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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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?
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).
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.
It is required to post a salary range in some states. Sometimes they are quite wide, but realistically in the posting I see the posters seem to be taking the rule in good faith.
Signing up for another page is a bit annoying (especially for places that are all using the same platform, like Workday—I understand these are probably self-hosted or kept disconnected on purpose, but still it could be nice if there was a separate global space for applicants, then we could just be imported in).
To some extent it would be nice if it was harder to apply. Like I used to be happy to see a cover letter required, as that’d filter out some of the competition. Now people can just AI generate their cover letters I guess, so I mostly avoid postings that require them unless I’m really excited. (I think LLMs mostly review the applicants these days as well, and I’m pretty sure LLMs prefer LLM-speak, so it’s a losing proposition).
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.
It would be nice if they passed a law to also make every job listing represent an actual job opening at the actual company (or their representative). There are too many postings that are all about "collecting people", forming candidate algorithms, tracking applicants, and mining. It is really grotesque.
how are you getting to multiple interviews without having a concrete-ish idea of what the pay will be?
literally the first thing I talk about with recruiters during an initial phone screen.
yeah okay there may be a ~5-10k, maybe even a little more, bit of wiggle-room but if I can't make a reasonable guess where I'll land why would I even consider interview #2 when I already have an existing role?
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.
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.
It is even weirder in my case. I am not applying for any jobs, recruiters reach out to me. After exchanging plesantries with HR ladies at video calls they ask me what are my salary expectations. I explain them there are two options. For full time employment I expect them to give me their best offer for me to consider. For consulting I expect them to give me exact goals so I can give them exact quote.
I mostly never hear back from them, in rare cases they say their technical colleagues reviewed my resume and decided I am not appropriate candidate.
I suspect most of them are just mining data about salary expectations.
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.
Greenhouse saves your info and auto fills it. Companied that use Ashby are pretty much upload your resume. Only workday sucks or other random small ones that show up.
"Just email your cv" is literally impossible at many employers today. the app process is absolutely far
more onerous for the applicant than it was a generation ago. For a bit of silver lining, I have noticed the "auto-populate from my resume" feature actually works reasonably well on some sites, which was not the case just a couple years ago when I was last looking.
I don't know a single person who's got a job by just emailing their CV. In fact, it reads as asinine as the idea that you can get a job by just showing up in person with a good handshake.
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).
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.
They don't pay for it continuously. They post it once as a LinkedIn post or a recruiter does it either in LinkedIn or elsewhere. They either don't pay for it or pay for it once if a recruiter does it
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.
I found the "AI tailoring" on par with the rest of AI - it's completely untrustworthy. It makes shit up on my resume because it's in the job description when I have no experience in it. We've always had this technology, it's called lying. It may be great to get your foot in the door, but once you have to justify it you're gonna have a hard time.
> If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring.
Perhaps true in the most literal sense, but you cannot assume that it's true in the practical sense.
Lots of companies have laid off significant numbers of people, particularly in certain roles. There will always be some turnover that requires hiring at a large company but this does not mean that you should assume there are always open positions for your role.
Submitting to a large company for roles that are in secular decline within that company is mostly a waste of time.
It's also not uncommon for natural turnover to be used as an organic way to downsize, with a role for a person who just left remaining unfilled.
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.
> 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.
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.
The armed forces have a service commitment of several years (if I read this correctly, US Army is 8 years). People will sometimes change jobs within months.
They have the time to train someone into a role and typically don't have to worry about going to work for a competitor after they get out of AIT or A school.
While there's nothing wrong with those companies paying such, it drastically changes the incentives for the regular employee. Going to work in Big Tech can be like winning the lottery (in the dot com boom, I had about 6 million on paper... that I didn't sell before the crash).
That there is drastically different industries with correspondingly different levels of compensation has incentivized the person who can change jobs to move from a $60k job to a $120k job to a $250k job to do so.
There are companies out there where managers, mechanical engineers, marketing, and all the other non-technology roles work at for a decade or two. It's the software developers and IT people who switch jobs after two years working there.
What's the difference between those job types? It's that software development and IT have a multimodal salary with much greater discrepancy between the companies that fall into the distribution around the lowest mode and the highest mode.
If you switch from working at a local area company to Big Tech, you significantly increase your salary. For other careers, going from the local job to the national big company will likely give a much smaller boost.
Table 6 (last page) shows the median tenure by job classification. Computer and mathematical occupations are the ones that were going down between 2014 and 2020. The others were holding fairly constant.
Table 2 shows 21% of people 35 and older have 10 years or more of tenure at their employer. At 45 years old, it's 45%.
I still hold that software development is the outlier for shorter tenure and the largest factor driving that is that you can quit your job and get a new one that pays twice as much.
Do you have an alternate explanation for this data or published data that contradicts this?
> People used to spend their entire careers at a single company. Something changed, and it wasn't worker attitude.
The US-style neoliberal attitude towards decimating the workforce at a drop of a hat for PR purposes does have a chilling effect on any employee's trust.
But don't fool yourself: one of the most important tools anyone has to improve their life and wellbeing is the ability to switch jobs. It can create career opportunities you would otherwise not have, and even unblock career progression by sidestepping your current job's corporate constraints.
> unblock career progression by sidestepping your current job's corporate constraints
no shit I work with multiple people that dipped out of their old gig, did 2 years somewhere else, and came back at a much more senior level to their old job because HR limits how often you can get promoted or increases inside a bracket.
jumping matters, as does the potential threat of jumping.
> Perhaps the armed forces are doing something right, and the tech industry is not.
This shows some ignorance on the history of work relations. The bad old days of industrial guilds and company towns are not renowned for quality of life and independence. Your life was tied to the company, and all you could aspire to do in your life would be to toil in the same low paying job while mixing up your corporate structure with your life's social structure. If god forbid you lost your job, you and your family would lose your whole life.
Tell me how this is doing things right.
For those in the US to understand, see how your access to healthcare is tied to your employer, and the impact this have on your life of you are forced out of your job. Now extrapolate this to every single aspect of your life.
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
I got a job by applying to an old listing, for the wrong city.
Small companies may look to fill a certain set of skill-sets, and if that is filled by one person or three doesn't matter much; can puzzle around to make the workload fit what is found. large companies may hire 10 people generically, but may stop at 5 if they don't like the candidates, or hire 16 after a good set of resumes.
Forcing companies to be overly specific in the roles is just making it harder to apply.
Been awhile since I’ve been in the job hunt but doesn’t Indeed at least have an option to display the number of roles open on each posting? Wouldn’t that solve this issue pretty easily?
I was recently job searching and roughly 50% of all jobs ghosted me. Just an automated email and then... silence. And when applying via LinkedIn only ~5% of companies even opened my application.
I can believe that your company has a good reason for keeping the job up, but I also know that some job ads are black holes were no one bothers to do the bare minimum including taking the posting down. I have no idea how to differentiate one from the other.
50% is a pretty damn good response rate! I wouldn't complain about that.
It's not surprising about LinkedIn. They've made applying for jobs too easy so there's too much noise. I wouldn't bother applying for jobs there. LinkedIn is great for recruiters though - just put some effort into your profile, set it to "looking for work", and then reply to interesting recruiter spam. That's how I got my last 3 jobs.
extremely good, my stats have been generally 5-10% response rate for just screenings in the course of over 4 times when i was looking for new roles. each time sent anywhere between 200 - 400 applications. and that's just for calls to get to recruiter or hiring manager
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.
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.
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.
When I lived in the area about 6 years ago, I had 3rd party recruiters reach out to me about roles that they don't list. The whole region it felt like was 70% contractors (W-2 with the contracting firm), until the company really liked you and bought out your contract and converted you to an actual employee.
Surprisingly I had better benefits at the two contracting firms than what employees were getting.
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.
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.
This is not done everywhere. I've never hired in the US, but worked for companies in Europe and JP, from <100 people companies to FAANG, and all of them opened dedicated listing for every position we had to fill.
We do a hybrid of both. Internally, we have a specific job/position code, and externally we have job descriptions posted.
If we’re hiring 10 senior software engineers, I’ll have 10 position IDs at the start, but we’ll only have one job posting for Senior Software Engineer (assuming there is no difference in the JD).
I can’t imagine going onto a company site that’s hiring 10 Senior SWEs and seeing 10 identical listings. That would make me doubt their competence.
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".
Nobody is confused. It’s propaganda to justify further immigration to flood the labor market and, these days, additionally to quell fears about AI-related job losses.
> 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.
How on earth am I, a potential job seeker, supposed to be able to figure out if your year-old job posting is still up because you: couldn't find anyone after a year, are constantly hiring and never take it down, actually hired your quota six months ago and HR forgot to take the listing down, the job listing isn't for a real job and is just a trap to collect resumes, the listing is for a ghost job to placate the overworked current staff, some other reason?
I mean, in 26 years in the industry I’ve never worked anywhere that kept ads up for jobs that had already been filled. Not even on their own websites where hosting those ads is effectively free (as opposed to LinkedIn et al where you have to pay).
I’m not saying there are no companies that keep non-live job ads up purely for fishing purposes but, in my experience, it’s not the norm. It would really piss jobseekers off and that’s the kind of word that tends to get around and make it harder to hire in future. Maybe not if you’re a FAANG, because so many people want to work for you anyway, but it’s going to cause problems for “normal” companies.
Anecdotes are not data, etc, but several years ago I worked for a mom & pop company that conducted interviews with people for a job that didn't exist 'just to see what was out there', so stuff like that definitely does happen. (That place eventually went out of business for unrelated reasons)
I worked at several FAANG and similar companies for 20 years. We were always hiring from new grad up to principal. Just a handful of generic position descriptions.
I think the more common case is listings that are technically "open" but due to slow internal processes, repositioning, etc etc, no work is being done towards filling them that is visible to candidates.
For example, I've personally witnessed situations where the funding for a role gets postponed to next quarter, but my manager just kept it open anyway, either out of fear of missing out on the perfect candidate if they stopped accepting apps, or because it's simply easier than going through the HR process to re-post it in a month.
having experienced the UK & US markets - I can tell you within the startup cohort those using lever / Ashby etc - it's not that they have multiple positions - but they're tryna pull an illusion of growth specially in the UK market.
because luckily in the UK market - companies books are open to the public.
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).
Umm...why? Consider the alternate approach. What if I listed 10 Sr Software Eng roles. What would job seekers do? If you said 'apply to all of them', you'd be right. In general, the same recruiter will be responsible for all applications for the same role (e.g. all sr software engineers). There is no benefit to anyone in having the same resume in there 10 times.
If you are, for a year, constantly hiring senior software engineers? That tells me you're just throwing engineers at problems, which is not how problems are solved elegantly. That's sliding into Brook's Law.
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.
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
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.
because the pie grows, and if you are in a competitive market which most businesses are in, you don't want to lose talent and market prestige to your competitors
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.
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 .
> if companies hired all the SWEs they wanted they wouldn't still have the listings
I honestly can't tell if this a troll or not, but in case it isn't:
Because "number job openings" are used as a signal of company health, Ghost Jobs are far far more common than job listings which companies intend to hire from!
Is this true? some of the highest aura companies have very limited jobs open to signal exclusivity, or have such a high bar that they are in perpetual shortage
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.
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.
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.
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
I agree that every applicant should get a response (probably 2, 1 immediately of “hey, got your application” and a second of “not proceeding” or “we’d like to talk”).
