I’m looking for a job and like many people in this situation am finding it unusually difficult.
I’ve read rumors that many firms are actually in a hiring freeze, but they keep job reqs open for appearances. Apparently some investors use job postings as a company health metric.
From my contacts, I am personally aware of situations where internally-recommended CVs are ignored by HR, and other cases had open job postings and passed people successfully through the interview process, and then the hiring manager still didn’t pull the trigger. I have no way of knowing how widespread this is, but it is happening at some places.
Is your company like this? If you have real info and not just suspicions, let’s name some names.
I think the founders feel that it is the right posture to signal that the company is growing (external messaging) and that we are doing well (internal messaging).
Not to mention all the economic reporting that is completely messed up by this. Job openings are something that is tracked, and policy can't adapt if literally every company is saying they're hiring like gangbusters but nobody can get a job.
Edit: I can't find the article. Maybe I am confusing it with this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41112855
Indeed. And handsome whistleblower bonuses (i.e. enough to retire on) should be paid to individuals who are in a position to report the company principals to appropriate authorities (with easily obtainable evidence of course), so that they can be dealt with accordingly.
Instead of just casually mentioning to others at the water cooler that this is what their client/employer was doing, as if it were just one of those things.
Not everything we don't like should be illegal.
This sounds like the kind of thing that is incredibly unenforceable anyway. How do you differentiate between "we're not actually hiring" and "we simply have a very high bar"? How do you do it in a way that doesn't impact the economy too much (like forcing employers to do stupid things like auto-write everyone back and waste even more of their time in order to appear to actually be hiring)?
Also some companies keep up generic listings like "Senior engineer" not because they are hiring but because they would be willing to make an opportunistic hire for the right person, and want to collect the names of interested people for when they are hiring.
If talented folks are applying to ghost jobs and never hearing back, aren't they less likely to apply later when real vacancies open?
I know it's an employers market atm since firms don't have the cash flow to scale, but interest rates are coming down and it won't always be this way.
Again, I'm out of my depth, recruiting is not my expertise, etc...
On balance it probably helps more than hurts.
Absolutely feels that way... but it may also be VITAL.
The first (really only) goal of a company is to not die. I call this the SHL rule - as it was recommended several times to SHL that he kill off Gumroad.
Who can kill a company varies over time. Initially, that is likely 100% the founders. Either giving up, feuding or running out of money. Then investors/debtors have the power to kill a company off. Finally, and every company should be so lucky to reach this level, acquirers/bankers/Government can kill off a company. Making sure you don't die - and knowing who has the power to kill you off - should be prioritised at (almost) any cost.
As an example, I once had a client who spent $X0K a month on AdWords for one keyword exact matched. It generated almost no revenue. The main investor would Google this one word, and if the site did not rank 1st both paid and organic, he'd threaten to pull all future funding. The company was loss making at that time, so that would have killed it off. I moved that one keyword into it's own AdGroup, called it "Investor Relations", never talked about it again, and years later the company was sold for $X0,000,000.
From housing, jobs, healthcare, petcare, appliances. Everywhere I look these fucking vultures ruin everything they come into contact with.
> but they keep job reqs open for appearances
People hire for appearances. If you're a manager you need people to manage. It makes you feel important. That job that I had at VMware... The more I think about it, that job was making someone feel important, and feel like they were checking a box. My prior job was about making someone feel important, too. (My boss was promoted to manager so he hired me.)
So I wouldn't go and say that a company is pretending to be hiring. It's more that priorities change, or sometimes the bar for a position is high, ect, ect.
When you're a manager, you need a bench of candidates for areas where you think your team will grow, and for people from your team who might leave.
When I was a manager, I always had a list of potential hires, but it was a spreadsheet I kept, and when I'd talk to people informally I'd let them know - either I have no possible opening for them now, but I'd like to keep them in mind for the future if they were also interested in working for me or, I'd let them know I'd probably have an opening n months in the future. But, I'd never post job listings just to get a candidate list. Or interview random people just for the hell of it. For one, at most (bigger than tiny startup) companies, there's at least some bureaucracy in getting job listings approved - why would you do that work if you don't need to? Also, why would you want to lead people on who you want on your team?
