That plum job listing may just be a ghost | Hacker News Reader

That plum job listing may just be a ghost

wsj.com

83 pointserehweb64 comments

I've found that there are two approaches - shotgun and sniper.

Shotgun approach - figure out what software speciality and industry you want (for me, it's Data Engineering in Biotech/anything life sciences), and apply to every single job that you seem fit for. I applied to 20, heard back from 2-3.

Sniper approach - if you find a job that you actually really want, work your network as hard as you can. Find a friend who is connected with the company, ask them to make an introduction. Find random people at the company, LinkedIn message the hiring manager, do anything you can to get an interview. Once you get an interview, you have a chance, but the hard part is getting the interview.

I've used the sniper approach.

Where have you been? We've been trying FOREVER to find a good person for this role. You should have been working here years ago!

"I applied like 6 times. Nobody ever called me back."

Job posting: "If you aren't an exact fit on paper, please apply anyway".

ATS system: "Candidate does not have staff software enginer for 5 years of job titles + doesn't have 'SQL' and 'HTML' listed in their skills section" = /dev/null

Hiring Manager: I can train the skills if the person is right and has a solid foundation

HR recruiter: I don't want to actually have to look through all of these resumes to find "close" matches.

Hiring Manager: Okay, fine, then just forward me all the resumes you get, and I'll look through them!

HR recruiter: No

I do both.

I estimate how long I am willing to go without a job. for the first half of that time, I'm a sniper, applying for dream jobs. If I haven't landed one by the time the second half begins, I start going shotgun.

Interesting, I always start the shotgun well before I expect dream offers to pan out. I feel that I negotiate and interview best when I have a been interviewing and have offers in hand.

While I do concur with you about negotiating and interviewing best, I like to save shotgun for last because often the interview process from all of those companies slows me down a lot. Especially the companies that give you projects to do :/

While it stinks to feel like you've done worse going for jobs that you really care about, it helps to remind yourself that all companies have communication/social problems that will impede your work. No company is really all that special.

I agree. I think it's common for people to start with the shotgun approach to build confidence interviewing then start sniping a few dream roles as they start to get further along with the shotgun companies

I've only ever landed jobs worth having via the sniper strategy. However, with the ease of passively employing the shotgun approach using a good Linkedin profile, it's definitely worth doing that if only to benchmark the job market a bit.

At this point I’m stuck with the machine gun approach: “spray and pray”.

Fishing with nets vs spears, same idea. Both can be useful depending on your circumstances and goals.

There's a third: the net.

Always send a polite response to recruiters (but scripted). Asking for more info about the job, and concrete comp numbers. Serious recruiters won't hesitate to give it out (keep in mind they get a portion of it!). Body shops won't share that info but at this point it's ok to ignore them.

This has been true since at least June of last year, and has obviously accelerated and expanded.

I’m not sure why they think it’s a good idea. I’ve now got a pretty hefty list of companies I won’t work for, will recommend people I know don’t work for, and will recommend against doing business with (as customer or partner) based solely on disrespectful and deceitful practices like this.

I guess that’s irrelevant to most of them, but that’s the world I suppose.

> I’m not sure why they think it’s a good idea.

Historically hiring tech workers is really hard, especially for small companies. Applications trickle in. Good candidates are 10% of the pool at best.

"evergreen" job postings keep a pool of applicants that can quickly be drawn from when headcount is open. If headcount isn't filled quickly, hiring managers may lose the head count, so they are optimizing for fast hiring.

Staff that will burn thousands of combined hours of other people in order to save themselves a day or two are a HUGE RED FLAG! Businesses that think that is perfectly reasonable are toxic AF.

Back when my employer went under in the housing collapse I saw it even then. I estimated that at least 80% of everything I saw was either a repeat of something else or in some other fashion not a real job--and that was only the stuff I could actually determine was bogus.

You should post the list online. Name them and shame them. Otherwise what's the harm to them in doing it forever, to everyone?

Hiring a senior tech job for a niche company in a niche location: employees have 1 month notice, but it takes 12 months find a passable candidate, longer to find a good one.

Can I see the list?!

Great that you can do this.

It's a shame you can't post that list and invite others to add their experiences to it. IMO, transparency is the best way to fight tyrants.

Are you comfortable naming those companies here?

There's another reason for these "ghost jobs" that isn't even mentioned here: bypassing employment regulations against wage dumping.

For H1B (US) and most of EU worker visa, employers have to prove that they had open positions for domestic candidates that they couldn't fill in a reasonable time - so they keep up these postings and reject/frustrate domestic applications for long enough to hire someone from overseas at barely above minimum wage.

On top of that... some companies have burned the bridge so far by exploiting their employees that they legitimately can't find anyone willing to work there any more.

This is also part of the procedure for sponsoring an existing employee for their permanent residency (aka green card). A case must be made that there were no eligible domestic candidates to replace them. Just the fact that this is necessary is absurd to me.

