend, no one knows. We must fix it.

>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.

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.

> 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.

Except outsourcing has been a thing for almost two decades now and it invariably almost never works. Between security/privacy concerns, sometimes timezone issues (depends on where the team is located), and credential fraud (among many other issues) many companies end up reversing their decision.

Still, I think many would certainly advocate for tariffs for any kind of overseas contracting work in addition to reducing the H1B cap.

That both parties are against this sort of thing tells you quite a bit about their donors and motivations.

More like 4 now. NAFTA was over 30 years ago now.

I don't think tarrifs will fix this, though. it didn't in 2018. It just lead to a trade war, costing billions in dollars in millions in jobs lost. We lost a lot of domestic production over the last 15 years, so a trade war arguably hurts the U.S. worse than China or Mexico.

1) If Companies could just outsource this work they would already. An H1B Visa sponsorship is more costly than outsourcing.

2) H1B visa recipients very famously send money back to their home countries. Taking money out of our economy makes your "lesser of two evils" much muddier.

3) Federal taxes are not sufficient to raise the living standards of everyone in the US. Why do you think the concept of Welfare States exists?

> and the money is spent here for housing, food, cars, etc.. w

see point 2

The issue is actually much more complicated than you phrased it and that could be why many people are not willing to fall on the sword in the hope that our government will save them.

When the government starts giving out paychecks based on the federal tax revenue then I will assume the government will pay my rent. Till then you're basically saying "well the homeless shelters will be nicer for y'all"

Edit: Also your thinking leaves no room for the lost man-hours Americans spend applying to jobs that don't exist.

> which do you think is better?

2). we already do it with other sectors where the US lagged behind as a country. But at least those companies aren't sucking up the US's resources directly then not paying for them (taxes).

The US has plenty of funding to bolster and talent to nurture. the next Google if tomorrow Google somehow got bought out by Bytedance.

>At least with option 1, the money is still being made in the USA

Not to the actual workers. Which is the primary problem.

>taxes are paid here

No, no they aren't.

> and the money is spent here for housing, food, cars

Taxes are not paid, therefore we have underdeveloped housing in urban areas, surging food prices (that would have gotten worse with a certain merger), and the "economy" car is now $30, 000 instead of 10 (and EV's are more expensive because government doesn't/can't make subsidies for EV's).

Tariffs and taxes easily solve that issue.

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.

I have no issues with the Right learning that it must become further right to achieve its goals.

They worked so well against China in 2018 right?

Correct.

H1-Bs ARE keeping the JOBS local. They are merely filling them to some extent with immigrant EMPLOYEES (working side by side with true, red-blooded Americans).

The alternative, in many cases, would not be companies hiring an all-American staff. It would be hiring in their foreign offices instead, with Americans only considered if they emigrate. Or an American skeleton crew being sidelined from where the bulk of development happens.

> Or an American skeleton crew being sidelined from where the bulk of development happens.

Already the norm in cybersecurity.

Most of the new gen (post 2015) cybersecurity vendors have almost completely moved engineering and product to Israel and India.

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.

Is this just a modern spin on trickle down economics?

Your post makes the assumption that Americans are less qualified. Why is that?

A smaller selection pool is statistically less likely to be qualified, all else being equal.

>I t may hurt the individual, but helps the country.

No, it helps the Capitalists. Companies already do everything they can to avoid paying taxes. They'll move the business out of the country as soon as it is financially advisable.

When they’re not able to source labor locally, is that not incentive enough to leave?

They are able to source labor locally though. They're just not willing to pay market rate.

The fact that companies can import more exploitable workers who they can also pay less than market rate does not equate to them not being unable to find skilled local laborers.

There is an abundance of qualified local laborers.

Won't. not can't.

They are having their cake. They want non-American labor to lower wages, and American resources, locations, and customers to utilize. Do you see the issue here?

[dead]

Why would you openly admit to committing a crime (visa fraud) on Hacker News?

I will reply here because I think this is a good question, even if it may have been intended as merely rhetorical.

(1) The process was distasteful. I want there to be broader knowledge of the disfunctional way this system works in practice.

(2) I don't think anything I did was illegal under the letter of the law. I describe it a bit provocatively with words like "invent" and "fake" but if I was in a court of law I could defend as having solid reasons every candidate we rejected for the fake job search. The corporation had legal council engaged guiding the whole process in ways they advised to meet the corporation's aim of retaining the employee and helping them move from H1B to PERM status.

(3) This account is pseudonymous and while I am sure it is possible to get from it back to a real name I don't expect its worth that effort to any legal authorities, based on my description of practices they are well aware of.

(4) To me the most distasteful parts of this are the governmemt policy. In cases I've been involved in the employee already in the seat has been a stronger candidate for the role than anyone turned up in the fake search. This matches the corporation's goal of hiring the best candidates to begin with. The awful bit is that immigration policy doesn't allow any other path for a company to support a H1B visa holder moving to PERM status.

in terms of (4) the thing is that the government policy isn't solely concerned with "hiring the best candidate", or at least not necessarily considering cheap labor to be one of the criteria factoring into "best"

the government policy is concerned with protecting the jobs of citizens as well. it's a balance. it is meant to be a relief valve for employers when they legitimately can't find employees, it's not meant to be a mechanism for creating a wage ceiling or indenturing your employees so they can't move

You have it backwards. The existing policy (assessed as it works in practice) lowers wages for high-skilled roles such as I mention and endentures employees so they can't easily move.

For the roles I am familiar with the progression is (1) foreigner ineligable to work in US (2) OPT visa (3) H1B visa (4) Permanent resident (5) US citizen. Between each step of the progression are barriers with the effect that employees at a lower level have less negotiation power and must accept lower wages and cannot easily move to another job.

The barrier between (1) and (2) is a masters or PhD in a STEM subject area from a US university. From (2) to (3) there is a visa lottery. From (3) to (4) is the PERM process involving the fake job search as I described.

While under OPT or H1B visa, you MUST have a job or be deported. Timeframes to find an initial or a new job are very short. This is what gives employers increased power in the relationship, lowering wages and creating the nearly indentured status.