I think one thing that job seekers often miss is just how ridiculous the firehouse of low quality applications is. They know they’re competent, but they can’t accurately estimate how many others aren’t and have built up (or borrowed) machinery that lets them apply to hundreds of job postings per day. That level of noise is what causes things to have to be automated on the inbound side as well and where automated scoring tools or gates before talking to an actual human come from.
I still agree you should get a reply, but the first two are overwhelmingly likely to be automated.
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.
Well, no one else is making sense of it (or rather, the real answer is something we can't say), so people will do their own data gatherings and report their findings.
The only issue is that it's never one factor. Rising interest rates, s174, ghost jobs, outsourcing: them and many more factors all add up.
Large companies have teams, and every team puts out a different job description based on their particular requirements, stack, desired experience, etc.
I've never encountered a scenario where someone wants engineers in bulk and then they'll decide where to place them within the organization.
Almost every place when I’ve done campus recruiting treats it like bulk hiring of good raw talent. I hated it when I first saw it on the employer side, but it’s pretty practical.
Multiple big tech companies have historically done exactly this. I got hired at a public tech company as an iOS engineer in 2020 and they made an offer, I accepted, and then I got to meet with the managers of several teams and pick the one I wanted to work with. Single job posting.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
If you go through "Show HN" posts you will see multiple projects that partially or completely automate both search and application process. Just set up a bot that searches for newly posted positions matching whatever criteria, customizes the resume, applies. Probably costs a few cents for the applicant, but increases their chances somewhat. And the rest of us deal with the consequences.
Some fraction of applications that don’t really fit are submitted by people trying to keep their unemployment benefits. You have to keep applying to continue to qualify, but the jobs don’t have to be a perfect fit.
Being unemployed is hard and can be really demoralizing. Try thinking “I’m probably helping someone pay rent until they find a job listing that works for them” when you’re rejecting obviously unsuitable applications. It at least makes the “wtf”-ness of some of them seem a little less weird.
> Try thinking “I’m probably helping someone pay rent until they find a job listing that works for them” when you’re rejecting obviously unsuitable applications
I could believe this if you were in a population 5,000 town with few employers and the person applying had to work in person.
In our industry, where there are 1000 different remote job listings available to anyone at any time, there is no justification for this.
> In our industry, where there are 1000 different remote job listings available to anyone at any time, there is no justification for this.
Do you mean that there's no reason to send resumes or to wherever or that there's no reason to be unemployed given the theoretically endless number of postings?
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.
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.
Even for non-inside hires, I feel like it's more efficient for me as a hiring manager to go out and look for candidates rather than triage some AI-generated pile of crap.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps managers starting to do it by themselves rather than having HR in the middle is the answer to the problem.
> 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.
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.
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.
I work in the public sector. There's a requirement (i.e. law) that the job posting is available for the public to read for two weeks. No selection may be made before all applications are received.
After two weeks, the posting is taken down.
> - Submit a basic and honest response for the people who's resumes didn't make the consideration
If you have 200 resumes in the pool and 100 of them weren't passed on for additional consideration because they didn't meet the requirements (education, needing visa sponsorship, outside of the country, not following the instructions for the application), how long will that take?
Furthermore, in the litigious nation we live in, that information when provided honestly has tended to lead to lawsuits ("I wasn't considered because...").
> - A simple human note for the candidates who were considered but didn't make the interview
That's another 100 candidates. Three minutes each to write the email? That's three hours of someone's day. Again, this gets to the litigious situations. It only takes the allegation of bias to lead to a lawsuit - that costs way more than three hours of my day.
This is the public sector, we don't pay a lot - that's why it's only 200 applications. In the private sector it wouldn't be hard to multiply that number by 3 or 4.
> - Timely closer for the interviewed candidates who didn't get the job
This is something that we're good at. The people who were interviewed know by the end of the week. Job posting opening to the selection being made is four weeks.
The simple and honest response can be an automated email that says you didn't meet the requirements - you would be amazed at how many job postings don't even do that.
I can understand the justification for all of the other choices. But it doesn't mean I have to like it. The whole process is degrading and dehumanizing, and it's something that has gotten much, much worse in the last decade.
The GP said the quiet part out loud. They are so worried about lawsuits that they'd rather make the job market worse for everyone (including themselves) than risk a lawsuit over the most basic feedback. The product of a low-trust society.
I thought the threat of lawsuits was a lame excuse, so I tried to give good feedback to rejected candidates who asked.
It did not take long for one of them to try to turn it against me with threats. We would have easily won the case, but having a lawsuit hanging over my head and a target on my back as a liability for the company was not a good feeling.
Yeah, that's the product of a low trust society. It's not any single person perpetuating it, but it affects us all. A higher trust society would write it off as a bad outlier and keep going. A low trust society wonders when's the next time you get another person that causes an undue burden.
This isn't really a low trust society, it's a litigious society problem.
These lawsuits aren't a myth, if you hire a lot of people it'll eventually happen, even if you're not violating any laws. The lawsuits, even when you win, waste time and money. Giving reasons, especially customized "human" responses is absolutely going to increase your chances of being sued.
Low trust means assuming any and all reasons given out will result in lawsuits. It's precisely a symptom of a low trust society. A not-low trust (doesn't have to be high trust) society wouldn't assume legitimate feedback would be litigatable, and likewise candidates wouldn't be in such bad situations that they'd need to sue every rejection.
As you said, lawsuits take a lot of time and money. Individuals don't have that and would prefer to settle things privately. But if they don't trust institutions to do that, then the only thing to trust is the contract of a lawyer.
More time than average, less money than average. But these people also need to apply to dozens of jobs, more likely hundreds. They can't sue every place.
That's why feedback is important. If the reason was "we are looking for X experience and X is not on your resume" I can adjust that for later. If it was even as honest as "we found enough qualified candidates to interview and didn't look at your resume", that's still semi-actionable feedback. I either apply earlier or just accept that I was unlucky and it was not my ability.
Generic rejections like "we moved with other candidates" tells me nothing. So noise remains because candidates don't have feedback to improve upon. All because HR wants minimize lawsuits through obscurity.
I’m willing to be communicative and try to be helpful right up to the line where it puts me, my family, or my company at risk of some asymmetrically bad outcome.
Regardless of whether it’s due to a low-trust society, a litigious society, or El Niño, I will refrain from giving specific feedback if that puts those groups at risk.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Oh god, I should tell you about the frontend position, then, which got 1000 applicants and then we just closed within a week, despite naturally not having hired anyone yet...
>Dear lord the job market is an absolute disaster right now.
Indeed it is, I don't know and would never like to know the levels of desperation one needs to reach to accept writing Python as a career. (I jest, I jest)
In all seriousness, Python (and the same goes for with Javascript/Typescript) is a popular language that is taught at many bootcamps. I'm sure that has lots to do with the number of applications for these kinds of roles.
That’s a good theory, but we also get ridiculous numbers for C#, design, product management and, at a previous job, Ruby and devops we also got flooded.
Honestly the only language we do that gets a normal amount of candidates is C++, but the team that does it complains about quality too, a lot of CVs from people exaggerating their expertise.
> There are any number of great candidates who could be proficient in Python -
I don't think you understand.
You have to prioritize. You can't interview everyone.
There may be someone in the rejection pool who might be able to pick up Python quickly and enjoy it. It does not matter if I have 10 people who can bring 5 years of Python experience to the first day on the job, and 1-2 more people who can bring 10+ years and probably teach us something about 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)
I've painted houses. I've done programming. This analogy is not good at all. Some people don't adapt well to new programming languages. Some people try, then decide they hate the new language and start looking for new jobs. You don't have to risk any of this when you already have more Python applicants than interview slots.
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.
Several months ago, having exhausted all other options in fruitless job search, I asked for assistance of a recruiter who I used to work with some time ago. Just to get some pointers on how I could improve my search, with his experience working on the other side. His advice on "tailoring" was very simple.
Go to the most popular LLM (ie Claude). Give it the job description. Give it your resume. Ask it for percentage match, it will give you a number. Then ask for advice on improving your resume, you can either ask to rework the resume by itself (if you're in a hurry) or you can work with the thing to modify the sections/entries yourself, one by one, if you have time. With each modification you will get better and better percentage match. Ideally you need to get to high 80% or maybe even 90%.
The idea is that automated ranking tools used by recruiters/HR are ultimately use the very same LLM, so you are improving your ranking assigned to your resume by those ranking systems.
I have to add that now this advice is mostly useless as everybody's using the same technique so you won't be standing up against others but merely be on the same level.
Add to it the fact that many job descriptions are inaccurate and sometimes downright misleading, and hiring managers use their own criteria, and you will understand why connections/referrals is probably the only way to get hired now.
> The idea is that automated ranking tools used by recruiters/HR are ultimately use the very same LLM, so you are improving your ranking assigned to your resume by those ranking systems.
Working in HR-tech, that is definitely happening, and "self-bias" is a thing with LLMs so if you can guess what the employer/screening-process is using then that's a bonus.
That said, we should distinguish between "Hey robot tell me if X matches Y" prompts, versus model-weights comparison. In the second case, the system feeds your resume into a model with no prompt, grabs all the magic math numbers, and statistically compares them to the magic-numbers if the model had been given some "ideal" resumes.
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.
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.
Hiring a CEO, you know (of) the person and its more likely a "the board wants to hire {that person}" and it really doesn't matter what the text of their resume says. At most there's a dozen candidates and a several month process for selecting one of them.
For developers, if the resumes are largely the same, then you're selecting for the ones that show evidence that they read the job posting and want to work there.
This isn't about hiring the best candidate - it's the least risky candidate that is hired. If you're listing the preferred language of the job and the language that is mentioned in the job posting last, you're more likely to be a risky candidate than one who lists it first. You may not know the language as well. You may not enjoy working on it (there's a reason I don't list php in the languages on my resume).
In a stack with less risky candidates, the one that has the preferred language last won't be at the top of the list for callbacks.
While this makes absolutely no sense to me, I'm pretty sure unhinged language fanatics would reject some resumes because "Java is not the first on the list".
HR people and AIs, as much as I criticise them: would not reject that.
If I have 100 resumes, and 50 of them list Java first, and 50 of them list Java last, which pool of 50 am I most likely to find someone who knows and doesn't hate working in Java?
You're going to select 10 people out of that list of 100 because you don't have time to call everyone for three weeks to evaluate their skill.
You've also got only two hours to look through all 100 of those resumes today. You're spending about a minute and a half looking at each resume. How are you going to evaluate someone for a Java backend position who's last job was in C# and they list Java last in the list of languages they know?
If I were reviewing 100 resumes, I wouldn't use the language list. I'd use something with actual context, like work experience.
But more than that, why do you think someone who is terrible at java wouldn't put it first in the list when applying for a java oriented job? Assuming they were aware of this unwritten rule.
The last paragraph makes a great point: if the person has been out of Java the game for long, they will definitely be second to someone who's fresh out of a Java job.
And the reason is exactly as you say: limited time, excessive number of CVs. This completely changes the game.
>which pool of 50 am I most likely to find someone who knows and doesn't hate working in Java?
The one who has actual projects or professional experience in Java? I'm surprised this is such a sticking point. I list my skills last on the resume because it's the least relevant and it was mostly to try and satisfy ATS. But reality is stranger than theory, I suppose.
