Ask HN: Who is pretending to be hiring?
I’m looking for a job and like many people in this situation am finding it unusually difficult.
I’ve read rumors that many firms are actually in a hiring freeze, but they keep job reqs open for appearances. Apparently some investors use job postings as a company health metric.
From my contacts, I am personally aware of situations where internally-recommended CVs are ignored by HR, and other cases had open job postings and passed people successfully through the interview process, and then the hiring manager still didn’t pull the trigger. I have no way of knowing how widespread this is, but it is happening at some places.
Is your company like this? If you have real info and not just suspicions, let’s name some names.
It is anecdotical, but I'm consulting with a startup in the Bay Area. We have 9 job openings listed on the website (and for some reason only 4 on LinkedIn). But in reality one position (senior dev) is really open, and the bar is sky high. By that I mean that the founders would hire the right person. But the other 8 positions are just there for signaling and nobody looks at the applications we get (and for one of these positions we got 1k+ applications last time I checked). For when I'm asked, the CEO told me to say that we are prioritizing finding the senior dev first (and the position has been open for 6 months).
I think the founders feel that it is the right posture to signal that the company is growing (external messaging) and that we are doing well (internal messaging).
That's why one should spend less than a second for applying to positions.
It should be illegal. Given how many regulations there are around hiring, there should also be some around job postings. Making people waste a bunch of time updating their resume and writing cover letters for a company thats not actually looking to fill a role is awful. Its creating shitty dynamics for both job seekers and job posters - seekers have to spreadfire apply to as many places as possible with quantity over any quality, get their inboxes obliterated with rejections that make very little sense. Job posters get 1000 applicants for every position because there's barely any reason to read the description anymore.
Not to mention all the economic reporting that is completely messed up by this. Job openings are something that is tracked, and policy can't adapt if literally every company is saying they're hiring like gangbusters but nobody can get a job.
I remember reading something within the past month about how the SEC is looking to crack down on companies using fake job postings as a way to fake their growth. It's still technically an attempt to fraud shareholders.
Edit: I can't find the article. Maybe I am confusing it with this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41112855
My least favorite thing about this day and age is that we have to justify things primarily by whether it effects shareholders or not, not whether its causing a bunch of harm to people looking for work.
Heh :) Enforcement would potentially look a lot like unemployment, but in reverse: you have to show you’ve been interviewing people, just like unemployment requires you to show you’ve been looking
The core issue is that the common metric is a bad proxy for the actual signal. Goodhearts law and all that. Enforcing that the proxy be good is weird. It would be better to enforce publicly sharing the actual signal.
Not even that would be good enough because a lot of sham reqs still interview and then reject later.
The way it works for the unemployed is if they don't take an offer, benefits get cut off. So it would be on the company to prove that each rejected application did not meet the standards they were looking for (trivial - just use the same unrealistic expectations many companies already have: 10 years experience in $5_year_old_tech).
If nobody should be forced to hire someone, then maybe they should be forced to give metrics on how many people are hired vs job reqs posted, and that information should be given to the candidates. Good luck hiring people if you don't actually want to fill 80% of your roles and candidates know it.
Why? To burn money?
> It should be illegal.
Not everything we don't like should be illegal.
This sounds like the kind of thing that is incredibly unenforceable anyway. How do you differentiate between "we're not actually hiring" and "we simply have a very high bar"? How do you do it in a way that doesn't impact the economy too much (like forcing employers to do stupid things like auto-write everyone back and waste even more of their time in order to appear to actually be hiring)?
It should be illegal.
Indeed. And handsome whistleblower bonuses (i.e. enough to retire on) should be paid to individuals who are in a position to report the company principals to appropriate authorities (with easily obtainable evidence of course), so that they can be dealt with accordingly.
Instead of just casually mentioning to others at the water cooler that this is what their client/employer was doing, as if it were just one of those things.
> handsome whistleblower bonuses (i.e. enough to retire on) should be paid to individuals
Is this money coming from the government or the company?