To decrease the effect of lowered wages and indentured status requires a reduced number of people in visa states (2) and (3), which would be achieved by raising barriers between (1) and (2) or lowering barriers between (3) and (4). The distasteful PERM process is the barrier between (3) and (4).

If the policy goal was to raise wages, it would be designed differently. E.g. if the top 20% by taxable income of H1B holders were offered PERM status each year, it would be a different dynamic.

> The existing policy (assessed as it works in practice) lowers wages for high-skilled roles

Sure, not because of the law, but because of loopholes around the spirit of the law.

>For the roles I am familiar with the progression is (1) foreigner ineligable to work in US (2) OPT visa (3) H1B visa (4) Permanent resident (5) US citizen.

well yes, that's the point. They don't want international workers to be as easily hired as domestic ones. That's just common policy. Your workaround is just that, a way for the company to get what they want while "complying with law". AKA a loophole that breaks the spirit of the law.

Remember, the US isn't necessarily concerned with the best talent in the world. It ultimately wants to make sure the economy circulates from within.

>While under OPT or H1B visa, you MUST have a job or be deported. Timeframes to find an initial or a new job are very short. This is what gives employers increased power in the relationship, lowering wages and creating the nearly indentured status.

Yes, and I think we can lightly rework this as well. Basically let the H1b "own" the Visa. They find other work in the industry they have a visa in, they are still valid. Breaks all the chains while gaining from their talent.

>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.

> But I gotten say required can't be the right word.

I read it as their boss told them they had to do it.

"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.

https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-6-part-e-chapter-...

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."

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.

If something is "your own business" until you get caught doing it, then the correct label for that thing is "illegal".

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.

You don't get to just ignore laws because they cut into your profit margin.

So show me on their website. I see a ton about going on with a petition incorrectly, what about when there is a candidate and you would need to hire them to make this process not their market information scam, where is that? I don't think you (or burnte) are even referring to the process I linked to which I presume is the one in the top post.

The process is implied and extremely obvious: interview domestic candidates in good faith before interviewing foreign candidates.

There is little explanation for you not to understand this besides intentional obtuseness.

You clearly haven't read the actual documents. Your responsibility is to not do the PERM process if you can find a qualified candidate because that would be negatively affecting the market, immigration spends no time on what happens if you can find a candidate because deceiving people that you have a job is perhaps a standard market behavior (1 in 5 jobs is such a deception) and they are not your lawyer.

If you wanted to imply a process was was a serious obligation to hire the most qualified candidate you would call it a good faith effort to test the labor market?

Good luck arguing this with the labor dept and the IRS bud.

Armchair lawyers are insufferable...

Yes, I'll be sure to review the implied acts of Congress instead of believing an incident report from someone at an organization that did the PERM process matches the government website's summary and detailed documentation of it might be based on correct legal advice.

> so whether you are hiring after their fraud is your own business.

Fraud is fraud whether it's caught or not, whether you agree it's fraud or not. And fraud is everyone's business.

"I fucked a lot of people out of jobs and wasted their time but I don't want to name and shame because I don't want to have to look for a job myself"

Edit: I appreciate your honesty. I just want to call out the irony. I don't think you're a bad person, I wish you would whistleblow but I understand why you cant.

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.

>"On paper potentially qualified" has meant nothing for a long time.

yeah, almost like we have a much too long process after the paper to determine if that paper lives up to its name.

Even then, what does that say about our society if our automatic assumption is that a job application and the resume submitted are all fake?

>And if truly acceptable candidates do show up, that scuttles the immigration application.

yes, that's the point. We can fine tune some things (someone already in the country and working hard shouldn't need to worry about losing their visa becuse a company found an American), but the overall point of this is to prioritize hiring domestic labor.

>You do learn to recognize them

I'd love to have some tips, I am as dense as a log.

> > And if truly acceptable candidates do show up, that scuttles the immigration application.

> yes, that's the point.

The discussion is about whether job postings are real or fake. I use "scuttles" as evidence that that one is very real.

> >You do learn to recognize them

> I'd love to have some tips, I am as dense as a log.

For example, such a job posting is likely oddly specific as to experience and what it's applied to. A nonsense job posting might enumerate a bunch of irrelevant software applications or languages. We all (?) know to ignore that list. A visa requirement posting is not likely to do that. It's supposed to actually limit itself to required stuff. The software mentioned might be very specific and exactly the one that is actually used on the job. Not some HR or managerial delirium. For another example, some quirks of the current person's experience are likely to be mentioned when they are actually in use on the job (or at least plausibly in use). They may again seem oddly specific and quirky. These get mentioned because why not: they strongly restrict the number of people that might fit that position, and they are not even a lie.

It used to be also that it needed to be published in a publication "of record", like, not just on a web site. Some papers were full of these strange job postings. I have no idea what is the current requirement as to publication medium.

> I use "scuttles" as evidence that that one is very real.

Fair enough. I interpretd it as "scares away" or "puts in danger". I personally don't see a posting as "real" if your performance in such a process is already set as failing. But a fake app shouldn't be used as a way to prevent Visa holders from staying in the country. They're already here.

>The software mentioned might be very specific and exactly the one that is actually used on the job. Not some HR or managerial delirium.

Outside of being too specific, I do find some irony that a red flag to look out for is "it looks like a proper app with reasonae requirements and not like it was made by someone who never worked in programming languages"

But thanks. I'll keep a lookout for it. It doesn't happen that often, but once in a blue moon I'll come across some requirement of a framework of a framework. Or recruiter overinsisance of this very specific pipeline (yes, I have made use of WINE professionally. And I've studied Vulkan as a hobby. I have not done professional work with Vulkan through WINE.

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.

One adtech company I applied to ~10 years ago (Chango - doesn't exist anymore) also put me through the strangest interview I ever had. It was for an SRE role.

