Rendered at 19:16:01 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
Aurornis 2 hours ago [-]
This statistic constantly confuses people who haven't done hiring.
If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that. At a large or fast growing company, we might never stop interviewing and hiring senior software engineers. The listing stays open for a year or more.
There are also specialty roles where hiring takes months. I've had niche roles open where we didn't get any applicants with any experience on the topic for over 90 days on multiple occasions.
alightsoul 2 hours ago [-]
So you should apply to old job postings? Consensus in LATAM seems to be, they just forgot to take them down and they already have someone or in Latin America if you repost the same opening over and over the consensus seems to be the company is toxic they have a turnover problem, maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people
Aurornis 2 hours ago [-]
Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.
If the listing is generic like "senior software engineer" and all of the requirements are generic like being able to program or do teamwork, it's probably a generic listing.
Applying anyway is a safe bet, but I wouldn't invest as much energy into tailoring your resume if it's a 6 month old posting from a 50 person company with a website that looks like it's from 2009. That company probably forgot to take the listing down.
> maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people
This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
The target can also change constantly. At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.
mort96 2 hours ago [-]
> At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.
As an analogy it's kinda like hard drives: when one of my hard drives dies, it's An Event which I need to deal with specifically; I need to order a replacement for that specific drive. At Google's server farms, hard drives dying is just a statistic, you continuously buy hard drives just because you know existing drives are gonna die at some semi-predictable rate.
Sharlin 1 hours ago [-]
Or a more morbid analogy: military casualties in a war.
evilduck 60 minutes ago [-]
It's not really an analogy, it's just facts of life. In a large enough company or over a long enough time period at a job or in your career, realistically people actually will eventually die and cause vacancies. I've had two coworkers die, one because of illness, the other because of an auto accident. I stopped using the "bus factor of one" phrase as a result even and use "redundancy or succession planning" since it's not outside the realm of possibility that someone might get hit by a vehicle.
vkou 42 minutes ago [-]
More morbidly, military casualties in what the military insists isn't war.
HeyLaughingBoy 10 minutes ago [-]
Even in peacetime, training accidents kill an expected number of military personnel each year.
alightsoul 2 hours ago [-]
No this is not common sense. No company in LATAM has 10000 people. Large companies just aren't a thing here. Most companies here are the 50 people companies you mention so the normal thing is to hire occasionally. And LATAM never had an industrial revolution so software positions are just rare unless the company is larger than the local average. If you do find one, it's not a pure one or is service oriented, not to build a product. What I mean is, building a technological product is rare let alone as a product company in LATAM and most technical positions are service or outsourcing oriented. If you find a technical product role like being a mobile developer, it's often not at a company that offers a technological product but a service in another industry like a bank
mort96 2 hours ago [-]
You don't think MercadoLibre has job postings open all the time just to replace the people who are leaving? They're around 120 000 people, is each of those people hand-picked for a particular position and not just hired because they know they need to replace some percentage of workers who'll leave?
alt227 2 hours ago [-]
I googled and literally the first result was LATAM Airlines who have 44,000 employees.
Is it a big list? No. Is it a bank? Yep... but then Capital One is a large employer of tech in the US. Estimates put Walmart (certainly not a "tech" company) at having 20,000 technical roles.
Discriminating between technology product and technology role at a "regular" industry or service seems a bit biased. I (software developer) haven't worked at a tech company for the past two decades (and frankly, while wages are lower than the tech company jobs my job stability is much higher).
benjojo12 2 hours ago [-]
Petrobras?
tempest_ 2 hours ago [-]
Often you pay to have that posting. For a smaller company they def know that posting is still up. Likely they are just getting poor applications (or need to improve their posting because the right people are not seeing it)
In the age of LLMs every one is "tailoring" their resume to every posting.
mort96 2 hours ago [-]
This depends a ton on if we're talking about a company's own website's job listings or if it's on some dedicated job listing site.
CharlieDigital 2 hours ago [-]
Company's own website job listings are likely actually in an applicant tracking system (ATS) like Greenhouse or Ashby because they need to manage the pipeline, not just list the job.
johnnyanmac 30 minutes ago [-]
My common sense is that it varies per market. In an employer's market this bad you either need to be highly specialized or you need to get your submissions in early. First 24 hours matters a lot more than your actual skillset when job postings are regularly receiving 1000+ applicants. You know the hiring managers are going to stop after they find a few dozen qualified applicants.
But in a good market, sure. You can throw your hat into a random general application and you still might get a call back. Old postings are worth a shot. Any connection with an internal recruiter at least guarantees you start the process.
oejxiwjxjwjd 2 hours ago [-]
> you can assume that they're always hiring.
You can, but you’re probably wrong and are wasting your time and effort going through lord knows how many hoops to submit a simple CV.
Were submissions as simple as “here’s my CV, contact me if you like what you see”, then this wouldn’t be a problem. But when you have to sign up to the millionth HR service with the same 50 “please input the info that’s already on the resume you’re submitting” steps over and over again just to never hear back from the company or get rejected 6 months later, “submit away” is not an acceptable answer.
> This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
Yes, it would. Even if only 1 of the 10 spots is available, it still is a valid listing. Not knowing if the listing is valid at all is way worse.
Asking for “common sense” only works if the situation you are in makes sense to begin with. Job listings are a cesspit of bad behaviour, dark patterns, disrespectful processes and incongruous offers.
What we need is some sort of regulation on how job listings are posted and how candidates can and should apply.
While we’re at it, it should be utterly ILLEGAL and absolutely liable to have a job listing up with no salary range or a salary range that’s too wide to give a sense of what compensation looks like—lying about it should trigger serious legal consequences as well.
It’s about time candidates were treated with some dignity.
alt227 2 hours ago [-]
This kind of attitude is why some people cant find jobs. Meanwhile the ones who just emailed their cv and didnt overthink it are happily working.
oejxiwjxjwjd 2 hours ago [-]
What kind of attitude? Wanting employers to respect my goddamned time? Wanting to know how much employers are willing to pay for my services?
Yeah. I want a job listing to actively tell me how much I stand to gain in exchange for my time and skills. How absolutely entitled of me. Imagine that? A potential employee wanting to know upfront how much their time is worth in the eyes of a potential employer? Nonsense! You get what you get and you don’t get upset.
If that’s your line of reasoning then I can only assume you’re exactly the type of employer that indulges in such practices.
alt227 1 hours ago [-]
The UK is currently passing laws to make every job listing include salary:
Very kind of you good stranger. I’m not job hunting at the moment but I appreciate the support!
LoganDark 29 minutes ago [-]
Two times I posted in the "Who wants to be hired?" HN thread in the past few years, I had a job within the month. Both times, I did not even have any resume or CV at all. But this year, I've been posting there for over 6 months and nothing. Not sure if attitude is such a big factor -- the job market kinda does what it does. You do make a mistake by not putting yourself out there though, because then there's basically no chance that an opportunity will come your way. One comment in an HN thread could be your ticket, or you could be applying to thousands of listings for months and getting nothing but the occasional rejection (though of course, never nearly as many as you made applications).
johnnyanmac 19 minutes ago [-]
>the ones who just emailed their cv and didnt overthink it are happily working.
Tell that to the last 3 years of new grads.
Avicebron 2 hours ago [-]
This is not helpful and untrue, if you've tried to apply for jobs within the laat ~6+ years you will know it's screaming into the void. New accounts for the N+ glassdoor/indeed/bamboo/handshake/yougettheidea clones. Poorly pulling information from an uploaded resume, requiring manually editing or adding the info _every_ time. If your dilligent/dumb you writing a cover letter for each one (no AI the signal is too bad), then you submit it and wait an arbitrary amount of time for the rejection. There is a good reason people are complaining, it's asinine to put this on jpb seekers.
alt227 2 hours ago [-]
> if you've tried to apply for jobs within the laat ~6+ years you will know it's screaming into the void
I have applied for, and got, 3 jobs in the last 8 years. So yeah I think I am allowed an opinion on it without people telling me Im wrong.
oejxiwjxjwjd 1 hours ago [-]
Two things can be true. I’ve applied to a few jobs in the last few years and got a few of them as well. Does not mean that the hoops I had to jump through were any less demeaning, disrespectful or downright stupid.
legitster 19 minutes ago [-]
If OP is a hiring manager, they're on the other side of the job market right now. It can be true that managers have no problems getting jobs and the rest of us do.
locknitpicker 2 hours ago [-]
> Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.
Common sense would dictate that a company with 10,000 people has a need for a diverse set of roles, and it would be completely stupid to recycle the same template pretending the role was always the same. In fact, repeating a stale advert suggests the company does in fact not have positions opened and either forgot to pull an old advert or some recruiter is trawling for applications to pretend to be productive.