At least, that was my old approach. I found some advice I really liked and ultimately integrate a tech stack sub-bullet in every experience now. Seems to be a good balance of ATS and human(-skimming) readability.
AI wouldn't. It'll crunch the resume in milliseconds and sort it out itself.
HR is a mixed bag, usually without technical context. I'm sure most engineers in the 00's and 10's have some experience of "Java and JavaScript are similar, right?" In a recruiter call.
Plumbing for new construction, plumbing for HVAC retrofit (even boilers and heat pumps might be further split), and emergency plumbing service tech (for leaks, water heater replacements, and blocked sewer lines) all seem different enough to me to make making clear what experience you had relevant in plumbing.
>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.
There's also a high correlation between matching the job description perfectly and the resume being AI generated and/or dishonest. Doubly so if the requirements are overly specific or contain pure nonsense as some do (saw "Must have 5 years experience with Claude Code" recently). You can filter out people who blatantly don't match the job and those who obviously just copied the job description. Never seen much correlation between the quality of resumes in the middle (ok to great) and how well they do in interviews.
Not to mention at many places "requirements" are mere suggestions or a low-effort list of technologies taken from the resume of the person who quit. Everybody has their own filtering rules and hiring managers rarely agree with each other much less the HR people usually doing the first round of filtering. The true requirements come out only at the resume filtering or interview stage.
>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.
The "best candidate" a lot of times doesn't mean the best able to do the job. It often means the ones who 1. makes the hiring manager feel good by being enthusiastic about their (statistically) average job for average pay and 2. minimizes their perceived risk of looking bad for their hiring choice.
>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 you're not a FAANGMULA type place then sure. But also if your job posting lists something like "Python 3.14" or "7+ years Python" I know the hiring manager probably doesn't know the first thing about python. In that case I think it's fair for any decent programmer to lie because they will likely surpass the hiring managers knowledge by studying python a bit before the interview.
>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.
Do you really think the best candidates are ones who are bothering to cold apply through hiring portals to begin with? The best interviewers, sure.
For people who are actively searching, 10 minutes for 100 applications is 15 hours of work. Reply rates can be as bad as 1 in 500. In this kind of market you want to get that application rate down to 2-3 minutes. There's no time nor point to tailoring towards dream jobs; oods are you dreams were crushed 200 applications ago.
There's no particular reason your time is more valuable. We're all just trying to survive in these tumultuous times.
I've done volunteer resume review and interview coaching in the past.
The only people getting response rates that low either had the most awful resumes you've ever seen, or they were applying for jobs completely out of their league.
Like the 23 year old applying for Staff Software Engineer jobs as the next step up from his junior position (which he was laid off from) with 6 typos in his resume and an e-mail address of ninjadude69@hotmail.com at the top of his resume.
>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.
Resumes are only a 1 page summary (2 if you're really experienced) and this kind of market has you doing hundreds of submissions if you lack connections (or your connections are also job searching). You don't have the time to tailor every application for every role.
A shame because LLMs should really be perfect at this. Most current tools are too obsessed with writing for you (and creating a blander resume) instead of just taking a master CV and drag and dropping the most applicable roles/projects/experiences in.
This kind of stuff wouldn't be happening if we regulated jobs like we regulate banks.
Those regulations aren't perfect, but after working at one it became pretty clear that a lot of these things wouldn't fly if a bank did them.
Falsely advertise a financial offering? Pretty clearly actionable.
Ghost someone after they inquire about one? Deny them for some vague reason? Even just give them an unfavorable rate without specifying as much? None of those things would hold up. You have to send notices of any adverse action you take, not just providing clear communication that you're taking some kind of action against them, but giving a clear and objective reason why.
Call around to everyone someone might have worked for or with for references, without their knowledge or consent? See "clear and objective reason why." Also, if you use a third party to do this there are a whole collection of responsibilities under the Fair Credit Reporting Act -- you have to provide people with copies of the information gathered on request, inform them anytime it's used against them, offer some process for disputing incorrect details... And that threshold is from gathering the data, not from scoring it.
Never mind equity compensation, which is somehow special in terms of financial disclosures -- whether that's relative to the same company later offering the same stock to the public, or just more generally to any kind of investment offer.
None of this is any less unreasonable on the employer side.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, common knowledge sadly. Can get even worse, a friend had recently an interview with a, not-so-well-known, but you heard of them company and they didn't do any face to face interview, just AI driven via email, all steps. When he failed a step: they offered him some credits on the platform, literally a funnel via a job post (it's a dev platform).
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.
The flip side of this is filtering for "US Persons" (non cleared, but citizenship, located in the US) for remote work at the Sr/Staff level. The amount of BS that I get is astounding.
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.
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.
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.
We are at the moment hiring for a L3 (no fresh graduate but someone with 3-5 years of experience). The role has been open for two months now (it was a backfill). I personally am in charge of the technical screen which is the second interview after the hiring manager. I am already getting a filtered set of candidates after the recruiter and the hiring manager review candidates. Of the 5 that have come my way, I’ve said yes to 1 person and 1 as a yes, pending another technical screen. We are not even wanting an exact match, nor are we expecting cure for cancer. Yes there are a lot of people looking for jobs but you don’t realize how many candidates are just not what their resumes portray. It takes forever to get someone competent in the pipeline and even then, you know nothing about their work ethic. The reason the pipeline is slow is because the candidate pool is flooded with over the top resumes that are not backed by actual talent and once you hire a wrong candidate it is extremely difficult to fire them, even with at will employment contracts.
Any manager will tell you, they’d rather not go through the long hiring process.
> once you hire a wrong candidate it is extremely difficult to fire them, even with at will employment contracts
I live in a country where the probational period is 6 months (Germany), so the law says people can get fired without cause or justification, just give them 2 weeks notice or 2 weeks garden leave.
Even with that, it's a very arduous process to fire people. Even in cases where they repeatedly refused to show up for work, I've seen HR departments asking managers to "try harder". This only makes both the employee and the manager suffer.
The reason for that is simple: HR departments are extremely inefficient machines.
From what I've heard from other fields it seems as though this is somewhat unique to the tech industry. I share your belief that it's ridiculous. Companies somehow got along fine pre-FAANG with a few interview rounds before Google and Amazon convinced everyone that you need to have five rounds, a panel, a take home assessment, and a slate of brain teasers to pick out the true worthy 10x engineer.
Grow some balls, do a couple interviews, and just pick the candidate you like the most. You're hiring for a glorified IT guy, not a NASA astronaut. Companies that stretch out the process to a ridiculous degree need to get over themselves.
EDIT: and to be clear, yes, I've been on both sides of the hiring table
> From what I've heard from other fields it seems as though this is somewhat unique to the tech industry.
At least in (Northen) Europe ghost jobs are a pain on the ass in most industries, even for low-skilled labour. Hiring companies - not the actual companies that need a worker, but an intermediate - try to just amass a database of workers so they can say to their client that we have hundreds of people with these qualifications ready to come to work for you. It’s not even legal, but they still do it.
I think a lot of these problems are created by the companies themselves, and to lesser degree by candidates. Posting ghost jobs, asking for insane qualifications to run a simple website, interview process lasting 3 months… And candidates firehosing the job ads with bs CV’s generated by LLMs does not help. Currently I think you need to know somebody inside the company pretty well to get hired.
The fix would be pretty simple:
> Grow some balls, do a couple interviews, and just pick the candidate you like the most.
I did that with one of the faangs. Congrats you passed hiring committee! Oops no open roles!
2 months later recruiter from the same company hit me up. Told them I already passed the interview just give me the job already. Oops no roles, you just have to wait! So why are you reaching out? Couldn’t give me an answer.
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.
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.
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.
In 2019, when I applied to the company I still work for, I went to the interview, waited chit chatting with the manager because the other interviewing manager was 20min late, and when he came in he asked few questions and said “Ok, I don’t think we need to interview anyone else, when can you start?” They find it funny I had a cat and that I asked for way too little money.
Last place I applied to, one screening and two interviews, took several months, and in the end came second even though I was ready to take 700€ paycut. The job was basic AV&network upkeep, felt like I was applying to become an astronaut.
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.
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.
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.
> If they're large and well-known there's really no incentive to change anything.
Well there it is. Suggestions don't matter if there's no one in power who cares. Have them care and suddenly we'd be able to get people hired in 2-4 weeks.
Otherwise it's not rocket science. And you're not hiring rocket scientists. It shouldn't take more than 3 stages to know if a candidate can do the job:recruiter screen, main interview, negotiation meeting. If you need more people in the know, they join on the main day. If they can't, it clearly isn't important enough for their scope of responsibilities (does a skip manager 3 levels up really need to personally meet a candidate?)
A lot of it has to do with how long it takes to find the right candidate. As someone who has been involved in a lot of hiring over the last 20 years, I can say there's been a huge shift within the last couple of years and open reqs get 10-25x the number of applicants, which instead of increasing choice in a positive way has just resulted in the average applicant quality decreasing. That means recruiters and hiring managers spend a LOT more time vetting and also invest in parallel candidates to try to hedge, because so many candidates applying are legitimately unqualified.
It may sound like I'm blaming candidates, and sometimes it might be fair to, but this is also a problem caused by companies not investing in training and hiring junior level employees, which means that people who are unqualified feel forced to apply for more senior roles, as those are the only roles hiring. It's honestly shocking how many candidates I've interviewed in my career who don't even meet the basic bar for the role they've applied for, and are essentially just hoping to get lucky and snag a high-paying tech job even if it ultimately results in them being terminated, they can collect a check for 3-9 months without delivering.
Mass applications, AI cheating, fraudulent representation (e.g. saying you are person X but are actually interviewing on behalf of person X who you are not), lying on resumes and in screeners, and even nation state attacks on hiring (see North Korea trying to farm tech jobs for money to get around sanctions), it's not great on the hiring side either.
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.
It's only expensive because we destroyed our abilities to train workers. It really shouldn't matter in 95%+ of roles if someone isn't a perfect fit. If they have the fundamentals, they should be up to productive speed in 6 months at worst. That's 1000 hours of training. For reference, a semester of classwork for a single course is recommended to take 140 hours (we can make it 200 hours for engineering work). A company really can't get someone with the basics up to speed in 5 college courses?
Well, no. Because we abandoned the idea of fostering talent. We instead insist natural talent exists who will swoop in, be productive in our proprietary systems day one, and outdo all the pathetic engineers who spent years at the company. Almost like we're drafting for a sports team instead of training a workforce.
But at least sports teams spend time making teams feel like teams.
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.
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.
You’re not even hearing back from the recruiter for 14 days if the job posting just went up. I mean it takes 1-2 weeks from the day you got told that you’re getting an offer to the day when you sign it.
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.
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).
7-9 rounds just means 7-9 conversations. Just talking to a recruiter and the manager are 2 rounds. So 5-7 interviews that evaluate competency. You usually get the lower end unless you ended up giving mixed signals.
Sounds like asking a lot from candidates but unfortunately candidates lie a lot and the cost of hiring candidates that don’t match up to the requirements when paying $300k-$500k/year is just too high. Firing people is hard and takes a long time, especially in management roles. My personal guidance to managers is to have rounds match the level and experience required for the job. You can hire an intern with 2 rounds after the hiring manager conversation but a staff IC probably needs 5, directors need 7.
I'm talking about 7-9 rounds for non tech companies, and each round is at least an hour plus interview. These roles aren't even hitting the $200k marker.