There was a fairly standard phone screening interview, but then when I went in-person the CTO, VP of engineering, and somebody else I can't recall made the whole interview about torrents and USENET feeds for TV shows. Not a single serious discussion was had about the business or technology, despite my attempts to bring it up. I left scratching my head and a follow-up email that said "they were going to go in a different direction".

I can only guess that the role was going to somebody else they really wanted, but they needed a "competitive" alternative. I was annoyed that they wasted my time, though.

I've had something similar happen but I was actually hired. One of the rounds was with a super senior CTO-like type, and they questioned me about low level details of building Linux CLI tools, which is something I've never done or really didn't know anything about.

I think the idea was to pick an area the interviewer was super familiar with, and see how you can handle stress, can you say "I don't know", can you make some guesses even in the space you are not familiar with and so on. Is it the most effective way of doing interviews? Probably not. But it's not a terrible screen either for common pitfalls with senior engineers.

> Not going to say which one

Nothing will change until online naming and shaming is not considered taboo.

I just don't want my name ASSOCIATED with that kind of PRESS, ok??

I'm glad you clarified - I was expecting NYT!

I don't know what you're talking about :)

make an anon account.

Are there laws against companies committing fraud and false advertising? Job sites are directly evolved from classified ads in which ads stands for Advertisement.

You think there's law on the books that forces companies to speak honestly? And that someone is going to enforce it?

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.

Nothing will change until employees get proper protections against whistleblowing.

This is extremely common. In fact, it is the rule at universities and government agencies and government contractors, who are required to post every job even when they have a preferred candidate, and many big tech companies do the same thing. It wouldn't matter if you named the company – literally every large organization has done this dozens or hundreds of times.

If they had just blanket-declined me then I don't think I would have cared all that much, it's far from the first (or thousandth) job I've been declined for; what annoyed me is that they made me go through a stupid video seminar thing before they had even read my resume.

They're going to waste two hours of my time and not even give me the courtesy of reading my resume? Pretty douchey, IMO.

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.

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.

Send a bill.

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.

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.

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.

It's fairly likely they just confused about which candidate was which. Happens all the time.

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.

Wait, which newspaper did you say you work for again?

> A major one.

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.

> 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 :(

How can you be discriminated on a technical level? Is there even a case of a candidate who sued a company at a technical stage we are aware of? This seems like a weak argument considering the hassle of time and potential legal fees, especially for someone who is looking for a job? Although I could understand why a candidate would try to bring a case like this in the US.

Anyhow, it's not even the feedback the problem, it is that I have enough work experience to understand some of those startups seem to operate on a thin line between what is a technical assignment related directly to their core tech and getting free consultancy. The least they could provide to candidates who have involved time is what was expected.

Just because it never happened doesn't mean it cannot.

Sure it is a weak argument, but when you get to cite that possibility and thus save 10 minutes of time creating more detailed feedback (which may or may not be used).

Yeah it's a variant on "anything you say can be used against you."

Any feedback you give can potentially be twisted to support some argument of unfair treatment. Even if it's frivolous, employers don't want to spend time dealing with that. So they just say nothing.

> 3) I've seen big and small companies posting over and over the same job ad. For example a big consulting group has been posting the exact same job for more than a year (really) on linkedin and elsewhere - each time there are more than 100+ applicants on linkedin.

At the same time I’ve seen on the other end just endless unqualified applicants. Dozens and dozens of people who don’t pass a phone screening. Some jobs are tough to find the right applicant, or you’re looking in an area of high competition for a specific talent.

The question then becomes "how are applicants getting to the phone screening to begin with?"

Because from what I can tell, it seems like a complete toss up whether a qualified/unqualified applicant will even get that far, let alone how much further in the progress they'll get. I get the distinct feeling that most filtering systems are just dropping a lot of great candidates at the first hurdle, and then letting a bunch of unqualified ones through to the later rounds.

Have you ever had a stack for 100 resumes and had to figure out who to interview for the one position? You need to get rid of at least 80% quickly before it is worth your while to read them in more detail - that still leaves 20 to read, but that is way too much, now you are just looking for people who can probably do the job or meets any diversity requirements HR might have (and would be better, but you will interview anyone who lets you prove to HR you tried before hiring whoever comes out on top).

HR/HR software should be doing the first pass to filter that stack of 100 down and only giving you relevant candidates.

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.

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 :)

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?

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.

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.

This is exactly what's happening. My phone number and email are being targeted now.

I've sent out hundreds of applications over my career and never had this problem until now.

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.

You got the job, but you'll need to pay a $50 fee for a background check!

And voila, they have stolen $50.

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.

>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.

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.

> 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?

It's so common place that few are going to remember they applied to a specific company years ago to begin with.

> It's so common place that few are going to remember they applied to a specific company years ago to begin with.

Additionally, it take a single lazily-managed spreadsheet to identify this dysfunction. Surely any positive effect from doing this would be muted (again, likely into the negative) because the company doesn't want to hire you.

>Surely any positive effect from doing this would be muted (again, likely into the negative) because the company doesn't want to hire you.

In my experience, it's because they didn't actually see you (or they were never hiring anyone to begin with. Hence the article). If I don't get to a step where I speak to a human, I don't really count it as a rejection. Just a filtering.

Rejection implies that my skillset was not fit to the role, or that someone else was better than me and selected. Definitely not the vibes I get in this current market.

> In my experience, it's because they didn't actually see you

Are we supposed to simply assume that nobody ever reads any application we send in? I don't see how this works out anyway but negatively for the company. If I don't hear back from you, I'll just assume you don't want to hire me. There's no semantic difference in my mind between this and sending me a note that you've read and rejected my resume—especially in an industry where it's normal to simply ghost someone rather than issue a formal rejection.

I see we're talking in circles. I'll drop the conversation.

In this modern market? Yes. Hence the article. It's the Tree falls metaphor in my eyes, and in this specific case it does not make a sound as far as I'm concerned.

But if you're taking my "assumption" as an absolute, I don't know what to say. An assumption based on this precise slice of time. Not something that will always be true in all contexts. It's not even always true in this context.