Sharlin 1 hours ago [-]
I don’t think common sense suggests that at all. It’s like saying that the US armed forces requires soldiers with many specialized skillsets (which is true) so clearly it should recruit to every individual role and post separately.
A large company may have a handful of actually-very-special-role positions open for every hundred generic "our tech stack is this and isn’t going to change" developer roles.
cindyllm 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mixdup 2 hours ago [-]
> So you should apply to old job postings?
Yes. I recently got a job (IT infrastructure engineer with a non-tech company) on a posting that was 6 months old. they had filled it, and at the same time got approval for a second headcount so they never pulled it down
rsynnott 55 minutes ago [-]
If it’s a big company, anyway, then yeah. A FAANG type hires thousands of engineers a year. They are not going to have a bespoke ad per position.
maccard 2 hours ago [-]
You should, but you should always apply as early as possible.
The main reason the jobs are reposted are to get them to the top of the feed
1 hours ago [-]
CharlieDigital 2 hours ago [-]
You pay for job listings so it would be silly to not take them down.
jghn 18 minutes ago [-]
Another confounder is the opposite. When I've been hiring I'd often open up different public recs for the same role to cast a broader net. Some people self identify with certain terms and may not realize they'd be a fit.
So what would happen is I'd have say 10 real openings, I may have 5 different job postings, and all of them would stay open until I filled all 10 openings.
nitwit005 2 hours ago [-]
Then you'd still only have a small number of roles up, not the thousands of positions the article is showing for some companies. They'd be hiring hundreds of thousands a year if they were constantly interviewing for all of them, and I don't believe O'Reilly Auto Parts is recruiting people as quickly as a nation at war.
As someone with a niche job and title (and comes pretty decorated), I would expect to hear back on my applications more often and yet I get nothing either. There are some prominent companies (cough Figma, Smartsheet, Stripe cough) who literally have had an open role for exactly my job for nearly 3+ years without filling it.
Maybe I'm thinking a bit too much of myself, but it doesn't seem like they are that interested in really filling it.
ak6te 28 minutes ago [-]
This is probably too broad a category for anecdata to mean much, but just to balance the scales I've recently started looking in a job category that I thought was niche, but not that niche. I've heard back from something like 11/13 applications, often the same or next day.
smcg 8 minutes ago [-]
That's unusual. Most applicants are sending out dozens or hundreds of applications for a sub-20% response rate.
robotpepi 16 minutes ago [-]
This doesn't make any sense. You try to explain a 28% by arguing based on edge cases.
mindtricks 2 hours ago [-]
I'm curious, for the niche or senior roles, have you personally read through the resumes or do you depend on the recruiter? I hear you on the entry and early-career jobs, but I see Director and VP roles also open for months. With all the layoffs, it's hard to belief there is not SOME talent in there worth hiring or at least training up.
juneyi 21 minutes ago [-]
agree. am working somewhere that does the same. we can't find enough of the right engineers to join and it's been a long/slow journey. hiring can be tough for both sides (speaking of those looking for the other side).
ndiddy 1 hours ago [-]
You also have to deal with delusional hiring managers. A few months ago I remember seeing a comment on here from someone who had kept job listings up for years while hiring because he couldn't find anyone with the "right experience". Clearly there was no actual imminent need to fill the role and he was just hoping that some superstar would stumble across it, but he kept insisting that this counted as "really hiring for the role".
prerok 2 hours ago [-]
That's fair but still indicates shortage, no?
Bratmon 2 hours ago [-]
No, the exact opposite! A high percentage of ghost jobs indicates that there are very few actual jobs open in the field, which suggests an oversupply of workers.
johnnyanmac 14 minutes ago [-]
Or a lack of demand for workers in that particular region.
vanuatu 1 hours ago [-]
if the listings are open for the reasons OP stated, then yes it does indicate a shortage. if companies hired all the SWEs they wanted they wouldn't still have the listings
pixl97 1 hours ago [-]
100% untrue.
Let's say I have 50 employees working for $100,000 each.
Why would I not want to replace 25 of them that are willing to work for $50,000 each if they are producing anywhere close to the same quality.
In a case like this always open job listings are a warning to others.
Also there is something called market sampling. Where you put up these job openings and look at the quality of applicants in relation to the employees you already have to ensure you're on the right track internally.
smcg 7 minutes ago [-]
What if your $100,000 worker is actually more than twice as productive as your $50,000 worker?
jameshart 36 minutes ago [-]
> In a case like this always open job listings are a warning to others
‘Warning this company has management practices oriented around remaining solvent for the long term, rather than providing a sinecure for workers’?
pixl97 16 minutes ago [-]
Warning: This company will replace your ass so far without regard to your actual abilities or their current profitability.
Companies do not have human rights. They are a pleasant fiction the population allows because it's more effective than not having said rules. We the people can revoke those rules the moment the meta-idea of corporations no longer serve the public good.
In the US at least we seemingly have come to believe the corporation is the ultimate organism and all rights should be sacrificed for its eternal cancerous growth.
johnnyanmac 7 minutes ago [-]
Not every company is a hungry startup trying to hustle their way to a billion dollars. Businesses also value stability, and stable labor is a big factor in pretty much every other field.
You don't get stability by laying off workers every 2 years .
rsynnott 50 minutes ago [-]
Big companies never hire all the SWEs they want, because there is always attrition. At a certain scale, there will always be people leaving and a constant need to backfill.
flockonus 2 hours ago [-]
Not necessarily indicates any 1 thing; it can be fake job posts to signal growth, could be an extra picky hiring manager, even a decrepit company that forgot to close it.
prerok 2 hours ago [-]
I agree with that, just responding to the parent who wrote that their company keeps the hiring listed. So, in their case it's true but in other cases it is not.
I agree, I should have written a bit more, apologies.
firesteelrain 2 hours ago [-]
It’s a pipeline requisition or feeder requisition. Sometimes companies will close and refresh it. Can’t rely on job listings alone
guywithahat 2 hours ago [-]
I see this for experienced roles too, especially where pay isn't super competitive. If you need a lead software engineer in a certain city for a certain salary, that often means waiting months for them to come across it. 10 junior engineers may apply but ultimately they just can't perform the role required
tayo42 2 hours ago [-]
I think people just latch onto ideas that try to simplify and make sense of frustrating situations where they dont have control. "Ghost jobs" are thing to blame now, for a while is was that taxcode thing for software engineers.
johnnyanmac 3 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
rubatrejo 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
thesuitonym 1 hours ago [-]
This is exactly why hiring is such a mess, lazy managers who don't want to repost job listings or put any effort into hiring. Job seekers need to apply to thousands of jobs because they have no way of knowing if a company is actually hiring. Which means hiring managers (who we have already established are lazy) now are incentivised to find ways to not look at resumes.
mandeepj 1 hours ago [-]
Your response tells me you haven’t done much hiring, if at all, or, even if you have, you haven’t done it very well. You’re being unnecessarily defensive. Someone who actually knows what they’re doing, when hiring multiple people, keeps a count of the positions and, if they want to be transparent, updates it as people are hired and onboarded. It’s not that hard.
mjr00 1 hours ago [-]
I've done hiring at AWS and many other companies and the OP is 100% accurate, so I don't know why you speak with such confidence
You could argue that AWS doesn't know what they're doing but they also hire way more software developers than all but a handful of other companies
legitster 3 hours ago [-]
There are some browser plugins you can use for job sites like LinkedIn to filter out Ghost Jobs. It's been somewhat helpful, but honestly it feels like 90% of tech jobs right now are Ghost jobs.
It's happened so many times. Apply for a job, within an hour get an email that says I am not qualified (not true), and then a week later the same job gets posted again.
I'm normally a pretty free-market guy, but it should be illegal. It's clear-cut fraud - they are advertising something that doesn't exist, specifically to game numbers. And what's more, governments report on these numbers as if they are real job opportunities in the economy.
Aurornis 2 hours ago [-]
> Apply for a job, within an hour get an email
Hiring has been crazy for years. It's worse with remote jobs because you get a firehose of applicants everywhere.
When I was doing a lot of hiring I tried to be as responsive as possible because you don't want to lose the best candidates. I would try to review applicants as fast as they came in. You have to understand that in that hour I might get 40 resumes. 1 or 2 are amazing, another 2-3 could be worth a look, and another 5 might have made the cut if I didn't just read those 2-5 much better resumes ahead of them.
If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
The simpler explanation is that a tired hiring manager was just clicking buttons to dismiss applicants who didn't make the cut.
quadrifoliate 1 hours ago [-]
At this point why don't you try to go out and contact candidates yourself or via a recruiter rather than posting jobs? It seems to me that with LLM-based tools you are going to find it increasingly difficult to get those 2-3 out of the 40; all 40 will be LLM-written to perfect match your posting.
criddell 37 minutes ago [-]
AI tools have devalued resumes and cover letters, personal repos, leet code scores, etc...