Because I’m guessing the startup using fake job postings to signal growth probably doesn’t have enough runway to cover the handsome retirement of a 30-year old.
Presumably the government will backstop it by a certain amount X, to be increased to Y > X if such funds can be clawed back from the principals / company.
Not equivalent to the most attractive exit they hope to make (if they stayed with the company and if it paid out), of course -- but enough to make it worth their trouble, to hedge the diminished employment prospects that will be incurred as a price for sticking their neck out, and to convince these companies that they're running a significant risk in pulling shenanigans like this.
Sounds like a "them problem". If it weren't punitive, it wouldn't be a deterrent.
>If it weren't punitive, it wouldn't be a deterrent.
This is why I don't understand people who are against the death penalty and punishing mandatory minimum sentences. As you correctly point out, harsh retribution is a good deterrent.
Because the actions that lead to death penalties are usually committed without a calm and collected risk-benefit analysis, whereas economic decisions of a corporation absolutely are.
Look up the prison population vis a vis mandatory minimums and tell me its been a good deterrent. Maybe what drives crime is independent of how much deterrent there is!
I mean it’s not a them problem if they just can’t afford to pay it.
What are you going to do, rat on your employer to get money from them they know they can’t pay so they just go out of business and you lose your job?
I mean, yeah. It's still a them problem, because they can choose to engage or not engage in those practices while knowing the consequences. What are you going to do, never penalize companies when it might hurt their bottom line?
Just because they can't pay it doesn't mean there shouldn't be repercussions. That would be like saying that a person can't be fined because they don't have the money. AFAIK the judicial system will happily levy costs on you that you can't afford, and it is 100% a "you problem".
Get an attorney and have a conversation about filing a lawsuit in civil court. There’s objective economic harm for not at least calling everyone that applies, in my opinion (I’m not an attorney) to Unfortunately there’s taxes for people not understanding computer science and wanting to be in “management.” Especially if people stare at the software newspaper all day. Entry level manager positions aren’t supposed to be glamorous….
I know software managers and recruiters that don’t want to do fairly filter through 1000 applicants. When it’s a very large company that has over 100,000 global employees it’s a bit unfortunate.
TIL. I supposed this was mostly a "conspiracy theory" but I just acknowledged that this is true and even a standard practice. This explains a lot on some past job searches. It degrades job seekers mental health and the HR ability to manual screen CVs once job seekers adapt and shoot CVs everywhere.
Name names.
VCs are absolutely using job listings as a health metric, and it is leading to companies listing a bunch of jobs. They aren't exactly fake jobs -- they will hire someone if some unicorn walks in. But they are nice to have jobs, not necessary jobs.
Also some companies keep up generic listings like "Senior engineer" not because they are hiring but because they would be willing to make an opportunistic hire for the right person, and want to collect the names of interested people for when they are hiring.
I'm out of my depth here, but doesn't this feel a bit short-sighted on the part of start-ups?
If talented folks are applying to ghost jobs and never hearing back, aren't they less likely to apply later when real vacancies open?
I know it's an employers market atm since firms don't have the cash flow to scale, but interest rates are coming down and it won't always be this way.
Again, I'm out of my depth, recruiting is not my expertise, etc...
Once they've applied once their resumes are on file. These companies can always reach out to a candidate at a later date
Well, it's a game theory thing. Probably a few people will ignore their outreach after they remember the company never got back to them. But in most cases they will probably assume the application was just lost. Or if it's a hot startup that just got a round of funding and has an interesting problem, they won't care.
On balance it probably helps more than hurts.
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Why do VCs always ruin everything?
From housing, jobs, healthcare, petcare, appliances. Everywhere I look these fucking vultures ruin everything they come into contact with.
It's not VC ruin anything, it's the people chasing VC abused the systems for their own benefit.
When I worked at VMware in 2008, I remember interviewing a candidate. Priorities changed, we weren't crazy about the candidate, and they didn't get hired. No one was ever hired for the opening, and ~1 year later the project was canceled.