>There's no semantic difference in my mind between this and sending me a note that you've read and rejected my resume

Bots don't send hand written notes. They can, but the costs are a much higher margin than an auto reject email.

You're pretty close to what my main point is, though. Bots aren't an automatic bad, but there feels to be zero effort on the recruiting end this day to try and get quality candidates. That lack of care means I shouldn't spend any energy regarding their (lack of) feedback if all I'm getting back is slop. So I'll just spin the AI roulette again.

Take care.

With BS postings, low response rates, and the effect of having to apply to many jobs at once, how else can applicants manage their many applications but write things down?

The last time I did ran the job search, I needed a spreadsheet to keep track of things. When a recruiter reaches out to me, I'm going to see if their company is in there, and what my notes say about my last experience with them.

If I'm anything like the trend, I just move on. If a posting comes up and it's been more than a few weeks I apply anyway. All such a spreadsheet would show for 90% of my apps is "applied, never got a response". In both good and bad markets.

If anything I'd only remember postings I actually interviewed and was rejected for. Which is sadly a small enough number to keep in my head.

I completely understand why you would behave this way, but I would absolutely not apply to the same place. I've never hired someone I've seen twice. I'm sure it could theoretically happen (hell, it's likely to happen for a certain pair of personality and company) but the first rejection is generally a precedent for the second.

>I completely understand why you would behave this way, but I would absolutely not apply to the same place.

Well that's exactly why I apply multiple times.

Had an example last year. I applied once, got rejected, coincidentally met someone at that same company and team later in the week. They sent me a referral, and then boom, recruiter call the next day. My resume was the same. It's just the referral pile got me visiable.

I'm pretty convinced even pre-AI that there are so many times when I'm simply not seen. Getting no response or an automated response just tells me these days "okay, I didn't make it to a human. Maybe next time" instead of "welp, I'm not good enough right now".

Also note that those kinds of companies are pretty big with hundreds of roles for software. The hiring culture between each team may as well make it a few dozen companies. I'm not trying to re-apply (on purpose) to a small group of a a few dozen after one rejection from the exact same role.

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.

When I was in uni, I found that just having a boring cover letter drastically increased the odds of an interview (for internships and post grad work). I bet a lot of places just have a filter that adds you as a higher priority purely on the existence of a cover letter.

I've never read a cover letter that I found valuable for hiring anyone, though. And I'm sure mine were never of any actual value either.

I like that insight and should I ever be back in the kafkaesque nightmare of blind online job applications, I will take your advice. As you point out, barring typographical mistakes a cover letter being too generic isn’t likely to result in a rejection, but not “checking the box” very well might.

cheers

May you never have to write one again, but if you do, it might be helpful to think of the cover letter as a reflective writing exercise. You might be able to gauge your level of interest in a particular role by how easy it is to write about, for example. Or it could just be some practice at communicating your strengths and abilities (this would definitely apply to me).

IMO it's too disheartening to put effort into such personal writing without the awareness of some kind of direct value or benefit, since chances are it's going straight into the void.

I'm just going to use LLMs to write them, because they're exactly the kind of B.S. work that I hate, and LLMs are great at generating B.S.

Nicely put.

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.

I remember a post here where some recruitment manager (at a company) said "Always write a cover letter, which is not generated by AI, otherwise you're an automatically trashed".

I rolled my eyes.

Although this might be sound advice, it's not the reality of a lot of people looking for work.

Yes, they might do this for the few months, but after what 6 months+ of no or canned responses (even though you have ALL the skills they want) it gets tiresome and you just say F-it, copy-paste a canned cover letter.

You can't even be sure a cover letter is read. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are skipped. When I have 100 applicants I don't have time to read cover letters, I'm looking for the first bullet that suggests you can do the job otherwise I'm trashing your application (The goal is to get down to 10-20 resumes that I then spend a minute on to see if you go into the interview or not pile). I'm only going to read that cover letter if something suggests you despite lack of the experience I'm looking for you might have a different background and so be worth hiring anyway.

Remember I have lots of more interesting things to do than read your application. When we are hiring (like many we are not today) I take time to do the process, but I really want to be doing the more interesting work.

This is making that company not look very good, is it?!

Awful company. They could post “here are our standard job roles, we aren’t actively hiring but if you’re the perfect match please tell us why”, which warns the prospective applicant.

Doesn't hurt them either I don't think. Nobody knows. It sucks because the whole job hunting system is borked.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Presumably you’re not putting much effort then?

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.

Just an FYI.. the double negative means you said it makes the company look good.

(I don't think you intended that)

Thank you - fixed it.

What do you mean? They have open roles so they must be growing? Seems like a good investment.

> The job market has become more soul-crushing than ever.

I have often stated that the fact that I was basically evicted from the job market was one of the best things that ever happened to me (I didn't think so, at the time it was happening), and every time I read something like this, it reinforces that.

But I was one of the fairly rare (it seems) people that could afford to have that happen. My heart goes out to the folks that have to endure this stuff.

One of the saddest things, is that really good workers, that would take their job seriously, and be excellent employees, are being knocked out of the game, and the unproductive, disloyal, rapacious sharks that have learned to game the system, are taking all the fish food.

> really good workers, that would take their job seriously, and be excellent employees, are being knocked out of the game, and the unproductive, disloyal, rapacious sharks that have learned to game the system, are taking all the fish food.

This needs to be made illegal or at the very least cost prohibitive.

It's literally why the CEO lost his life. One side is destroying the livlihood of the other and even basic levels of "please stop" are hand waved away by the needs of the shareholders and YOY hockey stick growth. For some reason "it's business" is a valid and ethically clean reason to build an economic model on top of suffering.

Honesty and dignity need to become fashionable and valuable again. Until we can wean people off the cult of personality around narcissists and psychopaths we're just carrying water for the people who do the worst abuse and will never change unless confronted at figurative or literal gunpoint.

>"This needs to be made illegal or at the very least cost prohibitive."

How? Any mechanism to make it illegal will be vigorously fought by the same forces who currently benefit from it. Those forces have unlimited funds to "lobby" lawmakers.

