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Comment by edko | Hacker News Reader

Some companies even do this for job applications. A manager has a person they want for a role but, because of policy, they must publish it on their employment website, and go through the charade of interviewing candidates, wasting everybody's time. In the end, their preferred candidate wins.

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This has happened twice to my dad.

The first time was in 1994 when he applied for an Air Force position in Italy. The role required a max 3 out of 3 score on the DoD Italian proficiency test and some other niche requirements, all of which my dad fulfilled. The Air Force selected my dad for the position since the only other candidate that applied was the person currently holding the position. Then there was a big debacle because the commander over that position actually wanted the extend the guy currently holding the position a few years and decided crafting a niche job spec that seemingly only he could fill was the best way. There was a bunch of back-pedaling and politics and the job position was redacted in order for the commander to keep his guy from being replaced by my dad.

The second time was similar, but at a public university. A super niche job opening for their history department was published on their site that required experience with american military history, and a few other things my dad was uniquely qualified for. He applied, and the job posting was shortly taken down and my dad got a response like "actually we've decided to move a different direction from when we originally posted that job listing. That listing has been removed and we are no longer accepting applications for it". Seemed like another instance where the candidate to-be-hired was pre-determined, but my dad threw a wrench into their plans by applying to a job posting that was only supposed to have 1 candidate (the predetermined hire).

I applied for a job that a friend of mine was up for simply because they couldn't complete the job search until they had enough candidates. I went through the interview process to speed things up for him. Got interviewed by 9 people when we all knew what the outcome was supposed to be.

I spent most of the time talking about how great he was at his job just to move it along faster.

In my experience, this most frequently occurs if the company does business with the government (fed, state, or local). In such cases, the "charade" is required by Federal or State law. I agree its absolutely ridiculous, but large companies can and are in fact frequently audited on these and other hiring practice requirements (such as interview notes, etc.).

At my $BIGCORP, if you want to give somebody a band promotion (meaning, up to the next major band), the job must be posted both internally and externally and you must interview any candidates who appear to meet the requirements. It's a pain in the ass, especially when you clearly have someone in mind. There are always people both internal and external looking at our jobs site because we're a well known Fortune 50; you're bound to get applicants to the higher level roles. It just creates extra work and wastes the time of all involved...but alas, regulation.

eta: could also be a requirement of publicly traded companies, though I'm far less sure on this.

It's not so much an actual regulation, as it is good practice that once you get large enough (ie attractive enough to sue), HR will implement actions to "affirmatively demonstrate" that they are fair in their hiring practices.

Typically, I assume most fuckery is built into a business charter and becomes so ingrained, most employees have no idea why they're jumping through the hoops

Green card job postings do this because it is a requirement to advertise the opening. So you tailor the job description specifically for the person you already employ on a immigrant visa.

You're probably referring to job postings used to justify H-1B (and similar) visa applications. Such visas are only supposed to be approved if the employer shows that no US person can do the job.

There's not really any green card job postings. But getting an H-1B can be the first step toward obtaining a green card (permanent residency) for some immigrants.

Nope. Green card requires PERM which I think is a bit more extensive than the H1B process.

> tailor the job description

And still don't hire anybody who shows up who actually has those qualifications.

Honestly if the job ad surfaces someone who can do the job and doesn't need all that immigration rigamarole I'll take them in a flash. I'll save a ton just in lawyers and time lost.

And isn't that how it's supposed to work: hire local in preference to bringing in someone from outside? I'm an immigrant myself and I still think that's a good idea.

We had this in Australia a few years back. TCS employed a whole call centre to advertise jobs and interview many people for them so they could bring in their own overseas contractors because they could not fill the positions with local developers as they lacked the skills required. All of them.

> Some companies

I'm genuinely asking - are there companies that don't do this? I guess excluding companies with something like <20 people.

Of course there are. If all companies only publish job openings as a charade and know who they want to hire why go through the charade?

You don't necessarily know who you want to hire when you have a position. The question is if you already know who you want to hire, do you always go through the charade?

And the answer is "almost never, unless there are formal requirements for the appearance of a hiring process, which companies will tend not to put in place unless legal/contractual/csr obligations around hiring force them into doing or they really don't trust middle managers' ability to promote". Even a charade of a hiring process costs time and money (and much more so than an RFP process)

Even organisations like universities that have formal requirements to advertise [certain positions] externally will stick to doing the minimum allowable (which might be a poorly written and overly demanding job spec put up on the org's own careers page for the shortest allowable time and any responses binned) if they've actually already made the decision.

Of course there's also a tendency of people to confuse the charade with the more common case of a position being genuinely open and contested and an internal or existing relationship candidate applying (and sometimes but definitely not always being favoured), especially if they just missed out on a job after thinking their final interview went well...

In my experience it's the opposite. I personally know this has happened for probably over 100 positions, and that's not based on rumors but something I witnessed. And I saw that across a half dozen organizations ranging from 100-10,000 employees.

So "almost never" is almost certainly wrong. My sample size is small, but it's big enough that when it happens 100% of the time it suggests it's the norm.

Your assumption that organizations are efficient might be wrong. I'm basing my judgment on observation and you're basing it on theory.

You personally know of over 100 cases where the company didn't have any sort of formal policy obliging it to advertise jobs, but went through a full fake hiring process with multiple candidates it was committed to not hiring just for the fun of it?!

(Your assumption that my understanding of hiring processes is based wholly on theory might be wrong)

By adding that clause to your statement, you're essentially nullifying your argument. "It almost never happens, except when it always happens." So I ignored the latter half because otherwise your statement seems pretty useless. Because then we're ignoring most of the data because...well just because, I guess.

Sure, if we discount all the times it happens by default, maybe your argument makes sense. But that's like saying let's ignore the majority and only focus on the exceptions and extrapolate to make conclusions about the majority.

You're answering a question that nobody asked. And I'm the person that asked the question.

Every sufficiently large company will have some job postings which are charades, but that doesn't mean that every job posting from a sufficiently large company is a charade.

Getting an H1B worker visa requires the hiring company to advertise the open position and assert that no other candidate met the required qualifications.

Either the company performs a real search with intent to hire, or they are violating the law in a way they think they won't be caught.

The H1 visa thing is one, although usually those jobs get posted in obscure places and are purposefully written very poorly.

Another is if you want to justify using a contractor. Sometimes you have to show problems attracting good candidates before you can go that route.

I don't know if it's universal at large companies, but your cut-off is at least an order of magnitude to small.

We have done it at every company I've ever worked for, but not for all positions. Probably less than half on average. But it is somewhat common to find that someone we know and like has become available and we open a position to offer it to them. But HR makes us post it anyway, pro forma.

Yes. In fact, it's probably safe to assume it's happening unless the position being advertised is entry-level or has multiple openings for the same job description.

I interviewed at a bank shortly after I graduated college. We had to do an exam as part of the interview process and for that a few candidates were at the office at the same time. I learned that one of the candidates worked there previously and was known to the hiring team. Immediately I knew I wasn't getting that job!

This practice is fairly rampant at universities. It's just a way they game the rules they're forced to operate under.

I don't think it's an exclusively bad practice, especially at larger organizations where cliques and silos are deeply entrenched. It can be hard to retain good people when every opportunity is spoken for by the director's buddy and there's no path to move up.

I'm not arguing an absolute, there should be a way for leaders to hand pick the clear favorite when they're qualified, but I don't know if that should be the default policy.

Someone I know didn't get a job written for them because someone with staggeringly high qualifications applied. It's rare but it happens.

This is needed for H1-B and PERM.

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