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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
"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.
"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.
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.
Are there laws against companies committing fraud and false advertising? Job sites are directly evolved from classified ads in which ads stands for Advertisement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Readit News
What amazed me was it said (maybe on LinkedIN?) how many poor souls actually took the time to apply to the position. It was in the hundreds. I can't help but feel bad knowing they never had a chance.
PT role turning into FT… it’s going to the PTer.
Temporary budget allocation became permanent and determinate spot becoming indeterminate? Same.
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.
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".
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.
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 did post my availability few times on HN "who wants to be hired" but with poor results and lots of wasted time (as again, the person on the other end does not know me or has worked with me everything gets bureaucratic again).
Also, all of the people I had hired for my clients came again from my network, there was never a public posting.
There's also other benefits, in general, you don't get to do silly technical interviews, as you're bringing former coworkers you can vouch for.
Not saying this can scale anywhere, but in smaller companies with good teams and professionals they always know someone from their previous jobs or their online communities (common in open source related githubs/discords/slacks) and I like it.
I 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 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.
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.
It seems to me that if somebody can actually solve the problem of increasing signal-to-noise ratio, they could do very well.
Great developers with domain knowledge are always possible to fit in, simply because they are money generators rather than a cost.
So if you happen to find that unicorn who is not only a great developer but is also expert in the major areas of your tech stack and your business domain, you hire them in a heartbeat.
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 wonder how many people applied for that job before it was taken down.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
I believe this would be considered immigration fraud.
And good luck proving that on the call (that was never recorded I proved/or not about the Y skill).
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).
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?
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.
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.
It may hurt the individual, but helps the country.
Dead Comment
(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.
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.
I read it as their boss told them they had to do it.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
There was a fairly standard phone screening interview, but then when I went in-person the CTO, VP of engineering, and somebody else I can't recall made the whole interview about torrents and USENET feeds for TV shows. Not a single serious discussion was had about the business or technology, despite my attempts to bring it up. I left scratching my head and a follow-up email that said "they were going to go in a different direction".
I can only guess that the role was going to somebody else they really wanted, but they needed a "competitive" alternative. I was annoyed that they wasted my time, though.
I think the idea was to pick an area the interviewer was super familiar with, and see how you can handle stress, can you say "I don't know", can you make some guesses even in the space you are not familiar with and so on. Is it the most effective way of doing interviews? Probably not. But it's not a terrible screen either for common pitfalls with senior engineers.
Nothing will change until online naming and shaming is not considered taboo.
They're going to waste two hours of my time and not even give me the courtesy of reading my resume? Pretty douchey, IMO.
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.
It's possible that the hiring manager was just embarrassed and didn't want to admit fault, but I still think they were using me and the recruiter for compliance reasons, especially since I reached out to that recruiter a year later and apparently that role was never filled, at least not from that recruiting agency.
> A major one.
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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.
Years ago, when I was heavily involved in hiring, I asked our CTO whether we can provide feedback to rejected candidates, because it could benefit them. The CTO answered that it may become a legal quagmire if a candidate decides to sue due to perceived discrimination, or something, based on the feedback, even without any merit. The probability is very low but the downside is very bad. So we had to abstain from giving feedback :(
Anyhow, it's not even the feedback the problem, it is that I have enough work experience to understand some of those startups seem to operate on a thin line between what is a technical assignment related directly to their core tech and getting free consultancy. The least they could provide to candidates who have involved time is what was expected.
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.
At the same time I’ve seen on the other end just endless unqualified applicants. Dozens and dozens of people who don’t pass a phone screening. Some jobs are tough to find the right applicant, or you’re looking in an area of high competition for a specific talent.
Because from what I can tell, it seems like a complete toss up whether a qualified/unqualified applicant will even get that far, let alone how much further in the progress they'll get. I get the distinct feeling that most filtering systems are just dropping a lot of great candidates at the first hurdle, and then letting a bunch of unqualified ones through to the later rounds.