>"hand waved away by the needs of the shareholders and YOY hockey stick growth."

Not needed, but desired. Corporations acting as responsible stewards of capital aren't mandated to grow at a given percentage, just that the capital doesn't decrease. We need to remind corporate America that perpetual double digit growth is impossible, and they can and should be happy with any growth at all.

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.

I've found almost all my career positions through recruiters. I find it's about 100x more productive of an experience. You know the job exists because they're paying someone to fill it. You get to talk to someone on the phone about the job before you have to lift a finger. If you sound good on the phone, they just put you right through to the hiring manager/interview process, and also are materially invested in your success. Getting the formatting right on your resume is an afterthought. They'll give you an entire gameplan and tips on this company's specific process.

People hate on LinkedIn but having a presentable profile and using the right keywords is worth it's weight in gold IMO. Even if it doesn't work out, they'll keep you in their rolodex and hit you up for jobs long into the future.

Main issue is that recruiters can get every bit as bougy as applicants can get when the market sways in their favor. So in a market like this, you may have less than a 10% response rare from messaging recruiters. Whereas 2021-2022 you'd almost always at least get a reply when you messaged a human.

I never message recruiters cold. Only wait for them to message me, or hit up recruiters I have existing relationship with.

Yeah, tried that early on. Messaged 4 recruiters I thought I had food relations with. 2 didn't have any jobs. 2 were no longer working as a recruiter. Oh and one ghosted me for... Almost 2 years.

Same here, but have you looked for a position in the past 2 years? It's dramatically worse than I've experienced in my 20 years as a dev.

I only ever apply to jobs that I know I'm qualified for and know that I can demonstrate it, so my application -> offer ratio was historically pretty high. In my last job search, I sent out 99% of the applications I've ever sent out in my career.

The tech job market enshitified rather quickly.

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.

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?).

Have you tried creating a demo project in an area you want to work in and blogging about it?

Then use that in your cv and point to it in your covering letter.

Most of my projects on my GH are me contributing to other OSS projects, or me just experimenting (there are a couple exceptions). One of them is one I've thought about posting about on here, actually, since it's in it's pre-release stage and is quite stable. I've never had my own blog for professional purposes, so talk about new territory for me... Lol

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.)

Your the first person who's told me the opposite of the advice that I've been told. It's hard to figure out which advice I should actually consider and what should be thrown out. I'm honestly unsure how tailoring would change my resume all that much. I'm a new college grad (graduated about 2 years ago, will be 3 in May) so... Shrug. Honestly I'm wondering if I should just keep doing what I'm doing, maybe? Idk nowadays, and I doubt the automation problem is going to go away.

I mean I just don't think spamming applications pays dividends so much as exhibiting alignment with positions you actually have got a match for. That said, if you've never swung a first position post degree it's probably only going to get harder.

Especially now if you don't have real experience or interesting public facing content or code or contributions... I definitely think spamming applications is only going to help if the positions you're hitting have few applications.

I'm obviously low sample size, though. But I've mostly found roles without using my network or applying for more than a few places a day for a few weeks. But right out of college the two things that saved me were applying for positions that more experienced folks would have seen red flags (got me in the door of the field) and having experience in pertinent stuff during college.

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.

Recruiters and agents have been solving this problem for years. Firms hire a recruiter for jobs that they actively want to fill. Applicants hire a job agent. Those two meet. Very little incentive for spam in this relationship.

The problem, of course, is mismatched incentives for the middlemen versus the clients, particularly at the margins. Similar to real-estate brokers. They may be effective in many ways, but they are looking for pareto-efficiency, where they get you 80% of the match (or 80% of the pay) or whatever for 20% of their effort.

It's hard to imagine any incentive scheme between buyers (hiring managers) and sellers (applicants) that wouldn' be subject to the same market mechanics, even if at lesser scales when done through more automated means.

I don't think crypto really has anything to do this.

The power dynamics between employee and employer are such that the employer ought to foot the bill for that on their own. Candidates really shouldn't have to go to an agent to find a job.

The employer doesn't need to hire an external recruiter either. They just need an HR team that actually does anything other than protecting against liabilities and aggressively managing labor costs down. Most of HR is a practical joke of questionable taste.

> 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.

I know how much I'm willing to accept after doing my own diligence, and I'd rather not shell out tens of thousands of dollars to an agent. There are also jurisdictions where the salary must be disclosed. Hiring an agent introduces the principal-agent problem, so they cost more than just their fees.

Yes, you can absolutely add a middle man to sort through the spam for you, and that "solves" the problem in the sense that you are trading money for time. It's no different than paying for a personal assistant to collect your mail for you and pass along the valuable stuff. That said, it's incredibly inefficient and most people, for most interactions, cannot hire a third party to handle those interactions for them.

So no, I don't think adding layers of middle men really solves the problem for most people.

> "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.

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.

I’ve never heard of, or met, a job agent. More info?

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.

I was asking for specific people.

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.

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.

> someone who... has been spending time on the streets, is going to have a very hard time maintaining a bank account or obtaining a credit card without an income.

Slightly tangential to your main point, but in this day and age electronic transfers are money; cash is in effect just a fallback option for situations where there's no connection to the Internet. I believe that, in the absence of central bank digital currency, banks should be required to have a process for issuing current accounts to homeless people (albeit not necessarily with credit, just like customers who do have fixed homes). That measure alone would immediately fix a range of issues that homeless people face, wouldn't it?

It absolutely would, as would Postal Banking, which there's already a movement afoot to bring back(? I think it was around before? I'm not super up on it).

I 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.

The problem is, as I noted, spending $100 to post a completely bogus job 100 times is basically nothing to even a medium-sized company.

The asymmetry in power & wealth means that if you want the $1 spent by a job-seeker to even come close to the guarantees you describe, you'll probably need to make the company pay $100 per posting or more. And that would effectively require some pretty widespread and strictly-enforced regulation/legislation.

If you're going to have to get that just for this middleman solution, why not go all the way and have the regulation mandate that any job that a company posts has to be real, with full intent to hire, and every single applicant must get a timely, non-canned response?

