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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I talked to a hiring manager friend at a big company you've definitely heard of. I was looking for a job so I sent him a link to one of his jobs and said "can I interview for this?"

He said: Oh, I have 23 recs on the job site but none of them are open. They just keep them there to make us look like we're still hiring like crazy.

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Yeah, common knowledge sadly. Can get even worse, a friend had recently an interview with a, not-so-well-known, but you heard of them company and they didn't do any face to face interview, just AI driven via email, all steps. When he failed a step: they offered him some credits on the platform, literally a funnel via a job post (it's a dev platform).

This is called ghost jobs. More than 90% of posted jobs are like this.

In HN's Who's Hiring it is very close to 100%, so I don't look at that thread anymore.

The solution: use AI robots for jobs.

You are being downvoted but hn is really bad about this. One company posted an advert for their “third engineer” for literally years.

Correct, and don't complain about it or you will be lightly punished by the mods.

My standard procedure when looking at job listings is to search references of the company on HN, to see if there's any chitchat about its services/products.

Just 2 months ago I found a LI listing for a company that even has a "Show HN" - "...one of the fastest-growing security and compliance platforms in history." Not much chatter about it, but enough I felt assured to apply to the listing.

It's only after I clicked Submit that I discovered a factoid on the LI listing: it had been open for NINE months. The company's ATS does not show time-of-posting.

Worse-- just right now, I went to both the company's ATS listing and Linkedin: the posting is still open, 11 months now and counting.

Oh, and no surprise-- no response to my application, two months later.

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