14 ms·

1 in 5 online job postings are either fake or never filled, study finds

418 points by belter 2y ago

grajaganDev 2y ago
This is clearly fraud and needs to stop. Companies behaving like this demand regulation. Instead of whining about regulation, read the room and don't bring it on yourselves.
hunglee2 2y ago
The outrage from job seekers is justified but Gizmodo doesn't help matters by categorising fraud (fake jobs) with failure (never filled). Hiring is hard, as anyone who has ever done it will attest, and very many vacancies opened in good faith are not filled for a variety of reasons - budget pulled, hiring manager won't make a decision, internal candidate appears at late stage etc. We also need to draw a distinction between employers posting jobs directly vs 3rd party agencies posting jobs for the company's they represent, or purport to represent. There is a disincentive for the former to post 'fake jobs' - who wants to deal with the applicant flow, but an incentive for the latter to do so - harvest resume's, build a database. Anyways. My point is, there _is_ a problem but mainstream magazine treatment like this from Gizmodo serves to add smoke when there's already a fire
- reptation 2y ago
  Sure, hiring is hard but the factors you mention are rare, and teams are extremely motivated to fill vacancies.
  - derektank 2y ago
    Teams are also strongly motivated to not hire a bad team member that drags down morale and wastes resources. I want to say this is more true in government hiring, where it's difficult to fire people, but I've seen private companies hold out for a long time until they find someone with the right combination of cultural fit and technical skills.
    - spratzt 2y ago
      It’s extraordinary how frequently companies discuss the cost of a bad hire and never consider the opportunity cost of a no-hire. Companies that keep waiting for Mr. Right are really saying that the opportunity cost of not completing their project is very low. In other words it’s not really that important at all.
      - danaris 2y ago
        On the contrary. "Not completing the project" is not an option—if they don't hire someone to fill a vacancy on the team, the rest of the team will just be expected to work extra hours to keep up. Oh, not with overtime—you're salaried, remember? (Alternate version: Oh, no, you can't actually log the extra hours; we don't have the budget for overtime, and I, the manager, can't be seen asking for more money, or it would affect my bonus!) And you'd better step up and work those hours. You want to be seen as a team player, right?
        johnnyanmac 2y ago
        >Not completing the project" is not an option—if they don't hire someone to fill a vacancy on the team, the rest of the team will just be expected to work extra hours to keep up. And that's the opportunity cost we don't talk about. The cost isn't "we slow down on a project from a bad hire". It's "demoralize/burned out engineers quit to a point where the deadline is impossible to reach". You can't force overtime to engineers that leave and take their institutional knowledge with them There's also a lot of fake job postings as a sort of carrot to overworked engineers that "promise more help is coming". Which is just as ingenuous to existing employees as it is to applicants.
- NVHacker 2y ago
  The way I read it, Gizmodo cannot tell whether those jobs are fake or just never filled. How could anyone tell from outside ? The visible fact is that no-one is hired for those jobs.
- spandrew 2y ago
  Disagree. If you post a job then reneg on it that still leaves folks out in the cold who are, in earnest, looking for work. Mistakes happen, and I don't blame hiring managers for the shifting financial landscapes they often have to face. But that job wasn't solid enough to count as a real position. Lump them together.
  - lazide 2y ago
    A posting which was never intended to be filled is still different than one that was intended to be filled, but never actually happened. Good luck telling them apart however. If you make it so every posting has to be filled or it’s ‘fraud’, it will be an even bigger mess.
    - kylebenzle 2y ago
      Maybe, but it's too hard to distinguish between the jobs that were posted with intention to not be filled and jobs that were posted with intention to be filled but through other circumstances weren't. So the distinction is moot. It's a lot like this website. It used to be pretty obvious which comments were trolls and which are real people but more and more the people have gotten dumber and the trolls gotten smarter so it's almost impossible to tell the difference between maliciousness and stupidity and for the rest of us it doesn't really matter one way or the other. A person wasting our time is a person wasting our time, the intentions aren't important.