It's always been the case, but now it's more true than ever: your professional network is super important. If somebody on the inside can recommend you, your chances of getting an offer are good compared to throwing your resume on the pile.
legitster 1 hours ago [-]
Especially if the job is posted on LinkedIn. You can already just poll a list of the most qualified candidates and reach out to them with opportunities.
The problem is companies would actually have to make compelling offers to qualified people.
pixl97 1 hours ago [-]
>via a recruiter
While not as bad as applying yourself, they can be pretty damned awful.
Aurornis 1 hours ago [-]
I do reach out to LinkedIn profiles and some social media accounts, but I'd never use LLM-written text to do so.
You have to appear like a real human. The candidates in demand get recruiter spam all week long. If you go LLM slop canon on their inbox they're not going to respond.
Cold outreach has a low response rate. It's worth doing, but you can't rely on it. You have to go through all angles.
Typically I'd be doing a mix of my own cold outreach, public job postings, an internal company referral program, and for difficult roles a trusted external recruiter who I know is good for candidates.
gedy 41 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, I’ve never understood this - earlier in my career this was the standard to have technically skilled hiring managers look for and contact people.
Now people act like they must have this ridiculous firehose of resumes to sort through, then have non-technical HR gals sort and filter out based on whatever random criteria they use, and then by the time it gets to the hiring managers - they still have no idea if this person is a complete idiot or has any skills at all. The qualified people you actually want to hire don’t want to be treated like idiots or liars either.
I just don’t feel it has to be this way - there is zero value in a firehose unless you were looking for desperate and cheap people.
whstl 35 minutes ago [-]
I don't think anyone really wants the firehose. It's just something that happens when you advertise on any popular platform.
However I'll agree with you, the non-technical people sorting CVs on unknown criteria is something that became very widespread lately, and is certainly part of what's contributing to the problem.
matwood 1 hours ago [-]
> You have to understand that in that hour I might get 40 resumes. 1 or 2 are amazing, another 2-3 could be worth a look, and another 5 might have made the cut if I didn't just read those 2-5 much better resumes ahead of them.
This sounds like a dream. We posted a job a couple of weeks ago and had 1200 applications in around 2 days. Most are complete garbage. I'm confused why they took the time to apply at all, even if AI did it for them.
legitster 2 hours ago [-]
> If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
That assumes that I am writing my resume for just your job posting. If I am just going to copy and paste the job requirement verbatim on my resume, doesn't that make your job screening applicants for actual experience much harder? Often times the difference is splitting hairs anyway ("we're looking for someone who paints brown houses").
But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them, I would just frankly not have the time to do so.
Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody. The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.
shagie 1 hours ago [-]
Consider the case... I've got a stack of 100 resumes and 2 hours today to select the top 10 candidates from that stack. I'll be ranking those 10 and give them to HR at the end of the day today. Tomorrow, HR will take the top 5 who are available and schedule interviews for next Tuesday. One of them will be selected from those who interview next Tuesday.
What can you do to increase the odds that you're in the top 10 (and preferably top 5)?
It's possible that a superficial reason was used to separate number 10 from number 11 ... and maybe number 11 would have been a great candidate and future employee. What I don't have is three weeks to do all day 9-5 1h long interviews for every candidate.
legitster 1 hours ago [-]
That makes sense for the opportunities that actually close after they are posted. I'm talking about jobs that disqualify you as a candidate same day, then repost the same listing next week. And next month. And next year. These are clearly ghost jobs.
Regardless - it would be nothing to show some basic human decency and respect:
- Review them more often until you get the 5 quality candidates to interview (there's no way in hell you actually review all 100 resumes fully - quit sitting on them for weeks and weeks)
- Take down the posting after resumes are reviewed
- Submit a basic and honest response for the people who's resumes didn't make the consideration
- A simple human note for the candidates who were considered but didn't make the interview
- Timely closer for the interviewed candidates who didn't get the job
None of these add any substantial time to the hiring process, but can go a long way to remember the human in a job market that's an absolutely brutal and soulless Leviathan right now.
Aurornis 1 hours ago [-]
> That assumes that I am writing my resume for just your job posting. If I am just going to copy and paste the job requirement verbatim on my resume, doesn't that make your job screening applicants for actual experience much harder?
It doesn't make the hiring manager's job harder if you decline to customize your resume. They press reject and move to the next resume.
> Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody.
If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.
If there was a hidden requirement to know Python but the job listing didn't ask for it, you get a lot of applicants that don't fit. Smart hiring managers will update the job listing as they review candidates. There are some lazy companies that will have secret requirements that they don't put in the job listing, but that only creates more work for everyone involved. It's not a secret trick they're pulling to be mean. They're just bad at their jobs.
> The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.
Unpopular opinion around these parts, but there's a high correlation between the best candidates and people who take the time to review the job posting and customize their resume before submitting.
I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
> But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them,
Complaining about low response rates and refusing to tailor your resume are highly correlated, in my observation.
legitster 49 minutes ago [-]
> If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.
The thing though is it's a bad requirement. There are any number of great candidates who could be proficient in Python - the skills are very transferrable. (It's like trying to find a painter and filtering out people who have never painted a brown houses)
The thing you're screening for by being so specific is not finding the most qualified person, you're going to end up with the person with the most time and patience to fib or lie on their resume.
> I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
That's exactly wrong - the best candidates are going to be busy people who are great at their job - the people jumping through HR hoops to get hired are by nature going to be worse candidates.
whstl 26 minutes ago [-]
So, I recently got about 600 resumes for a senior Python backend position.
Out of those about half had no experience in backend or python, plus weren't senior enough for us to consider. Or forgot to include all that in their CV. They get filtered out in the first filter phase.
While I'm sure a portion of those could do the job, I can't realistically interview those 300 people when there are other 300 who happen to have at least written that in their CV.
legitster 17 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
cryzinger 60 minutes ago [-]
Probably a dumb question, but when you say "tailor your resume", what kind of tailoring do you mean? I've seen this advice repeated a lot, but I've rarely taken it because I tend to apply to jobs with the same job title and roughly the same responsibilities; in general, I assumed that tailoring is mainly helpful if you have a diverse/generalist skillset.
Like, it's obvious to me why a true Jack of all trades would use different resumes for applying to a plumber role vs a carpenter role, but less clear why a career plumber would tailor resumes for applying to two plumber roles at slightly different companies.
shagie 47 minutes ago [-]
If the job is for a backend Java developer position, change the list of languages you know from:
Languages: JavaScript, C#, Python, Java
to:
Languages: Java, C#, JavaScript, Python
Many times people order their languages by familiarity or preference for working with that technology. Don't make the person looking at the resume have to hunt for the information. If it's last on the list, that may say something about how much you're interested in that job and how likely you are to stay.
> but less clear why a career plumber would tailor resumes for applying to two plumber roles at slightly different companies.
If one company is looking for a plumber to do PEX and another is looking for someone who is experienced with natural gas and black pipe, you might want to make sure that your experience in those two different domains of plumbing are at the front of the experience. They're both plumbers, but the heating and air conditioning company hiring a plumber is looking for different things than the residential new construction plumber.
legitster 28 minutes ago [-]
It's so funny to me that a tech company will have no problem hiring a VP from, like, a beverage company - but heaven forbid you put your programming languages in the wrong order on your resume.
badatnames 2 hours ago [-]
The consistent reports I'm getting through friends who have spoken to recruiters is just that standards have increased dramatically. Firms accepting only a single candidate CV from a recruiter instead of 5 or more, and the recruiter downstream working their ass off to ensure it is absolutely the best possible CV, because if it's not then they don't get paid.
legitster 2 hours ago [-]
> Firms accepting only a single candidate CV from a recruiter instead of 5 or more
Why though? I've done hiring before - it takes less than 30 seconds to skim a resume. The recruiters also have no idea what the responsibility is for the jobs they are hiring for - it's a terrible place to bottleneck candidates on.
It sounds like everyone, including recruiters, are being sent on a snipe hunt.
SoftTalker 1 hours ago [-]
I would guess that with bots and AI, a lot of resumes are not even from real candidates, and those that are, are AI slop. I don't envy recruiters or hiring managers these days.
MarleTangible 2 hours ago [-]
There are also a lot of reposts coming from recruiting companies.
I see a position getting posted for a local company, and within hours the same requirements are showing up for 10 new postings with vague company names like "... is wanted for a local manufacturer" etc.
legitster 2 hours ago [-]
The way I got my current job is that the company I applied for rejected my application and then hired a recruiter who brought me in with the same application.