> but they keep job reqs open for appearances
People hire for appearances. If you're a manager you need people to manage. It makes you feel important. That job that I had at VMware... The more I think about it, that job was making someone feel important, and feel like they were checking a box. My prior job was about making someone feel important, too. (My boss was promoted to manager so he hired me.)
So I wouldn't go and say that a company is pretending to be hiring. It's more that priorities change, or sometimes the bar for a position is high, ect, ect.
> If you're a manager you need people to manage. It makes you feel important.
When you're a manager, you need a bench of candidates for areas where you think your team will grow, and for people from your team who might leave.
When I was a manager, I always had a list of potential hires, but it was a spreadsheet I kept, and when I'd talk to people informally I'd let them know - either I have no possible opening for them now, but I'd like to keep them in mind for the future if they were also interested in working for me or, I'd let them know I'd probably have an opening n months in the future. But, I'd never post job listings just to get a candidate list. Or interview random people just for the hell of it. For one, at most (bigger than tiny startup) companies, there's at least some bureaucracy in getting job listings approved - why would you do that work if you don't need to? Also, why would you want to lead people on who you want on your team?
At the line manager level, this theory makes no sense. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, just that it is as stupid for the manager as it is wasteful for the job applicant.
Interesting take, did you feel like your work never helped the company or only helped marginally? Or was it a role you could purely coast in
There’s a few rumors out there that promotion for managers at Amazon require a minimum head count. Fortune 500 companies are a disaster.
It’s all a game of smoke and mirrors. Pump the stock at all costs
>People hire for appearances. If you're a manager you need people to manage. It makes you feel important.
This eventually leads to layoffs. At my old company, when someone in a team moved teams or quit, they reflexively hired a replacement or consultant even if it was not needed. Then they had to be laid off due to budget (me included)
So yes, managers just want a bigger team to look good. It worked when money was free...
More often than not Managers aggressively hiring and “growing” the team is to build a facade for themselves to get promoted or prove that they grew the team.
This has always been the case in all industries. The applications that you get, by volume or type, may change depending on people looking for work. It is not restricted to tech either. If you are in the "Laser" industry and post a job looking for a _shark wrangler_, it is an indication that you are a good company to call if one is looking for "sharks with laser beams attached to their heads".
My wife was looking for a job earlier this year (non tech), and it was interesting to see the grind from the outside. It seems that we are at the point where job seeker AIs and job poster AIs are just going to have to fight it out. There is no way to tell if a job is real or if you are going to get ghosted. As a candidate you don't have the time to research and write cover letters. It is a numbers game and if you are going to get ignored hundreds of times, you need to send out hundreds of applications, so you have to spam job postings. Job postings get lots of spam, so it is difficult to rise to the top of the pile. Each party needs a better AI than their competitors. It used to be a better CV, or a better job posting, but those days are long-gone.
The tiny German startup I worked at last year was posting 4 dev positions. After some financial problems hit they announced (internally but in an official manner) that they were not going to hire anybody.
Couple weeks later I pointed out to the person responsible for hiring that the postings were still up. They explicitly responded that they will keep them up. I didn't get an actual reason but I think it was for job market "research" and to keep a steady stream of applicants to threaten existing employees with replacement.
It’s rough out there, folks.
Anecdote: a while back, I did an internship at a YC “darling” company that you’ve definitely heard of. They apparently liked me so much that a couple years ago, the lead of intern recruiting emailed me encouraging me to re-apply if I was ever on the job market.
Well it’s fall 2024, and they automatically rejected my resume without review.
Apparently not even internships are good enough as a hiring signal anymore.
If you have the recruiter's contact, it might be worthwhile reaching out to them directly. Automated screening is far from accurate.
In the past I was auto-rejected for a position within my own company, that the hiring manager literally told me to apply for.
