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Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

It should be illegal. Given how many regulations there are around hiring, there should also be some around job postings. Making people waste a bunch of time updating their resume and writing cover letters for a company thats not actually looking to fill a role is awful. Its creating shitty dynamics for both job seekers and job posters - seekers have to spreadfire apply to as many places as possible with quantity over any quality, get their inboxes obliterated with rejections that make very little sense. Job posters get 1000 applicants for every position because there's barely any reason to read the description anymore.

Not to mention all the economic reporting that is completely messed up by this. Job openings are something that is tracked, and policy can't adapt if literally every company is saying they're hiring like gangbusters but nobody can get a job.

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I remember reading something within the past month about how the SEC is looking to crack down on companies using fake job postings as a way to fake their growth. It's still technically an attempt to fraud shareholders.

Edit: I can't find the article. Maybe I am confusing it with this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41112855

My least favorite thing about this day and age is that we have to justify things primarily by whether it effects shareholders or not, not whether its causing a bunch of harm to people looking for work.

We don't have to, but it's easier, more clear cut, less politicized, etc.

Heh :) Enforcement would potentially look a lot like unemployment, but in reverse: you have to show you’ve been interviewing people, just like unemployment requires you to show you’ve been looking

Not even that would be good enough because a lot of sham reqs still interview and then reject later.

Why? To burn money?

aye was my thought. interviewing is expensive and time consuming, and has a very small but greater than zero chance of turning into a lawsuit.

throwing up a bunch of job adverts up on a low cost platform is comparatively simple and requires no real activity after putting them up; just ignore the emails.

If nobody should be forced to hire someone, then maybe they should be forced to give metrics on how many people are hired vs job reqs posted, and that information should be given to the candidates. Good luck hiring people if you don't actually want to fill 80% of your roles and candidates know it.

The way it works for the unemployed is if they don't take an offer, benefits get cut off. So it would be on the company to prove that each rejected application did not meet the standards they were looking for (trivial - just use the same unrealistic expectations many companies already have: 10 years experience in $5_year_old_tech).

The core issue is that the common metric is a bad proxy for the actual signal. Goodhearts law and all that. Enforcing that the proxy be good is weird. It would be better to enforce publicly sharing the actual signal.

Why would interviewing people be the test? If you don't hire anyone, it isn't a real position. They should have to prove the people applying for the position could not perform or be trained to perform the position.

And they’d lie to comply just like people do in your valid example. :)

It should be illegal.

Indeed. And handsome whistleblower bonuses (i.e. enough to retire on) should be paid to individuals who are in a position to report the company principals to appropriate authorities (with easily obtainable evidence of course), so that they can be dealt with accordingly.

Instead of just casually mentioning to others at the water cooler that this is what their client/employer was doing, as if it were just one of those things.

> handsome whistleblower bonuses (i.e. enough to retire on) should be paid to individuals

Is this money coming from the government or the company?

Because I’m guessing the startup using fake job postings to signal growth probably doesn’t have enough runway to cover the handsome retirement of a 30-year old.

Sounds like a "them problem". If it weren't punitive, it wouldn't be a deterrent.

I mean it’s not a them problem if they just can’t afford to pay it.

What are you going to do, rat on your employer to get money from them they know they can’t pay so they just go out of business and you lose your job?

I mean, yeah. It's still a them problem, because they can choose to engage or not engage in those practices while knowing the consequences. What are you going to do, never penalize companies when it might hurt their bottom line?

Just because they can't pay it doesn't mean there shouldn't be repercussions. That would be like saying that a person can't be fined because they don't have the money. AFAIK the judicial system will happily levy costs on you that you can't afford, and it is 100% a "you problem".

>If it weren't punitive, it wouldn't be a deterrent.

This is why I don't understand people who are against the death penalty and punishing mandatory minimum sentences. As you correctly point out, harsh retribution is a good deterrent.

Look up the prison population vis a vis mandatory minimums and tell me its been a good deterrent. Maybe what drives crime is independent of how much deterrent there is!

Because the actions that lead to death penalties are usually committed without a calm and collected risk-benefit analysis, whereas economic decisions of a corporation absolutely are.

> the actions that lead to death penalties are usually committed without a calm and collected risk-benefit analysis

Really? I thought death penalty is typically reserved for premeditated acts where the criminal did actually think it through.

> where the criminal did actually think it through

Until we can get into the criminal's brain we can't know the extent to which they thought it through.

We're just basically saying, "Anybody would know that they shouldn't kill somebody and it seems like they probably thought about killing this person before they did it."

I doubt there's going to be a stat that satisfies you here, but this one is interesting:

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/murder-rates...

