Ghost Jobs – it's not your fault that you are not getting hired in 2024 [video]
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But it's a trick to keep people from leaving and to be able to continue to overwork their employees and squeeze out a bit more before burnout.
They hired someone, I handled the technical interview, I trained him, and then they suggested maybe I should find a new job.
Why on earth would you do this in a companywide meeting?
Throughout this period they kept promising they were trying to hire but I hadn't seen a single resume or interview.
Most jobs, I'd just bounce and leave 'em hanging at that point. But, I actually liked most of the people I worked with, they just had a terrible CEO that had a bad habit of seeing devs strictly as cost centers. I wanted them to fix it, and this was an appropriate move for that company and the company's culture.
Thanks for your judgement though, wish you'd been there to tell me how to be better.
It's not a social club, there's a requirement for devs to do work. Sometimes this work is boring or drudgery and as people we might say we don't want to do this and rather go sit in the sun and chill.
But the social contract is to either submit to both the interesting and unpleasant aspects of the work or go and be some free spirit elsewhere.
> Throughout this period they kept promising they were trying to hire but I hadn't seen a single resume or interview.
So, they were clearly lying. Pointing this out publicly like you did probably feels good for the ego and your principles BUT as you experienced, it's not a wise move if you want to actually stay at that company. Nobody likes to be pointed out in public, and unless you are in a position of power, you will be in the receiving end afterwards.
In any case from what you say that company wasn't a good place to be for you, so I hope you found another place.
I left for family reasons, but it remains the best place I’ve worked. Its product was leading the field because they actually had open discussions about things and built what people cared about.
It seems like the ruse would depend on there being interviews for the role, but interviews are so expensive and disruptive that I don't see someone scheduling them if they're not going to hire
More likely ghost jobs. I think that they aren't planning to fill unless a highly qualified candidate comes along that happens to be desperate and willing to accept a low offer. When that happens, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they hire them to replace someone who is earning significantly more. Potential for big cost savings at the expense of intangible accumulated institutional knowledge and team cohesion/morale.
I would guess this practice is pretty rare. There can be stale postings e.g. when a large company pauses hiring but nothing along the lines of what parent is describing.
HR said they didn't accept the offer and went elsewhere. What they didn't know is that the person LinkedIn messaged me saying they enjoyed the team, and were disappointed we passed, respectfully asking what I would recommend to work on for their interviewing.
Opinions on whether to reach out after a rejection aside, it highlighted what I already suspected; the job was never going to be filled, and even as the team lead they were lying to me and the team.
When there was yet another round of layoffs months later, the spot remained, unsurprisingly, unfilled.
Were you guys actively trying to fill the role (screen dozens of candidates, several went through final rounds, etc), or was this just some passive thing where recruiting tried to push someone who looked great?
That was 3 months ago (and 3 months into the position posting), and the position is still unfilled.
That's the mystery for me, why put the team through a charade that actively harms their productivity?
The only thing I can think of is the candidate disclosed something that would be a legal red flag and can't really divulge that is an issue without threat of a lawsuit. Or something came up in a background check, but I imagine it didn't get to that point if the candidate reached out to you directly.
- We'll hire more people, it's just so hard to find candidates! - We're doing bonuses right after evaluations, but we're doing a new evaluation system that's taking a bit longer than we expected this year - We're just finalizing talking to a customer we'll have them signed next month, we swear
That delays people looking, delays that large investment, and you can extract engineering time with little investment.
If you ran a company that couldn't afford another engineer for a team that desperately needed another engineer, are you going to paint the bleak picture for your team and risk losing those engineers that you have, or lie? If you have morals and say you'd be upfront, great; but that's unfortunately not a universal answer.
Harming productivity only matters for hourly staff (in the minds of bad executives leaders). Salaried folks have to finish the with no matter how long it takes, and it doesn't cost the company more.
This was an unequivocal HR lied and kept the mirage of "help is coming don't worry!".
Yes there's overhead of us spending time doing the interviewing, but a few hours here and there once a month is enough to keep the charade going. The applications site would go first to HR, then they'd put resumes in front of me. I always wondered why I couldn't just see everyone that applied and why it had to be filtered first; after this event I understood why. I suspect there was plenty more applicants than I was told of.
If your interviewing notes were simply a, "would recommend to hire" they'll pass.