So it's not something that either the company or employee does wilingly

What the company is not doing willingly is raising wages, which is the actual intent of the law.

> What the company is not doing willingly is raising wages, which is the actual intent of the law.

That may be the intent of the law but it is so badly implemented that it takes 1 year to get a DOL certification that the wages are ok, then 3 months to prepare for a job opening and advertisements, 1 month to interview candidates and then file a PERM application with DOL again which takes another 9 months.

These timeframes are ridiculous. The tech industry changes much faster than the above timeframes. So employers are left with no choice but to "game" the system to retain their employees.

Until the US government figures out how to make the immigration process more efficient, there is no stopping the gaming. People don't live so long, companies don't survive so long. Employees don't stay at the company so long. Then, the only option left for these companies is to hire outside the US.

I think the parent comment was making the case that if these companies raised wages, they could hire US permanent residents which wouldn't require these timelines you've mentioned. Making the immigration process less onerous would have the opposite effect.

> I think the parent comment was making the case that if these companies raised wages, they could hire US permanent residents which wouldn't require these timelines you've mentioned. Making the immigration process less onerous would have the opposite effect.

Like I said, the companies are more likely to open offices and hire in other countries than to keep raising wages in America. By arbitrarily preventing the smartest from coming to America, we are encouraging American companies to go elsewhere.

But why don't they just raise wages? Because that's how American capitalism works. One could argue that American capitalism needs to change but by the time that happens, the smart people have built a competing service in another place. See: Tiktok

> Like I said, the companies are more likely to open offices and hire in other countries than to keep raising wages in America. By arbitrarily preventing the smartest from coming to America, we are encouraging American companies to go elsewhere.

I see. I think your previous comment could have been clearer because I don't think you actually said that, and I didn't see anyone else include that avenue as a part of this conversation.

This is a fair point, but I don't see how it ties into incentives to create ghost job postings. (Whereas with the H1B angle, ghost job postings would seemingly allow you to skip the timeframe where you have to say you tried to find someone.)

Anecdote: I have 9 years of solid tech experience and applied to ~20 open roles last month. So far I have only heard back from 1 of those recruiters. Companies that are hiring right now are filling roles primarily through employee referral, so work your network.

Agreed. I'd push "work your network" a few steps further and advise people to shamelessly leverage your network.

If you’ve found a job that interests you or even simply a company that appeals to you, get on LinkedIn and see if you have any connections at all at the company. Regardless of how strong or tenuous the connection, reach out to them and ask them if they have any insight into the position. Even if they know nothing about the role, ask them if they can introduce you to someone that does. The worst that will happen is they will simply ignore you so you’re no worse off than if you hadn’t reached out in the first place.

This was recommended to me too. It's more sniper and less shotgun.

Job boards really obscure the fact that so many jobs, as in so much of life, is who you know.

Value your time as a job applicant as much as you value your time as an employee. Don't make yourself just another row in a database. Be a high priority email thread.

Employee referrals are the real job network.

Additionally, attend meetups, present things you are doing as a beginner, let it strike conversations, and let the ensuing experience about talking about something work like be the feeling you leave each other with. In time you'll find something you can bring up with them, or they can bring up with you. Build your network months or years before you ever need anything from it.

I’ve had a handful of referrals go nowhere in the past few months since a layoff, but the worst by far was one where I talked with the former coworker in January shortly after the role was posted, clicked through his referral link to apply, mentioned him in the cover letter, and then waited…

I checked back with him after a few weeks, with no updates. Finally, I checked in with him again just last week – and learned through him that the role had now been filled, all without the company so much as sending me a rejection email.

In an already-demoralizing job search, it was a real gut punch, and despite 10 years of experience, has me really starting to question whether I still have a future in tech.

This resonates. It's a numbers game right now even with experience and referrals. Right now you need like 12-16 referrals, to get 8 recruiter conversations, to get 6 interviews, to get 1-2 offers (if you interview well). These numbers multiply if you interview poorly.

This is the first time I've ever really studied for interviews since college because the effort required to get the interview opportunity is high enough I don't want to wing it and risk getting rejected over something stupid like whether I can implement a dynamic programming solution.

Sorry to hear your job search has been rough :( the lack of transparency in the interview process is a real problem (i.e getting ghosted by companies) .

I'm working on a product to make the transition from happily employed -> actively looking as easy as possible for candidates by creating a personalized job board of companies interested in you while you aren't looking. Once you are actively looking, I'm trying to address the transparency issues via communication SLAs and automation.

It's in the super early stages, but you can check it out here: https://sharedrecruiting.co/

Let me know if this resonates/what you think!

>In an already-demoralizing job search, it was a real gut punch, and despite 10 years of experience, has me really starting to question whether I still have a future in tech.

Wait till you have about 30 years experience, it gets worse.

