Well I opened the article, near the beginning I saw the text: "81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled."
Instantly that felt completely insane to me, my bullshit detector went off the chart, so since they provided a source, I followed up on the source to see the evidence for myself.
What do you know, the source is from a "my perfect resume" website that apparently conducted a study on the issue, but they aren't providing the details of the study, aren't providing a paper , aren't providing the methodology or questions asked, aren't providing any details whatsoever, the only thing they provide is the "conclusions" of their study.
So, apparently because this random website supposedly conducted a study, and they say the result was "81% posted fake jobs", that makes it true.
Hey, I also conducted a study, and 14% posted fake jobs. There, my claim has just as much backing as theirs does.
Instantly lost interest in the "study" and the article based on it.
I've done tech interviewing for years. Job listing that are to various degree fake are quite common. Of course, fakeness comes in many flavor, from listings posted just to "see if there's anyone out there" (I had a boss who did this regularly) to jobs a supervisor really does want to fill but which they know they won't because the bureaucracy has forced impossible requirements on them. An example: "Junior programmer, 10 years experience in language X" (that's existed for five years).
Just to note. 80% of recruiters doesn't mean 80% of ads. A recruiter that has posted thousands of legitimate ads in their career, technically only needs to have posted 1 fake one to be eligible for inclusion in the 80%.
Although I understand, and to some extent share, your skepticism regarding the "study", I have no problem conceiving that a trend might currently be setting around the practice of posting fake ads, for whatever reason. It doesn't require much. In an unregulated playing field, simple peer pressure and survival is all you need to drive everyone to shady practices.
So, the study might be moot, but the number isn't so surprising.
You probably need to pay to see their surveys, but even if you don't trust that: the bureau of labor has had to make huge adjustments all this year and last year. This isn't just some bad optics.
> Well I opened the article, near the beginning I saw the text: "81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled."
I love San Francisco to death, but there's no reliable local newspaper. It drives me nuts.
The really common reason in my experience is there is a job that is made to fit a specific internal applicant but it has to advertised “because of process”. Often the manager is not even telling recruiting that they have already picked the candidate.
What about job postings for a position already held by an H1B visa holder?
What about job postings that are not taken down until a new hire is given the offer, agrees verbally, signs the paperwork, relocates and actually shows up on the job?
Many companies have policies requiring that all jobs have to be posted both internally and externally before being filled. The intent is to prevent Sam the VP from just slotting his buddy into the job. At the end of the day, Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them.
Same thing happens with H1B/PERM, except now it's the law requiring it rather than company policy. The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it.
> The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it.
Posted obscurely in a corner of the cafeteria, but exposing my salary to anyone who cared to look. They were never going to hire someone else, and we all knew it, but the charade had to be played.
H1B has evolved into a bizarre collaborative scam between the government and tech corporations; there is, in fact, a US citizen who can fill any software engineering role a US company has.
Also back in the day, we would say we need X new staff, corporate would encourage us to advertise and interview, but when it came to extending and offer they would tell us we can't increase head count. Happened over and over till I left.
In Europe jobs have to be published. Even if there is no intention of filling it from the public. And companies also publish bullshit jobs which are used to manipulate regulatory requirements if needed (eg. if you want to hire a foreigner, you must prove you couldn't fill the position locally - by publishing it for 3 months).
> At the end of the day, Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them.
Nowadays, in tech, it's all about who you know rather than what you know.
I've recently witnessed a situation where VP hired someone he used to work with This VP is not the best judge of talent. The guy barely does any work, and rarely responds to messages. He'll send me a scheduled slack at 8 AM. I reply. I don't hear from him all day. It's incredibly frustrating, since we had better candidates.
> but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it
I've got my first job after moving countries in Europe, despite this (very similar but it was 6 weeks IIRC) limitation being in place by law, within a week. Consulting body shop through which I was billing per day, and the umbrella company took 20% cut.
It seems its trivial to circumvent this kind of rule across the globe, and TBH what kind of state employee team would go over every single foreign first hire in given region, all the evidence and check its validity, gather all the details. Heck police ignore smaller crimes below certain threshold, states have no real processing power to handle this well.
For H1B/PERM, I remember they had to post it on the wall in a public place. Our company posted the jobs on the wall in the lunch room at our office. It has every information including the salary. I guess things have changed a bit since the early 2000s?
> Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them.
...except now the recruiting and HR can report these candidates and interviews on their metrics, candidates had a hope of finding a job, and Sam has a bulletproof explanation in case if anybody asks why his buddy was hired. Win-win-win.
I’m not shocked at all. Another issue is recruiters posting fake jobs and asking for references as step one. Soon as I say “I don’t provide references until the last step, and only to the company hiring” they hang up on me
Yea this is a weird one. Some job applications actually require me to fill in reference contact information. I can't submit the application without that detail. Of course, I try to skirt it.
