6 ms·
That plum job listing may just be a ghost
- itsdrewmiller 4y agoHere's the blog post giving a little more detail about the survey cited in the article: https://clarifycapital.com/job-seekers-beware-of-ghost-jobs-survey https://clarifycapital.com/job-seekers-beware-of-ghost-jobs-... The methodology here is still not clear - how did you source "managers involved in the hiring process", and how did you find 1045 of them over two days - but it provides some information that at least puts the article in a little bit more context. The "one third" of managers saying that they post fake jobs to trick employees was in response to a multi-select question where the next closest reason was literally "no reason in particular".
- thephyber 4y agoI’ve also read that some companies do this (overprovision job listings and make them difficult / impossible to match) to prove the need for H1B visas, presumably to open the market up to cheaper employees. Not discussed in the article: The “resume firewall” (resume filtering software) also seems to be a significant hurdle for applicants and likely causes misallocation of hiring resources if it is misconfigured for reasonable applicants. It’s possible that some positions actually exist and might match listings, but no applicants can manage to “press all the right buttons” to get interviewed.
- abudabi123 4y ago[flagged]
- ergonaught 4y agoThis has been true since at least June of last year, and has obviously accelerated and expanded. I’m not sure why they think it’s a good idea. I’ve now got a pretty hefty list of companies I won’t work for, will recommend people I know don’t work for, and will recommend against doing business with (as customer or partner) based solely on disrespectful and deceitful practices like this. I guess that’s irrelevant to most of them, but that’s the world I suppose.
- joncrane 4y agoAre you comfortable naming those companies here?
- itake 4y ago> I’m not sure why they think it’s a good idea. Historically hiring tech workers is really hard, especially for small companies. Applications trickle in. Good candidates are 10% of the pool at best. "evergreen" job postings keep a pool of applicants that can quickly be drawn from when headcount is open. If headcount isn't filled quickly, hiring managers may lose the head count, so they are optimizing for fast hiring.
- Krisjohn 4y agoStaff that will burn thousands of combined hours of other people in order to save themselves a day or two are a HUGE RED FLAG! Businesses that think that is perfectly reasonable are toxic AF.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoBack when my employer went under in the housing collapse I saw it even then. I estimated that at least 80% of everything I saw was either a repeat of something else or in some other fashion not a real job--and that was only the stuff I could actually determine was bogus.
- FredPret 4y agoYou should post the list online. Name them and shame them. Otherwise what's the harm to them in doing it forever, to everyone?
- gampleman 4y agoHiring a senior tech job for a niche company in a niche location: employees have 1 month notice, but it takes 12 months find a passable candidate, longer to find a good one.
- __jambo 4y agoCan I see the list?! Great that you can do this.
- mschuster91 4y agoThere's another reason for these "ghost jobs" that isn't even mentioned here: bypassing employment regulations against wage dumping. For H1B (US) and most of EU worker visa, employers have to prove that they had open positions for domestic candidates that they couldn't fill in a reasonable time - so they keep up these postings and reject/frustrate domestic applications for long enough to hire someone from overseas at barely above minimum wage. On top of that... some companies have burned the bridge so far by exploiting their employees that they legitimately can't find anyone willing to work there any more.
- hackernewds 4y agoThis is also part of the procedure for sponsoring an existing employee for their permanent residency (aka green card). A case must be made that there were no eligible domestic candidates to replace them. Just the fact that this is necessary is absurd to me. So it's not something that either the company or employee does wilingly
- User23 4y agoWhat the company is not doing willingly is raising wages, which is the actual intent of the law.
- nine_zeros 4y ago> What the company is not doing willingly is raising wages, which is the actual intent of the law. That may be the intent of the law but it is so badly implemented that it takes 1 year to get a DOL certification that the wages are ok, then 3 months to prepare for a job opening and advertisements, 1 month to interview candidates and then file a PERM application with DOL again which takes another 9 months. These timeframes are ridiculous. The tech industry changes much faster than the above timeframes. So employers are left with no choice but to "game" the system to retain their employees. Until the US government figures out how to make the immigration process more efficient, there is no stopping the gaming. People don't live so long, companies don't survive so long. Employees don't stay at the company so long. Then, the only option left for these companies is to hire outside the US.
- RistrettoMike 4y agoOn the flip-side to what’s described in this article (companies posting listings for jobs that don’t exist), our company doesn’t hire often and has incessant issues with bots picking up & re-hosting our old job listings from years prior. We must get 15-20 mails a week in regards to a re-posted listing for a position that hasn’t been open since last spring.
- devstein 4y agoDo you have source of truth for if that job is still active? For example, is the job description still publicly visible from your ATS (Greehouse, Lever, etc) I asked because I've been thinking about this problem with job boards. Job boards often duplicate job description information rather than relying on the original JD in the company's ATS.
- jurassic 4y agoAnecdote: I have 9 years of solid tech experience and applied to ~20 open roles last month. So far I have only heard back from 1 of those recruiters. Companies that are hiring right now are filling roles primarily through employee referral, so work your network.
- Peroni 4y agoAgreed. I'd push "work your network" a few steps further and advise people to shamelessly leverage your network. If you’ve found a job that interests you or even simply a company that appeals to you, get on LinkedIn and see if you have any connections at all at the company. Regardless of how strong or tenuous the connection, reach out to them and ask them if they have any insight into the position. Even if they know nothing about the role, ask them if they can introduce you to someone that does. The worst that will happen is they will simply ignore you so you’re no worse off than if you hadn’t reached out in the first place.