I've also seen my company open applications for a job that is almost definitely going to be an internal promotion rather than a new hire, but for the sake of "fairness" they interview a handful of other people.
Hiring is expensive. It takes a lot of time and energy to do interviews and screens and stuff like that, and usually some higher ups are involved in the process, so wasting their time is probably worse than just not posting the job if you're not going to hire.
Probably Hanlon's Razor applies: «Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.»
In other words, it's a mixture of laziness, some need for employees but not following through, rigid software for job applications, corporate politics and plain stupidity.
I imagine one example how it might happen more or less like this:
- A product owner sees that their team is overworked
- They ask for a job opening or just enter the job description in the software
- They get shot down by someone higher up or they are replaced or fired themselves
- The process starts anyway and nobody is responsible for incoming applications
I don't buy the reasoning/justification.
The HR folks I worked with threw out fake job adverts to gauge the quality of applicants, salary expectations, and ability/speed to fine new hires. Essentially lets you create a few action plans if Jimmy in Accounting gets a better gig, or gets fired for sexually harassing people. Also generates plans / forecasting for layoffs, or windfalls that demand many new bodies.
Does the guy at any point provides any kind of substantial proof that companies are actually doing that ? I'm curious what it could be.
But maybe it's because my gig has a hard time _actually finding people to hire_ ...
lots of ppl have a hard time finding a gainful employment; seems there is something wrong with expectations (probably on both sides)
They tell me I "don't have enough experience with debian" and offer me to apply for the HPC job. I go and list them all the experience I have with every bullet point of the job offer, and mention that I've been using debian for 20 years and ask what specific skillset they are looking for. No answer except "all we can do is start the process for the HPC job".
I ended up finding something else where I'm not particularly interested, have no prior experience, but I'm paid way more than my previous job and they seem to love my work despite it being very slow and frustrating. So I'm just going to stick to that, and give up on the idea of finding "the dream job". More recently I found an offer where they told me they have a "multiple month hiring process" and I stopped answering to emails, pretty sure it's fake as well.
It’s pay, on both sides. Maybe remote working too.
People work for money, fake company “benefits” are a scam and people have caught up.
You're not _always_ looking to fill a position where good junior people can fit - that reduces the pool of acceptable applicants.
(In theory, the market dynamics are supposed to eventually match expected skills vs desired benefits.
I hope I'll soon get my passport to go live in theory.)
Real shame there's nothing to replace it, there's huge arbitrage in the market of good people who don't know people. If I were starting out now I don't know what I would do, how do you even meet people.
I got my first job through Triplebyte actually. I think I would have gotten one without it since I was getting interviews and getting better at them. Even though I had passed the Triplebyte tech screen I got very few company "matches" or opportunities through them, but one ended up working out for me to get my foot in the door.
The first 5 years at my current job (7 years total), my team had *one* person join and leave. The past 2 years, we've had 3. No change in team leaders, style, nothing. In one case, they were just straight not doing anything. Like legitimately just not online for a whole week, except to pop into the daily standup on Friday, with their camera off and muted.
They were given a task to complete as basically a "complete this or you're out" ultimatum, and they came to me to help them with doing it because they were totally lost. I tried to give them advice, but when they saw I wasn't going to do it for them they just went AWOL, and quit the next week.
I'm lazy AF, and that shit was *wild*.
When employers actually need labor they hire who comes along and train them to fit the needed roles while managing attrition.
But what I'm seeing is all about arbitrage. When an employer prefers to leave positions unfilled without facing the costs of constructing skilled labor, they're just scalping.
Employees are expected to self fund training in branded products to be "competitive".
"Growth" / "innovation" become PR terms for automated scalp removal.
What's weird is that internally at fat corps they don't know what to do with the skilled staff they have.
For example Intel has a perpetual purgatory they literally call "the pool" where they send skilled staff to tread water before being laid off. They've had the pool for 35 years but have no internal equivalent of LinkedIn. They don't even bother to curate the staff they already have while endlessly seeking greenwood. The training is more than half outsourced to the community while the firm enjoys humongous tax breaks because it's "employer of choice". But weirder still, they'll help arrange for a PhD then dump the staff member a few years later.
It's this incredible selfishness to process absent of purpose that leads to a community corroding pathos which explains why the Bay Area is one of the most stratified and regressive regions in the world. It produces churn where the only feature of the landscape that represents stability is in "Defense" contracts and a culture that produces policy like this:
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2008/R...