The issue is thst we both know those won't happen. Even if it's just scam shops that abuse it and everyone else plays the honor code. Rotten apples and all that.

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.

Also, free applications systems are so common that I'd simply see any system that I, the applicant, needs to pay for as a scam. Much more different than a paid forum or news site. I pay $10 for those and I get exactly what on the site, even if the news updates slowly or the forum is empty.

If I had to pay $100 for 10 applications and still get ghosted or auto rejected, I don't know what I'd do. That's just theft at that point.And the incentives for recruitment are just perverse at that point. Don't hire, just make a good job app.

It would be worth it to build a highly refined and moderated "free tier", with a paid option that is even better. From what I noticed during my last job hunt, all the big platforms could vet their submissions better.

(paypal me 0.1$ to see this reply)

Morality aside, the logistics of this means you cannot literally PayPal someone 10 cents. The processing cost isn't worth transferring such a small amount.

So the answer to this is to pay $5 and be able to see 50 replies. But what if you're unsure you want to even see that many replies? It's now a steep cost to consider.

I suspect they want to do a side-channel payment system.

So you pay X $100 or w/e and they increase your account by 96.50 or w/e it is after fees and X pocket that 96.50 into X's own bank account. Then when you have to pay 10 cents to somebody they move 10 cents in X's ledger while the 96.50 never moves between bank accounts.

Eventually whoever's article you read (Y) will want to withdrawal what the ledger has but ideally at that point it will be a higher value like $100 so they'd get $96.50 of that but individually each reader only paid 10 cents.

I really wish that's how (a subset of) the internet worked. Not for replies, but for quality website access. Think newspapers and other primary sources of information. Fill up your browser tank and go visit these websites. The site then gets paid per view, or per duration of stay. Details are tricky though.

In my opinion a big barrier to the success of such systems is that newspapers often aren't primary sources. Most outsource the reporting to press agencies and (increasingly) to social media. Press agencies usually do sell individual stories with primary reporting, but not at the prices you and I can afford.

For mainstream press though, is it worth the pennies of a microtransaction to read someone's re-hashing of public records and social media posts? That is very much dependent on both the reader's personal expertise and the author's, and if they are mismatched the article becomes worthless to the reader. An article explaining what HN is would be illuminating to many, but entirely unworthy even of pennies to you and I.

Other way around. You should paypal them $0.01 if your reply is worth viewing.

But Hacker News already has a cost to posting replies: you can only post a few (I think 5 replies every 4 hours) and although you can make more accounts, there's a limit to that too. So I know this was one of your top 5 in this 4-hour period.

Your account is being rate limited because your replies were repeatedly against the “rules”. Been there done that

Who would say their reply is not worth viewing?

Spammers. Even the most miniscule transaction cost means that sending spam costs more money than it makes.

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.

>but we don't have identity figured out quite yet

Can you explain further? ( btw, your overall analysis is spot on)

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

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.

There are job postings out there that are solid, but where the company is unwilling to pay the recruiter markup, and hiring organically just doesn't result in solid candidates. Not every company hiring is a Fortune 500 or Big Tech company looking to get over on the world. Many are smaller companies looking to fill roles but may be lacking in the bandwidth or resources to lower expectations and either pay well over market or hire downmarket and train extensively. To say these companies are hiring fraudulently is unfair.

>hiring organically just doesn't result in solid candidates.

If you get one bad hire, it's probably on them

If you get 20 bad hires, it's probably on the company. At some point, no matter the size, people really need to look at themselves and say if they are really trying to enhance their shop and let talent succeed, or if they are a churn shop and don't deserve solid candidates to begin with.

I'm not talking about hires, but candidates. Not all markets are awash in talent in every stack.

It's the same concept. Even with niche tech. If you can't hire a good candidate in a buyers market, and repeatedly get bad hires, what's your interview pipeline doing? Paying too low, getting reqs wrong in a game of telephone? Hiring through nepotism instead of merit?

I'm just a bit tired of the "but we need to avoid bad hires" narrative. Especially since a certain blundermouth more or less said the quiet part out loud for the intentions many have with that. It made sense in 2022, but is that really an issue in 2025? If you can't "find solid candidates" now, how did you Faire in non-bust markets?

A small relatively unknown company outside of more popular job markets will not get huge numbers of applicants to posts on a random job board. That doesn't make those posts malicious on the company's part. It's just a relatively illiquid market.

They may need other help to find a candidate, e.g. recruiters. But that's a different topic than the OP, which is about "online job postings"

You really haven't seen how much of a buyers market this is, have you? Even small unknown companies can throw a post on and get hundreds of responses in hours. Yes, a lot is slop, but we're still talking some dozens of genuine candidates that needs any job.

> But that's a different topic than the OP, which is about "online job postings"

This whole topic is about online job postings. Smaller groups that don't just grab their friends need to find talent too.

I know -- in popular markets, for more general roles, you will get lots of valid candidates.

If you need specific skills in a specific geographic area, you probably still get a lot of responses, but the vast majority (if not all) aren't going to be suitable. Really, these jobs don't have much luck being filled on job boards, because it isn't the best medium to hire those people, but many companies will put them out there anyway to broaden their reach.

Sure, it comes down to your filters at the end. But I think legitimately needing a unicorn or domain expert is different from the above statement of

> hiring organically just doesn't result in solid candidates.

the tech hiring has been a bit annoying for a decade now, but this simply sounds like a narrative for someone simply wanting an H1B rather than one who is simply bad at finding talent.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

The distinction is also moot from perspective of an individuals's time being cavalierly wasted by a large corporation.

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.

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.

nah, fake profiles are a huge problem. depending on the site, it could easily be 1 to 5 real:fake or more.

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.

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.

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.

There is nothing wrong with reductor ad absurdum to make a point about dependency and categories. It is the primary use case.

I think there are a million practical challenges to implementing a fine. I wonder if there is enough incentives to draw employers to a verified list service.