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        different is a matter of use case. The difference doesn't matter to the applicant. It probably does if you propose the death penalty for posting fake listings.
        johnnyanmac 2y ago
        A fine large enough to make bad job postings (genuine or not) unprofitable is fine. We don't need reducto ad absurdum here. Just make businesses put thought into their postings and not let someone who has no idea of the qualifications right them up themselves.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  If you get hundreds of apps and you can't get a single qualified candidate, you either have a horribly inefficient recruiting system or your job needs are so specific that general job boards won't help you anyway. If you have years of inefficiencies happening without being addressed, at what point to we just call it fraud instead? Or possibly you highly overestimate your job needs vs. The requirements posted. Which is endemic of the above reasons anyway.
juujian 2y ago
That would actually be a surprisingly low figure as far as I'm concerned.
- pelagicAustral 2y ago
  I'm thinking exactly the same. Feel like it's more like 3 in 5, if not 4 in 5. I recently commented on another thread about how I managed 2 interviews and 1 offer out of ~500 applications. Which is kind of telling, since it only took 2 actual interviews to get another job (alas for less money that I make right now anyway)... If the jobs were real, it should be far easier to get them.
  - convolvatron 2y ago
    The part I don’t get is that 6 months later I get responses to applications. I’ve talked to recruiters and the picture they paint is hundreds or thousands of resumes in the inbox. They keep shuffling their search criteria and sometimes someone interesting pops out. That doesn’t entirely make sense to me, but something is clearly quite broken, and it seems to be as much due to incompetence as fraud
    - daseiner1 2y ago
      I’ll never forget getting a boilerplate rejection email from Lockheed Martin 13 months after I applied for an internship for the upcoming summer.
      - b112 2y ago
        I'll try to upstage that! 20+ years ago I applied, and interviewed for a Federal Gov of Canada job. 18 months later they called me to tell me I got the job. I'd been at another job for 16 months! Glad I didn't take it. Government and traditional big corp are very stodgy, slow to change.
        ryandrake 2y ago
Havoc 2y ago
That’s better than I would have guessed frankly. Internet is making it sound like 4 out of 5
- nsagent 2y ago
  Well, my recruiter callback ratio is likely 1 out of 5, despite having a very VERY niche profile: a PhD focused on NLP for creative text generation, especially in video games, and a prior career as a game developer. Needless to say, I've only focused on roles that fit that narrow profile. One of the recruiters that contacted me didn't even know I worked in games, despite it making up the bulk of my work experience (including as a lead developer). Considering how closely I match this narrow profile, and the number of people that likely do, it's weird how low my callback ratio has been.
  - sumtechguy 2y ago
    > One of the recruiters that contacted me didn't even know I worked in games I get that all the time with my setup. "you look like a good fit and have lots of experience for XYZ tech". Nowhere on my resume does it even mention it. Sometimes I have to look it up and see what they are talking about. One of them even went on and on about my current job. Despite it only having the start date in that spot and no exp on what I do here. It is blindingly obvious they did not read my resume. They are keyword scumming and hoping for the best.
Glyptodon 2y ago
I think the rate of non-fill is higher. But the reasons for it are all over the map. Everything from "we always leave a posting up even when we're not really looking just in case the perfect candidate happens to walk through the door" but in the mean time nobody really pays attention to applicants, to "we weren't getting the applicants we wanted with this posting, so we took it down and are trying a new posting," to "we're legally obligated to post this, but we already have a plan about hiring" whether it's someone connected, someone internal, or a preference for H1B workers, to all kinds of other scenarios. Anybody who has ever applied for a dozen jobs, sent literate applications and outreach, and has heard from most of them never to months later regardless of actual fit for the job knows this.
- fifilura 2y ago
  I think "looking for the perfect candidate" is the most common reason by far. Great developers with domain knowledge are always possible to fit in, simply because they are money generators rather than a cost.
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    100% agree. A big issue with tech is there are so many options and domains that for any particular job it can easily take even an amazing developer 6-9 months to get up to speed if they're unfamiliar with your particular tech stack or business area. That's not the case with most other professions - if I'm, for example, a professional violin player, I can play in basically any orchestra in the world and be proficient from day 1. So if you happen to find that unicorn who is not only a great developer but is also expert in the major areas of your tech stack and your business domain, you hire them in a heartbeat.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      Sounds like something many technical professions have to deal with. Even with all the licenses and certs in the world, very few lawyers or doctors are just walking in and learning the process in a week. Other types of engineering need to understand the pipeline in another firm compared to their old one. A firefighter needs time to mesh with the team and figure out what equipment and tools are available here. But then again, I bet most of those also aren't trying to rely on AI to find talent.
dyauspitr 2y ago
You also have companies like mine (very large) where we don’t even post job descriptions online but just hire through internal referrals.
OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
At one of my previous companies, I recall suggesting to my CEO that we open some job postings "just in case" the right person comes along. He candidly noted that we already have open job postings, and gave me access to the email they all went to. I saw over 3,000 applications made over the last 2-3 years. Tailored resumes. Cover letters. This wasn't some LinkedIn "quick apply", these were direct "Fill out the form" on our website. Not a single one of these applications got read.
- f1shy 2y ago
  This is making that company not look very good, is it?!
  - grajaganDev 2y ago
    It is not making that company look very good. Enticing job seekers to waste their very precious time is not ethical. Edit: fix double negative.
    - b112 2y ago
      Just an FYI.. the double negative means you said it makes the company look good. (I don't think you intended that)
      - grajaganDev 2y ago
        Thank you - fixed it.
  - duxup 2y ago
    Doesn't hurt them either I don't think. Nobody knows. It sucks because the whole job hunting system is borked.
    - chgs 2y ago
      If 500 people apply for a fake job and don’t get to an interview or personal response stage, then when they need a real job filling they’ve already wiped out a lot of applicants who won’t bother applying next time.
robcohen 2y ago
This is a spam problem. Spam problems are easily solved by simply charging for attention. Job postings should pay me to view them, and I should pay job postings to apply to them. The only reason why ghost postings exist is because the marginal cost to the company is so incredibly low to do it. In demand people should get paid for their attention. What I don't understand is why are there no systems that actually implement this? Most likely because the user education problem of cryptocurrency wallets and the various UI/UX issues it presents, but there's no mainstream apps that I can think of that actually try this. Seems like it would work in dating apps, in advertising, in CRMs, in social networks of all types. Why hasn't it been done? My guess is because we've only solved half of the problem with crypto. We have the cheap value exchange, but we don't have identity figured out quite yet.
- shultays 2y ago
  (paypal me 0.1$ to see this reply)
  - airstrike 2y ago
    I really wish that's how (a subset of) the internet worked. Not for replies, but for quality website access. Think newspapers and other primary sources of information. Fill up your browser tank and go visit these websites. The site then gets paid per view, or per duration of stay. Details are tricky though.
    - seabass-labrax 2y ago
      In my opinion a big barrier to the success of such systems is that newspapers often aren't primary sources. Most outsource the reporting to press agencies and (increasingly) to social media. Press agencies usually do sell individual stories with primary reporting, but not at the prices you and I can afford. For mainstream press though, is it worth the pennies of a microtransaction to read someone's re-hashing of public records and social media posts? That is very much dependent on both the reader's personal expertise and the author's, and if they are mismatched the article becomes worthless to the reader. An article explaining what HN is would be illuminating to many, but entirely unworthy even of pennies to you and I.
CretinDesAlpes 2y ago
I've been on a career break / job search for about a year. I used to work in "AI" before it became fashionable, here are some observations of the tech job market: 1) There are so much BS jobs in BS companies it's hard to understand if those are even companies doing real thing (cf. David Graeber) 2) 80% of jobs in my field are about LLMs and technology no one understand or in companies that don't even know if they need it but are just following the trend 3) I've seen big and small companies posting over and over the same job ad. For example a big consulting group has been posting the exact same job for more than a year (really) on linkedin and elsewhere - each time there are more than 100+ applicants on linkedin. 4) Recruiters from 'serious' agencies told me it was the worst job market they know of 5) There is also a rise of fake recruitement agencies, it's very easy and quick to set up a page on Linkedin now with fake workers, fake images, fake jobs, etc. 6) The supply demand imbalance allows some small companies (startups) to ask for insane technical assignement that takes hours, which at the end looked like free consultancy. I had one that did not even provide feedback after a rejection, and when asked said "because we don't" 7) The increase of centralised platform such as Linkedin has increased competition. Everyone is applying to the same jobs, and many candidates uses AI to beat the HR platform. [This has been reported by FT - https://www.ft.com/content/1429fcb2-e0ef-4e47-b2b8-8bd225ac2fe2 https://www.ft.com/content/1429fcb2-e0ef-4e47-b2b8-8bd225ac2... ]. Same problem as in the online dating market. 8) There is so much ghosting, that can happen at any stage of the process. Again, same problem as in the online dating market.