* 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 :)
1. Slurp up contact information, focusing on people trying to break into a cushier lifestyle (data entry, entry level analysts, LLM evaluation in some specialized domain, ...).
2. Cold-contact them about being eligible for one of many possible remote jobs, with high hourly rates listed (something specify, like a "salary" of $38.51/hr). They'll either have a legitimate-at-first-glance looking website (usually the ownership has been transferred a few days prior, sometimes a few months, but one of the operators seemed to have a pool of domains they'd been letting age for years to throw you off a bit more), or they'll spoof the spelling of a real company when they text/email you.
3. Go through some form of hiring process. It's as little effort as they can put in on their end to keep the semblance of them being a real company.
4. Then this turns into normal check fraud. Your cushy remote job requires expensive office supplies, so they "provide" those. A local member of the gang delivers fake equipment in real boxes. You pay $5k or something out of the $7k fake check they previously sent, the rest supposedly being a signing bonus.
AFAICT, many tens of thousands of people have gotten as far as step 4, and a decent fraction have fallen for the whole charade. If you're struggling to get a real job out of college and haven't seen what the normal interview process looks like, the confirmation bias (and desperation) combined with lack of real-world experience can cloud your judgement.
There are tons of other endgames. Not all are quite that nefarious, but none are good.
And voila, they have stolen $50.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 rolled my eyes.
Although this might be sound advice, it's not the reality of a lot of people looking for work.
Yes, they might do this for the few months, but after what 6 months+ of no or canned responses (even though you have ALL the skills they want) it gets tiresome and you just say F-it, copy-paste a canned cover letter.
Remember I have lots of more interesting things to do than read your application. When we are hiring (like many we are not today) I take time to do the process, but I really want to be doing the more interesting work.
Enticing job seekers to waste their very precious time is not ethical.
Edit: fix double negative.
I have often stated that the fact that I was basically evicted from the job market was one of the best things that ever happened to me (I didn't think so, at the time it was happening), and every time I read something like this, it reinforces that.
But I was one of the fairly rare (it seems) people that could afford to have that happen. My heart goes out to the folks that have to endure this stuff.
One of the saddest things, is that really good workers, that would take their job seriously, and be excellent employees, are being knocked out of the game, and the unproductive, disloyal, rapacious sharks that have learned to game the system, are taking all the fish food.
This needs to be made illegal or at the very least cost prohibitive.
It's literally why the CEO lost his life. One side is destroying the livlihood of the other and even basic levels of "please stop" are hand waved away by the needs of the shareholders and YOY hockey stick growth. For some reason "it's business" is a valid and ethically clean reason to build an economic model on top of suffering.
Honesty and dignity need to become fashionable and valuable again. Until we can wean people off the cult of personality around narcissists and psychopaths we're just carrying water for the people who do the worst abuse and will never change unless confronted at figurative or literal gunpoint.
How? Any mechanism to make it illegal will be vigorously fought by the same forces who currently benefit from it. Those forces have unlimited funds to "lobby" lawmakers.
>"hand waved away by the needs of the shareholders and YOY hockey stick growth."
Not needed, but desired. Corporations acting as responsible stewards of capital aren't mandated to grow at a given percentage, just that the capital doesn't decrease. We need to remind corporate America that perpetual double digit growth is impossible, and they can and should be happy with any growth at all.
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.
People hate on LinkedIn but having a presentable profile and using the right keywords is worth it's weight in gold IMO. Even if it doesn't work out, they'll keep you in their rolodex and hit you up for jobs long into the future.
I only ever apply to jobs that I know I'm qualified for and know that I can demonstrate it, so my application -> offer ratio was historically pretty high. In my last job search, I sent out 99% of the applications I've ever sent out in my career.
The tech job market enshitified rather quickly.
Still in many cases those recruiters are the only way to get the job. Just beware that recruiters don't know when a new job will open for them either.