It's an effect of "once burned twice shy". Every time there was a "bad" hire they had to change things. People add to the list but no one ever wants to advocate for a lighter process since they might be blamed for it.
I'd say it's more incompetence than cruelty. People (edit: I mean companies) have options and don't know how to filter, so they just go nuts in the worst possible way.
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.
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.
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.
if its remote initially, closed eye interviews where you just have a discussion might be easiest way. Pretty easy to tell if someone is bullshitting if they can't discuss topics that likely should excite them somewhat, or at the very least topics they've been around for years.
Feel like any test nowadays should INCLUDE ai, but you likely just want insight into how they are getting from A to B. I don't wanna assume what you mean by cheating with AI, could be as simple as answering live questions with cheating software or whatever, which is obviously a huge issue. I wanna respond and say it should be expected for any take home type stuff, and be rolled into the expectations if anything, but that could be way off of what you mean.
both sides of the entire process is just a nightmare now, one side has all this noise to sift through, and the other side is pressured to mass apply because of all the competing noise they can't be seen through. I was listening to something about AI generated responses, and they seemed to have no empathy for the people who gave human responses, but used AI to give them an overview of the company and what it does for the question "why do you want to work at x?", and sorta mocked the person because they can tell they asked for a generic description of what the company does.
There has to be some give and take, initial applications if you are spending hours researching a single company, you are setting yourself up to be absurdly let down if that same company sends you an automated rejection within a day. A reasonable person will only do that so many times, before just giving up and waiting for the other side to be the first mover instead.
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.
The line is where ever it needs to be for the role and the candidate. Hiring is subjective, using AI to tell me about your previous projects is a signal you are sending. For some roles that may be a positive signal for others it may be negative.
But if you can’t talk about your personal experience without AI telling you what to say, then I don’t want to hire you.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Did you read the Clarify Capital article? The definition of “ghost job” does not support the point you’re trying to make. The definition of “ghost job” in that article is so broad it includes pretty much every job post. A job post being open for 30 days does not make it a “ghost job” by any reasonable definition. The Congress publication includes no evidence or conclusion and even notes that the issue of ghost jobs is disputed. Did you just google ghost jobs and copy the first 2 links without reading them?
I rcently joined a hiring process for a role. I think a majority of the jobs will NOT be filled in 30 days, given how the process and coordination works.
n of 1 and all, but most jobs I've gotten that were worth getting were from personal reference. To the extent that applying through job sites seems like a real waste of time unless I'm really desperate.
And to reflect that, the jobs I've gotten were the ones you'd only accept if you were really desperate.
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
If it's "previous employers", it might already be too late. Networking basically comes down to "being confortable about people who you know will vouch for you". Especially helpful if they are in power to hire or you suspect they will be one day.
As the other reply said, it really comes down to "hang out with them outside of work". Not often, just enough that you know more about the person than what's related to the job. Working colleagues already work with you so they can speak to your technical skill.
Outside of work colleague, you gotta meet people. So find soke tech communities locally or some FOSS projects you can contribute to.
In any case, it's a slow process and stuff rarely happens immediately. It's something best to do when you don't need a job.
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?
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.
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.
The simple explanation is incompetence: the ratio of false negatives is too high, so everyone has a story of being rejected from jobs they could perfectly fulfil. The ratio of false positives is also high, so jobs remain open for longer they should.
I recently met the CTO of a unicorn in a social function, and they urged me to apply, he would fast track. I interviewed there before, got an offer but decided to go somewhere else. Even with a face-to-face invitation from the CTO and obviously having passed an interview in the past, they rejected me.
There is no end to incompetence in modern business.
Earlier this summer I applied for a job at a local startup that I had all the qualifications for and quite a bit of relevant experience. I got a rejection email within 48 hours. Eventually I happened to meet with one of the founders through a connection and had a chat, he said how amazing it was that someone local had worked on similar problems in the past. In the end he said that unfortunately they don't have the capacity to expand the team right now.
Their job postings are currently still up on their site and linkedin.
I work with US healthcare postings and our numbers are pretty similar: >400k open/active postings, 30% over 90 days, median 44 days. These are direct-hire only postings from the employers (no job boards / aggregators / staffing agencies).
I don't have a hypothesis for why jobs stay posted for so long, other than that employers are always look for a workers, the roles are generally well-defined, and turnover can be high. I don't think there's anything nefarious within healthcare causing so many postings to stay up for so long. Most healthcare employers are generally desperate for workers. So much so that they pay crazy rates for temporary workers (staffing agencies / travelers). The company I work for helps health systems try to minimize those costs.
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".
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)
Warning: the page has been deleted and Im getting a 404. I wonder why? Its on the HN front page and people are still discussing it, but there is no article
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.
“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?
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...
The article is talking about "The Economy" (read: stocks and bonds), not employment numbers. The market can both be awful for job seekers and great for capital owners.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
I have to say, as a middle-aged physician in the military, the dynamics of hiring terrify me. I interviewed to get into college, medical school, and residency. At all other times I have been gainfully employed. I hear about people studying for weeks or months for job interviews. What do you do to study?
Its the same across the board for everything, no one has an answer for the noise AI creates. Really cool tech, but the timing is so bad because we just can't even fathom what dealing with the surplus of generated garbage looks like.
The answer is likely moving away from the internet entirely and having actual face to face screening right away. no company wants to commit to that, so its gonna continue to be some weird expectation from both sides where the applicant doesnt wanna be screened with AI, and the hiring team wants X amount of effort put into every initial application.
I think it just must move entirely offline, until some semblance of an answer exists, because right now like i said, we can't even fathom what a solution looks like online.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
Or a more morbid analogy: military casualties in a war.
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.
Sure, but in one many more people leave the workforce by being killed and maimed than in the other.
"Lottery factor" works, though it's more of a mouthful
That, and nobody knows what you're talking about.
Just the first time
More morbidly, military casualties in what the military insists isn't war.
Even in peacetime, training accidents kill an expected number of military personnel each year.
I'm not talking about training accidents.
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
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?
I googled and literally the first result was LATAM Airlines who have 44,000 employees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LATAM_Airlines
I think he means "software companies".
Large companies exist, but pure software companies or with heavy side of it?
Airlines and state owned companies seem to be the exception
ok, that statement seems a bit different than your previous one of "No company in LATAM has 10000 people."
Except for the companies who have 10000 people, no companies in LATAM have 10000 people.
I think we can all agree No True LATAM company would have 10,000 employees.
Love the logic, have an upvote.
So América Móvil doesn't have nearly 200k? There are plenty of LATAM companies with more than 10k people.
This was an intentional fallacy for comedic effect, specifically "No True Scotsman"
Lol
Bimbo
Femsa
Grupo Salinas
There's plenty more: https://es.tradingeconomics.com/bimboa:mm:employees
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Brazilian_comp...
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).
Petrobras?
> 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.
It is required to post a salary range in some states. Sometimes they are quite wide, but realistically in the posting I see the posters seem to be taking the rule in good faith.
Signing up for another page is a bit annoying (especially for places that are all using the same platform, like Workday—I understand these are probably self-hosted or kept disconnected on purpose, but still it could be nice if there was a separate global space for applicants, then we could just be imported in).
To some extent it would be nice if it was harder to apply. Like I used to be happy to see a cover letter required, as that’d filter out some of the competition. Now people can just AI generate their cover letters I guess, so I mostly avoid postings that require them unless I’m really excited. (I think LLMs mostly review the applicants these days as well, and I’m pretty sure LLMs prefer LLM-speak, so it’s a losing proposition).
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.
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.
The UK is currently passing laws to make every job listing include salary:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg7gg2zdexo
That’s a good start.
It would be nice if they passed a law to also make every job listing represent an actual job opening at the actual company (or their representative). There are too many postings that are all about "collecting people", forming candidate algorithms, tracking applicants, and mining. It is really grotesque.
Good luck on your job hunt.
Very kind of you good stranger. I’m not job hunting at the moment but I appreciate the support!
Taking time off your existing role to do multiple interviews for something that turns out to pay 10-15% less than you are currently on is insulting.
how are you getting to multiple interviews without having a concrete-ish idea of what the pay will be?
literally the first thing I talk about with recruiters during an initial phone screen.
yeah okay there may be a ~5-10k, maybe even a little more, bit of wiggle-room but if I can't make a reasonable guess where I'll land why would I even consider interview #2 when I already have an existing role?
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.
>then you submit it and wait an arbitrary amount of time for the rejection
You get rejections? When I was jobhunting, half of the companies I applied to never replied to me.
> 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.
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.
It is even weirder in my case. I am not applying for any jobs, recruiters reach out to me. After exchanging plesantries with HR ladies at video calls they ask me what are my salary expectations. I explain them there are two options. For full time employment I expect them to give me their best offer for me to consider. For consulting I expect them to give me exact goals so I can give them exact quote. I mostly never hear back from them, in rare cases they say their technical colleagues reviewed my resume and decided I am not appropriate candidate. I suspect most of them are just mining data about salary expectations.
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.
Nobody is allowed to do anything without someone telling them they're wrong.
Three jobs in 8 years? Seems like a red flag, we want to hire someone who will stick around.[1]
1. (Actual feedback I got in an interview two weeks ago, for a position no sane person would want to stay in for longer than two years.)
Fair enough, dont hire me. There are thousands of jobs out there.
Greenhouse saves your info and auto fills it. Companied that use Ashby are pretty much upload your resume. Only workday sucks or other random small ones that show up.
Workday is the only one of these I’ve heard of or encountered in the US.
Probably because workday sucks so much that you notice it.
>the ones who just emailed their cv and didnt overthink it are happily working.
Tell that to the last 3 years of new grads.
"Just email your cv" is literally impossible at many employers today. the app process is absolutely far more onerous for the applicant than it was a generation ago. For a bit of silver lining, I have noticed the "auto-populate from my resume" feature actually works reasonably well on some sites, which was not the case just a couple years ago when I was last looking.
Also, in some orgs you physically cannot send the cv.
I can't send or recieve documents as email attachments anymore to external stakeholders, everything must be via sharepoint link.
That, plus a decade of compulsory anti phishing training means no half competent HR person should be blind opening an attachment that says 'CV'.
I don't know a single person who's got a job by just emailing their CV. In fact, it reads as asinine as the idea that you can get a job by just showing up in person with a good handshake.
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).
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.
They don't pay for it continuously. They post it once as a LinkedIn post or a recruiter does it either in LinkedIn or elsewhere. They either don't pay for it or pay for it once if a recruiter does it
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.
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.
I found the "AI tailoring" on par with the rest of AI - it's completely untrustworthy. It makes shit up on my resume because it's in the job description when I have no experience in it. We've always had this technology, it's called lying. It may be great to get your foot in the door, but once you have to justify it you're gonna have a hard time.
> If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring.
Perhaps true in the most literal sense, but you cannot assume that it's true in the practical sense.
Lots of companies have laid off significant numbers of people, particularly in certain roles. There will always be some turnover that requires hiring at a large company but this does not mean that you should assume there are always open positions for your role.
Submitting to a large company for roles that are in secular decline within that company is mostly a waste of time.
It's also not uncommon for natural turnover to be used as an organic way to downsize, with a role for a person who just left remaining unfilled.
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.
> 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.
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.
Perhaps the armed forces are doing something right, and the tech industry is not.
The armed forces have a service commitment of several years (if I read this correctly, US Army is 8 years). People will sometimes change jobs within months.