Had one group request references at the beginning, checked them, then my references got to infer that I didn't get the job offer. In fact if I recall, that group ghosted me, leaving me to infer as well.
But then later another group asked me for references at the beginning, I declined to provide them, and then they were okay with proceeding through the interview process.
Maybe it would work in the general case to always reply to such a request with "some previous group ghosted me, and so I've vowed to withhold the references until later in the process."?
Personally, I find needing to provide references at all to be akin to me needing to get my parents permission. It makes my skin crawl and I will actively screen jobs that require them. The process feels demeaning and dehumanizing. Then you have to bother people who don't really know you anymore and beg them to waste their time on someone else's BS.
Yeah, I'll provide peers, but absolutely not seniors/management references. One of them very purposefully has no social media footprint and I'm not going to cross that line because of some recruiter call that almost never goes nowhere.
I'd love to go back to times where it was fine for a candidate not to have a LinkedIn. Currently, regardless of your blog, or your multiple StackOverflow answers, or your GitHub, or your posts on any of the other tech-focused communities, if HR doesn't see your LinkedIn, it's as if you're off-planet.
The tech field is centered around skills. You're under pressures to keep them sharp and up to date. When you're looking for work and you're done polishing the resume, updating the blog posts, doing your leetcode drills, do you really want to add playing LinkedIn games to the mix?
It seems to me that tech workers would benefit from having really tech-focused job networks. Not these hybrid platforms. LinkedIn, Indeed, and friends. They don't particularly care about you as a tech worker. They don't even understand you or your skillset. You're a backend dev with many years of OOP, FP, Agile, Kanban, Python, Go, SQL, JavaScript, and a slew of other relevant skills for the job, but they'll gladly inform you that you're missing a few skills to better match the list in the ad: go-getter, team-player, positive-attitude. Ok, sure, whatever...
Another thing, seeing an ad that asks for Python, Go, Node.js, SQL, React, Terraform, Kubernetes as an "Intermediate position" just tells me that no one in charge cares.
Hi, I never had a LinkedIn account or profile. Been working professionally for more than 15 years. It’s a good way to avoid distractions. You might miss on being told about opportunities, but other than that, are you sure you’re being cancelled for not having one?
When I interview, I often ask the recruiter to share the cv, portfolio, and GitHub/other. As they often just share a LinkedIn URL but that’s up to the interviewer and team to decide if enough to compromise theirs and the candidates time.
Absolutely. And a lot of spam. A few months ago there was a little flame war between a few people. Company posted an ad and someone replied "this is spam, and you don't respond, just keep posting the same ad", and the company replied "no, I own the company and hand write this job ad every month to fit our future needs" which was patently a lie (exact same headcount, exact same three positions, every month for the last eight months, and usually a byte-accurate copy of each posting), and several similar.
Not to mention it's "discouraged" to call employers out on poor behavior. I know of at least three companies who post pretty steadily who ghosted at final rounds or in one case, "We intend to present a written offer" (though in "fairness", they did eventually inform me that they'd decided to freeze hiring, well, nearly three months later).
Also along with ghost jobs do we have ghost candidates? Every job posting on LinkedIn have hundred plus applicants within the first two hours. Maybe many of the applicants are not eligible but this phenomenon points to a massive increase in labor supply for tech jobs. Automation and opening up competition globally is gutting out most of the tech jobs it seems.
Last I applied to a job posted on Who's Hiring, they had me fill a self recorded video interview on some platform. And do some coding exercise with screen sharing. Then send it to them. I've never gotten any sort of reply back, positive or negative. Felt like a clown. Won't be using that again.
Don’t use LinkedIn or Monster or Indeed. You’re better off searching on Google with “ inurl:careers” and finding positions these companies are directly hiring for.
Or Dice. Dice is just a spam magnet for "I know you're a PM in Washington looking for remote roles, but we have this two month onsite Kubernetes contract in Indiana, can we talk?"
There is benefit to being an active participant in your job search. I don't depend on anyone for employment, as self-employment is ALWAYS an option if you're serious about longevity and profit ($$$).
Honestly, the ideal approach if you're going for traditional W-2 steady paycheck employment job is:
- recruiters/people already approach you. This works when you build your network and reputation.
- use your network of trusted/worked-with-previously recruiters for leads.
- fend for yourself in the murky depths of the scummy internet full of low-life tactics reference farming, resume scraping, and G*d knows else happens when you participate in a public forum.
Real question: did you really want that job or was this just a +1 for your gamified job search? I think quality searches yield quality results.
