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.
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.
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.
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.
Netorking has its own problems that are much harder to solve.
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.
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'd be immediately suspicious. Why are they leaving Google to come here?
I do hate this stigma that clearly being laid of means you're a lesser programmer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Citation needed. The execution of Jews by gas chamber during the holocaust was not a public event.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!).
But sure, I think almost all of them got severance.
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. :)
Another big part of embedded Linux is managing the OS itself and updates. Things like Yocto handle building an OS image
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But then again, I bet most of those also aren't trying to rely on AI to find talent.
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.
>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).
I hear you on geography though. Luckily the human body doesn't change too much between locations.
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).
"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"
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.
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.
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.
If you've used a tool long enough, you've identified warts and misfeatures. And you will have opinions about them.
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.
Yea, and those people can stay living overseas.
>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.
you can rationalize anything with this kind of logic
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
Anyone who has tried and failed to find work during a recession knows that there is a finite amount of work to be done.
If anything, an influx of skilled workers is a symptom of growth, not recession.
We mix that with immigration, but there's no reason to. Typically workers _love_ new businesses around -- more work, more business.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No one knows my friend, no one knows. We must fix it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
It 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.
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.
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?
(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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
There is little explanation for you not to understand this besides intentional obtuseness.
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?
Armchair lawyers are insufferable...
Fraud is fraud whether it's caught or not, whether you agree it's fraud or not. And fraud is everyone's business.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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 :)
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. 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.
I've sent out hundreds of applications over my career and never had this problem until now.
And voila, they have stolen $50.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
cheers
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 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.
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.
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.
Enticing job seekers to waste their very precious time is not ethical.
Edit: fix double negative.
(I don't think you intended that)
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.
Then use that in your cv and point to it in your covering letter.
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.
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.
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 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.
Do you know how much the last candidate got hired for? An agent probably does.
So no, I don't think adding layers of middle men really solves the problem for most people.
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.
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.
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?
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you explain further? ( btw, your overall analysis is spot on)
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
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.
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 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?
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"
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And yes, that's what audits are for. To deduce intent by investigating from within, something we could never do.
Just make businesses put thought into their postings and not let someone who has no idea of the qualifications right them up themselves.
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.
Or I suppose to win a presidential debate, these days.
Of course it is subjective until you introduce a context.
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.
Or possibly you highly overestimate your job needs vs. The requirements posted. Which is endemic of the above reasons anyway.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Companies behaving like this demand regulation. Instead of whining about regulation, read the room and don't bring it on yourselves.
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 not chased down every scraper and submitted a remove request. But I can easily see how 20%+ of job listings are dead-ends.
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.
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
(well, okay. Actually honest. How many of those "urgent" postings eve felt urgent?)
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?
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.
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.
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.
The application market needs an entire overhaul.
The joke of the meme is I feel ashamed/disappointed but I forget I'm fine.
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.
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.
[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/
VCs actively encourage putting up fake listings, under the guise of "opportunistic hiring".
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.
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.
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 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.
Yes, and that is a BS posting.
Is this just some hr compliance so they can search outwards?
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.
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.
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.
This of course leads to a tragedy of the commons but that is what unregulated capitalism demands.
No net new job but net lower income.
Because it's common for the same job to be listed on multiple job sites.
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.
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.
It’s laughable.