I also suspect that the state of affairs at Intel that you described is largely due to incompetence as opposed to selfishness.
If you've never seen it yourself, it's only that it hasn't occurred to you -yet-.
It's in the news every day with reports like Tesla lays off thousands to cut costs while board gives CEO $50 billion payout.
I do not see this as explainable through any idea of incompetence. It's about some wiley edge of control over profits.
It's not contradictory that firms depend on skilled labor but are incapable of producing the conditions for constructing the needed labor force. Business has a long track record of enslaving labor and prefers to wreck labor as a force. Even at business's very best, it's widely understood that business / community partnerships are required to meet needs, where the community funds the training from which business cherry picks "talent" and while negotiating tax breaks that get passed on to investors executives.
This can't be explained as incompetence, it's explained through organized contention between specific vested corporate interests and the broader community who bears the costs of cultivating the labor force.
It's a story of business competency that led to Michael Moore to write about his stories about Flint Michigan, which became emblematic of US corporate culture.
Within corporate enclaves you can always find a small population who have never endured the ongoing existential crisis which is business churn: People for whom the crisis of labor hasn't occurred... yet.
For the special few who get to the grave in business having never seen any pathos... Is this good luck or a curse? There's no shortage of evidence!
Look around your community and the commons, do you see decay? Is it explainable through "competence" or "incompetence?"
It seems some other language is needed to explain what we see.
Also, I admit I was specifically looking at tech with my statement about not having seen it, given the platform and your comment about Intel. I think there are many, many, many truly great places to work in tech where there is not this petty short-sightedness.
However, zooming back out, my opinion in general is that scenarios like the one you described at Intel is pure incompetence. Much corporate decay and malfeasance is due to incompetence.
- Position withdrawn midway through interviews
- Position withdrawn after final interview
- Rejected on a minor skill component when employer has re-advertised this and several similar/associated positions repeatedly each week since
- Repeated requests for 'one more interview' (did one, they decided they didn't need another) . Got 'verbal confirmation they want to take you' and told that 'everyone in the company at every level says they want to go ahead' but mysteriously they somehow haven't been able to commit that to writing.
Matches ChatGPT summary of transcript for this video:
To recognize signs of fake job postings, the presenter advises looking out for certain red flags, such as:
- *Vague Job Descriptions*: If the job description lacks detail or is unclear about the responsibilities and requirements, it might be a ghost job.
- *Repeated Postings*: If you notice the same job posting recurring over several months or even years without apparent updates, it could indicate that the role is not intended to be filled.
- *No Response or Ghosting*: If you apply and even proceed through several rounds of interviews, only to be ghosted or told the position is no longer available, this could be a sign of a fake posting.
- *Prolonged Hiring Process*: Companies that keep stringing along candidates without clear timelines for hiring or giving vague excuses might be using ghost job tactics.
The presenter advises job seekers to be cautious and not take rejection personally, as these practices are often due to the company's strategies, not because of the candidate's qualifications. Ultimately, these signs help job seekers avoid companies that might be toxic or engage in unethical practices.
it's a way of life, but not everybody can do it
Doesn't seem to be enough jobs and too much people needing one.
Every company I’ve worked for in the past several jobs has had me interviewing candidates directly. I’m part of the decision making on whether the candidate is hired, or which candidate from a panel is hired.
That doesn't mean you (or other employee interviewers) are seeing all the candidates. There are almost certainly a lot that are getting screened out before they reach that stage.
This is about whether positions are being created without ever planning to fill them.
I think it’s perfectly fine to screen out candidates and not interview them. And while ideally they’d still get a response, I can see how volume can make it hard to receive a handcrafted personal response.
But again, this is about companies creating positions strictly to improve the morale of the employees still around.
Right. And what I mean is that, if your hiring department is posting job "openings" which they don't intend to fill, they probably aren't allowing any of the applicants to advance to an interview.
A big part of it is recruiters just trying to build their CV database for the future.
Another big part is recruiters and companies doing market research to see what skills are out there and compensation levels to make sure their employee compensation and candidate offers are in line with market.
The final part is companies fulfilling the regulatory requirement to be able to say "we tried to find Americans and couldn't" before bringing on the H-1B's they always planned to bring on from the start.
Head hunters have started doing it as well.
I know at the previous company I worked at you couldn't get promoted unless if you were partaking in interviews, so I feel that might be a potential reason.