- y-curious 2y ago
  What is the point of a fake recruiting agency? I've heard claim of this but I wonder what the endgame is. Is it to harvest contacts? Scam people? Waste people's time?
  - CretinDesAlpes 2y ago
    My bet is the collection and reselling of personal information, legally or illegally. Many (most?) people do put their real name, real address, real phone number and real email on their resume. You automate this on linkedin and can get a lot of CVs, I don't think this is a crazy idea.
ge96 2y ago
I forgot to make a meme about it but I still get these "We're sorry we went with someone else" months later from jobs I applied to but it's alright I have a job now. The joke of the meme is I feel ashamed/disappointed but I forget I'm fine.
f1shy 2y ago
I have seen that happening inside a company (big one). There is an internal job market, and I would say the ratio is about 20% or more fake. From every 20 applications to postings that seem like a copy of my resume, I get 5 replies (the rest is black hole, or come a reply 10 months later) from the replies, eventually 2 interviews.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Weird, I really don't see the reason an internal job board does this. They know all the people and their experiences. Is this just some hr compliance so they can search outwards?
  - f1shy 2y ago
    One option is HR compliance with some kind or procedure. One other thing I've seen (many times) is to pacify an over-worked team: the team is working crazy over hours, demotivated, asking for help. The manager knows is impossible to hire (head count / budget limits) and so they open a Job Offer, where they can show "we are searching for help, but nobody comes". How do I know? once I was in such over exploited team, so each of the team made a fake resume that was, of course, like a glove for the position. Nobody got a call back. When we confronted the manager, he had to confess. [in case somebody asks himself, 6 months later the whole team was gone]. Then same company, I applied for a job, where my resume was really perfect for the position. As I received the canned response, I called the manager, pressed a little bit, and also said "we had to do as we are searching, but we are really not". Yet another one I know of, because of reasons: HR consulting companies and also some HR departments want to test if they are paying too much/too little, want to have some "market measurement". They fake jobs, fake interviews, and they would inconspicuously ask "how much are you earning now" and/or "how much do you want to earn" and that is all they want from you really.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      Yeah I've heard that angle too. Really nasty. Glad the team wassable to stand up for themselves and walk away from the abuse. Sure wish that could be the outcome more often; it'd fix a lot of things overnight.
lambdaone 2y ago
One in five seems to be an under-estimate. Based on my experience of Upwork, at least 50% would be a better estimate.
iknownthing 2y ago
I worked at a company that created fake job postings for H1B reasons.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  This is for PERM, not H1B. Many companies did and still do this. Imo, the concept of PERM is flawed, which causes companies to do this stuff. Some have had to settle with the gov't and can no longer do this (Meta). Also, the jobs are not fake, they are labor market test jobs, designed to show that no citizen meets the job requirements thus validating a green card for the H1B visa holder. They are "fake" in that they are designed so no one applies for or gets the job. Imo, labor market test should be part of the visa granting process, not the naturalization.
  - dzdt 2y ago
    I have been required to create such fake job postings. From the line manager perspective, how it looks is you have a colleague who has been working with you for several years who is on a H1B visa. They want to get a green card and become a permanent resident. To support this, we are required to post a fake job ad for their position, and invent a reason to reject any US citizens who apply for the position. (Non-US applications are ignored.) Our legal advice was that the job posting had to be contain only legitimate requirements for the role, so it could not be highly tailored to only match the resume of the employee seeking PERM status. The result was phone screen interviews were required to reject 8-10 on-paper-potentially-qualified US applicants for the fake position. This is for a highly specialized area within finance, where in real hiring there is an immense effort to find the strongest candidates regardless of nationality. In hindsight I am confident that earlier in my career I had applied to at least one such fake role. One not-well-known advantage of working with a recruiter as a job seeker in such a field is the recruiter will have back-channel information to know to ignore such fake job postings.