They have the time to train someone into a role and typically don't have to worry about going to work for a competitor after they get out of AIT or A school.
People used to spend their entire careers at a single company. Something changed, and it wasn't worker attitude.
One of the biggest changes since then is that there are companies that a different scale of revenue per employee ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28google%2C+meta%29+re... ) and pay accordingly.
While there's nothing wrong with those companies paying such, it drastically changes the incentives for the regular employee. Going to work in Big Tech can be like winning the lottery (in the dot com boom, I had about 6 million on paper... that I didn't sell before the crash).
That there is drastically different industries with correspondingly different levels of compensation has incentivized the person who can change jobs to move from a $60k job to a $120k job to a $250k job to do so.
In the 90s I was making $50k/year ($50k '95 -> $109k '26 https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm ).
The companies where people used to work a decade or two or three are still there and in many cases, largely unchanged.
This is so out of touch
There are companies out there where managers, mechanical engineers, marketing, and all the other non-technology roles work at for a decade or two. It's the software developers and IT people who switch jobs after two years working there.
What's the difference between those job types? It's that software development and IT have a multimodal salary with much greater discrepancy between the companies that fall into the distribution around the lowest mode and the highest mode.
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal
If you switch from working at a local area company to Big Tech, you significantly increase your salary. For other careers, going from the local job to the national big company will likely give a much smaller boost.
Here are the stats for tenure: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf
Table 6 (last page) shows the median tenure by job classification. Computer and mathematical occupations are the ones that were going down between 2014 and 2020. The others were holding fairly constant.
Table 2 shows 21% of people 35 and older have 10 years or more of tenure at their employer. At 45 years old, it's 45%.
I still hold that software development is the outlier for shorter tenure and the largest factor driving that is that you can quit your job and get a new one that pays twice as much.
Do you have an alternate explanation for this data or published data that contradicts this?
What an incredible contribution to the discussion!
> People used to spend their entire careers at a single company. Something changed, and it wasn't worker attitude.
The US-style neoliberal attitude towards decimating the workforce at a drop of a hat for PR purposes does have a chilling effect on any employee's trust.
But don't fool yourself: one of the most important tools anyone has to improve their life and wellbeing is the ability to switch jobs. It can create career opportunities you would otherwise not have, and even unblock career progression by sidestepping your current job's corporate constraints.
> unblock career progression by sidestepping your current job's corporate constraints
no shit I work with multiple people that dipped out of their old gig, did 2 years somewhere else, and came back at a much more senior level to their old job because HR limits how often you can get promoted or increases inside a bracket.
jumping matters, as does the potential threat of jumping.
> Perhaps the armed forces are doing something right, and the tech industry is not.
This shows some ignorance on the history of work relations. The bad old days of industrial guilds and company towns are not renowned for quality of life and independence. Your life was tied to the company, and all you could aspire to do in your life would be to toil in the same low paying job while mixing up your corporate structure with your life's social structure. If god forbid you lost your job, you and your family would lose your whole life.
Tell me how this is doing things right.
For those in the US to understand, see how your access to healthcare is tied to your employer, and the impact this have on your life of you are forced out of your job. Now extrapolate this to every single aspect of your life.
> 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
I got a job by applying to an old listing, for the wrong city.
Small companies may look to fill a certain set of skill-sets, and if that is filled by one person or three doesn't matter much; can puzzle around to make the workload fit what is found. large companies may hire 10 people generically, but may stop at 5 if they don't like the candidates, or hire 16 after a good set of resumes.
Forcing companies to be overly specific in the roles is just making it harder to apply.
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.
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
You pay for job listings so it would be silly to not take them down.
It seems like if you're interested in a role it's ok to apply and be in their system and that much more discoverable.
Being able to reach out and have a chat with the HR manager either way also makes a candidate more human.
Been awhile since I’ve been in the job hunt but doesn’t Indeed at least have an option to display the number of roles open on each posting? Wouldn’t that solve this issue pretty easily?
I was recently job searching and roughly 50% of all jobs ghosted me. Just an automated email and then... silence. And when applying via LinkedIn only ~5% of companies even opened my application.
I can believe that your company has a good reason for keeping the job up, but I also know that some job ads are black holes were no one bothers to do the bare minimum including taking the posting down. I have no idea how to differentiate one from the other.
50% is a pretty damn good response rate! I wouldn't complain about that.
It's not surprising about LinkedIn. They've made applying for jobs too easy so there's too much noise. I wouldn't bother applying for jobs there. LinkedIn is great for recruiters though - just put some effort into your profile, set it to "looking for work", and then reply to interesting recruiter spam. That's how I got my last 3 jobs.
extremely good, my stats have been generally 5-10% response rate for just screenings in the course of over 4 times when i was looking for new roles. each time sent anywhere between 200 - 400 applications. and that's just for calls to get to recruiter or hiring manager
You mean “Open to Work”? If yes, did you turn on the green ring around your profile pic?
Yeah exactly. I don't know what the green ring is so.. no!
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.
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.
That's unusual. Most applicants are sending out dozens or hundreds of applications for a sub-20% response rate.
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.
https://careers.oreillyauto.com/us/en/c/information-technolo...
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)
When I lived in the area about 6 years ago, I had 3rd party recruiters reach out to me about roles that they don't list. The whole region it felt like was 70% contractors (W-2 with the contracting firm), until the company really liked you and bought out your contract and converted you to an actual employee.
Surprisingly I had better benefits at the two contracting firms than what employees were getting.
That is point, these are fake roles.
I dispute this. I have done hiring, and each listing was one-to-one tied to a role inside the CRM and talent trackers.
But to find the actual candidate who fills the role? yeah potentially months.
Entry to mid level was exploding -- 800+ applicants each time -- but for mid-to-high or manager roles we'd get 40 apps and maybe 2 were fits.
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.
The article is a content marketing piece. The goal is to attract attention, not necessarily to be precise or accurate
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.
This is not done everywhere. I've never hired in the US, but worked for companies in Europe and JP, from <100 people companies to FAANG, and all of them opened dedicated listing for every position we had to fill.
We do a hybrid of both. Internally, we have a specific job/position code, and externally we have job descriptions posted.
If we’re hiring 10 senior software engineers, I’ll have 10 position IDs at the start, but we’ll only have one job posting for Senior Software Engineer (assuming there is no difference in the JD).
I can’t imagine going onto a company site that’s hiring 10 Senior SWEs and seeing 10 identical listings. That would make me doubt their competence.
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".
aka the person willing to work for a fraction of their worth.
Nobody is confused. It’s propaganda to justify further immigration to flood the labor market and, these days, additionally to quell fears about AI-related job losses.
That seems like something you could pretty easily solve for by just specifying that it's for multiple hires, or that the post is evergreen.
I don't think anyone reasonable is saying that you can't or shouldn't be able to do that -- just that there should be good faith disclosures.
> 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.
How on earth am I, a potential job seeker, supposed to be able to figure out if your year-old job posting is still up because you: couldn't find anyone after a year, are constantly hiring and never take it down, actually hired your quota six months ago and HR forgot to take the listing down, the job listing isn't for a real job and is just a trap to collect resumes, the listing is for a ghost job to placate the overworked current staff, some other reason?
I mean, in 26 years in the industry I’ve never worked anywhere that kept ads up for jobs that had already been filled. Not even on their own websites where hosting those ads is effectively free (as opposed to LinkedIn et al where you have to pay).
I’m not saying there are no companies that keep non-live job ads up purely for fishing purposes but, in my experience, it’s not the norm. It would really piss jobseekers off and that’s the kind of word that tends to get around and make it harder to hire in future. Maybe not if you’re a FAANG, because so many people want to work for you anyway, but it’s going to cause problems for “normal” companies.
Anecdotes are not data, etc, but several years ago I worked for a mom & pop company that conducted interviews with people for a job that didn't exist 'just to see what was out there', so stuff like that definitely does happen. (That place eventually went out of business for unrelated reasons)
https://www.resumebuilder.com/3-in-10-companies-currently-ha...
2024.
I worked at several FAANG and similar companies for 20 years. We were always hiring from new grad up to principal. Just a handful of generic position descriptions.
I think the more common case is listings that are technically "open" but due to slow internal processes, repositioning, etc etc, no work is being done towards filling them that is visible to candidates.
For example, I've personally witnessed situations where the funding for a role gets postponed to next quarter, but my manager just kept it open anyway, either out of fear of missing out on the perfect candidate if they stopped accepting apps, or because it's simply easier than going through the HR process to re-post it in a month.
Then post a disclaimer that this is a generic position post to gather resumes. Don't publish lies to people that a role is open.
having experienced the UK & US markets - I can tell you within the startup cohort those using lever / Ashby etc - it's not that they have multiple positions - but they're tryna pull an illusion of growth specially in the UK market.
because luckily in the UK market - companies books are open to the public.
Can’t be bothered to update a job ad on your own websites. Can’t be bothered to respond to applicants.
WTF do these people doing hiring actually do?
I mean, naïvely you’d think encouraging more higher quality applicants would be important somehow, but no.
This doesn't make any sense. You try to explain a 28% by arguing based on edge cases.
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).
>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.
I'm not confused that's just a red flag not to work for your company.
Umm...why? Consider the alternate approach. What if I listed 10 Sr Software Eng roles. What would job seekers do? If you said 'apply to all of them', you'd be right. In general, the same recruiter will be responsible for all applications for the same role (e.g. all sr software engineers). There is no benefit to anyone in having the same resume in there 10 times.
If you are, for a year, constantly hiring senior software engineers? That tells me you're just throwing engineers at problems, which is not how problems are solved elegantly. That's sliding into Brook's Law.
As a hiring manager, I approve this message.
That's fair but still indicates shortage, no?
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.
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
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.
because the pie grows, and if you are in a competitive market which most businesses are in, you don't want to lose talent and market prestige to your competitors
> 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’?
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.
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 .
What if your $100,000 worker is actually more than twice as productive as your $50,000 worker?
> if companies hired all the SWEs they wanted they wouldn't still have the listings
I honestly can't tell if this a troll or not, but in case it isn't:
Because "number job openings" are used as a signal of company health, Ghost Jobs are far far more common than job listings which companies intend to hire from!
Is this true? some of the highest aura companies have very limited jobs open to signal exclusivity, or have such a high bar that they are in perpetual shortage
And large cos are always hiring
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.
Exactly, hence why having jobs open indicates a shortage.
Or a lack of demand for workers in that particular region.
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.
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.
It’s a pipeline requisition or feeder requisition. Sometimes companies will close and refresh it. Can’t rely on job listings alone
Yeah my hiring into current job (bank) took 6 months. I even quit the previous job, and date of start kept pushing. Job post was still there.
At one point I flatly threatened to hiring agency I am quitting the process if this goes on further, and all was finished within a week or two.
Corporations work in mysterious (aka chaotic) ways. Even though it usually boils down to specific manager being lazy ass.
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
> We leave it open and collect resumes through that.
This is really shitty behavior. If you aren't hiring, remove the posting.
How is it shitty behaviour. "I are hiring 10 people, we won't remove the job listing until 10 people are hired."
If I apply to a job, I expect you to get back to me within the week. Anything else is just disrespectful to me and wasting my time.
I agree that every applicant should get a response (probably 2, 1 immediately of “hey, got your application” and a second of “not proceeding” or “we’d like to talk”).