HR and hiring managers aren't the same people, and aren't always operating with the same set of criteria. I was directed to re-apply and answer some of the questions differently (and not quite truthfully...) just to get past the screening system.
I would encourage you to reach back out to intern recruiting and see what's up.
At my previous company, I was rejected by HR for a job the hiring manager not only told me to apply for but hired me immediately after the interview for.
Reach out for sure. Do anything humanly possible to avoid going through HR.
> they automatically rejected my resume without review
They switched to "AI" for efficiency :)
What kind of punishment does HR get if they reject good candidates?
I had a discussion with an HR person the other day, she was claiming things like "oh we would just paste their CV into chatgpt and ask whether we should hire them", "his belt didn't match his shoes so we blacklisted him", "he used forbidden words like 'but', not a good match". Maybe it was just an exception, but I have a feeling like it would be pretty common. Between that and black magic CV filtering software, they have all the excuses. Nothing human about anything in that process anymore.
Their KPIs and quotas (pass rate of candidates passing HM stage, time to hire) and hiring manager busting their balls. Depends on the company though and again it's 99 rejects and 1 hire, as a manager I can't be reading CVs everyday and interviewing everyone and I've been on the candidate side to
Haha, bold thread. I can understand the frustration as probably we all know this monkey business is too common - but I suspect that an open invitation to "name some names" is not probably not going to be a productive and useful as you might hope :)
If you don’t call out companies engaging in this anti-worker practice, it will continue as the norm. Norms don’t change without social pressure.
> Is your company like this? If you have real info and not just suspicions, let’s name some names.
A certain company (the name starts with "A") is widely known for doing this, you might guess which company I refer to by deep-diving into my comments history.
It looks exactly like in this YT short: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/V5VAN6ldS9o
About a year or so ago I interviewed with Sourcegraph for about 6 months then they ghosted me and the role I was up for disappeared. Pretty sure no one got hired for it.
I saw source graph posted on the "Who's Hiring" thread today and looked at some of the postings.
They are pretty open about their leveling and pay structure.
Although the job listing says they pay "above average", the pay for a Software Engineering role with 5-8 years experience can pay as low as $63k
That’s less than what I made in nominal terms (USD) when I graduated in 2009.
I've heard startup founders pretending to hire, like it's a common best-practice.
Personally, I don't think it's very honest, and I'm going to wonder what other honesty they have flexibility about.
I wonder whether any of the third-party job-posting sites has figured out ways to say you're not much hiring -- or only hiring/promoting internally, or only filling a funnel for possible future openings, or only hiring if a rare unicorn comes along -- without that looking negative to people who only want simpleton metrics.
Maybe the cooling of "growth" theatre startups will make it OK to sound like you're not "growing" right now.
The most obvious approach I can think of would be some sort of post-application questionnare and comparing that to the companie's job posting, sort of, stats.
Say, the company has a lot of job postings, but the all the applicants say they're auto-rejected. That's a decently clear indicator.
Also, if you link your linkedin/stackoverflow/github or something, there could be a more or less automatic way of evaluating you as a candidate in general and your fit for this/similar position, which could be fed back into the post-interview questionnare processing. Obviously, not that good a way to evaluate candidate fitness, but a way nonetheless.
Rings privacy alarm bells, but oh well. Someone could build a decentralized version of it which would work via a browser extension. And, actually, 3rd party hiring companies have a way better relationship with the companies hiring than with the candidates, so I very clearly can see this mechanism weilded against us.
When it happened at my last job it was definitely foreshadowing other malevolent behavior.
A couple of places have reached out to me to interview for their senior full stack position in the past few weeks including Capital One. I am currently employed though and no longer willing to do corporate web work.
My experience in looking for work last year suggests that corporate job portals were all ignored. I had employees I knew at Walmart and Fidelity confirm this to me and it was double confirmed by various third party recruiters who struggled to fill positions they knew actually did exist. Most of these openings were legally required in conformance with EEO laws but just weren’t real, at least to the public.