Sure there is, it's in the name. We don't need an absurd argument for a punishment that is straightforward to explain. You usually use absurdum to simplify complex topics.

Or I suppose to win a presidential debate, these days.

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.

Every posting needs to have an honest attempt to fill it. I don't know the exact numbers, but if there 1000 applicants per posting and you end up reposting your job 4 times, there's clearly something amiss.this overlap of 1-4000 applications and not one of them are worth a call? Even if we accept 90% is spam, that's still hundreds of candidates in a "recruiters market" being passed over.

The challenge of course is that ‘I just didn’t like them’ is a valid form of discrimination.

So while it may be obviously bullshit (what, you can’t find anyone you actually like out of thousands?), it takes a non trivial amount of paperwork right now to prove it’s bullshit to the degree you could actually punish anyone for it. Especially with the recent administration change.

Yeah, the usual product of excessive greed. It's on the exploited to prove stuff with info they don't have access to. At least Lina Khan gave voided non-competes before capitalism took the reigns again.

The way I read it, Gizmodo cannot tell whether those jobs are fake or just never filled. How could anyone tell from outside ? The visible fact is that no-one is hired for those jobs.

If you 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.

Sure, hiring is hard but the factors you mention are rare, and teams are extremely motivated to fill vacancies.

Teams are also strongly motivated to not hire a bad team member that drags down morale and wastes resources. I want to say this is more true in government hiring, where it's difficult to fire people, but I've seen private companies hold out for a long time until they find someone with the right combination of cultural fit and technical skills.

It’s extraordinary how frequently companies discuss the cost of a bad hire and never consider the opportunity cost of a no-hire.

Companies that keep waiting for Mr. Right are really saying that the opportunity cost of not completing their project is very low. In other words it’s not really that important at all.

On the contrary. "Not completing the project" is not an option—if they don't hire someone to fill a vacancy on the team, the rest of the team will just be expected to work extra hours to keep up.

Oh, not with overtime—you're salaried, remember? (Alternate version: Oh, no, you can't actually log the extra hours; we don't have the budget for overtime, and I, the manager, can't be seen asking for more money, or it would affect my bonus!)

And you'd better step up and work those hours. You want to be seen as a team player, right?

>Not completing the project" is not an option—if they don't hire someone to fill a vacancy on the team, the rest of the team will just be expected to work extra hours to keep up.

And that's the opportunity cost we don't talk about. The cost isn't "we slow down on a project from a bad hire". It's "demoralize/burned out engineers quit to a point where the deadline is impossible to reach". You can't force overtime to engineers that leave and take their institutional knowledge with them

There's also a lot of fake job postings as a sort of carrot to overworked engineers that "promise more help is coming". Which is just as ingenuous to existing employees as it is to applicants.

That would actually be a surprisingly low figure as far as I'm concerned.

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.

I remember a few years ago I posted that throughout my career, during market ups and downs, my average application:interview:offer ratio was around 100:10:1 and half of HN thought I was exaggerating, or there was something wrong with my interviewing, or that I was shotgunning my resume, and so on. We've got an industry full of young employees who are seeing the first bear market of their lives.

500:x:1 doesn't seem outrageous at all in a down market. The 2:1 interview:offer ratio is actually outstanding, especially where the industry is today.

I guess as a "newer employee" (8 years now) I see that and say "yeah, that was pretty much my first job search. Maybe a bit better reply rate". I may not have been applying for jobs in 2008, but I feel this bust isn't just about low hiring. And that's what makes it all the worse.

For reference, these 8 years and 3 jobs later, I'm probably around 300-20-0. Or 1 if you the count the part time freelancing that just showed up out of the blue. But I didn't even apply for that.

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

I’ll never forget getting a boilerplate rejection email from Lockheed Martin 13 months after I applied for an internship for the upcoming summer.

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.

This one's not as bad but still amusing: I applied to a well-known telecom company that rhymes with "May Pee and Pee" and got to the final onsite interview, after which they ghosted me. Afterwards, I did the whole round of interviews at a different company, got hired, moved my family across the country, and got established in that new job. A few months later, I got an E-mail from the telecom company saying "We would like to interview you one last time. Please let us know when you are free." LOL

Gov of Canada, famously, has some of the most braindead slow hiring practices in the country. Their HR teams are incredibly bad at their jobs. It's genuinely astounding. Last I checked the time from application to starting your job could be anywhere from 9 to 18 months. Everyone, including the employees, know it, so everyone gets "Bridged In" through an internship or hires internally. The rules are totally different with internal postings and you can get hired in a week if you're a good candidate.

If you get an interview you are already on a short list. The process I usually see is 100's of applications -> screening by recruiter and hiring manager -> phone screen 10-20 -> coding challenge 3-7 -> onsite 2-3 -> hire 1.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

Can confirm. 90% of L7, L8 hires at AWS between 2021 and 2022 flopped.

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.

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

This is why I don't write custom cover letters anymore, even though I'm pretty good at it. It's just too exhausting when you know a lot of them are going to fake postings. I'll do it if I'm working with a solid recruiter who is working with legit companies. But I'm not doing it anymore if I haven't heard of the company in question and I'm blind applying.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?)

One in five seems to be an under-estimate. Based on my experience of Upwork, at least 50% would be a better estimate.

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).

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.

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.

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)

Job posting boards can punish them if they detect them as being spoofed through response rates.

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?

I worked at a company that created fake job postings for H1B reasons.

This is for PERM, not H1B. Many companies did and still do this. Imo, the concept of PERM is flawed, which causes companies to do this stuff. Some have had to settle with the gov't and can no longer do this (Meta).

Also, the jobs are not fake, they are labor market test jobs, designed to show that no citizen meets the job requirements thus validating a green card for the H1B visa holder. They are "fake" in that they are designed so no one applies for or gets the job. Imo, labor market test should be part of the visa granting process, not the naturalization.

I have been required to create such fake job postings.

From the line manager perspective, how it looks is you have a colleague who has been working with you for several years who is on a H1B visa. They want to get a green card and become a permanent resident. To support this, we are required to post a fake job ad for their position, and invent a reason to reject any US citizens who apply for the position. (Non-US applications are ignored.)