    - aprilthird2021 2y ago
      Yep, this is how it is done. I think it really needs to be revisited because everyone is faking the labor test because you have an employee who is great, who's been here for years and years, probably even had kids here, and if in the 10-15 years since the employee was hired, one US citizen could do the same job now, he gets sent back? It should be a requirement for the visa, not the residency. Residency should be done like Canada where you earn points to get it to foster assimilation.
tiffanyh 2y ago
Does cross posted job listing mess up this data? Because it's common for the same job to be listed on multiple job sites.
RainyDayTmrw 2y ago
In trading, spoofing[1] is placing insincere orders to generate a signal, and presumably influence other participants' behavior, without an intention of actually having those orders filled. Bad actors spoof trades because it works. Spoofing is illegal, and rightly so, although enforcement may be a bit lax. I guess, we're now seeing the rise of spoofing in job postings. I, for one, find it quite tiring. I think there's a parallel. Bad actors spoof job postings because it works. What can we do to make it less effective or less worthwhile? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoofing_(finance) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoofing_(finance)
- esafak 2y ago
  Job posting boards can punish them if they detect them as being spoofed through response rates.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Can. Won't. If trading has lax enforcement where this can cost people millions, why would a job board getting paid to post fake jobs care?
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
> The job market has become more soul-crushing than ever. I have often stated that the fact that I was basically evicted from the job market was one of the best things that ever happened to me (I didn't think so, at the time it was happening), and every time I read something like this, it reinforces that. But I was one of the fairly rare (it seems) people that could afford to have that happen. My heart goes out to the folks that have to endure this stuff. One of the saddest things, is that really good workers, that would take their job seriously, and be excellent employees, are being knocked out of the game, and the unproductive, disloyal, rapacious sharks that have learned to game the system, are taking all the fish food.
- dirtybirdnj 2y ago
  > really good workers, that would take their job seriously, and be excellent employees, are being knocked out of the game, and the unproductive, disloyal, rapacious sharks that have learned to game the system, are taking all the fish food. This needs to be made illegal or at the very least cost prohibitive. It's literally why the CEO lost his life. One side is destroying the livlihood of the other and even basic levels of "please stop" are hand waved away by the needs of the shareholders and YOY hockey stick growth. For some reason "it's business" is a valid and ethically clean reason to build an economic model on top of suffering. Honesty and dignity need to become fashionable and valuable again. Until we can wean people off the cult of personality around narcissists and psychopaths we're just carrying water for the people who do the worst abuse and will never change unless confronted at figurative or literal gunpoint.
  - NickC25 2y ago
    >"This needs to be made illegal or at the very least cost prohibitive." How? Any mechanism to make it illegal will be vigorously fought by the same forces who currently benefit from it. Those forces have unlimited funds to "lobby" lawmakers. >"hand waved away by the needs of the shareholders and YOY hockey stick growth." Not needed, but desired. Corporations acting as responsible stewards of capital aren't mandated to grow at a given percentage, just that the capital doesn't decrease. We need to remind corporate America that perpetual double digit growth is impossible, and they can and should be happy with any growth at all.
selimthegrim 2y ago
I applied to some New York City series B start up with a Director literally looking over my shoulder after she assured me the job postings weren’t fake. Plot twist: they were fake they just weren’t in her department so she didn’t know and the only job they were really hiring for according to LinkedIn was an Azure contractor for $60 an hour
ulfw 2y ago
Way way way way more than 1 in 5. Honestly.
smel 2y ago
I would say 4 out of 5 to be honest
extr 2y ago
I've found almost all my career positions through recruiters. I find it's about 100x more productive of an experience. You know the job exists because they're paying someone to fill it. You get to talk to someone on the phone about the job before you have to lift a finger. If you sound good on the phone, they just put you right through to the hiring manager/interview process, and also are materially invested in your success. Getting the formatting right on your resume is an afterthought. They'll give you an entire gameplan and tips on this company's specific process. People hate on LinkedIn but having a presentable profile and using the right keywords is worth it's weight in gold IMO. Even if it doesn't work out, they'll keep you in their rolodex and hit you up for jobs long into the future.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Main issue is that recruiters can get every bit as bougy as applicants can get when the market sways in their favor. So in a market like this, you may have less than a 10% response rare from messaging recruiters. Whereas 2021-2022 you'd almost always at least get a reply when you messaged a human.
