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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I started and abandoned a little side project a while ago where I wanted to see which employers tended to have the exact same (or fuzzy-the-same) "Who's Hiring" post month after month. Goal would be to find some signal about which posts were actually resulting in hiring (in other words, the company didn't come back with the same posting) and which ones were just trawling for the same job month after month without actually hiring anyone. Was going to call it "Who's Not Hiring?"

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I know some of the recruiters at my employer, various teams have started testing and hiring multiple vacancies off of a single job ad which is kept open for longer. To an external person it's odd because the assumption is one ad = one vacancy, but company policies and processing speed makes them try odd things to be able to hire what they need.

So while your idea is nice it wouldn't work because not every company lhas the same recruitment process, frontend or backend (visible to the candidate vs workable for the recruitment teams)

Companies posting every month could just as easily be continuously growing (or, I suppose, have consistent attrition problems). Most of the places I've worked at have had a perpetually-open listings for SWEs, despite regularly hiring them.

Yeah. I know the ~same text as the post that became my current job kept getting posted many months after I was hired.

You know I've wondered that about companies that post hiring announcement here constantly, in particular Tesorio ( https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=tesorio.com ) which as far as I can tell post every time the rate limit permits them to do so. After 7 years are they a healthy successful company or is it just endless spam?

Their last funding round was a Series A nearly 3 years ago.

In my experience, long-standing unexplained openings in small companies, including early stage startups, are signal that something is wrong.

I did see this in one example in the “who’s hiring” thread here, but also in following the newsletter for a startup I applied to.

Two reasons I saw in my last job hunt:

1. The company is lowballing wages.

2. The hiring manager for the position does not want to hire or is not aligned with the startup team‘s decision that they should hire for the role.

You can get good at qualifying for these scenarios early, but if you don’t have experience looking for and actively screening these out, a list of repeat posts might save some people time.

At least it might add weight to a possible dismissal.

or they could be growing so fast they keep hiring more SWEs

We tend to hire multiple developers in bursts, and recycle our text between months. We only remove the role-specific blurb if we hit capacity for that role.

So, not sure this methodology identify quite what you're looking for.

The US Digital Service posts in pretty much every hiring thread, because many folks who work for USDS are on a temporary “tour” that only lasts a year or two.

I’m sure there are other reasons companies would post each month: churn, or always on the lookout for strong talent, etc.

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