The company essentially handed the recruiter $10k because they were too bad at reviewing their own applications.
mattm 54 minutes ago [-]
How do hire a recruiter as a candidate?
legitster 46 minutes ago [-]
In this case the company hired the recruiter because "they couldn't find any candidates".
Hiring your own recruiter can be kind of a scam - if you do it on your side they'll want ~10% of your first year's salary. But if you're interested in such a thing, all you have to do is so much as wag a finger on LinkedIn and they'll come swarming.
thepryz 43 minutes ago [-]
This. I can't tell you how many times I've been contacted by a recruiter looking to fill a job that I myself am the hiring manager for or is within my reporting line. When recruiters can't even be bothered to look at the job, company and potentially hiring manager before contacting someone, the system is broken.
destitude 2 hours ago [-]
After I scheduled an appointment which I realized was a "recruiter" the zoom link showed the local time zone for the recruiter was from some West African country. I cancelled the appointment.
valgaze 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds super annoying sorry it sucks but who exactly are they defrauding in your view? And what numbers are they gaming?
legitster 2 hours ago [-]
Investors for one. If these are larger companies, they will often inflate their actual hiring numbers to make it look like they are anticipating more growth than they are actually expecting.
But I certainly feel ripped off applying for jobs they never intended on filling. If they put up a lot of hoops to jump through to apply (submit a portfolio, set up an account, write a cover letter specific to our company), times that by the 1000 people who have applied, and it's an exorbitant amount of human time getting wasted.
dgunay 2 hours ago [-]
The job market should be just that, a market, between buyers and sellers, not people who pretend to be buying in order to look like they've got money.
I know this analogy breaks down a little bit since this behavior does actually happen, sort of, in real life p2p markets but the point is, it sucks and if you've ever sold anything on fb marketplace you know how obnoxious it is dealing with people who demand a lot of you but do not intend to actually commit to buying what you're selling.
HumblyTossed 2 hours ago [-]
Investors maybe. Makes your company look better than it is.
rubatrejo 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jedberg 1 hours ago [-]
I talked to a hiring manager friend at a big company you've definitely heard of. I was looking for a job so I sent him a link to one of his jobs and said "can I interview for this?"
He said: Oh, I have 23 recs on the job site but none of them are open. They just keep them there to make us look like we're still hiring like crazy.
jonas21 2 hours ago [-]
Every time I've hired someone at a big company, it's taken multiple months to get candidates through the pipeline, and it was not uncommon to have to go back to the candidate pool when someone would accept an offer and change their mind before starting. 90 days to fill a role would be considered relatively quick.
sporadicism 2 hours ago [-]
What an absolutely insane way to do business. Everybody is out here trying to squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of software teams to the point of shipping garbage. Meanwhile managers, executives, and hr are operating under the belief that taking literal months to move "candidates through the pipeline" is eminently reasonable.
solatic 15 minutes ago [-]
> eminently reasonable
Companies feel like they have no choice, for two reasons:
1. Jurisdictions where workers must give minimum notice periods before leaving their prior employer - the worker accepts a competing offer, gives notice, waits out the notice period, then starts. And many workers often ask for additional unpaid time between jobs before starting (since no vacation days have been accrued yet at the new job).
2. Hiring happens by committee. In most companies, job candidates must be interviewed by, at the absolute minimum, an HR screener, the hiring manager, and the hiring skip-level; and usually also by people who will be peer teammates, plus an HR "culture" interview. If you need to pass a committee of 3-6 people, interviews must be scheduled with each member of the committee; at one committee member per week, that is 3-6 weeks.
6 weeks (1.5 months) plus background checks plus getting pay packages approved plus 30 day notice periods plus two weeks unpaid vacation is, yes, a multiple month endeavor at minimum to fill a role. The only way to fill a role within a week is to grant full hiring autonomy to the hiring manager and only hire people who are currently unemployed (and therefore have no notice period or desire to take more unpaid time before starting), which in most companies beyond early startup size, is a complete non-starter.
mattm 1 hours ago [-]
Most tech companies have a:
- recruiter screen
- tech screen
- multiple interviews during an "onsite" round
Job is posted. You apply along with hundreds of other people. The recruiter/hiring manager needs to spend some time sifting through them along with juggling all the other tasks they have going on. Let's say that this takes 1-2 weeks. Some places may let the opening sit longer to get more applicants.
Several candidates are identified as possible fits. Recruiter reaches out to them to schedule the recruiter screen. Schedules need to line up. This likely takes 1-2 weeks until the recruiter screen happens.
The recruiter needs to schedule the tech screen after a successful recruiter screen. Again, schedules need to line up. This could take another 1-2 weeks.
Feedback needs to be submitted and then the onsite round is scheduled. This could take another 1-2 weeks.
The onsite round will have multiple interviewers. This means more people to collect feedback from which likely increases delays in getting that. A debrief is normally scheduled with everyone who interviewed them. But let's say one week to gather this and make a decision.
An offer is made. It takes some time to prepare and get sign off. There will be time to discuss with the recruiter to explain the details, plus some time needed for negotiation and thinking it over. This could be another 1-2 weeks.
Additionally, some candidates may want to ask for more time during these phases in order to prepare better or align their schedules. This pushes back the process for all other candidates if the company is hiring for a specific job in order to give all candidates a fair assessment against the pool.
Adding this all up, we arrive at 6-10 weeks.
mrweasel 47 minutes ago [-]
This absolutely sucks if you don't have networking skills, but this is exactly why it pays of to network. You're basically able to skips 50 - 90% of the recruitment "pipeline" is you know the right people and they want you specifically.
sporadicism 48 minutes ago [-]
The person I responded to said that filling a role in 90 days would be "relatively quick" so you've already improved theoretical hiring efficiency by up to 50%.
But it still doesn't sound like a very effective process typed out like this.
mattm 39 minutes ago [-]
I can't speak to their experience but the bigger the company, the more process and people involved usually. That causes delays here and there that add up. It's also a matter of how much of a priority the company makes it. If they're large and well-known there's really no incentive to change anything. They'll always have a stream of candidates applying and being available to hire.
What would you do to make it more effective?
sporadicism 17 minutes ago [-]
So it's not that they can't, it's that they won't. Seems crazy to me.
>What would you do to make it more effective?
I'd ask companies who have managed to get the process down to 2-3 weeks what they're doing, and then do that. It sounds like you're saying they don't actually care to, though.
georgeecollins 38 minutes ago [-]
True. But if your job is HR taking a long time to hire people and maintaining a high level of turnover is probably good for your job security. I don't think it is overt, but I have noticed that large orgs have a lot of HR process, small companies just try hard to maintain staff.
SpicyLemonZest 1 hours ago [-]
Hiring the wrong person in corporate roles is very, very, very expensive. New hires are expected to be unproductive right out the gate, and it's hard to measure productivity in general, so you can easily end up in scenarios where it takes months to notice there's an issue and a year or more before you can get the person back out the door. So you really do have to double and triple check that a prospective hire is the right choice.
It can move faster than months, of course, when everyone's willing to prioritize it. But as anyone who's worked in hiring can tell you, the set of people who want hiring to move faster is much larger than the set of people who are willing to accept inconvenient interviews and fill out their feedback promptly.
pixl97 1 hours ago [-]
Maybe I'm an old fart, but I've never had a job take over 14 days to get. Stringing people along for 3 months is absolute insanity. This is what happens when people get turned into numbers instead of actual beings with needs and emotions.
whstl 53 minutes ago [-]
Same, in the past it was much faster.
IMO the reason it takes longer now is because multiple people are getting interviewed simultaneously.
Considering job postings are getting 10x more resumes than before, I'm not surprised companies are hedging their bets and interviewing way more people for the same position.
esseph 1 hours ago [-]
3 months? Try 6. 7-9 rounds of interviews over a 6 month period. It's insane.
newtonianrules 14 minutes ago [-]
People need to stop subjecting themselves to that. Eventually companies would get the message.
jt2190 2 hours ago [-]
Remember that the average job candidate is absolutely clueless about how positions are created and filled in real life, so seeing bad assumptions like “most positions are filled in under ninety days” shouldn’t be surprising.
esseph 2 hours ago [-]
I am hearing from multiple people in hiring departments at different companies that they are doing 7-9 rounds of interviews for non-coding tech roles.
These companies have lost their minds.
alistairSH 2 hours ago [-]
That sounds pretty insane to me.