This wasn't thought of when false advertising laws were drafted. California:
17500. It is unlawful for any person, firm, corporation or association, or any employee thereof with intent directly or indirectly to dispose of real or personal property or to perform services, professional or otherwise, or anything of any nature whatsoever or to induce the public to enter into any obligation relating thereto, to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated before the public in this state, or to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated from this state before the public in any state, in any newspaper or other publication, or any advertising device, or by public outcry or proclamation, or in any other manner or means whatever, including over the Internet, any statement, concerning that real or personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, or concerning any circumstance or matter of fact connected with the proposed performance or disposition thereof, which is untrue or misleading, and which is known, or which by the exercise of reasonable care should be known, to be untrue or misleading, or for any person, firm, or corporation to so make or disseminate or cause to be so made or disseminated any such statement as part of a plan or scheme with the intent not to sell that personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, so advertised at the price stated therein, or as so advertised. Any violation of the provisions of this section is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or by both that imprisonment and fine.
The language is broad, but they didn't cover the case of ads where no transaction was even contemplated. This is a bug.
> We leave this role posted because it's so critical to our operation and onboard as demand requires, however at this time we don't have enough demand to justify another full time hire.
I wonder how demoralizing this must be on HR workers, having to post a job, screen CV's, trying to stay professional while knowing that the hiring manager actually doesn't care, having to constantly put people with hopes off, and ultimately let people feel they are not good enough just because some C-hole wants to bring in his buddy who's most likely not half as competent as the people who were rejected.
Recruiting (which is typically part of HR) lives and dies by the need to search for candidates for open positions. No open positions - they're out of a job. So I very much doubt they feel bad doing the job they were hired to do.
I'll bite my tongue on my HR thoughts, but AFAIK HR incentives are saving a company money, or making the company a lot of money. You don't necessarily need to hire people if you're focused on cost saving measures.
I agree with others that this can be seen as market abuse since it disrupts the essential functioning of our labor markets. After completing my Master's, I've since struggled to find a job, only signing a contract yesterday thanks to my past connections and proven work from before I returned to academia. The current job market in my country has been absolutely brutal. I've applied to hundreds of roles. For many interviews, I traveled to other cities only to learn later that the positions I was being interviewed for were canceled entirely, with no one hired.
But the real issue are these "ghost" job postings where there's no intention to hire anyone at all in the first place. Some companies use them to, I guess, just gather some data and CVs + salary expectations, while others want to appear active and growing to investors, but don’t engage whatsoever when people spend time and apply. This distorts the job market and creates a lot of frustration in applicants. 90% of people I know here and more broadly in Europe have gotten their jobs via connections and people they know. I wouldn’t be surprised if some regulation comes soon, as I doubt I'm the only one impacted by this situation.
Well I think the person quoted is suggesting you work on your network now, presumably before you are looking for a job. But I could see an argument that even going to meetups and just talking to people while you're actively looking is more likely to be successful than emailing resumes. That is to say, even the act of building a network from the ground up could be highly effective.
So, this is the problem. We are doing a Kabuki dance where there is an illusion of good faith and meritocracy, when really, it's just a brutalist labor order book between employers and employees, unless you have a network (which takes years to build and might still prove useless if you can't refer someone into your org because blah blah hiring pipeline that is really just garbage anyway). For example, someone at the VP level at Slack recently posted on LinkedIn for a job req that all candidates have to go through the formal process to avoid unfairness (no informal resume reviews or interviews would be had).
If you offer up a job req, there should be punitive consequences if it is not legitimate. You are incurring cost and harm on job seekers spending time engaging with said post, at no cost to the employer. This is to be solved for, just as pay transparency is slowly being solved for with regulation and statute. If you have policy suggestions, I'm interested, as someone who engages with policymakers.
Embarrassing admission: I don't really understand how "networking" works when it comes to getting a job. It's always just stated: "Go network, bro!" but without any explanation of how it is supposed to work. I wish someone could pretend I was a dummy, and explain the process to me using simple words. From start (you don't know anyone working at company X) to finish (you accept a job at company X).
I remember long ago the career development people at my university would tell us to all go out and "network" company representatives when they come during career week. The way it was explained to me was to go up to them and pretend to be their friend, talk about sportsball, drink alcohol with them, gain some rapport or something... It was never really clear what the right magical incantation was. All I know was some people were really good at it and got invited to interview at dozens of companies, and other had no luck at all.
But, just for argument's sake, let's say I go out and successfully manage to "network" you. You now know me and think I would be a good employee. What now? I guess I say "Hey, rightbyte, I'm looking for a job at your company. Do you know of any roles that are hiring?" You say "Sure, here's job position XYZ, and the link to go apply. Good luck!" And now I'm back where I started. Or if I'm lucky, you will refer me in your company's HR system, giving your digital "thumbs up" in that system, and that referral will send me... an E-mail with the link where I should go apply. I'm still not that much better off. Is that thumbs up going to let me skip rounds of interviews or give me extra points when the yes/no decision happens? How does it help me break through the hundreds of other candidates that are cold-applying?
I've had people reach out to me and ask me to refer them for a job with my employer, and in most companies, all I can do is point them to a job link. I'm lowly worker-bee number 52231, I don't have some kind of hiring boost I can hand out to people.