On the flip-side to what’s described in this article (companies posting listings for jobs that don’t exist), our company doesn’t hire often and has incessant issues with bots picking up & re-hosting our old job listings from years prior.

We must get 15-20 mails a week in regards to a re-posted listing for a position that hasn’t been open since last spring.

Do you have source of truth for if that job is still active? For example, is the job description still publicly visible from your ATS (Greehouse, Lever, etc)

I asked because I've been thinking about this problem with job boards. Job boards often duplicate job description information rather than relying on the original JD in the company's ATS.

Or worse, go to an interview, they ask you how to fix a specific problem, never hear from them again. Later find out that they had no openings, just wanted the problem solved.

Lmao has this happened to you? If someone’s problem really can be fixed in a 45 minute conversation I’d gladly provide it for a beer. No subterfuge necessary.

Once, shortly after the .com bubble burst, and I only found out a year or so later. The interviewer, rather worse for ware, approached me in a nightclub and told me all about it.

You're hired, I will pay you ~40 beers a week

I ran interviews at my last job. Most candidates struggled with basic algos like: write a function to check if a string is a palindrome.

I can't imagine a candidate being:

A. Someone who can solve engineering problems we can't with no context in under an hour.

B. Someone we don't want to make an offer too.

> A. Someone who can solve engineering problems we can't with no context in under an hour.

Not all employers have dedicated IT teams, behaviour such as this fixes a problem without having to pay for it, while giving false hope to interviewees.

>> write a function to check if a string is a palindrome.

outside of an intern or junior these types of questions are such garbage. Do your teams write a lot of trivial, isolated functions in the day to day?

It's a smoke test, there are a lot of fakers out there. Everyone should be able to write a function to check if a string is a palindrome, regardless of the role not necessarily involving writing trivial isolated functions.

No, but it should be easy.

I agree for questions that are impossible if you didn’t memorize the specific algorithm that solves them.

This question and the others I tried to ask usually have a ton of possible solutions and someone who knows how to code or can at least talk with me about coding can come up with one.

Even worse, I've had two instances in the past few months of going through the entire interview process, being told that they just need to make the final decision or put together an offer, and then having the job disappear. One of those postings is still up...

A cynic's take on this -- having gone through this process with direct reports for whom I was applying for H1B visa's for -- is that it is required for us as a part of the H1B application process.

I had to do this more than once. Post job description, collect resumes, show evidence of job posting, and interviewed candidates.

In that scenario, I doubt they would go all the way to discussing the offer and how they can shape the role for me. Also, I'm in design, which has less of an H1B presence. I think the org just decided at the final moment that they didn't actually want to hire for the role.

I've had that twice in the past few months, too.

I now have 3 companies that tell me that they need to make final decision/put together an offer, waiting to see if that goes better.

Ugh, good luck.

I do currently have a job, so I've decided to just drop out of this game for a bit. It's too frustrating to waste my time.

" One-third of the managers who said they advertised jobs they weren’t trying to fill said they kept the listings up to placate overworked employees."

"placate overworked employees". Thats a funny way of saying "lying to keep exploiting overworked employees". But is the Wall Street Journal, what could we expect?

Here's the summary from the company using this to generate press.

https://clarifycapital.com/job-seekers-beware-of-ghost-jobs-...

Another reason one third of managers claimed - "no reason in particular".

> I first thought of it as an anomaly, and now I see it as a trend

This has been going on for decades. I was complaining about it back in the year 2001. It is not new.

I’ve also read that some companies do this (overprovision job listings and make them difficult / impossible to match) to prove the need for H1B visas, presumably to open the market up to cheaper employees.

Not discussed in the article: The “resume firewall” (resume filtering software) also seems to be a significant hurdle for applicants and likely causes misallocation of hiring resources if it is misconfigured for reasonable applicants. It’s possible that some positions actually exist and might match listings, but no applicants can manage to “press all the right buttons” to get interviewed.

Here's the blog post giving a little more detail about the survey cited in the article:

https://clarifycapital.com/job-seekers-beware-of-ghost-jobs-...

The methodology here is still not clear - how did you source "managers involved in the hiring process", and how did you find 1045 of them over two days - but it provides some information that at least puts the article in a little bit more context. The "one third" of managers saying that they post fake jobs to trick employees was in response to a multi-select question where the next closest reason was literally "no reason in particular".

It could be a honey trap, to identify potential competitors, or it could be used to falsely imply said company is working on something they are not, so as to distract there competition. In either case it's clearly an intelligence operation.

I've scraped job listings for several companies, organizations and governments for years. It's a wealth of information that gives you insights into what a company is doing, what it values and where it may be going.

None of this is new. This was happening to me back in 2018.

At this point I'm no longer willing to deal with job postings because I can't trust anything I see on the internet. I'd rather just put up a "situation wanted" post with a "principals only" warning and see if waiting for people to reach out to me is really that much worse than reaching out to businesses.

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