IME (hiring, not interviewing) it's always been 3-4 rounds. First is an HR phone screen (usually 20-30 minutes on the phone), 2nd with hiring manager, 3rd with a senior engineer/architect, and a 4th with the hiring VP. And those are almost always combined into a single morning or afternoon(2+3 or 3+4) and the final round doesn't always happen (VP's choice).
gib444 1 hours ago [-]
It's just cruel
pixl97 1 hours ago [-]
Maybe the cruelty is the point? They are looking for people that will put up with bullshit and suffering?
whstl 53 minutes ago [-]
I'd say it's more incompetence than cruelty. People have options and don't know how to filter, so they just go nuts in the worst possible way.
smcg 3 minutes ago [-]
Or they don't have options and have to put up with it.
Rotdhizon 35 minutes ago [-]
A small anecdote from the cleared space (security clearance jobs). If you look through websites like clearedjobs, you'll notice that you see the same sets of cyber jobs posted over and over and over. All from the same companies in the same locations. Come to find, it's simply because they can't find people desperate enough with good qualifications to work for low wages in HCOL areas like northern VA and DC. Companies that want unicorn analysts/engineers with 6-10 YOE, TS/SCI, degree, and extensive, specific experience to relocate to northern VA for 130k/yr - 5 days in office - standard crappy contractor benefits. Shocked pickachu face when practically no one will accept those terms who actually qualify.
mgaldys4 2 hours ago [-]
At least in my country, a job posting that stays up forever isn't a ghost job. It's a company that can't keep people. Either the conditions are brutal or the pay is garbage.
pixl97 1 hours ago [-]
Heh, this sounds like the more human case where if you see a person that is single you don't want to go out with them as there's a rather serious reason why they are single.
aqfamnzc 51 minutes ago [-]
I would never date someone with standards low enough to date a person like me. Huge red flag.
alightsoul 2 hours ago [-]
What country is it?
mgaldys4 2 hours ago [-]
China
rubatrejo 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
justinator 2 hours ago [-]
I was under the impression a large % of jobs posted on jobs sites are done simply for compliance reasons and because HR has some "bullshit jobs" parts to it and the companies will usually simply hire from within the company itself.
reticulates 2 hours ago [-]
Sometimes that can happen but it is not common, certainly not a large % of job posts.
Bratmon 2 hours ago [-]
Do you have a source on that?
It would be genuinely shocking to me if someone came up with evidence that the majority of jobs on job sites were made by companies that actually intended to hire the best candidate that applied through that site!
reticulates 50 minutes ago [-]
Surely you should be looking for evidence of the opposite. Why would a company create a job listing if they aren’t hiring? You are supposing there’s a global conspiracy to create fake job listings.
Every company I’ve worked at, from startups to big tech have had job listings open when they want to hire someone. Sometimes a job post will stay open for months or even years, not because it is fake but because finding the right candidate is far more important than finding a candidate.
I empathize with the frustrating experience of seeing job listings that you’re qualified for and not being hired, and certainly a lot of companies half-ass their hiring and do not review every applicant, but fake job listings make very little sense. When they do occur, it’s for obscure reasons, not because that is standard operating procedure.
The whoishiring thread here on HN regularly sees candidates accuse regularly posting companies of not actually hiring, even though there’s ample evidence these companies are hiring.
Re: the original claim about job posts being created when the company already has an internal candidate, there are very few organizations where that is necessary. A private company rarely has an obligation to consider outside candidates, it is mostly seen in government recruitment and for visa reasons. Job sites charge lots of money to list, a company wouldn’t waste money advertising a job they don’t intend to hire for.
rubatrejo 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lucicditee 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
syntaxing 2 hours ago [-]
I conduct interviews pretty often for various levels. Interviews seems so broken from both sides. Hard to find jobs that aren’t ghost jobs. Hard to find candidates that won’t cheat using AI and actually know their stuff. Just feels like AI has made hiring in tech even more inefficient which says a lot.
blablabla123 30 minutes ago [-]
I've been asked to do take homes for different companies recently. Each time I was very confused whether using AI is acceptable, desirable, required or unacceptable. One time I asked just in time, the other time I wasn't sure if even using Google was okay.
I mean in University there were tests where you were allowed to bring a cheat sheet, or even a bag full of books. So called bag tests. And people were still able to fail. Although I never had the latter in my curriculum.
I think it's necessary that teams for which people are hired for brainstorm up-to-date tests. Just recycling the same challenge from 3 years ago isn't good enough.
gib444 1 hours ago [-]
Is AI use by current employees considered cheating?
whstl 48 minutes ago [-]
If they can't do even a vibe check without reading from a screen, I'd say yeah, it's worse than cheating.
I've also caught a few people using LLM cheating software accidentally revealing it.
SpicyLemonZest 59 minutes ago [-]
If I were in a meeting with a current employee, and discovered that they were reading an LLM script at me instead of considering and responding to my questions, I would definitely tell them and their manager that this is unacceptable.
skeptic_ai 47 minutes ago [-]
Why you don’t make harder questions that would probably require to use ai?
Real job you have ai, so no point to ask too many things that ai can answer anyway.
Ok, some big level stuff like node has an event loop.
SpicyLemonZest 26 minutes ago [-]
Most technical interviews aren't designed to emulate what the job will be like, so what you would or wouldn't have access to on the job isn't really relevant. The goal is to evaluate the human being applying for the job. An interview that effectively emulates the job would really have to be done over at least a week, and most good candidates can't or won't make time for that.
wrxd 1 hours ago [-]
I sent a few CVs recently trying to get a fully remote job and the experience has been miserable.
From what I can tell the job posting have been opened for a while, companies are inundated with CVs thanks to them offering remote and form the screening feedback I had (when I was lucky to get any feedback) it was basically that they can be as picky as they want and hire people who matches every single one of their requirements.
On the flip side at my work (FAANG, not remote) we barely get any CVs from people who can pass the technical screening. Most the candidate fail so badly it’s not even funny
whstl 50 minutes ago [-]
> On the flip side at my work (FAANG, not remote) we barely get any CVs from people who can pass the technical screening. Most the candidate fail so badly it’s not even funny
Same experience in multiple YC startups whose payment isn't even that competitive. Half of the resumes don't match the qualification, and on top of that the freelancing recruiter doesn't even seem to care. Lately I resorted to hiring from my own network.
LoganDark 18 minutes ago [-]
How do you build a network? I have a few previous employers, but they don't have any help for me directly, and I haven't had any luck by applying or reaching out to recruiters or agencies.
whstl 8 minutes ago [-]
If you're an individual contributor: keep in touch with colleagues, especially senior level and technical managers, or people going to other companies.
Managers: keep in touch with the best people and just hire them on your next job for more than they were getting paid. Win-win.
It's not easy for everyone, if you don't interact with colleagues outside the job it's probably impossible.
destitude 2 hours ago [-]
I've about given up looking for a remote job even as a software engineer with over 20+ years of experience especially with macOS since I never seem to get a reply or "no longer accepting applicants".
zelphirkalt 2 hours ago [-]
Probably a lot of those that have remained open will also stay that way, because they are (1) fake job ads, or (2) job ads of companies, where you don't even reach a human soul during the application process, and the companies don't realize how broken their hiring process really is, or (3) job ads of companies, who have so unrealistic idea about what they are looking for and what they themselves are actually offering to attract whomever they are looking for, that almost no one applying meets the criteria.
Probably I also forgot some more categories of crazy hiring processes in my enumeration.
whatever1 2 hours ago [-]
It is clear signal but its causes are multiple and I am not sure what percent attribution each one has:
1) Roles with high turnover. Likely the posting stays always on.
2) The pay is bad and nobody takes the job.
3) The role is too niche and the candidates in the market with visibility to the role are very few.
4) Aggressive hiring. Candidates have many options and until they actually show up at work, you keep interviewing other candidates.
5) Forgotten posts / ghost posts (my gut feeling says that this is the lowest contributor to the spike we observe, as likely it should be flat over time)
MarleTangible 2 hours ago [-]
Reposts from recruiting agencies or other unrelated companies to resell the candidates or simply farm user details for fraud etc.
dgellow 2 hours ago [-]
So, you’re saying it’s not really a clear signal?
dvt 2 hours ago [-]
As someone that's currently looking (with plenty of experience, corporate, startup, and contract), can confirm it's pretty rough out there. I think the application process is just becoming enshittified: because HR uses AI to filter, applicants are starting to use AI to apply, so we have volumes and volumes of nonsense flowing back and forth.
Been working professionally for ~15 years or so, and it's never been this bad. Other than "knowing someone" (i.e. a referral, and even that falls through routinely), not sure what the best way to snag a position is these days.
nabbed 1 hours ago [-]
I just read this on CNBC:
“US business continues to boom,” S&P Global Market Intelligence chief business
economist Chris Williamson said in a statement. “To put the growth surge in
context, barring the spike in demand following the opening up of the economy
after the COVID-19 lockdowns, the latest improvement in business activity
is the greatest recorded since early 2015. Business is clearly booming now in
both manufacturing and services.”