The whole 'networking' enterprise seems like a bizarre, opaque process where nobody can explain how it works, but everyone's advice is that we should all somehow "go do it" as it's an important component of a job search.
I think there’s a legitimate market opportunity here. I am seeking a cofounder to build the job board that vets employers, and makes money by charging candidates to access it.
The problem to be solved, imo, is ghost listings.
- I don’t care if a company ghosts me because they hired someone else
- I care if I spend time filling out applications for jobs that don’t exist
I’m not sure how to make participation by the employer tractable. They can’t exactly be mandated to hire, can they? Unless I’m trapped in a prison of the mind that seems like too risky of a proposition for them.
That said, as a candidate I would happily pay $USD/month for access to a job board where I know that the job as posted is definitely for real and definitely getting filled in a certain timeframe. I don’t care if my particular resume gets read, or replied to. I only care that the phenomena of “ghost job” is nonexistent in the walled-garden that I’m paying for access to.
This sounds similar to a problem dating sites face—solving the user's problem leads them away from the service. But you have the added difficulty that people looking for employment may not have the resources to spend on another monthly subscription.
>. I am seeking a cofounder to build the job board that vets employers, and makes money by charging candidates to access it.
Sounds like awful monetization. Dating site issue is right. Your best candidates (so ideally, all the ones you vet) won't be long term subscribers. And sadly, there's way too many grifts in the job system where a candidate paying is a red flag. You'd need to offer the candidates something of value to justify that. Not just "a promise of no ghost jobs").
Is there an issue with the usual recruiter pipeline where you can charge the company some percent of the hire once they get hired? Candidates get hired, company pays a little extra on a successful hire, and your profit incentives come from quality to offer for the companies (hopefully).
The main issue is that it assumes that companies genuinely care about an efficient hiring pipeline. And I've been very cynical in recent times...
Incentivize the employer to only provide real listings by having them pay to advertise a listing. Let them be reimbursed if it's filled via the platform.
You don't need to solve the problem 100%. An employer can still drag their feet and not fill a listing. But by aligning all incentives you can drastically reduce the problem.
Post makes errors around what nonprofits are and can do. (IANAL, but I do set up and run nonprofits for a living.)
Error 1: "In the US, non-profits are heavily regulated in their operations..."
Correction: There are no more or less regulations than other sectors, but there is almost ZERO enforcement, so if anything, the nonprofit sector is more accurately described as very lightly regulated.
Error 2: ", and exempt from income tax."
Correction: Nonprofits are NOT exempt from income tax on revenue from earned activity that is not mission related, known as Unrelated Business Income.
Error 3: "Across the many different structures, though, non-profits have one thing in common: They don't have owners."
Correction: Oversimplification - nonprofits are run and functionally owned by a board of directors, people who hire and fire the CEO, decide how revenue is allocated, and approve any merger or dissolution. Nonprofits can also own for-profit subsidiaries (see OpenAI) so there are a lot of gray areas here.
In sum, nonprofit status is far more complex that OP thinks and there are a ton of opportunities for skulduggery - just because Ghost is a nonprofit does NOT mean it is free of conflicts or other bad things than companies do.
If Ghost really wants to demonstrate its transparency, it should publish its tax returns (IRS form 990) and also an itemized P&L -- then they can stake a claim to being holier than the typical business.
People often think that "non-profit" means that the company can't make a profit. It actually means that the company doesn't have any owners who can personally take the profits. Any revenue earned can only be reinvested.
What we need is, is Job-postings-as-code so that we can automate the deployment of Linkedin postings such that when a recruiter is let go, we can automatically identify their postings and clean them up.
We'll call it DevHiringOps
Seriously tho, always use the companies website instead of believing whatever is on some job posting website.
Noticed this trend a few years ago from startups keen to look like they were growing much faster than they really were. Personally I wouldn’t begin the process unless an insider had confirmed that a position was a) Real, and b) I would not be disfavoured somehow, meaning that I would be applying on a level playing field.
Of the obvious fake job postings I've seen, I always assumed they were attempts at Russian or Chinese espionage. Example: for a very brief time I was a US DoD contractor.
Just my own experience but I have never gotten a job with a cold application on a job board. Always been via a recruiter or even better an inside contact.
My experience is completely the opposite: I've always gotten jobs from job boards. In one case, my resume was posted somewhere (monster.com I think, many years ago) and the hiring manager saw it and liked it and called me. In all other cases, I applied myself.
I've tried working with 3rd-party recruiters, and always found them to be a waste of time, because the companies they worked with weren't good and didn't pay very well.
In contrast, I have only once in my career gotten a job via an inside contact. Of the four jobs I've had since school, three of them were with a cold application.
I think my secret is working in a specific niche, but I could be wrong.
> They also made ads to “trick overworked employees” into believing that more people would be brought on to alleviate their overwhelming workload.