I'm not affiliated with them but ghostjobs.io is doing awesome work tracking companies that do this.
For the job seekers on HN, avoid companies that engage in this behavior.
It might be some small comfort that this "fake hiring" situation has always been around and is not limited to US and dev positions.
Anecdotally, my wife applied to a large European cross-country multi-billion project as an architect. She had the perfect mix of government and private experience in relevant technologies or so we thought. There was no response.
The position remained open for a half year more along with dozens more.
Why would someone waste money advertising (even in print) on these positions, if no interviews were conducted?
Apparently all that happened is that high level management hired HR firm to place advertisements and collect candidates for lower level positions that would actually do the work. Presumably this was done in good faith in that project would be moving forward.
Now two years later the project has 4X ballooned in cost to 25 billion. Those local positions are still not filled.
My last company, OctoAI, would leave postings up even through layoffs. They'd go unfulfilled; exceptional candidates would still join the company on occasion, but not through the front door.
Honest question, not trying to be confrontational, just curious every time I see these kind of posts/anecdotes.
It seems to me that finding a job in tech is easier than finding a job in any other professional field (e.g. chemical engineering). I am an electrical engineer myself and it was easier to get a job that paid better doing programming than in EE. Specially for the effort you have to put in.
How is it that HN complains so much about the whole process? Are people only applying to big tech companies or hot startups hoping to get the compensation they have been getting for the past n years?
There must be plenty of tech jobs in non tech industries doing normal, “boring” work like dba or maintaining legacy systems.
I mean, those kind of jobs still pay enough to live a normal, decent life. They might not be exciting but work is work. Although that is my take, coming from a 3rd world country and all.
Or am I just delusional and the “boring” jobs(that pay less but still enough) are nonexistent?
I am not from the US so I really don’t know how the market looks outside of the FAAANG/startup bubble. Heck, last time I checked even the US government needed tech folks. It feels that there are jobs out there but the jobs don’t match people’s expectation. But I could be really wrong.
Not trying to be confrontational either in answering your question. Just sharing an anecdote, since I have some experience working in a company that for a time, employed mostly EE as software engineers. I'll call this company Y (since the X alias is now prone to create confusion).
Y is entrenched in the business of producing monitoring tools for electrical systems (power systems, controllers, rt simulation, etc). Beyond very basic drivers and software to interface with their devices, the actual useful apps to work with them were always written by partner companies that were in the software business.
One day, Y found itself having to compete with a former partner (a software company) that had acquired one of Y's direct competitors (power systems, controllers, simulation, etc). Y then thought it was time they became less reliant on external software for their products and it made sense that they, too, entered the software business. The obvious next step was to reverse engineer and replicate some of the existing apps that were interfacing with their systems.
Y first tried to hire some SE for the job. But faced with the challenge of paying SE salaries, it was reasoned that since Y's existing EE have the academic prerequisite to code, they can probably do the job. A few meetings later, company management and the various EE managers all agreed that code is obviously code. Network, web, desktop, you name it, they can build. They can do it all.
Three years of technical debt later, they tried hiring actual SE who, upon interacting with the code, just kept leaving, for some reason. By the fourth year, those projects were scrapped and new ones started from scratch, with actual SE as project leaders and a few handpicked former-EE-turned-software-devs from the old teams.
All this to say that although EE can technically write code, building software, if done right, is a lot more than about simply spewing logic with a programming language. I'm not saying that an EE can't also become a qualified software dev, but once that happens, they'll want to be paid a software dev salary.
This rings true in my experience. I'm in the tech space, but my brother is a veterinarian. Find a job, he must comb through local newspapers, look for vet shops, ask friends/colleagues and maybe look in 3 or 4 job pages. And the pay is shit.
We in tech have it easy: upload your CV to LI and Indeed and hunt the postings there. Everything is concentrated in one place.
> We in tech have it easy: upload your CV to LI and Indeed and hunt the postings there. Everything is concentrated in one place.