I think one thing that job seekers often miss is just how ridiculous the firehouse of low quality applications is. They know they’re competent, but they can’t accurately estimate how many others aren’t and have built up (or borrowed) machinery that lets them apply to hundreds of job postings per day. That level of noise is what causes things to have to be automated on the inbound side as well and where automated scoring tools or gates before talking to an actual human come from.
I still agree you should get a reply, but the first two are overwhelmingly likely to be automated.
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.
Well, no one else is making sense of it (or rather, the real answer is something we can't say), so people will do their own data gatherings and report their findings.
The only issue is that it's never one factor. Rising interest rates, s174, ghost jobs, outsourcing: them and many more factors all add up.
I don't think you've actually done any hiring.
Companies don't need a "software engineer" x100.
Large companies have teams, and every team puts out a different job description based on their particular requirements, stack, desired experience, etc.
I've never encountered a scenario where someone wants engineers in bulk and then they'll decide where to place them within the organization.
Almost every place when I’ve done campus recruiting treats it like bulk hiring of good raw talent. I hated it when I first saw it on the employer side, but it’s pretty practical.
Multiple big tech companies have historically done exactly this. I got hired at a public tech company as an iOS engineer in 2020 and they made an offer, I accepted, and then I got to meet with the managers of several teams and pick the one I wanted to work with. Single job posting.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
If you go through "Show HN" posts you will see multiple projects that partially or completely automate both search and application process. Just set up a bot that searches for newly posted positions matching whatever criteria, customizes the resume, applies. Probably costs a few cents for the applicant, but increases their chances somewhat. And the rest of us deal with the consequences.
Some fraction of applications that don’t really fit are submitted by people trying to keep their unemployment benefits. You have to keep applying to continue to qualify, but the jobs don’t have to be a perfect fit.
Being unemployed is hard and can be really demoralizing. Try thinking “I’m probably helping someone pay rent until they find a job listing that works for them” when you’re rejecting obviously unsuitable applications. It at least makes the “wtf”-ness of some of them seem a little less weird.
> Try thinking “I’m probably helping someone pay rent until they find a job listing that works for them” when you’re rejecting obviously unsuitable applications
I could believe this if you were in a population 5,000 town with few employers and the person applying had to work in person.
In our industry, where there are 1000 different remote job listings available to anyone at any time, there is no justification for this.
> In our industry, where there are 1000 different remote job listings available to anyone at any time, there is no justification for this.
Do you mean that there's no reason to send resumes or to wherever or that there's no reason to be unemployed given the theoretically endless number of postings?
A lot of them are also from hostile foreign powers trying to commit economic sabotage.
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.
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.
Even for non-inside hires, I feel like it's more efficient for me as a hiring manager to go out and look for candidates rather than triage some AI-generated pile of crap.
>via a recruiter
While not as bad as applying yourself, they can be pretty damned awful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps managers starting to do it by themselves rather than having HR in the middle is the answer to the problem.
> 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.
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.
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.
I work in the public sector. There's a requirement (i.e. law) that the job posting is available for the public to read for two weeks. No selection may be made before all applications are received.
After two weeks, the posting is taken down.
> - Submit a basic and honest response for the people who's resumes didn't make the consideration
If you have 200 resumes in the pool and 100 of them weren't passed on for additional consideration because they didn't meet the requirements (education, needing visa sponsorship, outside of the country, not following the instructions for the application), how long will that take?
Furthermore, in the litigious nation we live in, that information when provided honestly has tended to lead to lawsuits ("I wasn't considered because...").
> - A simple human note for the candidates who were considered but didn't make the interview
That's another 100 candidates. Three minutes each to write the email? That's three hours of someone's day. Again, this gets to the litigious situations. It only takes the allegation of bias to lead to a lawsuit - that costs way more than three hours of my day.
This is the public sector, we don't pay a lot - that's why it's only 200 applications. In the private sector it wouldn't be hard to multiply that number by 3 or 4.
> - Timely closer for the interviewed candidates who didn't get the job
This is something that we're good at. The people who were interviewed know by the end of the week. Job posting opening to the selection being made is four weeks.
> That's another 100 candidates. Three minutes each to write the email? That's three hours of someone's day.
Minor nit, but it’s even worse than that: 300 minutes is five hours of someone’s day.
The simple and honest response can be an automated email that says you didn't meet the requirements - you would be amazed at how many job postings don't even do that.
I can understand the justification for all of the other choices. But it doesn't mean I have to like it. The whole process is degrading and dehumanizing, and it's something that has gotten much, much worse in the last decade.
The GP said the quiet part out loud. They are so worried about lawsuits that they'd rather make the job market worse for everyone (including themselves) than risk a lawsuit over the most basic feedback. The product of a low-trust society.
I thought the threat of lawsuits was a lame excuse, so I tried to give good feedback to rejected candidates who asked.
It did not take long for one of them to try to turn it against me with threats. We would have easily won the case, but having a lawsuit hanging over my head and a target on my back as a liability for the company was not a good feeling.
I no longer give specific feedback.
Yeah, that's the product of a low trust society. It's not any single person perpetuating it, but it affects us all. A higher trust society would write it off as a bad outlier and keep going. A low trust society wonders when's the next time you get another person that causes an undue burden.
This isn't really a low trust society, it's a litigious society problem.
These lawsuits aren't a myth, if you hire a lot of people it'll eventually happen, even if you're not violating any laws. The lawsuits, even when you win, waste time and money. Giving reasons, especially customized "human" responses is absolutely going to increase your chances of being sued.
Low trust means assuming any and all reasons given out will result in lawsuits. It's precisely a symptom of a low trust society. A not-low trust (doesn't have to be high trust) society wouldn't assume legitimate feedback would be litigatable, and likewise candidates wouldn't be in such bad situations that they'd need to sue every rejection.
As you said, lawsuits take a lot of time and money. Individuals don't have that and would prefer to settle things privately. But if they don't trust institutions to do that, then the only thing to trust is the contract of a lawyer.
Individuals without jobs have a lot of time since they don't have a job, and can find lawyers willing to work on contingency.
More time than average, less money than average. But these people also need to apply to dozens of jobs, more likely hundreds. They can't sue every place.
That's why feedback is important. If the reason was "we are looking for X experience and X is not on your resume" I can adjust that for later. If it was even as honest as "we found enough qualified candidates to interview and didn't look at your resume", that's still semi-actionable feedback. I either apply earlier or just accept that I was unlucky and it was not my ability.
Generic rejections like "we moved with other candidates" tells me nothing. So noise remains because candidates don't have feedback to improve upon. All because HR wants minimize lawsuits through obscurity.
I’m willing to be communicative and try to be helpful right up to the line where it puts me, my family, or my company at risk of some asymmetrically bad outcome.
Regardless of whether it’s due to a low-trust society, a litigious society, or El Niño, I will refrain from giving specific feedback if that puts those groups at risk.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> So, I recently got about 600 resumes for a senior Python backend position.
Dear lord the job market is an absolute disaster right now.
People are clambering for the last helicopter out of Saigon.
Oh god, I should tell you about the frontend position, then, which got 1000 applicants and then we just closed within a week, despite naturally not having hired anyone yet...
>Dear lord the job market is an absolute disaster right now.
Indeed it is, I don't know and would never like to know the levels of desperation one needs to reach to accept writing Python as a career. (I jest, I jest)
In all seriousness, Python (and the same goes for with Javascript/Typescript) is a popular language that is taught at many bootcamps. I'm sure that has lots to do with the number of applications for these kinds of roles.
That’s a good theory, but we also get ridiculous numbers for C#, design, product management and, at a previous job, Ruby and devops we also got flooded.
Honestly the only language we do that gets a normal amount of candidates is C++, but the team that does it complains about quality too, a lot of CVs from people exaggerating their expertise.
> There are any number of great candidates who could be proficient in Python -
I don't think you understand.
You have to prioritize. You can't interview everyone.
There may be someone in the rejection pool who might be able to pick up Python quickly and enjoy it. It does not matter if I have 10 people who can bring 5 years of Python experience to the first day on the job, and 1-2 more people who can bring 10+ years and probably teach us something about 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)
I've painted houses. I've done programming. This analogy is not good at all. Some people don't adapt well to new programming languages. Some people try, then decide they hate the new language and start looking for new jobs. You don't have to risk any of this when you already have more Python applicants than interview slots.
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.
Several months ago, having exhausted all other options in fruitless job search, I asked for assistance of a recruiter who I used to work with some time ago. Just to get some pointers on how I could improve my search, with his experience working on the other side. His advice on "tailoring" was very simple.
Go to the most popular LLM (ie Claude). Give it the job description. Give it your resume. Ask it for percentage match, it will give you a number. Then ask for advice on improving your resume, you can either ask to rework the resume by itself (if you're in a hurry) or you can work with the thing to modify the sections/entries yourself, one by one, if you have time. With each modification you will get better and better percentage match. Ideally you need to get to high 80% or maybe even 90%.
The idea is that automated ranking tools used by recruiters/HR are ultimately use the very same LLM, so you are improving your ranking assigned to your resume by those ranking systems.
I have to add that now this advice is mostly useless as everybody's using the same technique so you won't be standing up against others but merely be on the same level.
Add to it the fact that many job descriptions are inaccurate and sometimes downright misleading, and hiring managers use their own criteria, and you will understand why connections/referrals is probably the only way to get hired now.
> The idea is that automated ranking tools used by recruiters/HR are ultimately use the very same LLM, so you are improving your ranking assigned to your resume by those ranking systems.
Working in HR-tech, that is definitely happening, and "self-bias" is a thing with LLMs so if you can guess what the employer/screening-process is using then that's a bonus.
That said, we should distinguish between "Hey robot tell me if X matches Y" prompts, versus model-weights comparison. In the second case, the system feeds your resume into a model with no prompt, grabs all the magic math numbers, and statistically compares them to the magic-numbers if the model had been given some "ideal" resumes.
If the job is for a backend Java developer position, change the list of languages you know from:
to: 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.
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.
Hiring a CEO, you know (of) the person and its more likely a "the board wants to hire {that person}" and it really doesn't matter what the text of their resume says. At most there's a dozen candidates and a several month process for selecting one of them.
For developers, if the resumes are largely the same, then you're selecting for the ones that show evidence that they read the job posting and want to work there.
This isn't about hiring the best candidate - it's the least risky candidate that is hired. If you're listing the preferred language of the job and the language that is mentioned in the job posting last, you're more likely to be a risky candidate than one who lists it first. You may not know the language as well. You may not enjoy working on it (there's a reason I don't list php in the languages on my resume).
In a stack with less risky candidates, the one that has the preferred language last won't be at the top of the list for callbacks.
While this makes absolutely no sense to me, I'm pretty sure unhinged language fanatics would reject some resumes because "Java is not the first on the list".
HR people and AIs, as much as I criticise them: would not reject that.
If I have 100 resumes, and 50 of them list Java first, and 50 of them list Java last, which pool of 50 am I most likely to find someone who knows and doesn't hate working in Java?
You're going to select 10 people out of that list of 100 because you don't have time to call everyone for three weeks to evaluate their skill.
You've also got only two hours to look through all 100 of those resumes today. You're spending about a minute and a half looking at each resume. How are you going to evaluate someone for a Java backend position who's last job was in C# and they list Java last in the list of languages they know?
If I were reviewing 100 resumes, I wouldn't use the language list. I'd use something with actual context, like work experience.