The part of the picture I'm more interested about is how the managers see it.
There must be a lowly manager actually trying to do something about their overworked team, and I assume they have access to HR and know which positions are real which aren't. And they know the company not only doesn't intend to hire, but is also gaslighting them, and they're made part of it.
It feels so gloom and just depressing beyond words.
The article doesn't really discuss the legality of this, which I'd be curious to hear the opinion of a lawyer.
In other cases, it's considered criminal if a company deliberately puts out false information about itself. E.g., if you lie about your companies products (like Theranos), it's pretty clear that this is not legal.
I don't see why it should be legal to lie about your job opportunities.
ah the ol “Everything is securities fraud”. I could see it. Company posts jobs for department that is being divested/going out of business/etc, this misleads investors, ergo: securities fraud.
This is just one example. While tech jobs are diverse, the well-heeled players substantially set the tone and they have gone berserk: over the last few years they have neutron bombed entire zip codes claiming hard times, then posted record-shattering EPS beats, then hired back a bunch of people at substantially lower compensation in a phenomenon so pervasive to have a catchy name: “boomerang”. It’s not even the first time recently got popped for wage fixing, Don’t Poach Gate was like 15 years ago. They’re giving us all the finger in the Crimson, and we will do nothing because we can do nothing.
It’s a trivial abuse of monopsony pricing power, it’s illegal in the sense that the laws as written prohibit it on a common-sense, “intended by the legislature” sense, a lawyer can tell you if it’s maybe legal via stare decis via activist judges bench legislating.
But more importantly it has destroyed what loose social contract there was: they cannot in fact run these businesses at 60-70% of peak headcount sustainably: they can merely coast on previous investments long enough to crush salaries and then clean up the mess because there isn’t any real competition. They can distort hiring to where McCarthyist vibe checks and loyalty tests hit a precision/recall that is Pareto optimized for the minimum amount of competence that admits an endorsement of their nepo baby “nice trumps kind” mythology.
And they’re going to get away with it at the level that matters: the individual incentives of executives are nothing to do with the long term interests of shareholders or the commons on this: progress is stalling out in a way that will never show up on a quarterly report in time to matter to the executives.
And you can see it in real time: we haven’t had such an embarrassing crop of people who were someone’s roommate at Harvard running the show in at least 30 years, the outcomes are awful, the software sucks, the products suck, and the game is soft communist friction around leaving the platform.
I haven’t had to resort to applying to jobs I couldn’t or wouldn’t do to fulfill unemployment insurance requirements, but who knows what will happen in December if this goes on.
proportions. 1 uninterested candidate wastes maybe 5 hours at best of a million dollar company's time. All the while those doing the interviewing were paid anyway.
1 bad post wastes dozens, hundreds of applicant's time. Especially the damn Workday apps. That time is not compensated and only gets worse the farter in you go.
I mean the reason I can think of off the top of my head is that one is wasting the time of people who are looking for a job so they can continue to live, and the other is wasting the time of a person who's job is reviewing resumes?
thegrim33|1 year ago
Instantly that felt completely insane to me, my bullshit detector went off the chart, so since they provided a source, I followed up on the source to see the evidence for myself.
What do you know, the source is from a "my perfect resume" website that apparently conducted a study on the issue, but they aren't providing the details of the study, aren't providing a paper , aren't providing the methodology or questions asked, aren't providing any details whatsoever, the only thing they provide is the "conclusions" of their study.
So, apparently because this random website supposedly conducted a study, and they say the result was "81% posted fake jobs", that makes it true.
Hey, I also conducted a study, and 14% posted fake jobs. There, my claim has just as much backing as theirs does.
Instantly lost interest in the "study" and the article based on it.
joe_the_user|1 year ago
neonrider|1 year ago
Although I understand, and to some extent share, your skepticism regarding the "study", I have no problem conceiving that a trend might currently be setting around the practice of posting fake ads, for whatever reason. It doesn't require much. In an unregulated playing field, simple peer pressure and survival is all you need to drive everyone to shady practices.
So, the study might be moot, but the number isn't so surprising.
johnnyanmac|1 year ago
https://www.forbes.com/sites/karadennison/2023/11/27/how-gho...
You probably need to pay to see their surveys, but even if you don't trust that: the bureau of labor has had to make huge adjustments all this year and last year. This isn't just some bad optics.
PittleyDunkin|1 year ago
I love San Francisco to death, but there's no reliable local newspaper. It drives me nuts.
wood_spirit|1 year ago
m463|1 year ago
What about job postings that are not taken down until a new hire is given the offer, agrees verbally, signs the paperwork, relocates and actually shows up on the job?
DebtDeflation|1 year ago
Same thing happens with H1B/PERM, except now it's the law requiring it rather than company policy. The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it.
