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Comment by dentemple | Hacker News Reader

As a current job seeker, this certainly _feels_ right. But how true is it in actuality? Is anyone able to confirm or deny this practice (at least anecdotally) for companies they've been at?

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I can confirm that some companies leave job postings up to seem like they're thriving for optics, and/or to pacify overworked undermanned teams for a bit longer.

I have had HR tell me that a candidate everyone loved interviewing for us took another offer; except that candidate messaged me on linked in thanking me for the time spent interviewing them, and thst they were disappointed we passed and what could they have done better?

While I'm not a fan of reaching out to the interviewer like that, it definitely confirmed what I thought about that company; we were never going to replace the people we lost, and all those promises to hire more was never going to materialize.

Unsurprisingly layoffs eventually wiped out most teams, and no, we never did hire the three missing positions. But we definitely had ads out for it.

The company knows they had no money to hire. Butthe managers keep saying they are short-staffed. so they let the managers do the song and dance, only to pull the rug from underneath them when it came time to actuallly commit

I've known some corporate recruiters personally and I thought I'd heard most of the hiring horror stories. I have _never_ heard of this, and now I'm wondering how prevalent it is.

Well, this is second hand (thankfully my company doesn't do it) but I know through friends and colleagues at other companies some places definitely are doing something like it.

I've heard of it in 3 flavors:

The first flavor are businesses do it so their customers/clients/investors don't get nervous - it shows they're on a growth trajectory! They have no intention of ever hiring people for these roles.

The second flavor is similar to the first, but HR/internal recruiters are trying to build out a network of candidates they can cold-call at a later date when/if roles open up again (either because of turn-over or budget).

The third flavor is what I'd call "whale hunting". Basically, they're only interested in very specific candidates that perfectly fit criteria and blow the interviewer away.

I can definitely attest that "open position" is a much more abstract concept in the tech/software industry than people think. It is rare for a company to have a slot on a specific team that they have to fill immediately. Hiring is instead more about finding generally smart people and holding on to them. So companies can afford to take as little or as much time as they want in hiring and also can hire 0 - N people for a single open position.

That's not been true in my experience. Engineering figures out how many people they want, finance tells them how many they'll get, and that number of people gets hired. But maybe it's true at really small early-stage companies.

Yes but that's the number they will hire department-wide over the full year vs for one position in the next two weeks.

On the other end, that's also extremely true at large companies. My last job, all hiring was functionally locked in at the fiscal year rollover. There was no emergent need so large that the budget could allow you to hire anyone new until the next year. Didn't matter if the entire team was about to quit (and then nearly did) because of understaffing. Budget was budget.

I’ve worked at a few companies that also are just super slow about removing job listings that get filled. There is not much incentive to drop it, and lots of different incentives of leaving it up.

Yeah this is my experience - or even: we definitely need to hire for position x (go through all the approvals etc., post a job) then something changes and maybe we don’t need to hire the person ASAP, but maybe in ~ 6 months, and it ends up easier to leave the posting up and see what comes in with a tighter aperture (since this is now went from high to low priority) - there is actually an open rec but it’s like a 1% chance of getting hired today vs maybe a 5% chance in a few months…

> As a current job seeker, this certainly _feels_ right.

This is why I don't invest a lot of time in any specific job until I get high engagement (IE, face-to-face interviews) with people who I will be working with.

I flat-out refuse to do long take-homes without good engagement on the company's end.

Im also looking for a job and this does seem very much the case, and I have some hints based on the ways they answer, the exact timeframe between companies with nothing in common and how often they update their listing amongst other things.

I’m thinking of writing a blog post about my experience in the past half a year of searching because it is insane what the market has become.

With AI it's only going to get worse. Fake companies with fake interviewers to get samples of your voice so they can fake you as a remote employee somewhere. I feel job boards and social media and the like aren't ready for the onslaught of fakes coming like a tsunami from scammers. I could be wrong. I'm wary of even talking on the phone anymore to numbers I don't know.

This is next level nefarious, but an entirely believable prediction of what’s to come in this area. Voiceprint theft will become a huge problem beyond just job seeking, and this line of thinking has given me a whole new list of reasons to never pick up the phone (or start disguising my voice).

Can't speak for how things are operated now that Broadcom has taken over, but when I was at VMware (departed in 2020), it was an open secret that there were job roles posted to fish for 'good candidates' that there was no immediate intention of hiring for unless a particularly valuable candidate showed up in the pipeline.

it's long been common knowledge that companies will keep active listings hoping to catch a unicorn employee, but generally not actually hiring reasonably good candidates. It's also a form of status/competition "we're hiring" says you're successful and growing to VCs, potential customers, employees who might be laid off next week etc.

I've seen it over and over and now you also see scraped postings for jobs from 2005, this economy is a total nightmare if you are not in the 1%.

The place I used to work at only a few years ago rarely had an updated careers page, it took an act of congress to get something added/removed it was almost always wrong (jobs that didn't exist, that were filled, and openings that weren't listed)

Just looked and my current employer has an opening on the careers page that I know for a fact we're not hiring for at the moment.

The year is sometimes part of the job code. There are positions listed that are multiple years old. I work for a company with such positions listed on their website.

When they do want to hire someone, another role gets created, so I suspect no one looks at the resumes submitted, except for statistics perhaps.

on tech forums like cscareers its common for job seekers to post data visualizations of their search and compare them to their prior search

the changing practices whether there were more ghosts or rejections doesn't tell you why

so that is the limitation, as we cant fit data to match a conclusion, we have to just react to data

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