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Comment by vanusa | Hacker News Reader

Most job ads - especially in the tech industry - are already basically fake news, aren't they?

I've ditched everything except for Real Talk. I'm not throwing my resume into a form hole, I'm not responding to recruiters. I email someone I would be working with directly until they start the hiring process. This precludes me from working at any large company, in my experience they just beat me around the algorithm and HR bushes for 1 to 6 hours then send me a canned rejection from their no-reply address. It's a complete waste of my time.

Same here, pretty much. It's like their basic strategy has come to be:

"It's all about the funnel! Got to get more people in our hiring funnel! But wait, we don't actualy know how to evaluate them effectively and efficiently (or even how to communicate with them decently). So... let's just get a bunch of people "engaged" and see who washes up at the end. That way, we can at least tell the higher-ups that thanks to our diligent hiring process, we can go online and brag about how we only hire the top 2 percent of incoming candidates."

It isn't limited to tech, but tech has been pretty bad in this area for years. Especially where it concerns recruiters posting fake jobs just to harvest CVs.

The most interesting example I've seen of this lately is a large publicly traded company most people on HN would know. They have dozens of job listing on their career page with no actual open role. If you apply, they route you into other roles. It's a complete bait-and-switch.

fake news is not even the right term for this. It is just con-men.

It's a bummer and wholly unnecessary that such a partisan, politically loaded term as "fake news" wound up in this story. It forces anyone who objects to the usual usage of "fake news" to either swallow their tongue if they want to participate in the conversation, or more likely, opt out.

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