Terrible situation for all involved.
vosper|1 year ago
Posted obscurely in a corner of the cafeteria, but exposing my salary to anyone who cared to look. They were never going to hire someone else, and we all knew it, but the charade had to be played.
KerrAvon|1 year ago
jay_kyburz|1 year ago
thrw42A8N|1 year ago
gaws|1 year ago
Nowadays, in tech, it's all about who you know rather than what you know.
icedchai|1 year ago
iancmceachern|1 year ago
jajko|1 year ago
I've got my first job after moving countries in Europe, despite this (very similar but it was 6 weeks IIRC) limitation being in place by law, within a week. Consulting body shop through which I was billing per day, and the umbrella company took 20% cut.
It seems its trivial to circumvent this kind of rule across the globe, and TBH what kind of state employee team would go over every single foreign first hire in given region, all the evidence and check its validity, gather all the details. Heck police ignore smaller crimes below certain threshold, states have no real processing power to handle this well.
ojbyrne|1 year ago
djmips|1 year ago
drillsteps5|1 year ago
...except now the recruiting and HR can report these candidates and interviews on their metrics, candidates had a hope of finding a job, and Sam has a bulletproof explanation in case if anybody asks why his buddy was hired. Win-win-win.
matt3210|1 year ago
zero-sharp|1 year ago
Is this normal?
NickC25|1 year ago
The amount of spam and fake jobs on LI + other major sites is just disgusting and is ripe for government to come in and crack some heads.
arwhatever|1 year ago
But then later another group asked me for references at the beginning, I declined to provide them, and then they were okay with proceeding through the interview process.
Maybe it would work in the general case to always reply to such a request with "some previous group ghosted me, and so I've vowed to withhold the references until later in the process."?
deprecative|1 year ago
johnnyanmac|1 year ago
neonrider|1 year ago
The tech field is centered around skills. You're under pressures to keep them sharp and up to date. When you're looking for work and you're done polishing the resume, updating the blog posts, doing your leetcode drills, do you really want to add playing LinkedIn games to the mix?
It seems to me that tech workers would benefit from having really tech-focused job networks. Not these hybrid platforms. LinkedIn, Indeed, and friends. They don't particularly care about you as a tech worker. They don't even understand you or your skillset. You're a backend dev with many years of OOP, FP, Agile, Kanban, Python, Go, SQL, JavaScript, and a slew of other relevant skills for the job, but they'll gladly inform you that you're missing a few skills to better match the list in the ad: go-getter, team-player, positive-attitude. Ok, sure, whatever...
Another thing, seeing an ad that asks for Python, Go, Node.js, SQL, React, Terraform, Kubernetes as an "Intermediate position" just tells me that no one in charge cares.
heldrida|1 year ago
When I interview, I often ask the recruiter to share the cv, portfolio, and GitHub/other. As they often just share a LinkedIn URL but that’s up to the interviewer and team to decide if enough to compromise theirs and the candidates time.
whamlastxmas|1 year ago
Buttons840|1 year ago
FireBeyond|1 year ago
Not to mention it's "discouraged" to call employers out on poor behavior. I know of at least three companies who post pretty steadily who ghosted at final rounds or in one case, "We intend to present a written offer" (though in "fairness", they did eventually inform me that they'd decided to freeze hiring, well, nearly three months later).
evilfred|1 year ago
la64710|1 year ago
ThalesX|1 year ago
itqwertz|1 year ago
stewx|1 year ago
FireBeyond|1 year ago
latentcall|1 year ago
Eumenes|1 year ago
itqwertz|1 year ago
Honestly, the ideal approach if you're going for traditional W-2 steady paycheck employment job is:
- recruiters/people already approach you. This works when you build your network and reputation. - use your network of trusted/worked-with-previously recruiters for leads. - fend for yourself in the murky depths of the scummy internet full of low-life tactics reference farming, resume scraping, and G*d knows else happens when you participate in a public forum.
Real question: did you really want that job or was this just a +1 for your gamified job search? I think quality searches yield quality results.
Sakos|1 year ago
Animats|1 year ago
17500. It is unlawful for any person, firm, corporation or association, or any employee thereof with intent directly or indirectly to dispose of real or personal property or to perform services, professional or otherwise, or anything of any nature whatsoever or to induce the public to enter into any obligation relating thereto, to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated before the public in this state, or to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated from this state before the public in any state, in any newspaper or other publication, or any advertising device, or by public outcry or proclamation, or in any other manner or means whatever, including over the Internet, any statement, concerning that real or personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, or concerning any circumstance or matter of fact connected with the proposed performance or disposition thereof, which is untrue or misleading, and which is known, or which by the exercise of reasonable care should be known, to be untrue or misleading, or for any person, firm, or corporation to so make or disseminate or cause to be so made or disseminated any such statement as part of a plan or scheme with the intent not to sell that personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, so advertised at the price stated therein, or as so advertised. Any violation of the provisions of this section is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or by both that imprisonment and fine.