But more than that, why do you think someone who is terrible at java wouldn't put it first in the list when applying for a java oriented job? Assuming they were aware of this unwritten rule.
Okay, yeah, now I agree with you.
The last paragraph makes a great point: if the person has been out of Java the game for long, they will definitely be second to someone who's fresh out of a Java job.
And the reason is exactly as you say: limited time, excessive number of CVs. This completely changes the game.
>which pool of 50 am I most likely to find someone who knows and doesn't hate working in Java?
The one who has actual projects or professional experience in Java? I'm surprised this is such a sticking point. I list my skills last on the resume because it's the least relevant and it was mostly to try and satisfy ATS. But reality is stranger than theory, I suppose.
At least, that was my old approach. I found some advice I really liked and ultimately integrate a tech stack sub-bullet in every experience now. Seems to be a good balance of ATS and human(-skimming) readability.
AI wouldn't. It'll crunch the resume in milliseconds and sort it out itself.
HR is a mixed bag, usually without technical context. I'm sure most engineers in the 00's and 10's have some experience of "Java and JavaScript are similar, right?" In a recruiter call.
Plumbing for new construction, plumbing for HVAC retrofit (even boilers and heat pumps might be further split), and emergency plumbing service tech (for leaks, water heater replacements, and blocked sewer lines) all seem different enough to me to make making clear what experience you had relevant in plumbing.
>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.
There's also a high correlation between matching the job description perfectly and the resume being AI generated and/or dishonest. Doubly so if the requirements are overly specific or contain pure nonsense as some do (saw "Must have 5 years experience with Claude Code" recently). You can filter out people who blatantly don't match the job and those who obviously just copied the job description. Never seen much correlation between the quality of resumes in the middle (ok to great) and how well they do in interviews.
Not to mention at many places "requirements" are mere suggestions or a low-effort list of technologies taken from the resume of the person who quit. Everybody has their own filtering rules and hiring managers rarely agree with each other much less the HR people usually doing the first round of filtering. The true requirements come out only at the resume filtering or interview stage.
>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.
The "best candidate" a lot of times doesn't mean the best able to do the job. It often means the ones who 1. makes the hiring manager feel good by being enthusiastic about their (statistically) average job for average pay and 2. minimizes their perceived risk of looking bad for their hiring choice.
>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 you're not a FAANGMULA type place then sure. But also if your job posting lists something like "Python 3.14" or "7+ years Python" I know the hiring manager probably doesn't know the first thing about python. In that case I think it's fair for any decent programmer to lie because they will likely surpass the hiring managers knowledge by studying python a bit before the interview.
> There's also a high correlation between matching the job description perfectly and the resume being AI generated and/or dishonest.
If the resume is dishonest we find out in the phone screens or first interview rounds, and the candidate is tossed.
>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.
Do you really think the best candidates are ones who are bothering to cold apply through hiring portals to begin with? The best interviewers, sure.
For people who are actively searching, 10 minutes for 100 applications is 15 hours of work. Reply rates can be as bad as 1 in 500. In this kind of market you want to get that application rate down to 2-3 minutes. There's no time nor point to tailoring towards dream jobs; oods are you dreams were crushed 200 applications ago.
There's no particular reason your time is more valuable. We're all just trying to survive in these tumultuous times.
> Reply rates can be as bad as 1 in 500.
I've done volunteer resume review and interview coaching in the past.
The only people getting response rates that low either had the most awful resumes you've ever seen, or they were applying for jobs completely out of their league.
Like the 23 year old applying for Staff Software Engineer jobs as the next step up from his junior position (which he was laid off from) with 6 typos in his resume and an e-mail address of ninjadude69@hotmail.com at the top of his resume.
>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.
Resumes are only a 1 page summary (2 if you're really experienced) and this kind of market has you doing hundreds of submissions if you lack connections (or your connections are also job searching). You don't have the time to tailor every application for every role.
A shame because LLMs should really be perfect at this. Most current tools are too obsessed with writing for you (and creating a blander resume) instead of just taking a master CV and drag and dropping the most applicable roles/projects/experiences in.
This kind of stuff wouldn't be happening if we regulated jobs like we regulate banks.
Those regulations aren't perfect, but after working at one it became pretty clear that a lot of these things wouldn't fly if a bank did them.
Falsely advertise a financial offering? Pretty clearly actionable.
Ghost someone after they inquire about one? Deny them for some vague reason? Even just give them an unfavorable rate without specifying as much? None of those things would hold up. You have to send notices of any adverse action you take, not just providing clear communication that you're taking some kind of action against them, but giving a clear and objective reason why.
Call around to everyone someone might have worked for or with for references, without their knowledge or consent? See "clear and objective reason why." Also, if you use a third party to do this there are a whole collection of responsibilities under the Fair Credit Reporting Act -- you have to provide people with copies of the information gathered on request, inform them anytime it's used against them, offer some process for disputing incorrect details... And that threshold is from gathering the data, not from scoring it.
Never mind equity compensation, which is somehow special in terms of financial disclosures -- whether that's relative to the same company later offering the same stock to the public, or just more generally to any kind of investment offer.
None of this is any less unreasonable on the employer side.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
How do hire a recruiter as a candidate?
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.
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.
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.
Sounds super annoying sorry it sucks but who exactly are they defrauding in your view? And what numbers are they gaming?
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.
Also, possibly the government -- depending on where they are and what kinds of tax breaks they could be getting for bringing jobs into the area.
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.
Investors maybe. Makes your company look better than it is.
A free market requires perfect information. Ghost jobs are the opposite of that.
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.
Yeah, common knowledge sadly. Can get even worse, a friend had recently an interview with a, not-so-well-known, but you heard of them company and they didn't do any face to face interview, just AI driven via email, all steps. When he failed a step: they offered him some credits on the platform, literally a funnel via a job post (it's a dev platform).
This is called ghost jobs. More than 90% of posted jobs are like this.
In HN's Who's Hiring it is very close to 100%, so I don't look at that thread anymore.
The solution: use AI robots for jobs.
You are being downvoted but hn is really bad about this. One company posted an advert for their “third engineer” for literally years.
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.
Pretty sure something like this will still get 1000 applicants, nobody will get hired, and a C-Level will blame the hiring manager and HR/recruiter.
The flip side of this is filtering for "US Persons" (non cleared, but citizenship, located in the US) for remote work at the Sr/Staff level. The amount of BS that I get is astounding.
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.
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.
> 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.
Immigration red tape and education verification can add even more time on top of all that.
We are at the moment hiring for a L3 (no fresh graduate but someone with 3-5 years of experience). The role has been open for two months now (it was a backfill). I personally am in charge of the technical screen which is the second interview after the hiring manager. I am already getting a filtered set of candidates after the recruiter and the hiring manager review candidates. Of the 5 that have come my way, I’ve said yes to 1 person and 1 as a yes, pending another technical screen. We are not even wanting an exact match, nor are we expecting cure for cancer. Yes there are a lot of people looking for jobs but you don’t realize how many candidates are just not what their resumes portray. It takes forever to get someone competent in the pipeline and even then, you know nothing about their work ethic. The reason the pipeline is slow is because the candidate pool is flooded with over the top resumes that are not backed by actual talent and once you hire a wrong candidate it is extremely difficult to fire them, even with at will employment contracts.
Any manager will tell you, they’d rather not go through the long hiring process.
> once you hire a wrong candidate it is extremely difficult to fire them, even with at will employment contracts
I live in a country where the probational period is 6 months (Germany), so the law says people can get fired without cause or justification, just give them 2 weeks notice or 2 weeks garden leave.
Even with that, it's a very arduous process to fire people. Even in cases where they repeatedly refused to show up for work, I've seen HR departments asking managers to "try harder". This only makes both the employee and the manager suffer.
The reason for that is simple: HR departments are extremely inefficient machines.
From what I've heard from other fields it seems as though this is somewhat unique to the tech industry. I share your belief that it's ridiculous. Companies somehow got along fine pre-FAANG with a few interview rounds before Google and Amazon convinced everyone that you need to have five rounds, a panel, a take home assessment, and a slate of brain teasers to pick out the true worthy 10x engineer.
Grow some balls, do a couple interviews, and just pick the candidate you like the most. You're hiring for a glorified IT guy, not a NASA astronaut. Companies that stretch out the process to a ridiculous degree need to get over themselves.
EDIT: and to be clear, yes, I've been on both sides of the hiring table
> From what I've heard from other fields it seems as though this is somewhat unique to the tech industry.
At least in (Northen) Europe ghost jobs are a pain on the ass in most industries, even for low-skilled labour. Hiring companies - not the actual companies that need a worker, but an intermediate - try to just amass a database of workers so they can say to their client that we have hundreds of people with these qualifications ready to come to work for you. It’s not even legal, but they still do it.
I think a lot of these problems are created by the companies themselves, and to lesser degree by candidates. Posting ghost jobs, asking for insane qualifications to run a simple website, interview process lasting 3 months… And candidates firehosing the job ads with bs CV’s generated by LLMs does not help. Currently I think you need to know somebody inside the company pretty well to get hired.
The fix would be pretty simple: > Grow some balls, do a couple interviews, and just pick the candidate you like the most.
I did that with one of the faangs. Congrats you passed hiring committee! Oops no open roles!
2 months later recruiter from the same company hit me up. Told them I already passed the interview just give me the job already. Oops no roles, you just have to wait! So why are you reaching out? Couldn’t give me an answer.
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.
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.
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.
In 2019, when I applied to the company I still work for, I went to the interview, waited chit chatting with the manager because the other interviewing manager was 20min late, and when he came in he asked few questions and said “Ok, I don’t think we need to interview anyone else, when can you start?” They find it funny I had a cat and that I asked for way too little money.
Last place I applied to, one screening and two interviews, took several months, and in the end came second even though I was ready to take 700€ paycut. The job was basic AV&network upkeep, felt like I was applying to become an astronaut.
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.
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?
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.
> If they're large and well-known there's really no incentive to change anything.
Well there it is. Suggestions don't matter if there's no one in power who cares. Have them care and suddenly we'd be able to get people hired in 2-4 weeks.
Otherwise it's not rocket science. And you're not hiring rocket scientists. It shouldn't take more than 3 stages to know if a candidate can do the job:recruiter screen, main interview, negotiation meeting. If you need more people in the know, they join on the main day. If they can't, it clearly isn't important enough for their scope of responsibilities (does a skip manager 3 levels up really need to personally meet a candidate?)
A lot of it has to do with how long it takes to find the right candidate. As someone who has been involved in a lot of hiring over the last 20 years, I can say there's been a huge shift within the last couple of years and open reqs get 10-25x the number of applicants, which instead of increasing choice in a positive way has just resulted in the average applicant quality decreasing. That means recruiters and hiring managers spend a LOT more time vetting and also invest in parallel candidates to try to hedge, because so many candidates applying are legitimately unqualified.
It may sound like I'm blaming candidates, and sometimes it might be fair to, but this is also a problem caused by companies not investing in training and hiring junior level employees, which means that people who are unqualified feel forced to apply for more senior roles, as those are the only roles hiring. It's honestly shocking how many candidates I've interviewed in my career who don't even meet the basic bar for the role they've applied for, and are essentially just hoping to get lucky and snag a high-paying tech job even if it ultimately results in them being terminated, they can collect a check for 3-9 months without delivering.