  - extr 2y ago
    I never message recruiters cold. Only wait for them to message me, or hit up recruiters I have existing relationship with.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      Yeah, tried that early on. Messaged 4 recruiters I thought I had food relations with. 2 didn't have any jobs. 2 were no longer working as a recruiter. Oh and one ghosted me for... Almost 2 years.
- mywittyname 2y ago
  Same here, but have you looked for a position in the past 2 years? It's dramatically worse than I've experienced in my 20 years as a dev. I only ever apply to jobs that I know I'm qualified for and know that I can demonstrate it, so my application -> offer ratio was historically pretty high. In my last job search, I sent out 99% of the applications I've ever sent out in my career. The tech job market enshitified rather quickly.
tombert 2y ago
I've posted this story before, but it's relevant. About two years ago, I was looking for a job, and a recruiter reached out about a software engineering position at a prominent newspaper [1]. I told the recruiter to apply me, they did, and they made me sit through a two hour video course on ethics and sexual harassment, which was weird considering that I hadn't even done an interview yet. About a week later, the recruiter gets back to me, and they declined me because my resume "reads too much like a manager, no hands-on coding experience". I was extremely confused, because most of the time people say the opposite, that my resume is too in the weeds, and I need to focus on high-level stuff. Moreover, I don't have any managerial experience on my resume...every role says something like "software engineer". And then it hit me: the hiring manager never read my resume. He already knew who he wanted to hire for the role, and for either legal or compliance or bureaucratic reasons, he had to make it look like he was looking for other candidates, and in the process, he wasted my time and the recruiter's. [1] Not going to say which one but you've definitely heard of it.
- stronglikedan 2y ago
  > Not going to say which one Nothing will change until online naming and shaming is not considered taboo.
  - tombert 2y ago
    I just don't want my name ASSOCIATED with that kind of PRESS, ok??
    - the-chitmonger 2y ago
      I'm glad you clarified - I was expecting NYT!
      - tombert 2y ago
        I don't know what you're talking about :)
    - 2y ago
redleggedfrog 2y ago
Makes me want to use an LLM to apply for a gajillion jobs. See how they like their own medicine.
matchagaucho 2y ago
I've noticed sites like Indeed are still showing job listings scraped from our website 5 years ago. I've not chased down every scraper and submitted a remove request. But I can easily see how 20%+ of job listings are dead-ends.
taeric 2y ago
There is a big gulf between "fake" and "never filled" that I don't like being washed here. Specifically, there are plenty of reasons you might have a position not get filled that are not nefarious. Could be an aspirational. Could be a company that is so under water that they can't manage a hiring pipeline. Could be one that isn't under water, but doesn't know how to manage a hiring pipeline. Could have been overcome by other events. Plenty of options. Yes, I'm sure there is some fraud. I'd love to see data that went into that detail. I'm assuming it is rather lower than 1 in 5.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  If companies were as honest about "low priority" evergreen work over the constant need help immediately, that may be acceptable. But I've never see anyone say that in a job posting. If you're indistinguishable from the behavior of a fraudster, that still reflects poorly and has the same results on applicants. (well, okay. Actually honest. How many of those "urgent" postings eve felt urgent?)
- Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  In general, some people want ghost-workers for working visa scams. i.e. some desperate individuals pay to not even work in a country to get around immigration rules. This scam was outed by some undercover East Indian journalists. Its gross because cons exploit people, and suppress domestic economic reality by bidding down wage rates. Nothing was done about this by the way... nothing... =3
maybeculdbeyeah 2y ago
Maybe they are there to fake a good faith effort to justify their H1B hires.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
neom 2y ago
I'm starting to wonder if this is something that could/should be regulated...? I can't think of a great reason for allowing this from industry. It seems least reasonable you could be required to go back and remove postings when the position is filled or no longer available??