The language is broad, but they didn't cover the case of ads where no transaction was even contemplated. This is a bug.
briandear|1 year ago
Posting ghost jobs is a deceptive act.
SN76477|1 year ago
> We leave this role posted because it's so critical to our operation and onboard as demand requires, however at this time we don't have enough demand to justify another full time hire.
neilv|1 year ago
> While some respondents said employers did it to maintain a presence on job boards and build a talent pool, it’s also used [...]
For securities fraud?
toomuchtodo|1 year ago
de6u99er|1 year ago
I wonder how demoralizing this must be on HR workers, having to post a job, screen CV's, trying to stay professional while knowing that the hiring manager actually doesn't care, having to constantly put people with hopes off, and ultimately let people feel they are not good enough just because some C-hole wants to bring in his buddy who's most likely not half as competent as the people who were rejected.
drillsteps5|1 year ago
johnnyanmac|1 year ago
iamsanteri|1 year ago
But the real issue are these "ghost" job postings where there's no intention to hire anyone at all in the first place. Some companies use them to, I guess, just gather some data and CVs + salary expectations, while others want to appear active and growing to investors, but don’t engage whatsoever when people spend time and apply. This distorts the job market and creates a lot of frustration in applicants. 90% of people I know here and more broadly in Europe have gotten their jobs via connections and people they know. I wouldn’t be surprised if some regulation comes soon, as I doubt I'm the only one impacted by this situation.
tropicalfruit|1 year ago
wow, HR and management really have a lot of contempt for their staff.
i deleted my ln in 2022. i have a deep mistrust of all web platforms. i know what i do on the UI and what happens in the code are not the same.
rightbyte|1 year ago
“Always, always, always put networking as one of the top components of your job search strategy,”
This is such a strange advice. It is too late when searching for a job.
A 'network' takes year to build.
jgwil2|1 year ago
toomuchtodo|1 year ago
If you offer up a job req, there should be punitive consequences if it is not legitimate. You are incurring cost and harm on job seekers spending time engaging with said post, at no cost to the employer. This is to be solved for, just as pay transparency is slowly being solved for with regulation and statute. If you have policy suggestions, I'm interested, as someone who engages with policymakers.
ryandrake|1 year ago
I remember long ago the career development people at my university would tell us to all go out and "network" company representatives when they come during career week. The way it was explained to me was to go up to them and pretend to be their friend, talk about sportsball, drink alcohol with them, gain some rapport or something... It was never really clear what the right magical incantation was. All I know was some people were really good at it and got invited to interview at dozens of companies, and other had no luck at all.
But, just for argument's sake, let's say I go out and successfully manage to "network" you. You now know me and think I would be a good employee. What now? I guess I say "Hey, rightbyte, I'm looking for a job at your company. Do you know of any roles that are hiring?" You say "Sure, here's job position XYZ, and the link to go apply. Good luck!" And now I'm back where I started. Or if I'm lucky, you will refer me in your company's HR system, giving your digital "thumbs up" in that system, and that referral will send me... an E-mail with the link where I should go apply. I'm still not that much better off. Is that thumbs up going to let me skip rounds of interviews or give me extra points when the yes/no decision happens? How does it help me break through the hundreds of other candidates that are cold-applying?
I've had people reach out to me and ask me to refer them for a job with my employer, and in most companies, all I can do is point them to a job link. I'm lowly worker-bee number 52231, I don't have some kind of hiring boost I can hand out to people.
The whole 'networking' enterprise seems like a bizarre, opaque process where nobody can explain how it works, but everyone's advice is that we should all somehow "go do it" as it's an important component of a job search.
singlepaynews|1 year ago
The problem to be solved, imo, is ghost listings. - I don’t care if a company ghosts me because they hired someone else - I care if I spend time filling out applications for jobs that don’t exist
I’m not sure how to make participation by the employer tractable. They can’t exactly be mandated to hire, can they? Unless I’m trapped in a prison of the mind that seems like too risky of a proposition for them.
That said, as a candidate I would happily pay $USD/month for access to a job board where I know that the job as posted is definitely for real and definitely getting filled in a certain timeframe. I don’t care if my particular resume gets read, or replied to. I only care that the phenomena of “ghost job” is nonexistent in the walled-garden that I’m paying for access to.
hiatus|1 year ago
It sounds interesting though, good luck!
johnnyanmac|1 year ago
Sounds like awful monetization. Dating site issue is right. Your best candidates (so ideally, all the ones you vet) won't be long term subscribers. And sadly, there's way too many grifts in the job system where a candidate paying is a red flag. You'd need to offer the candidates something of value to justify that. Not just "a promise of no ghost jobs").
Is there an issue with the usual recruiter pipeline where you can charge the company some percent of the hire once they get hired? Candidates get hired, company pays a little extra on a successful hire, and your profit incentives come from quality to offer for the companies (hopefully).