Is it booming for everyone except software developers? I keep hearing about developers who have been looking for a job for 6 months or longer and don't get responses to applications.
Or is it some process failure (which you hint at) that is making it difficult to capitalize on that boom?
bonesss 5 minutes ago [-]
Speculation, but: if tech over hired during COVID our section of the market could be experiencing a corrective slowdown while others are booming in aggregate.
ndiddy 39 minutes ago [-]
Most job growth for the past several years has been in the healthcare, leisure and hospitality, and construction sectors. Removing these sectors makes job growth negative for 2024 and 2025, and wipes out the majority of job growth in 2026. See https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/economy/spotl...
Business doing good doesn't automatically mean populations of humans are doing good themselves.
2 hours ago [-]
throwitaway222 58 minutes ago [-]
We need to make a law making it punishable to jailtime for posting fake, ghost, harvesting job postings. The proof is things like this - a posting for longer than 90 days.
glitchc 57 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like there are too many white collar employees and not enough white collar jobs. The market can pick and choose, wait for the perfect candidate to pop up.
jrochkind1 2 hours ago [-]
I've been hearing people looking for jobs with (to me) weird theories about fake/ghost job postings, that the employer never plans to fill... they have various theories of why (hypothetical) employers would do this that I don't quite follow.
Has anyone else heard of/seen this, or can explain where it's coming from or if it means anything?
fwlr 1 hours ago [-]
It is absolutely and undeniably a real phenomenon. Take your pick of explanations, nobody actually knows for sure, but you have to tell yourself something or you’d toss your phone out the window when you get the 40th notification that you might be interested in the exact same job that auto-rejected you the previous 39 times. Speaking from personal experience over the last year.
jrochkind1 46 minutes ago [-]
It's very weird. You would think the people posting the jobs might know for sure, although different posters may have different motivations. It seems something that should be amenable to some journalistic investigation, but while it's getting a lot of talk between job seekers, including in these comments, nobody seems to have tried to do such investigation to get some clues as to what's going on.
hn_submit 1 hours ago [-]
This is common everywhere. Employers are leaving open job listings and just wait and see who comes along.
Career sites would do well to automatically close job listings after 90 days or so.
petcat 2 hours ago [-]
Meaningless stat. My company keeps our website job listings open indefinitely and it's because we're always hiring. We're just extremely selective.
mattm 1 hours ago [-]
Every company is selective
doctorpangloss 27 minutes ago [-]
Nobody has a solution for hiring.
We have AGI before we have general purpose hiring.
toomuchtodo 3 hours ago [-]
Ghost jobs! Tremendous dataset. Hospitality and education roles listed near the top are likely strong signal the wages are inadequate and a refusal to raise the wage to a market clearing price. Healthcare is self explanatory, demand is voracious due to a rapidly aging population and wages available and appropriate in many cases.
> Hospitality postings sit the longest: 43.9% have been open more than 90 days, median 65 days. Healthcare turns over fastest at 19.7%.
(kudos to unlisted for aggregating and reporting, this gives me a data point to offer to jurisdictions and regulators interested in compliance monitoring in this context)
dofm 2 hours ago [-]
Education roles are also an indication of mandatory listing: they have someone internally in mind for a future vacancy but are legally required to list it.
toomuchtodo 2 hours ago [-]
Any citations are welcome on this for my source of truth knowledge graph. Thank you in advance.
mixdup 2 hours ago [-]
It's the case for most government jobs (which in the US most education roles are for government institutions--whether it be traditional K-12 schools or universities). The law in most states and at the federal level require opening jobs to the general public to prevent favoritism, encourage diversity, discourage corruption, etc. It usually just results in having a job posting that is filled before it's posted as they will have an internal candidate, and the rest is for show
Source of truth from this one is I've worked in public higher ed in two states in the US and gone through this process personally
renjimen 2 hours ago [-]
My partner is a teacher in rural Canada and this is true here, at least. District admins often design a role with someone in mind, setting very specific requirements to that effect (needs to have shop AND socials training/experience is one that comes to mind). They need to post the job to meet union criteria, but only one person could realistically fit the bill.
rubatrejo 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
fHr 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah because they ask for low level kernel 10yoe specialists AI llm inference training phd people lol
AznHisoka 2 hours ago [-]
How do we know if this is normal or not? You really need a historical time series to know if it has always been like this or not
pixl97 1 hours ago [-]
Job postings in the past were made in places with relatively limited space hence higher costs.
The internet has turned the cost of the vast majority of job postings to almost nothing.
Based on that information you tell me how you think the incentives will work?
blitzar 2 hours ago [-]
Historically the ad was in a newspaper and you would sit and circle them with your breakfast while listening to the wireless.
Companies didnt pay to put the ad in the paper every day once the vacancy was filled.
jrochkind1 2 hours ago [-]
Hey, historically your "employer" would flog you if you tried to change "jobs".
blitzar 54 minutes ago [-]
HR was much better at "employee retention" historically.
rubatrejo 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Joel_Mckay 46 minutes ago [-]
Could also mean 28% of "job" postings are not functioning as described.
Whenever you hear of labor shortages, it is almost always a euphemism for a shortage of people desperate enough to tolerate a terrible working arrangement.
The "AI" slop from staffing agencies, lead-generators, applicants, and data scrapers... have dropped the signal to noise ratio into spam number territory. =3
jnugunknjhgvb 25 minutes ago [-]
=3
16 minutes ago [-]
adamrezich 2 hours ago [-]
Why is OP being downvoted to [dead] in every single comment here?
SpicyLemonZest 53 minutes ago [-]
I at least was pretty disappointed to scroll down and discover this is a self-promotion. I'm willing to accept some level of slop for an interesting analysis, but an AI-generated report to promote your AI-generated product with AI-generated copy is too much.
MattyRad 4 minutes ago [-]
Yeah the homepage toplines are pure vibeslop, they didn't even bother touching their own homepage. Trust is instantly vacated. Next.
pluc 41 minutes ago [-]
These sites are popping up to exploit job seekers because the legit alternatives (linkedin et all) blow.
If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that. At a large or fast growing company, we might never stop interviewing and hiring senior software engineers. The listing stays open for a year or more.
There are also specialty roles where hiring takes months. I've had niche roles open where we didn't get any applicants with any experience on the topic for over 90 days on multiple occasions.
If the listing is generic like "senior software engineer" and all of the requirements are generic like being able to program or do teamwork, it's probably a generic listing.
Applying anyway is a safe bet, but I wouldn't invest as much energy into tailoring your resume if it's a 6 month old posting from a 50 person company with a website that looks like it's from 2009. That company probably forgot to take the listing down.
> maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people
This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
The target can also change constantly. At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.
As an analogy it's kinda like hard drives: when one of my hard drives dies, it's An Event which I need to deal with specifically; I need to order a replacement for that specific drive. At Google's server farms, hard drives dying is just a statistic, you continuously buy hard drives just because you know existing drives are gonna die at some semi-predictable rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LATAM_Airlines
While the 9th largest is 7,777 people reported... all the others are at least 40,000 people and the largest two are over 100,000.
Itaú Unibanco https://www.itau.com.br/download-file/v2/d/42787847-4cf6-446... shows 80,657 employees in Brazil in Q2 of 2026.
And for tech jobs... https://carreiras.itau.com.br/busca-de-vagas/software/35299/...
Is it a big list? No. Is it a bank? Yep... but then Capital One is a large employer of tech in the US. Estimates put Walmart (certainly not a "tech" company) at having 20,000 technical roles.
Discriminating between technology product and technology role at a "regular" industry or service seems a bit biased. I (software developer) haven't worked at a tech company for the past two decades (and frankly, while wages are lower than the tech company jobs my job stability is much higher).
In the age of LLMs every one is "tailoring" their resume to every posting.
But in a good market, sure. You can throw your hat into a random general application and you still might get a call back. Old postings are worth a shot. Any connection with an internal recruiter at least guarantees you start the process.
You can, but you’re probably wrong and are wasting your time and effort going through lord knows how many hoops to submit a simple CV.
Were submissions as simple as “here’s my CV, contact me if you like what you see”, then this wouldn’t be a problem. But when you have to sign up to the millionth HR service with the same 50 “please input the info that’s already on the resume you’re submitting” steps over and over again just to never hear back from the company or get rejected 6 months later, “submit away” is not an acceptable answer.
> This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
Yes, it would. Even if only 1 of the 10 spots is available, it still is a valid listing. Not knowing if the listing is valid at all is way worse.
