Job applicants are under enough stress as it is, they shouldn't be fooled into wasting their time applying to ghost jobs.
For a bit of additional context: we hire for multiple roles and have actually hired multiple people through these threads :)
We review every application by hand and get back to every single applicant, usually within 72 hours, despite thousands of LLM-generated spam/fraud applications. It takes a tremendous amount of time and energy, but we do it because we know how much time and energy candidates invest in applying to our open roles.
If you previously applied and didn't hear back, please shoot me an email so I can look into it: jared.silver@brilliant.org
It may be worth mentioning that you're continuing to open new positions and hire in the next thread. That would be (imo) a positive signal for others and would dispel these types of concerns. Because like others have said, they remember the companies who post over and over again and tend to not bother with them, under the assumption that they just aren't filling the position (if they even exist).
If you want, you could take a look at some of my past explanations about this as well - they're listed in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45094610. If you do that, and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
If you aren't capable of telling what postings are real/not real (and fair enough, it's a hard problem) what makes you think you can do the same for the replies?
I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling like it's very one sided, and in the current market which heavily favours hirers over seekers it's just another thing going against the seekers. Who often have real concrete stressors like the threat of homelessness.
Either that or remove the rules that by your own words are unenforceable, so people aren't mislead into thinking this board is more curated than, say, indeed or LinkedIn.
We can't, and that's the issue. There's no fair way of adjudicating which such complaints are true and valid, vs. which are partly true but distorted, vs. which are outright false.
It seems to me that the status quo is the least-bad feasible option, which is why we stick with it, even though of course it has downsides. I still think the Who Is Hiring threads are valuable, even with those downsides, and trying to do significantly better is one of those things it's important to say 'no' to. The problem is not that it wouldn't be valuable—it's that it would be valuable, but would consume too much of our limited resources and ultimately distract from the main goal of trying to run a good (or good-enough) forum.
Thanks for listening to feedback :)
It is a painful process for both the seekers (who feel they are being ghosted) and the employers (who feel they are being spammed by AI bots); IMO the best approach is to follow the general HN guidance of "be kind" and "assume good intentions". And if a company ghosted you, downvote their post. My 2c.
I suspect they wouldn't. I suspect companies that ghost and post fake jobs wouldn't even reply. And companies that have real job posts would reply and have a chance to convince the job is real.
People already have to scroll a ton of job posts that are not for them (due to stack, location, seniority, whatever) and the [-] button is pretty efficient in hiding long discussions.
The [-] button is a pretty good solution for long discussions in a job post.
Let seekers share their experience is a pretty useful signal, even if there is no way to know if the seeker is telling the truth. But downvotes are even more secretive and are allowed.