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  It absolutely should be regulated. Especially since there's so many ways companies exploit this for a variety of factors. I can't think of one benefit to applicants. Wastes their time, the increasingly AI-submitted rejections are useless noise instead of feedback on how to improve, and the rise of "video interviews" just give more data than necessary to a company without ever needing to send a human to talk to them. The application market needs an entire overhaul.
ethin 2y ago
It wouldn't surprise me if this was a significant under-count. I've been applying for jobs for, what, 3-4 years now, both when I was in Uni and after. I don't even know how many job applications I've submitted but I think I've gotten maybe 10-15 interviews at most? I have of course gotten the typical advice: "Build your network", "Submit a cover letter", blah blah blah, but the first bit is completely useless to me (I don't have the finances to go to conferences for example) and I've tried the second bit and haven't gotten anywhere. I've been told to tailor my resume but... Yeah, I'm not doing that when I'm supposed to be submitting hundreds of applications per day or something. Honestly it's hard to muster up the motivation now to apply for jobs instead of working on open-source projects and (maybe) posting something freelance-ish on fiver or something because at least with open-source projects I'll get somewhere and it's something I enjoy; with job hunting and all the automation at play, and with even more things getting automated, it's a lot harder to answer the question of "why should I even bother" when companies are slashing headcount like crazy and aren't fined heavily by these platforms for posting ghost jobs and wasting my time (or some equally as harsh punishment that makes them actually pay attention). I still apply occasionally, but given how horrible the market is I know my job application count has significantly fallen. I just hope the market turns around and we see some huge crackdowns on all this automation because it's massively disincentivizing applicants (after all, why apply when you can only submit an application every 10-30 seconds while a bunch of people can submit 10000 applications per minute?).
- Glyptodon 2y ago
  If you're submitting a hundred applications a day, you're doing it wrong. You should get better results aiming for just a few a day, but each tailored. (Though obviously it's just not a great time right now, I'd argue not being bot-fodder and obvious chaff is extra worth it if any human ever does actually look.)
  - ethin 2y ago
    Your the first person who's told me the opposite of the advice that I've been told. It's hard to figure out which advice I should actually consider and what should be thrown out. I'm honestly unsure how tailoring would change my resume all that much. I'm a new college grad (graduated about 2 years ago, will be 3 in May) so... Shrug. Honestly I'm wondering if I should just keep doing what I'm doing, maybe? Idk nowadays, and I doubt the automation problem is going to go away.
indiantinker 2y ago
I have been applying to this job at major brick making toy company for the past 3-4 years that is super dope. But i never get it and neither does anyone else.
rdtsc 2y ago
> actually a corporate strategy designed to make the businesses posting them seem like they’re growing Assume these companies don't have morals (that should be the default, btw) and ask yourself why wouldn't they generate 1000s of open job postings? Especially if many steps in the initial process can be automated. This makes them look like they are growing, and maybe their filter might find some rare great candidate and they'll find an opening for them. All upsides and almost no downsides. One downside is having to manage applications. But that can be outsourced or automated. It's immoral, disheartening to potential job seekers and skews job number stats, but that means nothing unless it's illegal. Once they start fearing of getting in legal trouble, they'll keep doing the same.
eterm 2y ago
I got an email from LinkedIn prompting me to "unsubscribe from job alert <X> because you haven't viewed it in 3 months". Indeed I haven't, because every week they email me the same list of the same jobs that have been listed since the first week I signed up. And also because setting "remote" effectively turns off the radius, even though I ideally want a job that is remote but also local if possible.
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CM30 2y ago
Makes sense. Seen an awful lot of jobs on these sites come up time and time again, and it always felt rather suspicious how often that happened. If a job can't be filled within a year or three, that's a pretty good sign that the company isn't particularly interested in filling it. As you may expect, they also tend to be the jobs that don't even respond with a rejection or anything when people apply to them, and where anything submitted seemingly just vanishes into the ether.
ricciardo 2y ago
Seriously contemplating if it is even worth applying in this type of job market. Being young, would it not be more beneficial to just contribute to Open Source projects in which my actual passion for the field comes from and additionally find outside work to just get by? I guess it all comes down to an individual's ambitions and goals in life, but seeing some of my colleagues and friends do nothing but apply to jobs for a straight year seems extremely unfulfilling (mind you this is a perspective of a new-grad in CS).
- InkCanon 2y ago
  I have similar thoughts. I'd say one big upshot of working in tech was they formed very high talent densities during their peak in the 2010s, so you could learn a lot. But now I'm not so sure. Plus it's a circus getting hired as a fresh grad. I'm largely thinking of masters or PhD - in the right place you get that talent density too.