Asking for “common sense” only works if the situation you are in makes sense to begin with. Job listings are a cesspit of bad behaviour, dark patterns, disrespectful processes and incongruous offers.
What we need is some sort of regulation on how job listings are posted and how candidates can and should apply.
While we’re at it, it should be utterly ILLEGAL and absolutely liable to have a job listing up with no salary range or a salary range that’s too wide to give a sense of what compensation looks like—lying about it should trigger serious legal consequences as well.
It’s about time candidates were treated with some dignity.
Yeah. I want a job listing to actively tell me how much I stand to gain in exchange for my time and skills. How absolutely entitled of me. Imagine that? A potential employee wanting to know upfront how much their time is worth in the eyes of a potential employer? Nonsense! You get what you get and you don’t get upset.
If that’s your line of reasoning then I can only assume you’re exactly the type of employer that indulges in such practices.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg7gg2zdexo
Tell that to the last 3 years of new grads.
I have applied for, and got, 3 jobs in the last 8 years. So yeah I think I am allowed an opinion on it without people telling me Im wrong.
Common sense would dictate that a company with 10,000 people has a need for a diverse set of roles, and it would be completely stupid to recycle the same template pretending the role was always the same. In fact, repeating a stale advert suggests the company does in fact not have positions opened and either forgot to pull an old advert or some recruiter is trawling for applications to pretend to be productive.
A large company may have a handful of actually-very-special-role positions open for every hundred generic "our tech stack is this and isn’t going to change" developer roles.
Yes. I recently got a job (IT infrastructure engineer with a non-tech company) on a posting that was 6 months old. they had filled it, and at the same time got approval for a second headcount so they never pulled it down
The main reason the jobs are reposted are to get them to the top of the feed
So what would happen is I'd have say 10 real openings, I may have 5 different job postings, and all of them would stay open until I filled all 10 openings.
They've got a few open spots if you're interested in relocating to Springfield, MO (and even some entry level IT positions https://careers.oreillyauto.com/us/en/job/R203370/IT-Support... - that one was posted 09/21/2026)
Maybe I'm thinking a bit too much of myself, but it doesn't seem like they are that interested in really filling it.
Let's say I have 50 employees working for $100,000 each.
Why would I not want to replace 25 of them that are willing to work for $50,000 each if they are producing anywhere close to the same quality.
In a case like this always open job listings are a warning to others.
Also there is something called market sampling. Where you put up these job openings and look at the quality of applicants in relation to the employees you already have to ensure you're on the right track internally.
‘Warning this company has management practices oriented around remaining solvent for the long term, rather than providing a sinecure for workers’?
Companies do not have human rights. They are a pleasant fiction the population allows because it's more effective than not having said rules. We the people can revoke those rules the moment the meta-idea of corporations no longer serve the public good.
In the US at least we seemingly have come to believe the corporation is the ultimate organism and all rights should be sacrificed for its eternal cancerous growth.
You don't get stability by laying off workers every 2 years .
I agree, I should have written a bit more, apologies.
You could argue that AWS doesn't know what they're doing but they also hire way more software developers than all but a handful of other companies
It's happened so many times. Apply for a job, within an hour get an email that says I am not qualified (not true), and then a week later the same job gets posted again.
I'm normally a pretty free-market guy, but it should be illegal. It's clear-cut fraud - they are advertising something that doesn't exist, specifically to game numbers. And what's more, governments report on these numbers as if they are real job opportunities in the economy.
Hiring has been crazy for years. It's worse with remote jobs because you get a firehose of applicants everywhere.
When I was doing a lot of hiring I tried to be as responsive as possible because you don't want to lose the best candidates. I would try to review applicants as fast as they came in. You have to understand that in that hour I might get 40 resumes. 1 or 2 are amazing, another 2-3 could be worth a look, and another 5 might have made the cut if I didn't just read those 2-5 much better resumes ahead of them.
If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
The simpler explanation is that a tired hiring manager was just clicking buttons to dismiss applicants who didn't make the cut.
It's always been the case, but now it's more true than ever: your professional network is super important. If somebody on the inside can recommend you, your chances of getting an offer are good compared to throwing your resume on the pile.
The problem is companies would actually have to make compelling offers to qualified people.
While not as bad as applying yourself, they can be pretty damned awful.
You have to appear like a real human. The candidates in demand get recruiter spam all week long. If you go LLM slop canon on their inbox they're not going to respond.
Cold outreach has a low response rate. It's worth doing, but you can't rely on it. You have to go through all angles.
Typically I'd be doing a mix of my own cold outreach, public job postings, an internal company referral program, and for difficult roles a trusted external recruiter who I know is good for candidates.
Now people act like they must have this ridiculous firehose of resumes to sort through, then have non-technical HR gals sort and filter out based on whatever random criteria they use, and then by the time it gets to the hiring managers - they still have no idea if this person is a complete idiot or has any skills at all. The qualified people you actually want to hire don’t want to be treated like idiots or liars either.
I just don’t feel it has to be this way - there is zero value in a firehose unless you were looking for desperate and cheap people.
However I'll agree with you, the non-technical people sorting CVs on unknown criteria is something that became very widespread lately, and is certainly part of what's contributing to the problem.
This sounds like a dream. We posted a job a couple of weeks ago and had 1200 applications in around 2 days. Most are complete garbage. I'm confused why they took the time to apply at all, even if AI did it for them.
That assumes that I am writing my resume for just your job posting. If I am just going to copy and paste the job requirement verbatim on my resume, doesn't that make your job screening applicants for actual experience much harder? Often times the difference is splitting hairs anyway ("we're looking for someone who paints brown houses").
But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them, I would just frankly not have the time to do so.
Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody. The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.
What can you do to increase the odds that you're in the top 10 (and preferably top 5)?
It's possible that a superficial reason was used to separate number 10 from number 11 ... and maybe number 11 would have been a great candidate and future employee. What I don't have is three weeks to do all day 9-5 1h long interviews for every candidate.
Regardless - it would be nothing to show some basic human decency and respect:
- Review them more often until you get the 5 quality candidates to interview (there's no way in hell you actually review all 100 resumes fully - quit sitting on them for weeks and weeks)
- Take down the posting after resumes are reviewed
- Submit a basic and honest response for the people who's resumes didn't make the consideration
- A simple human note for the candidates who were considered but didn't make the interview
- Timely closer for the interviewed candidates who didn't get the job
None of these add any substantial time to the hiring process, but can go a long way to remember the human in a job market that's an absolutely brutal and soulless Leviathan right now.
It doesn't make the hiring manager's job harder if you decline to customize your resume. They press reject and move to the next resume.
> Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody.
If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.
If there was a hidden requirement to know Python but the job listing didn't ask for it, you get a lot of applicants that don't fit. Smart hiring managers will update the job listing as they review candidates. There are some lazy companies that will have secret requirements that they don't put in the job listing, but that only creates more work for everyone involved. It's not a secret trick they're pulling to be mean. They're just bad at their jobs.
> The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.
Unpopular opinion around these parts, but there's a high correlation between the best candidates and people who take the time to review the job posting and customize their resume before submitting.
I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
> But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them,
Complaining about low response rates and refusing to tailor your resume are highly correlated, in my observation.
The thing though is it's a bad requirement. There are any number of great candidates who could be proficient in Python - the skills are very transferrable. (It's like trying to find a painter and filtering out people who have never painted a brown houses)
The thing you're screening for by being so specific is not finding the most qualified person, you're going to end up with the person with the most time and patience to fib or lie on their resume.
> I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
That's exactly wrong - the best candidates are going to be busy people who are great at their job - the people jumping through HR hoops to get hired are by nature going to be worse candidates.
Out of those about half had no experience in backend or python, plus weren't senior enough for us to consider. Or forgot to include all that in their CV. They get filtered out in the first filter phase.
While I'm sure a portion of those could do the job, I can't realistically interview those 300 people when there are other 300 who happen to have at least written that in their CV.
Like, it's obvious to me why a true Jack of all trades would use different resumes for applying to a plumber role vs a carpenter role, but less clear why a career plumber would tailor resumes for applying to two plumber roles at slightly different companies.
> but less clear why a career plumber would tailor resumes for applying to two plumber roles at slightly different companies.
If one company is looking for a plumber to do PEX and another is looking for someone who is experienced with natural gas and black pipe, you might want to make sure that your experience in those two different domains of plumbing are at the front of the experience. They're both plumbers, but the heating and air conditioning company hiring a plumber is looking for different things than the residential new construction plumber.
Why though? I've done hiring before - it takes less than 30 seconds to skim a resume. The recruiters also have no idea what the responsibility is for the jobs they are hiring for - it's a terrible place to bottleneck candidates on.
It sounds like everyone, including recruiters, are being sent on a snipe hunt.
