Tell HN: BuildZoom posts jobs on HN, but no actual openings available | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: BuildZoom posts jobs on HN, but no actual openings available

89 pointslightwin26 comments

I see a HN job post from BuildZoom a couple of hours ago. If you click on the link, you will be taken to a job board which says no jobs are available.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40874189

Just wondering why a company posts a job on HN without having actual openings.

Is it some automated system to post jobs, or are companies using job posts as a marketing tactic?

View on HN

I've been seeing job posts for them coming up at the top of HN and I always wondered what was going on. Roles often repeating, like Principal Engineer, posted for years now, look:

https://imgur.com/a/lz7FP0x https://imgur.com/TgKbcI4

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Not just them. Aha! is also notorious for this. Even recent startups like Jam.dev do this.

Unfortunately a lot of companies use Who's Hiring as a way of keeping mind share / advertising. But they are not doing well so they can't actually hire you.

> Even recent startups like Jam.dev do this.

I was just hired at Jam through the HN post a couple of months ago, so it’s definitely not fake.

I have reports from the last 3 months about this. So maybe you were before that.

This is false. I am one of the co-founders of Jam. We hired 3 engineers who applied to us because they saw our post here. We don’t post here for advertising.

I have multiple reports from people who applied and didn't hear back. Can you share some data of how many applications you received and responded to?

We receive a lot of applications. But most people don’t qualify because we are looking for a specific skill set. Very few people make it to the initial phone screen and then a subset of them end up in the following rounds. I just looked at our typeform and found that we received 54 (72 the month before)submissions during the week when we posted on HN. (As they don’t specify how they found out about us in the Typeform, I am making an assumption here that 100% of the people who applied during that week was from HN).

The concern was about how many you responded to.

So the ones who do not match the narrow skill set you are looking for do not get any response if I understand correctly?

Would that number be 90%?

Also 54 is not a lot. Consider responding to all candidates at your scale which is still very tiny.

Github gets a much larger number of applications (1000s) and they still respond with a lot more details about why they reject people.

I work with a lot of mentorship and coaching of young tech folks and this can drastically improve how people think of you.

>the ones who do not match the narrow skill set you are looking for do not get any response if I understand correctly?

That's been sadly common even before the "seller's" market took a nosedive. It's to the point where I don't consider it "ghosting" despite understanding others who call it that. I just feel you need to exist before you can "ghost", and many jobs may as well not exist.

But hearing a 90% rate from a pool of 60 applicants is still a bit depressing.

(Not related to the company) Isn't it pretty normal to never hear back unless they want to schedule an interview?

Especially after the last two years with hundreds of thousands of laid off devs, companies are probably flooded with applications.

It's nice when they have a form letter, even nicer when a real person takes the time to reject you, but I wouldn't expect either as a matter of course.

Yes, sorry - the job ad system on HN has needed some work for years now. I'll see what I can do.

Is the company still paying for these ads? Or have they just not expired yet from their last payment?

I thought job ads were a perk of being a YC company?

Correct.

Those posts aren't paid - they're free for YC startups. This is one of the ways that HN gives back to YC in exchange for funding it. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

Some of the companies that post on “who's hiring” are not actually hiring too. I think they're using these fake openings to signal something to their competitors or investors.

I imagine if someone over qualified came along they could underpay, they would probably hire them. That’s what I assume a lot of job listings are.

There's also a company called MixRank that continuously posts the same openings but apparently never hires anyone.

We've been hiring non-stop for years. It's a lot of work to review resumes and interview candidates, I can't imagine why we'd keep it up if we weren't making good hires.

I'll admit that we are selective. Our positions are in high demand, I think partly due to macro reasons, and I think partly because we make an effort to offer entry-level positions with training.

I'm sad that you (or someone you know) didn't have a good experience applying for one of our positions. Please accept my apology (on their behalf).

Thanks, this is something that I read under one of MixRank's hiring posts on HN, and I thought might be true since I always see the same positions listed as well.

It makes sense that you're continuously hiring. It may be hard for me or others to differentiate that when the listed roles + post content are the same.

> I can't imagine why we'd keep it up if we weren't making good hires.

I imagine quite a few reasons. Some malicious, some giving the benefit of the doubt.

I'll hold my tongue, but the most important aspect is to at least candidates in the loop. There's so much ghosting and that's worse than any rejection.

They've been posting for a very long time

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39008011 and the rest of the thread

> Just wondering why a company posts a job on HN without having actual openings.

Ghost jobs. In addition to interviewers ghosting candidates, it's been a trend on the rise these past few years: https://www.forbes.com/sites/karadennison/2023/11/27/how-gho...

TL;DR there's 3 primary motivations:

1. -Lie- convince shareholders that they are still growing

2. -Lie- convince existing, overworked employees that help is coming

3. -Lie- conform to regulations for future offshorting/H1-B's.

#1 thing I'd want looked into from these job boards. It's fraud in sheep's clothing.

I imagine many companies do it on many websites. They can use it to falsely signal to their VCs that they're trying to hire when they're actually not.

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