Our legal advice was that the job posting had to be contain only legitimate requirements for the role, so it could not be highly tailored to only match the resume of the employee seeking PERM status. The result was phone screen interviews were required to reject 8-10 on-paper-potentially-qualified US applicants for the fake position.

This is for a highly specialized area within finance, where in real hiring there is an immense effort to find the strongest candidates regardless of nationality.

In hindsight I am confident that earlier in my career I had applied to at least one such fake role. One not-well-known advantage of working with a recruiter as a job seeker in such a field is the recruiter will have back-channel information to know to ignore such fake job postings.

Yep, this is how it is done. I think it really needs to be revisited because everyone is faking the labor test because you have an employee who is great, who's been here for years and years, probably even had kids here, and if in the 10-15 years since the employee was hired, one US citizen could do the same job now, he gets sent back? It should be a requirement for the visa, not the residency. Residency should be done like Canada where you earn points to get it to foster assimilation.

> 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.

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??

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.

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.

You also have companies like mine (very large) where we don’t even post job descriptions online but just hire through internal referrals.

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.

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).

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/

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

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".

Makes me want to use an LLM to apply for a gajillion jobs. See how they like their own medicine.

To be honest, I expected more.

There are many reason for job postings to never get filled. They can be fake for various reasons: visas, to make the company appear to grow, for data collection, etc... It can turn out the job wasn't needed after all. They may not have found any appropriate candidate. The job may have been filled in another way (ex: cooptation) but they forgot to remove the original posting.

And job postings that are never filled are not that bad by themselves. It starts becoming a problem when they lead to fake interviews, where significant effort is made for nothing.

In other word, 4 in 5 online job posting are real, which doesn't sound that bad.

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.

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.

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.

At some big companies at least, I think it is a policy to have to post the job publicly even if the person who was waiting in line inside the department for a few years already has it.

I have had two jobs in the past posting inside the department that 2 or 3 people had to waste their time interviewing for with zero chance just as a matter of policy. The manager had to interview x number of people in the name of fairness or something like that.

> At some big companies at least, I think it is a policy to have to post the job publicly even if the person who was waiting in line inside the department for a few years already has it.

Yes, and that is a BS posting.

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?

One option is HR compliance with some kind or procedure.

One other thing I've seen (many times) is to pacify an over-worked team: the team is working crazy over hours, demotivated, asking for help. The manager knows is impossible to hire (head count / budget limits) and so they open a Job Offer, where they can show "we are searching for help, but nobody comes". How do I know? once I was in such over exploited team, so each of the team made a fake resume that was, of course, like a glove for the position. Nobody got a call back. When we confronted the manager, he had to confess. [in case somebody asks himself, 6 months later the whole team was gone]. Then same company, I applied for a job, where my resume was really perfect for the position. As I received the canned response, I called the manager, pressed a little bit, and also said "we had to do as we are searching, but we are really not".

Yet another one I know of, because of reasons: HR consulting companies and also some HR departments want to test if they are paying too much/too little, want to have some "market measurement". They fake jobs, fake interviews, and they would inconspicuously ask "how much are you earning now" and/or "how much do you want to earn" and that is all they want from you really.

Yeah I've heard that angle too. Really nasty. Glad the team wassable to stand up for themselves and walk away from the abuse. Sure wish that could be the outcome more often; it'd fix a lot of things overnight.

feels like i somehow only applied to the fake ones during my last job search. outside of the us for context, so should rule out the h1b explanation. seen many of them staying up for months on end, and getting reposted on job sites as if something just came up. many happen to send rejection mails when they finally bother closing them in their crm.

while i still worked on applying and writing custom cv/cover letters the "old-fashioned way", i don't envy the past where you'd do the same paperwork physically. but it is very draining and frustrating given how many more openings you end up applying for compared to the analogue yesteryears.

getting on the employment train is hard, but for most people you could then just rely on personal network and getting reached out for newer opportunities.

I would say 4 out of 5 to be honest

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.

You mean Aha! isn't hiring 100 people in 100 locations world wide at all times?

The one person I know who worked there was very disillusioned.

Maybe they are there to fake a good faith effort to justify their H1B hires.

That’s better than I would have guessed frankly. Internet is making it sound like 4 out of 5

Well, my recruiter callback ratio is likely 1 out of 5, despite having a very VERY niche profile: a PhD focused on NLP for creative text generation, especially in video games, and a prior career as a game developer.

Needless to say, I've only focused on roles that fit that narrow profile. One of the recruiters that contacted me didn't even know I worked in games, despite it making up the bulk of my work experience (including as a lead developer).

Considering how closely I match this narrow profile, and the number of people that likely do, it's weird how low my callback ratio has been.

> One of the recruiters that contacted me didn't even know I worked in games

I get that all the time with my setup. "you look like a good fit and have lots of experience for XYZ tech". Nowhere on my resume does it even mention it. Sometimes I have to look it up and see what they are talking about. One of them even went on and on about my current job. Despite it only having the start date in that spot and no exp on what I do here.

It is blindingly obvious they did not read my resume. They are keyword scumming and hoping for the best.

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.

The ratio is probably 4/5 for YC Startups

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.

Does cross posted job listing mess up this data?

Because it's common for the same job to be listed on multiple job sites.

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 (85K6) 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.

How does one know that this is happening so that they are not wasting their time applying for positions that they will never get?

Usually they try to tailor the job description very specifically to the PERM person's skills, and they're allowed to discriminate based on someone not having a specific skill. You need to tick all the boxes in order to not get disqualified or to disqualify the PERM candidate.

The job description may still have some generic text about how we don't expect you to have everything; that's gobbledygook, ignore it. You need to have everything. If a job description looks too specific, it may be a PERM job post.

I don't think there is a clear cut way to avoid it. Probably the best way to get around it is referrals; people might know the hiring manager and know if the req is real.

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.

Way way way way more than 1 in 5. Honestly.

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