I haven't ever seen non-anecdotal evidence (flimsy or otherwise) that makes me think the death penalty acts as a deterrent.

> Until we can get into the criminal's brain we can't know the extent to which they thought it through.

Sure we can, based on their actions. For example, we know that the guy that killed 60 people in Vegas planned it out ahead of time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting#Prepar....

I'm not the one saying that the penalty works as a deterrent. It probably didn't in this case since the guy killed himself. Although he may have preferred death to a life in prison.

Congrats on picking the most extreme example possible.

What about a situation where someone kills their wife after work one day? How will you know if he had thought about it for a while or just snapped? Obviously you will look at the evidence and see if there was clear evidence of planning or not. But if there's not how can you be confident in whether it was planned?

> I'm not the one saying that the penalty works as a deterrent.

Good, because it doesn't.

I never said we know in every instance. And the death penalty isn't applied in every instance either.

> What about a situation where someone kills their wife after work one day? > Obviously you will look at the evidence and see if there was clear evidence of planning or not

Right, and in this court can choose not to execute him based on this uncertainty.

Theoretically. In practice it's reserved for the unfortunate souls who happen to be born in the most racist parts of the US with the most tough-on-crime attitudes and corrupt policing. And then some of them are just innocent, too.

The problem with death is you can't undo it. If you mess up, including systemic mess ups, it's over.

Just prosecute individuals making these kind of decisions. Currently you can get away with almost all white-collar crime as he company picks up the bill. Only the most outrageous of the outrageous ever ends up being prosecuted, and even that doesn't always happen.

Much of this tomfoolery will quickly end if you actually start holding people accountable. Giving some corporation a fine is not that.

Presumably the government will backstop it by a certain amount X, to be increased to Y > X if such funds can be clawed back from the principals / company.

Not equivalent to the most attractive exit they hope to make (if they stayed with the company and if it paid out), of course -- but enough to make it worth their trouble, to hedge the diminished employment prospects that will be incurred as a price for sticking their neck out, and to convince these companies that they're running a significant risk in pulling shenanigans like this.

> It should be illegal.

Not everything we don't like should be illegal.

This sounds like the kind of thing that is incredibly unenforceable anyway. How do you differentiate between "we're not actually hiring" and "we simply have a very high bar"? How do you do it in a way that doesn't impact the economy too much (like forcing employers to do stupid things like auto-write everyone back and waste even more of their time in order to appear to actually be hiring)?

They want to turn the US into the EU: a dying, poor, over-regulated museum of decline.

Easy, you offer a hotline where people can report it when they see it and then sue/fine the company for defrauding their investors by faking growth. If the case is legitimate, you reward the person that called in to the hotline with a bounty. Everybody wins except the fraudulent company, as it should be.

So now every company does a technical screen that weeds out a large percentage of people, then randomly chooses to waste some more people's time by dragging them through an interview. Everyone wastes more time but they can say they interviewed a lot of people.

I'm not saying this behavior isn't bad, to the extent that it actually really exists. I'm just not sure making it illegal is the right move. Why not let the market take care of it? You can usually see if a company is growing or not. If this becomes such a common phenomenon that that's a problem, you can usually explicitly ask, or there will be industry sources that can tell you if a company is growing or not.

As if people's time isn't already wasted by fake job listings?

The market isn't actually very good at fixing issues like these, and in fact caused the issue in this case (defrauding investors makes number go up which makes market happy but people sad), which is why you would regulate it.

> Not everything we don't like should be illegal

From a "fraud" angle I could argue that it should still be illegal. You're signaling to your investors that you're growing but you're really not.

Fake numbers are a real thing. 9 openings and only 1 real opening? So you're inflating your employment growth by a factor of 9? How is this different than Wells Fargo opening 9 phony, automatic accounts per customer to inflate their growth?

If company has 10 positions open for X months but their headcount is still same, then you can argue these are fake postings. We have big enough population that high bar, unless unrealistic, should not be problem.

It hurts future income tax dollars so it should be at the top of the priority list for all governments. Even if they don’t care about or prioritize their citizens, they usually at least care about receiving tax dollars and reducing fraud.

Get an attorney and have a conversation about filing a lawsuit in civil court. There’s objective economic harm for not at least calling everyone that applies, in my opinion (I’m not an attorney) to Unfortunately there’s taxes for people not understanding computer science and wanting to be in “management.” Especially if people stare at the software newspaper all day. Entry level manager positions aren’t supposed to be glamorous….

I know software managers and recruiters that don’t want to do fairly filter through 1000 applicants. When it’s a very large company that has over 100,000 global employees it’s a bit unfortunate.

When it’s a very large company that has over 100,000 global employees you should have HR tools that can do that filtering for you.

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