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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

I've been hearing people looking for jobs with (to me) weird theories about fake/ghost job postings, that the employer never plans to fill... they have various theories of why (hypothetical) employers would do this that I don't quite follow.

Has anyone else heard of/seen this, or can explain where it's coming from or if it means anything?

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It is absolutely and undeniably a real phenomenon. Take your pick of explanations, nobody actually knows for sure, but you have to tell yourself something or you’d toss your phone out the window when you get the 40th notification that you might be interested in the exact same job that auto-rejected you the previous 39 times. Speaking from personal experience over the last year.

It's very weird. You would think the people posting the jobs might know for sure, although different posters may have different motivations. It seems something that should be amenable to some journalistic investigation, but while it's getting a lot of talk between job seekers, including in these comments, nobody seems to have tried to do such investigation to get some clues as to what's going on.

The simple explanation is incompetence: the ratio of false negatives is too high, so everyone has a story of being rejected from jobs they could perfectly fulfil. The ratio of false positives is also high, so jobs remain open for longer they should.

I recently met the CTO of a unicorn in a social function, and they urged me to apply, he would fast track. I interviewed there before, got an offer but decided to go somewhere else. Even with a face-to-face invitation from the CTO and obviously having passed an interview in the past, they rejected me.

There is no end to incompetence in modern business.

Earlier this summer I applied for a job at a local startup that I had all the qualifications for and quite a bit of relevant experience. I got a rejection email within 48 hours. Eventually I happened to meet with one of the founders through a connection and had a chat, he said how amazing it was that someone local had worked on similar problems in the past. In the end he said that unfortunately they don't have the capacity to expand the team right now.

Their job postings are currently still up on their site and linkedin.

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