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Comment by Peroni | Hacker News Reader

OP here. Turns out if you tell people truthfully what the job actually involves rather than writing a prescriptive list of arbitrary requirements, both the quantity and quality of applications improves.

If you're responsible for writing job ads in 2024, the best advice I can give you is to disregard as many of the traditional job ad tropes as possible and write your job ad as if you're writing it for the actual human you want to hire in mind.

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Hi OP. Interesting points. I get the feeling that most companies simply do not care what their advert looks like these days, since they will be flooded with 1000s of resumes no matter what they post. I've been on both sides of the hiring process, and recently changed jobs. I didn't send a single resume to a single advert to get it. I just contacted people I worked with previously. I share that because my feeling is a job posting is a last ditch effort by a company when all other avenues already failed.

It’s long been the case that networking generally works best. But lately, between the tech job market, the frequent ease of applying, and algorithmic filtering, there’s this reinforcing cycle that tends to make a random application a low odds crapshoot.

I couldn't agree more. The sites like LinkedIn seem like a dating site. They don't make money by pairing you up, that's how they lose a customer :)

I see a huge number of job postings that I am highly qualified for but which scream “not welcome” / “HR nightmare”. I suspect I’m not alone in feeling this way.

It’s just boiler plate. I’ve worked contracts at places with “wtf?” that were great and had the inverse as well, it really just matter what the team/jefe you’re working with is like. Job ads are just a very rough approximation of what they’re looking for.

There are a lot of positions where if the company would tell people truthfully what the job actually involves, hardly anyone would apply.

Good. You’ve eliminated a bunch of employees who will be miserable, and attracted the ones who actually want the job.

I’d imagine it’s the same thing with salary.

Then they need to rethink the position.

Why, if it works for them? My point is that the OP’s claim “hey companies, you will get better hires if you are more truthful” isn’t actually universally true. He’s arguing more from the employees’ interests point of view (as you seem to be as well) than the companies’ interests point of view.

Well, I mean, does it work for them, really? Or has it just not finished failing yet? I think we can't really get anywhere with this trying to inject hypothetical specifics into talk of generalities anyway. I'm sure there are some positions that just suck no matter how you cut it, and maybe for some employers the most effective tactic really is to misrepresent the job and see who they manage to keep. But overall I get the sense that more clear and open communication of needs and offers would benefit all parties. Unfortunately I also get the sense that the problem starts upstream of the candidate interaction points, and may not be easily and clearly blamed. The results are no less easy to see, though, when you can witness the transformation of three different jobs into one -- that they somehow manage to hire someone for -- or watch over time as job role "duties" and "requirements" are snowballed along through iterations of the role. All the while, quite possibly none of the people who are touching it have real insight into what they're actually looking for, or whoever does seems to be the office cryptid.

Anyway, assuming that the core of a given job posting's problem wasn't simply inherited by people who can't do much about it, I must think, at the very least, that being more truthful will be likely to help and unlikely to hurt.

Edit: Saw another comment from someone else about how the companies in general are succeeding as things are. So in that sense I guess I can see wrt why would they change what's working. For some reason I got the sense of the focus shifting unaccountably from abstract to particular but without any actual particulars happening.

At the end of the day, as well as most of the rest of it, I guess I don't really know. I'm definitely not the guy who's going to miraculously fix this problem. I do wonder, though, if companies aren't merely succeeding despite everything -- or maybe a constantly churning majority with a crust of established players plus a bit of sawdust and super glue just manages to give the impression that the practices generally seen are the same ones that generally work.

And, it's crazy that this has to be mentioned: don't post ads for jobs that don't exist.

I had never considered it but its apparently a thing that big public companies post / keep up lots of fake jobs so that web scrapers see a stable/growing job posting count and infer the company is doing well financially.

I’ve heard this but never seen anyone put forward any proof that it’s actually true other than “trust me”. It seems like a an internet tall tale so far in my experience.

Would that be fraud? How would they coordinate that without a trail of evidence?

No coordination required.

It's just individual company not being incentivized to pull down job listings when they no longer have capacity to hire.

The roles suddenly become "opportunistic hire" rather than actual open headcount. Open roles exist in a continuum of "urgent backfill" / "open budget headcount this quarter" / "could negotiate headcount for the right candidate" / "just passively interviewing to see who is out there" / "no chance we are hiring anyone this decade".

Not a clear case of fraud to be made really. Better to have no job listing to send resumes to? Not clear thats true either.

Systematically offering roles that have already been filled seems like fraud, even if only due to subconscious neglect.

Though I suppose it's impossible to prove.

Not everything that is bad rises to the level of being a crime. And some things that are bad would have even worse side effects if you tried to police them.

How would you define a fraudulent job listing versus simply keeping a listing up in case the right candidate shows up / budget comes back next quarter?

Wouldn't this create incentives for companies to be more hesitant to post job openings and more aggressive in taking them down?

I've worked at places where we had job listing X, talked to some people and ended up filling job Y and Z instead (which didn't exist as listings) because we found some really interesting people.

Would that possibly create unwanted side effects like more jobs filled without being ever listed via backchannels/personal networks? Or more process/HR?

> write your job ad as if you're writing it for the actual human you want to hire

this is the 'tock' after the "prompt engineer" 'tick'

Hi! Informative piece to the ones that need it. Also, your last paragraphs 4 are duplicated, I guess?

Oh wow. Totally missed that. Fixing!

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