At the line manager level, this theory makes no sense. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, just that it is as stupid for the manager as it is wasteful for the job applicant.
My point being is that you are correct that for line managers it makes no sense to have fake job postings but at a lot of companies the line managers have zero say in whether it happens or not
You're clearly a good manager. (And I suspect I would enjoy working for you.)
Don't underestimate the amount of lousy managers out there. Many of them don't know they're lousy, or are just trying to do what's right without realizing that they aren't doing what's right.
This eventually leads to layoffs. At my old company, when someone in a team moved teams or quit, they reflexively hired a replacement or consultant even if it was not needed. Then they had to be laid off due to budget (me included)
So yes, managers just want a bigger team to look good. It worked when money was free...
It’s all a game of smoke and mirrors. Pump the stock at all costs
The product was cancelled before it shipped. (Basically, the market window ended and the product was my first career example of architecture astronauts and the consequences.)
But, to make it interesting: The HR guy who hired me bumped up my rank to get me a pay increase. They didn't tell me that I was the most experienced engineer on the team, nor did I have the leverage to push back on some serious architectural mistakes.
1 year in, I realized the project was an exercise of "architecture astronauts," although I didn't know the word at the time.
> Or was it a role you could purely coast in
I could have done that. I consider that generally unethical. I did coast a few days before I gave notice; I gave notice the day before a scheduled vacation, and then came in one day after the vacation to meet with HR.
To make a long story short: I decided to quit a few days before the Employee Stock Purchase Plan grant date, and I was afraid if I gave notice, I'd loose the stock. To put things in context, my manager wanted to walk me out the door as soon as I gave notice, and I had to tell him that would make him look bad.
Anecdote: a while back, I did an internship at a YC “darling” company that you’ve definitely heard of. They apparently liked me so much that a couple years ago, the lead of intern recruiting emailed me encouraging me to re-apply if I was ever on the job market.
Well it’s fall 2024, and they automatically rejected my resume without review.
Apparently not even internships are good enough as a hiring signal anymore.
HR and hiring managers aren't the same people, and aren't always operating with the same set of criteria. I was directed to re-apply and answer some of the questions differently (and not quite truthfully...) just to get past the screening system.
I would encourage you to reach back out to intern recruiting and see what's up.
Reach out for sure. Do anything humanly possible to avoid going through HR.
if you literally worked there, and you know the names of people who also work there, to include managers and HR, reach out to them directly. a polite email and a couple of calls and you've got a start date.
They switched to "AI" for efficiency :)
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Couple weeks later I pointed out to the person responsible for hiring that the postings were still up. They explicitly responded that they will keep them up. I didn't get an actual reason but I think it was for job market "research" and to keep a steady stream of applicants to threaten existing employees with replacement.
I had a discussion with an HR person the other day, she was claiming things like "oh we would just paste their CV into chatgpt and ask whether we should hire them", "his belt didn't match his shoes so we blacklisted him", "he used forbidden words like 'but', not a good match". Maybe it was just an exception, but I have a feeling like it would be pretty common. Between that and black magic CV filtering software, they have all the excuses. Nothing human about anything in that process anymore.
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Personally, I don't think it's very honest, and I'm going to wonder what other honesty they have flexibility about.
I wonder whether any of the third-party job-posting sites has figured out ways to say you're not much hiring -- or only hiring/promoting internally, or only filling a funnel for possible future openings, or only hiring if a rare unicorn comes along -- without that looking negative to people who only want simpleton metrics.
Maybe the cooling of "growth" theatre startups will make it OK to sound like you're not "growing" right now.
Say, the company has a lot of job postings, but the all the applicants say they're auto-rejected. That's a decently clear indicator.
Also, if you link your linkedin/stackoverflow/github or something, there could be a more or less automatic way of evaluating you as a candidate in general and your fit for this/similar position, which could be fed back into the post-interview questionnare processing. Obviously, not that good a way to evaluate candidate fitness, but a way nonetheless.
Rings privacy alarm bells, but oh well. Someone could build a decentralized version of it which would work via a browser extension. And, actually, 3rd party hiring companies have a way better relationship with the companies hiring than with the candidates, so I very clearly can see this mechanism weilded against us.