The main issue is that it assumes that companies genuinely care about an efficient hiring pipeline. And I've been very cynical in recent times...
tmn|1 year ago
You don't need to solve the problem 100%. An employer can still drag their feet and not fill a listing. But by aligning all incentives you can drastically reduce the problem.
SeattleAltruist|1 year ago
Error 1: "In the US, non-profits are heavily regulated in their operations..."
Correction: There are no more or less regulations than other sectors, but there is almost ZERO enforcement, so if anything, the nonprofit sector is more accurately described as very lightly regulated.
Error 2: ", and exempt from income tax."
Correction: Nonprofits are NOT exempt from income tax on revenue from earned activity that is not mission related, known as Unrelated Business Income.
Error 3: "Across the many different structures, though, non-profits have one thing in common: They don't have owners."
Correction: Oversimplification - nonprofits are run and functionally owned by a board of directors, people who hire and fire the CEO, decide how revenue is allocated, and approve any merger or dissolution. Nonprofits can also own for-profit subsidiaries (see OpenAI) so there are a lot of gray areas here.
In sum, nonprofit status is far more complex that OP thinks and there are a ton of opportunities for skulduggery - just because Ghost is a nonprofit does NOT mean it is free of conflicts or other bad things than companies do.
If Ghost really wants to demonstrate its transparency, it should publish its tax returns (IRS form 990) and also an itemized P&L -- then they can stake a claim to being holier than the typical business.
People often think that "non-profit" means that the company can't make a profit. It actually means that the company doesn't have any owners who can personally take the profits. Any revenue earned can only be reinvested.
erulabs|1 year ago
We'll call it DevHiringOps
Seriously tho, always use the companies website instead of believing whatever is on some job posting website.
b3ing|1 year ago
zero-sharp|1 year ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41714672
nickdothutton|1 year ago
ugh123|1 year ago
Ah... recruiters at it again.
doctor_radium|1 year ago
SN76477|1 year ago
SoftTalker|1 year ago
shiroiushi|1 year ago
I've tried working with 3rd-party recruiters, and always found them to be a waste of time, because the companies they worked with weren't good and didn't pay very well.
VyseofArcadia|1 year ago
I think my secret is working in a specific niche, but I could be wrong.
rqtwteye|1 year ago
josephd79|1 year ago
red-iron-pine|1 year ago
sdenton4|1 year ago
makeitdouble|1 year ago
The part of the picture I'm more interested about is how the managers see it.
There must be a lowly manager actually trying to do something about their overworked team, and I assume they have access to HR and know which positions are real which aren't. And they know the company not only doesn't intend to hire, but is also gaslighting them, and they're made part of it.
It feels so gloom and just depressing beyond words.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
hannob|1 year ago
In other cases, it's considered criminal if a company deliberately puts out false information about itself. E.g., if you lie about your companies products (like Theranos), it's pretty clear that this is not legal.
I don't see why it should be legal to lie about your job opportunities.
kaibee|1 year ago
fluorinerocket|1 year ago
Uncouple4063|1 year ago
evilfred|1 year ago
benreesman|1 year ago
It’s a trivial abuse of monopsony pricing power, it’s illegal in the sense that the laws as written prohibit it on a common-sense, “intended by the legislature” sense, a lawyer can tell you if it’s maybe legal via stare decis via activist judges bench legislating.
But more importantly it has destroyed what loose social contract there was: they cannot in fact run these businesses at 60-70% of peak headcount sustainably: they can merely coast on previous investments long enough to crush salaries and then clean up the mess because there isn’t any real competition. They can distort hiring to where McCarthyist vibe checks and loyalty tests hit a precision/recall that is Pareto optimized for the minimum amount of competence that admits an endorsement of their nepo baby “nice trumps kind” mythology.
And they’re going to get away with it at the level that matters: the individual incentives of executives are nothing to do with the long term interests of shareholders or the commons on this: progress is stalling out in a way that will never show up on a quarterly report in time to matter to the executives.
And you can see it in real time: we haven’t had such an embarrassing crop of people who were someone’s roommate at Harvard running the show in at least 30 years, the outcomes are awful, the software sucks, the products suck, and the game is soft communist friction around leaving the platform.
hinkley|1 year ago
tennisflyi|1 year ago
VyseofArcadia|1 year ago
harryjadon|1 year ago
[deleted]
lupire|1 year ago
Filtering through a 1000 unemployed people spamming every job listing isn't going to give them useful intel.
hinkley|1 year ago
johnnyanmac|1 year ago
proportions. 1 uninterested candidate wastes maybe 5 hours at best of a million dollar company's time. All the while those doing the interviewing were paid anyway.
1 bad post wastes dozens, hundreds of applicant's time. Especially the damn Workday apps. That time is not compensated and only gets worse the farter in you go.
ryanmcbride|1 year ago