Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I think the two most significant trends described by this article are "ghost jobs" - job listing that companies leave up even though they don't actually have a role to fill - and aggregators and scrapers which gather copies of job listings from elsewhere in order to populate a job board with a bunch of duplicate, potentially stale or filled positions.

Combined, these help explain why people complain of applying for 60 jobs and only hearing back from two of them - most of the listings aren't actually valid leads.

From the article:

> Half the managers in question said that one emphatically ambiguous reason they would keep such job listings open indefinitely was because “The company was always open to new people.” That was actually one of the better answers on a list of very bad ones. A tie, at 43%, went to the next most-common responses, “To give the impression that the company is growing” and “To keep current employees motivated.” Perhaps the most infuriating replies came in at 39% and 33%, respectively: “The job was filled” (but the post was left online anyway to keep gathering résumés), and “No reason in particular.”

> That’s right, all you go-getters out there: When you scream your 87th cover letter into the ghost-job void, there’s a one in three chance that your time was wasted for “no reason in particular.”

And in places like academia there are rules where you have to post a job opening even if the job already has a candidate picked (say a lab manager for an incoming scientist who wants to hire their spouse for the job). People who don't know the situation apply and are interviewed even though there is no real possibility that they will get the job.

Hiring at Meta is like this. You pass the onsite interview before you even get to “team matching” which means they don’t even know they need you yet when you’ve passed the interviews.

> applying to 60 jobs and only hearing back from two

Really makes you wonder what “service” these job platforms are providing if a significant amount of their jobs are fake.

Yeah so job boards are as fake and gamed as the rest of the popular internet. Big surprise.

I wonder what the other side looks like. Do people using Indeed and other services to find employees get real applicants? Or is it mostly auto-generated garbage?

I'm imagining a world where nobody human actually uses these sites, it's all bots applying to scraped and auto-posted jobs.

Sometimes you see people with the complaints from the other side here.

It looks like recruiters filter the mass of fake applications, and only send real people to the companies. From those real people almost everybody is comically unprepared, and most attempts at filling a job fail.

Of the thousands or so resumes I've received on Indeed, I have advanced maybe a dozen into an initial screening stage. The vast majority was basically spam - applicants with backgrounds that didn't match the job at all or new grad applicants for a posting that clearly stated we were looking for experienced candidates. Then there was the terrible auto-formatting that Indeed would apply to candidates' resumes, sometimes being so jumbled as to be illegible. It made it seem as if there was no one behind the submission checking to make sure their information was being sent correctly.

I realize this isn't exactly an earth shattering, but for the new grad applicants I think that's an understandable reaction to the way that job postings are written. Even when every listing isn't asking for the moon for an entry level positions, most job postings list so many desired skills that no one could actually be qualified.

> they need you yet when you’ve passed the interviews

But they are usually open to hiring you. That's not a ghost job.

(Or better, it only becomes a ghost job from a handful of weeks prior to a couple of weeks after a layoff.)

This is worse than a ghost job. HR running the hiring process when no team has a position. Even worse for the person applying as they are wasting more time than just sending their resume and cover letter to /dev/null @ corp.

But I don’t think this is something groundbreaking isn’t it? Similar to dating apps, when the pool is enormous It’s very cheap to keep the options open. With the automation and growing value of the personal data, everyone should keep that in mind when applying for a job. Also, I suspect there is a reason but the responders are too lazy or are too ashamed to provide it. My wild guess would be, as cited as before: this position has been allocated but it almost cost nothing to keep it open to farm data and to keep perception that the business is growing.

It is generally be considered a foux pas to maintain a dating profile after committing to a romantic partner.

Employers are polyamorous.

And most people are not. Which makes jobs dissimilar to relationships.

I think you mean faux pas

> But I don’t think this is something groundbreaking isn’t it?

The vast majority of employment-related issues do not occur to elites and policymakers. These issues are completely invisible to them. Articles like this make real issues legible to the important people who are in a position to do something about it.

Can't job listing sites just make the cost of each active listing a lot more expensive. If you want to list a job per month it's $10 bucks, but the next one is like $100, then $200, etc. Eventually holding open random speculative listings becomes expensive. If companies prove they hired people, then they're allowed to have more openings at the lower rate. Basically make a track record for hiring open up more cheap listings.

There’s no incentive for the job boards to do that. Perhaps a model where candidates paid for access to the job board might fare better, as they need to prove their quality to candidates.

Wouldn't the inventive be that jobs listed there are real and people pay attention to them?

As an employer, it makes complete sense to keep some kind of employee funnel active. This is achieved by having a listing active for months at a time. It is by far one of the most effective ways to recruit. You build and maintain funnels for client sales. Why would that not be done for the most business-critical aspect of an enterprise, human capital ?

This will not work for all jobs. And its effectiveness will vary by industry. For example: I wouldn't be able to run this technique successfully to hire a nurse for school. But if I was hiring nurses for a hospitwl, you can bet I'd have a permanent listing up. Something to think about the next time you are applying for a SWE at Amazon.

Why do employers do it? Because the vast majority of applicants dont read job descriptions at all. If you take 200 resumes and only 10 are qualified, its more likely you'll keep the position open, perhaps permanently, until you find a decent candidate. Or run a few trials with existing candidates while you wait for more applicants

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