This does not sound like someone who has been job hunting for software roles in the last few years.
I applied to ~60 positions that I think I was a strong fit for through linkedin and indeed and only heard back from 3. Only one of those actually followed through to an interview.
I also searched company careers pages manually and applied to 5 companies directly, which resulted in 4 interviews and 3 offers.
5 years of experience and all three offers were for ~$150k fwiw.
I work in cloud consulting and we definitely do not act like this. We currently maintain almost 0 bench for one of the hyperscalers and recruiting is proving to be very difficult for senior technical consultants (both infra & data domains). I have two roles listed via LinkedIn right now and I can't tell you how many low quality applications I've received. Lots of people are using the "easy apply" to try their luck, even if they're not remotely qualified.
This is sort of the flip side of what others have described about having a post listed just in case a unicorn walks in. I don't need unicorns. I just need solid cloud consultants with a few years of client facing experience.
I’m interested
My other favorite is sometimes there are posts here where the company is apparently looking to hire every single position required to make a company.
Well, in that case sure, I too am a multinational firm servicing the ___ industry just looking to fill a few roles: senior back end engineer, senior front end engineer, senior sales manager, senior accountant, founding product concept... that's all.
The title made me think you were looking for folks to make up a company and pretend they’re hiring folks :(
Well, if anyone wants to pretend to apply to my imaginary tech startup, we have an exciting product that combines intrusive cameras all over the customer’s house with cutting edge AI to blast a bloodcurdling scream through their smart speakers whenever they bite into a piece of fruit.
The appropriate response is to reject working for unethical corporations, unionize, and/or form your own company to keep more of the value of your effort.
Hmm, "they keep job reqs open for appearances" sounds like fraud?
Wouldn't leaving job reqs open be an indicator of not being able to attract talent?
I'm a product designer. The UX market is seemingly frozen right now. There's a bunch of influencers on LinkedIn who post new jobs and use this as evidence that the industry is turning the corner, but at the same time I keep seeing more and more looking for work badges, and many seniors I know who are quite good at their craft are simply unable to get interviews. I myself am looking for a new job and jobs hardly send out rejection emails anymore, which is new to me.
This thread reminds me. I once called out a Who's Hiring post on HN. I publically replied and commented that I was a good fit and had applied, but never heard anything in return. A short time later HN got more strict about "no discussion" in the Who's Hiring post. What a shame.
Pretending to be hiring has been going on for years.
“We are hiring” == “we are always open to consider a special James Bond special one-in-a-thousand special developer”
Funny you should say that because I've been suspecting the same thing here in Sweden.
Intel
My ultra qualified friend who is a lead at a fortune 500 company has only had 2 leads in 11 despite being probably in the top 3 best available candidates for all 11 applications. So yeah, I don't think many tech companies are actually hiring.
We, job seekers, should react against it. We should post their names here.
There are a lot of posts like that on HN's Who's Hiring. One of the most obvious examples is MixRank [0].
On the last jobs thread, they reposted [1] the same job advertisement they've been bot-posting for almost 2 years. It is identical.
And HN doesn't even allow us to flag/report this abuse.
Other companies that do the same: Cargado, Aha!,...
HN's "Who's Hiring" is turning into a trap.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41129813#41131139
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41709301
In the MixRank posting, did you see this section? It looks like they added it after receiving similar criticism.
> We're hiring continuously for the positions below— they aren't singular positions that will close once filled. Our philosophy on hiring is that the candidate is more important than the position. For each new member of the team, we design a custom role and responsibilities that are specialized to their interests. Other companies will come up with a long list of specific requirements for a position with the expectation that you'll exactly replace someone from the team, or that you'll be the perfect tetris piece that satisfies the job requirements decided by a committee. MixRank is more pragmatic: we'll first get excited about having a unique individual on the team, then we'll figure out the best way to accommodate their specific talents.
This entire thread triggers the "I hate this' meme in me so hard.
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