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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

This is about Wells Fargo allegedly lying about pursuing diversity in its security filings.

But I'm hearing more and more from friends on the tech interview circuit about processes requiring, in essence, free consulting to be done for a posting that remains listed and unfilled almost indefinitely after the interview (and subsequent ghosting). My hunch is these start-ups don't want to show an empty hiring pipeline to investors. But if that's being pursued wilfully, it seems to imply fraud.

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Even large corps leave postings up forever as a way to manipulate their stock price. Take down the postings and analysts see it as weakness. This has been going on for decades.

That's not always true. Sometimes they have up a "Senior Engineer" listing that just always stays up because they are always hiring for that role.

"always hiring" in the same way anyone would hire, say, Steve Wozniak if he knocked on your door.

I think one regulation to resolve this is to outline a term on when you expect to fill the role, in order to delineate between "we need this role right now" (AKA, "urgent hire"), "we want to fill it in 1-3 months", and "nice to have but no rush" postings. It'd give a better signals to workers and make it easier to call fraud if they are "urgently hiring" but repost the same thing 5 months in a row.

That's a nice theory but in reality many things could conspire to prevent you from hiring on schedule: lack of qualified applicants, changing business strategy, reduced budget, etc. It would be hard to tell from the outside whether lack of adherence to the schedule was due to malfeasance or "stuff happens."

>It would be hard to tell from the outside whether lack of adherence to the schedule was due to malfeasance or "stuff happens."

Sure. That's why they get audited for their recruitment like anything else in business. I'm not saying to bring the hammer down, just to have a better excuse than "well we're always hiring!"

That's extremely rare, especially right now.

"My hunch is these start-ups don't want to show an empty hiring pipeline to investors. "

Sounds very plausible, but why bother interviewing anyone?

The thing about "fake interviews", having gone to several myself, is that they are never completely fake, just very, very unlikely to produce a hire.

I imagine the company internally can say something like "we'll hire if we find someone capable of solving all of department X,Y and Z's problems simultaneously and will do so for market rate. We probably won't find that but looking will make people happy." with the second part said with only winks.

Except if I'm an investor, and someone tells me that they are looking for a specific role that will help the company reach financial goals, they are spending time and money trying to find that person(s) and they aren't actually looking (rather, just posturing) that is fraud-y in a roundabout way. They are spending time and money on something that they know won't pan out. That's a waste of money.

Sure, if you're the investor that asks all those questions and has enough information to answer them, you won't be happy. But I think most investors aren't going to drill down to that level. Especially, anyone investing is going to know some money wasting has to happen, some posturing has to happen, just to be trendy and so attract "brilliant/energetic/etc" people as well as more investors. And a given start-up investor has to want more investors since the company runs on an accelerating flow of funds; your money is only being multiplied if other people are tossing in theirs and if your money isn't being multiplied, it's vanishing.

sadly, there can be a lot of inefficies and the number can still go up. That's ultimately all modern (western?) stakeholders care about these days. Not like they can't switch their stocks in days if they get worried.

Intelligence on what other firms are doing, even if you are just getting a very high level view. Around 2009, I was working at an algo trading startup, and long story short, after having a previous company call me up after their non-compete in a business ended, and in the process one of them slipping in that they made like 4x what I was making at the time, I decided to look around.

I got lots of bites on my resume! And I was called in for lots of interviews. But they didn't really go anywhere, despite me often feeling like I did well in them. It took me a few months to realize that they were actually just hearing some murmurs about what my company was doing and wanted to learn more about it- we were approaching the problem in a unique way for the time.

Even seemingly innocuous details can give away a lot about a company's strategy. If you are working on say AR at Amazon, and you mention that your group is about 200 people, that says that they are not only going into this space, but doing a reasonably big push on it as well, which might be news to say FB. (This is completely contrived, I have no idea if Amazon is doing AR stuff at all).

I think you can get more intel than this just by scouring LinkedIn. You might have to use some statistics to eyeball some numbers, but you can get technologies used, group sizes, levels of team members, etc. Especially if you snapshot and compare over time.

In fact, I would be shocked if this kind of competitor-employee data mining was not a service already sold by Linked In.

Competitive intelligence has been around for a long time.

I guess anything is possible but this seems unlikely. The type of questions (and followups) you would ask in a job interview are quite different than for an inquiry. Also, there are more straightforward ways of getting this information so why take a more convoluted and less efficient path.

> type of questions (and followups) you would ask in a job interview are quite different than for an inquiry

Candidates will willingly disclose quite a bit, especially if they were stiffed by the last lot.

Sometimes its double fraud. Sometimes they tell employees internally that they are hiring even though they arent.

>Sounds very plausible, but why bother interviewing anyone?

Because then you don’t have to ask anyone else to lie for you, or count on them to do it well.

There are other options here though, beyond just lying and pickiness, which include:

a) some internal party sabotaging hiring to prevent someone getting in who will be a better fit for the role they want during growth

b) startups often don’t actually know where they need to put bodies, especially in areas outside of the founders’ technical training

Every startup has a massive "Hiring" page for optics. Are they actually hiring for all those positions? Probably not.

because funding wants to go somewhere and headcount is an easy earmark.

I could only read the first paragraph, but it seems like the article is about a specific type of fake job interview rather than "fake job interviews" in general.

https://archive.ph/KcjK6

> My hunch is these start-ups don't want to show an empty hiring pipeline to investors.

This wouldn't make any sense. If a startup has headcount and budget, they're going to want to hire someone as quickly as possible.

Investors don't care about the minutia of how many people are in your hiring pipeline. If portfolio company had board-approved budget and headcount and was failing to fill those roles in a timely manner, that would be a huge red flag that something is not right within the company.

Investors care about result and efficiency. I don't think any startup is going to impress investors by wasting a bunch of time deliberately fake interviewing people and then failing to hire anyone.

What's more like is the company wants to hire, has told the teams they can hire, but the board is reluctant to approve more headcount until the team starts showing results. Another possibility is that they're waiting for financials to improve enough to justify the hire.

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