Hacker News Reader

Comment by nekusar | Hacker News Reader

The real answer is that many jobbads are fraudulent.

And fraudulent job ads should be handled the same way a fraudulent advertisement for a good is handled: you either make good and prove hiring, or you're tried for felony fraud.

View on HN

What do you mean by “make good” and “prove hiring” operationally?

Say for example, a company posts 10 job openings, fills 9 of them, but for the tenth, they don’t receive good candidates initially, the hiring manager has to go back to their leadership and negotiate a higher salary for the position, it goes through HR, they update the PD, they do a round of interviews with two good candidates, but then the hiring manager has a death in the family and takes leave, one candidate accepts a different position in that time, and then when presented with the offer, the second candidate backs out because they were expecting a salary at the higher end of the range in the PD despite having limited experience, then after 6 months and the team prepping for another interview round, the financial situation has changed and executive leadership freezes all hiring indefinitely and the job gets taken down.

Has the company made good in this case? If not, and this was an example of fraud, what is the mechanism for detecting it as such? Are there law enforcement officers actively scrubbing for possible violations? How much does that cost? Is it worth pulling a prosecuting attorney from a civil rights lawsuit over?

Or, if the company has made good, what compliance could a company do to prove that they haven’t committed fraud? How many man hours do we expect the company to spend on that compliance?

I don’t ask these questions just to poke holes, I think there would be a lot of benefits to the job market for both employers and employees if everyone applying to a job could be confident that the position was open. But I am skeptical that anyone has done a serious cost benefit analysis to determine if the juice is worth the squeeze.

Then should be a paper trail of the position, and a final decision by a person to not fill the position.

I feel that as part of unemployment insurance all job postings should tie back to a canonical job position registered with the state with mandatory reporting of applications received,number of interviews conducted,date hired or date position withdrawn, and final dispensation: external hire, internal hire, contract hire, or position withdrawn.

If HR isn’t bullshitting everyone, they should have that data. State agencies and nonprofits already tract the information.

As far as it goes, I think that alone is a fairly reasonable ask (though a heavier touch than I personally would feel comfortable legislating without serious consideration). But I’m not sure it really solves the problem if all you need to do is have someone sign off and say, hey, we didn’t find any good candidates. It seems susceptible to pencil whipping. So, what’s the next step. What is the trigger for prosecution? Where’s the line drawn between a fraudulent job posting and the merely poorly managed? Or, if they’re the same, what’s the definition? Are there a minimum number of interviews that need to be conducted each week?

Public data that can’t be adjusted like Glassdoor reviews?

A way to keep recruiters honest? Is this for job xyz that has been reported filled as of Friday?

I’d certainly use it in interviews. Job x appears to posted every 10 weeks and reported a filled by internal hires. What is the problem with this job?

I mean companies also already feel quite content bullshitting DOL/ESD with "reason for termination of employment" - I've had multiple friends deal with "was fired for cause" appeal this only to have the employer no-show the hearing or actually admit "no, there wasn't cause", generally with no consequence.

That should be relatively easy to prove.

Was a position (and tax revenue) hired for this position?

Were there no candidates qualified for this position?

Ohhhh, there were? Why didn't you hire them?

Many job ads are simply scams. And companies faking job ads can rie in a fire, or fined out of extinction.

"What do you mean by “make good” and “prove hiring” operationally?"

We aren't worried about your case. We are worried about ID theft rings who harvest information from CVs sent to fake job ads. If you hire for even a fraction of your ads and you are engaged in any sort of legitimate business (where the revenue doesn't come from the CVs or information harvested from them), we aren't worried about that.

What is your proposed time limit (when someone has to be hired to fill the position) and "cooldown period" (when hiring can re-open after someone does not meet expectations in practice)?

What does this have to do with the original comment?

It's obviously a difficult problem to write rules around, and there are so many ways for companies to weasel out of any rule you write. The general principle is that you should not advertise a job if you don't actually intend to fill it. But you should also not do it if you have some "theoretical job" you can create and are just fishing for candidates. Any rules I write down here will have trivial ways to work around them though.

But this is an issue with all legislation (or tabletop game design), right? You also don't want to fall on the opposite end of the scale where the people tasked with prosecuting these violations are allowed to go just by feel.

At this point I'd be completely fine with just going by feel. It would be better than what we have now.

> It's obviously a difficult problem to write rules around

Bull-fucking-shit

Companies claim all the time that "if you give us a 10 year abatement we will bring X jobs to the area"

Well, time to quantify that, asshole.

We pay for it. And if you can't, I want C level blood. Id be OK with 100% of all taxes, with a 30% yearly interest, payable, to prevent jailing of the whole C level board.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com