I see a position getting posted for a local company, and within hours the same requirements are showing up for 10 new postings with vague company names like "... is wanted for a local manufacturer" etc.
The company essentially handed the recruiter $10k because they were too bad at reviewing their own applications.
Hiring your own recruiter can be kind of a scam - if you do it on your side they'll want ~10% of your first year's salary. But if you're interested in such a thing, all you have to do is so much as wag a finger on LinkedIn and they'll come swarming.
But I certainly feel ripped off applying for jobs they never intended on filling. If they put up a lot of hoops to jump through to apply (submit a portfolio, set up an account, write a cover letter specific to our company), times that by the 1000 people who have applied, and it's an exorbitant amount of human time getting wasted.
I know this analogy breaks down a little bit since this behavior does actually happen, sort of, in real life p2p markets but the point is, it sucks and if you've ever sold anything on fb marketplace you know how obnoxious it is dealing with people who demand a lot of you but do not intend to actually commit to buying what you're selling.
He said: Oh, I have 23 recs on the job site but none of them are open. They just keep them there to make us look like we're still hiring like crazy.
Companies feel like they have no choice, for two reasons:
1. Jurisdictions where workers must give minimum notice periods before leaving their prior employer - the worker accepts a competing offer, gives notice, waits out the notice period, then starts. And many workers often ask for additional unpaid time between jobs before starting (since no vacation days have been accrued yet at the new job).
2. Hiring happens by committee. In most companies, job candidates must be interviewed by, at the absolute minimum, an HR screener, the hiring manager, and the hiring skip-level; and usually also by people who will be peer teammates, plus an HR "culture" interview. If you need to pass a committee of 3-6 people, interviews must be scheduled with each member of the committee; at one committee member per week, that is 3-6 weeks.
6 weeks (1.5 months) plus background checks plus getting pay packages approved plus 30 day notice periods plus two weeks unpaid vacation is, yes, a multiple month endeavor at minimum to fill a role. The only way to fill a role within a week is to grant full hiring autonomy to the hiring manager and only hire people who are currently unemployed (and therefore have no notice period or desire to take more unpaid time before starting), which in most companies beyond early startup size, is a complete non-starter.
Job is posted. You apply along with hundreds of other people. The recruiter/hiring manager needs to spend some time sifting through them along with juggling all the other tasks they have going on. Let's say that this takes 1-2 weeks. Some places may let the opening sit longer to get more applicants.
Several candidates are identified as possible fits. Recruiter reaches out to them to schedule the recruiter screen. Schedules need to line up. This likely takes 1-2 weeks until the recruiter screen happens.
The recruiter needs to schedule the tech screen after a successful recruiter screen. Again, schedules need to line up. This could take another 1-2 weeks.
Feedback needs to be submitted and then the onsite round is scheduled. This could take another 1-2 weeks.
The onsite round will have multiple interviewers. This means more people to collect feedback from which likely increases delays in getting that. A debrief is normally scheduled with everyone who interviewed them. But let's say one week to gather this and make a decision.
An offer is made. It takes some time to prepare and get sign off. There will be time to discuss with the recruiter to explain the details, plus some time needed for negotiation and thinking it over. This could be another 1-2 weeks.
Additionally, some candidates may want to ask for more time during these phases in order to prepare better or align their schedules. This pushes back the process for all other candidates if the company is hiring for a specific job in order to give all candidates a fair assessment against the pool.
Adding this all up, we arrive at 6-10 weeks.
But it still doesn't sound like a very effective process typed out like this.
What would you do to make it more effective?
>What would you do to make it more effective?
I'd ask companies who have managed to get the process down to 2-3 weeks what they're doing, and then do that. It sounds like you're saying they don't actually care to, though.
It can move faster than months, of course, when everyone's willing to prioritize it. But as anyone who's worked in hiring can tell you, the set of people who want hiring to move faster is much larger than the set of people who are willing to accept inconvenient interviews and fill out their feedback promptly.
IMO the reason it takes longer now is because multiple people are getting interviewed simultaneously.
Considering job postings are getting 10x more resumes than before, I'm not surprised companies are hedging their bets and interviewing way more people for the same position.
These companies have lost their minds.
IME (hiring, not interviewing) it's always been 3-4 rounds. First is an HR phone screen (usually 20-30 minutes on the phone), 2nd with hiring manager, 3rd with a senior engineer/architect, and a 4th with the hiring VP. And those are almost always combined into a single morning or afternoon(2+3 or 3+4) and the final round doesn't always happen (VP's choice).
It would be genuinely shocking to me if someone came up with evidence that the majority of jobs on job sites were made by companies that actually intended to hire the best candidate that applied through that site!
Every company I’ve worked at, from startups to big tech have had job listings open when they want to hire someone. Sometimes a job post will stay open for months or even years, not because it is fake but because finding the right candidate is far more important than finding a candidate.
I empathize with the frustrating experience of seeing job listings that you’re qualified for and not being hired, and certainly a lot of companies half-ass their hiring and do not review every applicant, but fake job listings make very little sense. When they do occur, it’s for obscure reasons, not because that is standard operating procedure.
The whoishiring thread here on HN regularly sees candidates accuse regularly posting companies of not actually hiring, even though there’s ample evidence these companies are hiring.
Re: the original claim about job posts being created when the company already has an internal candidate, there are very few organizations where that is necessary. A private company rarely has an obligation to consider outside candidates, it is mostly seen in government recruitment and for visa reasons. Job sites charge lots of money to list, a company wouldn’t waste money advertising a job they don’t intend to hire for.
I mean in University there were tests where you were allowed to bring a cheat sheet, or even a bag full of books. So called bag tests. And people were still able to fail. Although I never had the latter in my curriculum.
I think it's necessary that teams for which people are hired for brainstorm up-to-date tests. Just recycling the same challenge from 3 years ago isn't good enough.
I've also caught a few people using LLM cheating software accidentally revealing it.
Real job you have ai, so no point to ask too many things that ai can answer anyway.
Ok, some big level stuff like node has an event loop.
From what I can tell the job posting have been opened for a while, companies are inundated with CVs thanks to them offering remote and form the screening feedback I had (when I was lucky to get any feedback) it was basically that they can be as picky as they want and hire people who matches every single one of their requirements.
On the flip side at my work (FAANG, not remote) we barely get any CVs from people who can pass the technical screening. Most the candidate fail so badly it’s not even funny
Same experience in multiple YC startups whose payment isn't even that competitive. Half of the resumes don't match the qualification, and on top of that the freelancing recruiter doesn't even seem to care. Lately I resorted to hiring from my own network.
Managers: keep in touch with the best people and just hire them on your next job for more than they were getting paid. Win-win.
It's not easy for everyone, if you don't interact with colleagues outside the job it's probably impossible.
Probably I also forgot some more categories of crazy hiring processes in my enumeration.
1) Roles with high turnover. Likely the posting stays always on. 2) The pay is bad and nobody takes the job. 3) The role is too niche and the candidates in the market with visibility to the role are very few. 4) Aggressive hiring. Candidates have many options and until they actually show up at work, you keep interviewing other candidates. 5) Forgotten posts / ghost posts (my gut feeling says that this is the lowest contributor to the spike we observe, as likely it should be flat over time)
Been working professionally for ~15 years or so, and it's never been this bad. Other than "knowing someone" (i.e. a referral, and even that falls through routinely), not sure what the best way to snag a position is these days.
Is it booming for everyone except software developers? I keep hearing about developers who have been looking for a job for 6 months or longer and don't get responses to applications.
Or is it some process failure (which you hint at) that is making it difficult to capitalize on that boom?
Business doing good doesn't automatically mean populations of humans are doing good themselves.
Has anyone else heard of/seen this, or can explain where it's coming from or if it means anything?
Career sites would do well to automatically close job listings after 90 days or so.
We have AGI before we have general purpose hiring.
> Hospitality postings sit the longest: 43.9% have been open more than 90 days, median 65 days. Healthcare turns over fastest at 19.7%.
(kudos to unlisted for aggregating and reporting, this gives me a data point to offer to jurisdictions and regulators interested in compliance monitoring in this context)
Source of truth from this one is I've worked in public higher ed in two states in the US and gone through this process personally
The internet has turned the cost of the vast majority of job postings to almost nothing.
Based on that information you tell me how you think the incentives will work?
Companies didnt pay to put the ad in the paper every day once the vacancy was filled.
Whenever you hear of labor shortages, it is almost always a euphemism for a shortage of people desperate enough to tolerate a terrible working arrangement.
The "AI" slop from staffing agencies, lead-generators, applicants, and data scrapers... have dropped the signal to noise ratio into spam number territory. =3
https://basecareer.co/ is basically the same slop.