Mass applications, AI cheating, fraudulent representation (e.g. saying you are person X but are actually interviewing on behalf of person X who you are not), lying on resumes and in screeners, and even nation state attacks on hiring (see North Korea trying to farm tech jobs for money to get around sanctions), it's not great on the hiring side either.
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.
It's only expensive because we destroyed our abilities to train workers. It really shouldn't matter in 95%+ of roles if someone isn't a perfect fit. If they have the fundamentals, they should be up to productive speed in 6 months at worst. That's 1000 hours of training. For reference, a semester of classwork for a single course is recommended to take 140 hours (we can make it 200 hours for engineering work). A company really can't get someone with the basics up to speed in 5 college courses?
Well, no. Because we abandoned the idea of fostering talent. We instead insist natural talent exists who will swoop in, be productive in our proprietary systems day one, and outdo all the pathetic engineers who spent years at the company. Almost like we're drafting for a sports team instead of training a workforce.
But at least sports teams spend time making teams feel like teams.
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.
Is that a high paying engineering role at a tech company in the US?
If so, 14 days is unheard of. Tell us more.
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.
You’re not even hearing back from the recruiter for 14 days if the job posting just went up. I mean it takes 1-2 weeks from the day you got told that you’re getting an offer to the day when you sign it.
3 months? Try 6. 7-9 rounds of interviews over a 6 month period. It's insane.
People need to stop subjecting themselves to that. Eventually companies would get the message.
Tell that to the people sending out hundreds of applications before eventually getting hired.
Starvation's a very powerful motivator for most people.
This only works in economies where there are far more well paying jobs then there are people that want to fill them.
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.
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.
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).
7-9 rounds just means 7-9 conversations. Just talking to a recruiter and the manager are 2 rounds. So 5-7 interviews that evaluate competency. You usually get the lower end unless you ended up giving mixed signals.
Sounds like asking a lot from candidates but unfortunately candidates lie a lot and the cost of hiring candidates that don’t match up to the requirements when paying $300k-$500k/year is just too high. Firing people is hard and takes a long time, especially in management roles. My personal guidance to managers is to have rounds match the level and experience required for the job. You can hire an intern with 2 rounds after the hiring manager conversation but a staff IC probably needs 5, directors need 7.
I'm talking about 7-9 rounds for non tech companies, and each round is at least an hour plus interview. These roles aren't even hitting the $200k marker.
It's an effect of "once burned twice shy". Every time there was a "bad" hire they had to change things. People add to the list but no one ever wants to advocate for a lighter process since they might be blamed for it.
It's just cruel
Maybe the cruelty is the point? They are looking for people that will put up with bullshit and suffering?
I'd say it's more incompetence than cruelty. People (edit: I mean companies) have options and don't know how to filter, so they just go nuts in the worst possible way.
Or they don't have options and have to put up with it.
From the candidates point of view, that's definitely the case.
Oh absolutely. And psychopaths enjoying inflicting the torture
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.
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.
I would never date someone with standards low enough to date a person like me. Huge red flag.
What country is it?
China
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.
if its remote initially, closed eye interviews where you just have a discussion might be easiest way. Pretty easy to tell if someone is bullshitting if they can't discuss topics that likely should excite them somewhat, or at the very least topics they've been around for years.
Feel like any test nowadays should INCLUDE ai, but you likely just want insight into how they are getting from A to B. I don't wanna assume what you mean by cheating with AI, could be as simple as answering live questions with cheating software or whatever, which is obviously a huge issue. I wanna respond and say it should be expected for any take home type stuff, and be rolled into the expectations if anything, but that could be way off of what you mean.
both sides of the entire process is just a nightmare now, one side has all this noise to sift through, and the other side is pressured to mass apply because of all the competing noise they can't be seen through. I was listening to something about AI generated responses, and they seemed to have no empathy for the people who gave human responses, but used AI to give them an overview of the company and what it does for the question "why do you want to work at x?", and sorta mocked the person because they can tell they asked for a generic description of what the company does.
There has to be some give and take, initial applications if you are spending hours researching a single company, you are setting yourself up to be absurdly let down if that same company sends you an automated rejection within a day. A reasonable person will only do that so many times, before just giving up and waiting for the other side to be the first mover instead.
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.
Is AI use by current employees considered cheating?
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.
If I’m asking you about previous projects you’ve worked on using X technology, then yes I would consider it cheating to use AI to answer.
So where's the line? And how is that communicated?
Or is this another arbitrary power play to suffer?
The reality is most companies will force you to use AI in various forms likely from day 1, so the hypocrisy is quite stark
The line is where ever it needs to be for the role and the candidate. Hiring is subjective, using AI to tell me about your previous projects is a signal you are sending. For some roles that may be a positive signal for others it may be negative.
But if you can’t talk about your personal experience without AI telling you what to say, then I don’t want to hire you.
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.
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.
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.
Applied to over 1,000 jobs on Linkedin last year. Gave up and started using other websites or channels.
It took about 100 apps/interview last year. These ghost jobs wasted about 6 months of my life.
I'd drop $10k+ on a solution to this problem.
Did you apply directly on LinkedIn?
I've switched to finding companies + jobs on LI, then applying directly on the company's website.
What alternatives are you using?
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.
Sometimes that can happen but it is not common, certainly not a large % of job posts.
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!
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.
The evidence for ghost jobs existing is that a majority of hiring managers openly admit to posting ghost jobs:
https://clarifycapital.com/job-seekers-beware-of-ghost-jobs-...
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12977
I'm still waiting for they evidence they don't exist, which was conspicuously absent from your post despite its length.
Did you read the Clarify Capital article? The definition of “ghost job” does not support the point you’re trying to make. The definition of “ghost job” in that article is so broad it includes pretty much every job post. A job post being open for 30 days does not make it a “ghost job” by any reasonable definition. The Congress publication includes no evidence or conclusion and even notes that the issue of ghost jobs is disputed. Did you just google ghost jobs and copy the first 2 links without reading them?
Even within this HN post there are people claiming that almost 100% of the whoishiring jobs are fake which is demonstrably untrue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49823091
A job posting that's open for over a month without hiring someone is absolutely a ghost job!
I rcently joined a hiring process for a role. I think a majority of the jobs will NOT be filled in 30 days, given how the process and coordination works.
https://www.resumebuilder.com/3-in-10-companies-currently-ha...
2024.
n of 1 and all, but most jobs I've gotten that were worth getting were from personal reference. To the extent that applying through job sites seems like a real waste of time unless I'm really desperate.
And to reflect that, the jobs I've gotten were the ones you'd only accept if you were really desperate.
(Covid Times, man: Covid Times.)
[flagged]
Can you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
If it's "previous employers", it might already be too late. Networking basically comes down to "being confortable about people who you know will vouch for you". Especially helpful if they are in power to hire or you suspect they will be one day.
As the other reply said, it really comes down to "hang out with them outside of work". Not often, just enough that you know more about the person than what's related to the job. Working colleagues already work with you so they can speak to your technical skill.
Outside of work colleague, you gotta meet people. So find soke tech communities locally or some FOSS projects you can contribute to.
In any case, it's a slow process and stuff rarely happens immediately. It's something best to do when you don't need a job.
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.
Really interesting report. I didn’t realize ghost jobs were that common. Gonna take a closer look, thanks!
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?
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.
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.
The simple explanation is incompetence: the ratio of false negatives is too high, so everyone has a story of being rejected from jobs they could perfectly fulfil. The ratio of false positives is also high, so jobs remain open for longer they should.
I recently met the CTO of a unicorn in a social function, and they urged me to apply, he would fast track. I interviewed there before, got an offer but decided to go somewhere else. Even with a face-to-face invitation from the CTO and obviously having passed an interview in the past, they rejected me.
There is no end to incompetence in modern business.
Earlier this summer I applied for a job at a local startup that I had all the qualifications for and quite a bit of relevant experience. I got a rejection email within 48 hours. Eventually I happened to meet with one of the founders through a connection and had a chat, he said how amazing it was that someone local had worked on similar problems in the past. In the end he said that unfortunately they don't have the capacity to expand the team right now.
Their job postings are currently still up on their site and linkedin.
I work with US healthcare postings and our numbers are pretty similar: >400k open/active postings, 30% over 90 days, median 44 days. These are direct-hire only postings from the employers (no job boards / aggregators / staffing agencies).
I don't have a hypothesis for why jobs stay posted for so long, other than that employers are always look for a workers, the roles are generally well-defined, and turnover can be high. I don't think there's anything nefarious within healthcare causing so many postings to stay up for so long. Most healthcare employers are generally desperate for workers. So much so that they pay crazy rates for temporary workers (staffing agencies / travelers). The company I work for helps health systems try to minimize those costs.
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".
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)
Reposts from recruiting agencies or other unrelated companies to resell the candidates or simply farm user details for fraud etc.
So, you’re saying it’s not really a clear signal?
What about companies in which managers hold on to requisitions to defer layoffs?
Or companies that are in a perpetual hiring freeze?
This has been a problem/norm for many jobs for many years now. If you haven't had to deal with it before now, consider yourself lucky.
Warning: the page has been deleted and Im getting a 404. I wonder why? Its on the HN front page and people are still discussing it, but there is no article
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.
I just read this on CNBC:
From https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/23/treasury-yields-oil-inflatio...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?
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
Business doing good doesn't automatically mean populations of humans are doing good themselves.
The article is talking about "The Economy" (read: stocks and bonds), not employment numbers. The market can both be awful for job seekers and great for capital owners.
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.
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.
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.
Meaningless stat. My company keeps our website job listings open indefinitely and it's because we're always hiring. We're just extremely selective.
This stat is meaningless because insert anecdote here.
Every company is selective
What a load of BS, if your churn rate is so high that you always have to hire that's a sign of a terribly toxic workplace.
We don't churn. We are constantly adding more and more developers
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)
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.
Any citations are welcome on this for my source of truth knowledge graph. Thank you in advance.
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
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.
I have to say, as a middle-aged physician in the military, the dynamics of hiring terrify me. I interviewed to get into college, medical school, and residency. At all other times I have been gainfully employed. I hear about people studying for weeks or months for job interviews. What do you do to study?
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
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.
Hey, historically your "employer" would flog you if you tried to change "jobs".
HR was much better at "employee retention" historically.
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?
72% of job postings on company career sites are closed within 90 days. Pretty sweet.
Nobody has a solution for hiring.
We have AGI before we have general purpose hiring.
Its the same across the board for everything, no one has an answer for the noise AI creates. Really cool tech, but the timing is so bad because we just can't even fathom what dealing with the surplus of generated garbage looks like.
The answer is likely moving away from the internet entirely and having actual face to face screening right away. no company wants to commit to that, so its gonna continue to be some weird expectation from both sides where the applicant doesnt wanna be screened with AI, and the hiring team wants X amount of effort put into every initial application.
I think it just must move entirely offline, until some semblance of an answer exists, because right now like i said, we can't even fathom what a solution looks like online.
Don't worry, AGI is going to suck at hiring just as much as meatbags suck now.
You can't solve incentive-incompatibility with technology.
Yeah because they ask for low level kernel 10yoe specialists AI llm inference training phd people lol
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
=3
Why is OP being downvoted to [dead] in every single comment here?
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.
Yeah the homepage toplines are pure vibeslop, they didn't even bother touching their own homepage. Trust is instantly vacated. Next.
These sites are popping up to exploit job seekers because the legit alternatives (linkedin et all) blow.
https://basecareer.co/ is basically the same slop.