- efields 4y agoThis was recommended to me too. It's more sniper and less shotgun. Job boards really obscure the fact that so many jobs, as in so much of life, is who you know. Value your time as a job applicant as much as you value your time as an employee. Don't make yourself just another row in a database. Be a high priority email thread.
- j45 4y agoEmployee referrals are the real job network.
- j45 4y agoAdditionally, attend meetups, present things you are doing as a beginner, let it strike conversations, and let the ensuing experience about talking about something work like be the feeling you leave each other with. In time you'll find something you can bring up with them, or they can bring up with you. Build your network months or years before you ever need anything from it.
- TheMoonToMyLeft 4y agoAt this point I'm no longer willing to deal with job postings because I can't trust anything I see on the internet. I'd rather just put up a "situation wanted" post with a "principals only" warning and see if waiting for people to reach out to me is really that much worse than reaching out to businesses.
- justsocrateasin 4y agoI've found that there are two approaches - shotgun and sniper. Shotgun approach - figure out what software speciality and industry you want (for me, it's Data Engineering in Biotech/anything life sciences), and apply to every single job that you seem fit for. I applied to 20, heard back from 2-3. Sniper approach - if you find a job that you actually really want, work your network as hard as you can. Find a friend who is connected with the company, ask them to make an introduction. Find random people at the company, LinkedIn message the hiring manager, do anything you can to get an interview. Once you get an interview, you have a chance, but the hard part is getting the interview.
- bluedino 4y agoI've used the sniper approach. Where have you been? We've been trying FOREVER to find a good person for this role. You should have been working here years ago! "I applied like 6 times. Nobody ever called me back."
- smallerfish 4y agoJob posting: "If you aren't an exact fit on paper, please apply anyway". ATS system: "Candidate does not have staff software enginer for 5 years of job titles + doesn't have 'SQL' and 'HTML' listed in their skills section" = /dev/null
- bluefirebrand 4y agoHiring Manager: I can train the skills if the person is right and has a solid foundation HR recruiter: I don't want to actually have to look through all of these resumes to find "close" matches.
- feoren 4y agoHiring Manager: Okay, fine, then just forward me all the resumes you get, and I'll look through them! HR recruiter: No
- 4y ago
- sammalloy 4y ago> I first thought of it as an anomaly, and now I see it as a trend This has been going on for decades. I was complaining about it back in the year 2001. It is not new.
- neonate 4y agohttps://archive.ph/HTtBR https://archive.ph/HTtBR
- mikelovenotwar 4y agoOr worse, go to an interview, they ask you how to fix a specific problem, never hear from them again. Later find out that they had no openings, just wanted the problem solved.
- ed25519FUUU 4y agoLmao has this happened to you? If someone’s problem really can be fixed in a 45 minute conversation I’d gladly provide it for a beer. No subterfuge necessary.
- mikelovenotwar 4y agoOnce, shortly after the .com bubble burst, and I only found out a year or so later. The interviewer, rather worse for ware, approached me in a nightclub and told me all about it.
- epups 4y agoYou're hired, I will pay you ~40 beers a week
- ericmcer 4y agoI ran interviews at my last job. Most candidates struggled with basic algos like: write a function to check if a string is a palindrome. I can't imagine a candidate being: A. Someone who can solve engineering problems we can't with no context in under an hour. B. Someone we don't want to make an offer too.
- mikelovenotwar 4y ago> A. Someone who can solve engineering problems we can't with no context in under an hour. Not all employers have dedicated IT teams, behaviour such as this fixes a problem without having to pay for it, while giving false hope to interviewees.
- skeeter2020 4y ago>> write a function to check if a string is a palindrome. outside of an intern or junior these types of questions are such garbage. Do your teams write a lot of trivial, isolated functions in the day to day?
- janeerie 4y agoEven worse, I've had two instances in the past few months of going through the entire interview process, being told that they just need to make the final decision or put together an offer, and then having the job disappear. One of those postings is still up...
- CharlieDigital 4y agoA cynic's take on this -- having gone through this process with direct reports for whom I was applying for H1B visa's for -- is that it is required for us as a part of the H1B application process. I had to do this more than once. Post job description, collect resumes, show evidence of job posting, and interviewed candidates.
- janeerie 4y agoIn that scenario, I doubt they would go all the way to discussing the offer and how they can shape the role for me. Also, I'm in design, which has less of an H1B presence. I think the org just decided at the final moment that they didn't actually want to hire for the role.
- Yoric 4y agoI've had that twice in the past few months, too. I now have 3 companies that tell me that they need to make final decision/put together an offer, waiting to see if that goes better.
- janeerie 4y agoUgh, good luck. I do currently have a job, so I've decided to just drop out of this game for a bit. It's too frustrating to waste my time.
- webdoodle 4y agoIt could be a honey trap, to identify potential competitors, or it could be used to falsely imply said company is working on something they are not, so as to distract there competition. In either case it's clearly an intelligence operation. I've scraped job listings for several companies, organizations and governments for years. It's a wealth of information that gives you insights into what a company is doing, what it values and where it may be going.
- stalfosknight 4y agoNone of this is new. This was happening to me back in 2018.
- my_city 4y ago" One-third of the managers who said they advertised jobs they weren’t trying to fill said they kept the listings up to placate overworked employees." "placate overworked employees". Thats a funny way of saying "lying to keep exploiting overworked employees". But is the Wall Street Journal, what could we expect?
- itsdrewmiller 4y agoHere's the summary from the company using this to generate press. https://clarifycapital.com/job-seekers-beware-of-ghost-jobs-survey https://clarifycapital.com/job-seekers-beware-of-ghost-jobs-... Another reason one third of managers claimed - "no reason in particular".