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goredsox 2y ago
There are companies that scrape linkedin job postings for skills based workforce analytics. These jobs reports are then sent to higher ed institutions to inform classes. So manipulating these markets can signal to higher ed what skills they would like to devalue in the future
woofcat 2y ago
You mean Aha! isn't hiring 100 people in 100 locations world wide at all times?
- Glyptodon 2y ago
  The one person I know who worked there was very disillusioned.
Aurornis 2y ago
This headline was carefully written to trigger confirmation bias, but the phrase “or never filled” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Most mid-sized companies where I’ve been a hiring manager haven’t had a 1:1 relationship between job postings and hires. Some times we’d post 1 job posting but hire 2-3 people out of it. Other times we’d post 2 or 3 job listings at different levels for 1 headcount because we were open to candidates of wide skill range but a single wide-range posting tends to turn off more experienced candidates. We’ve had situations where an internal candidate expresses interest in a public job posting, so we take it down without filling it and replace it with a different posting for their backfill. So looking back, several of my job postings would be considered “fake or never filled” despite the fact that we were honestly hiring and filling roles. This article and the WSJ article it sources from feel like journalists picking up on a social media trend and working backward to provide fodder for it. There is no 1:1 relationship between a job posting and a hire at many companies, so using job posting data to draw conclusions like this isn’t good logic. It probably feels like vindication to people who are tired of applying to jobs, though.
jstummbillig 2y ago
Companies dirty secret: Job postings are an invaluable signal generator for companies. Knowing how much demand there is for various positions in your company is super helpful to drive business decisions. And unfortunately the company loses most of the signal when they are candid about just gathering potential applicants (because people will not apply and you know a lot less about their interest and potential) Not defending being uncandid, just a heads-up to be realistic about what's going on here. Unless it's made outright illegal, just assume it's happening all the time, because of how fantastic the upside is and how cheap it is to do. The amount of work the company has to invests in screening incoming requests is entirely variable and scales to 0 if they really don't want to hire right now.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
  Most companies, if not nearly all of them, are just really bad at hiring above "entry-level" in general. The practice of pushing hiring through HR teams and recruiters often leads to the job posting being weird catch-all abstractions because a huge funnel brings in lots of resumes, which makes the HR teams look busy. Really, postings should be astoundingly specific --- literally, "This is exactly what we are looking for and the problem we want to solve. Prove to us you can solve that problem." Generalist hiring teams are usually unable to get that specific, which is why personal references and recommendations are very valuable. The number of applicants you get should be a good sign that your posting is too general or just right. Positions above the junior level should have significantly less applicants. If not, then you can probably simply hire a junior level.
  - nextworddev 2y ago
    Can confirm. 90% of L7, L8 hires at AWS between 2021 and 2022 flopped.
siliconc0w 2y ago
Good opportunity for a fakejobs.fyi site that names and shames companies that do this. Send in perfect resumes that 100% match the job req with 10+ years of experience and see which get a response. This of course leads to a tragedy of the commons but that is what unregulated capitalism demands.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
The headline could also apply to the 1990s. I was an employment counselor for a non-profit for a few years. I collected employment listings from multiple sources (Bureau of Labor was a big one) and printed+sorted them to help job seekers. I found a high percentage of distinct jobs that were endlessly listed. If I sent qualified applicants after them, they invariably never got a response. That was just the ghost listings. Another large chunk were problematic for reasons that had nothing to do with applicant qualifications. Maybe 2 listings in 5 were reasonable and competent efforts to find workers.
fsndz 2y ago
The ratio is probably 4/5 for YC Startups
Scoundreller 2y ago
Another 2 in 5 are real, but they’re hoping to replace an existing employee at a lower rate. No net new job but net lower income.
dzdt 2y ago
I have been required to create fake job postings because of US immigration policy. From the line manager perspective, how it looks is you have a colleague who has been working with you for several years who is on a H1B visa. They want to get a green card and become a permanent resident. To support this, we are required to post a fake job ad for their position, and invent a reason to reject any US citizens who apply for the position. (Non-US applications are ignored.) Our legal advice was that the job posting had to be contain only legitimate requirements for the role, so it could not be highly tailored to only match the resume of the employee seeking PERM status. The result was phone screen interviews were required to reject 8-10 on-paper-potentially-qualified US applicants for the fake position. This is for a highly specialized area within finance, where in real hiring there is an immense effort to find the strongest candidates regardless of nationality. In hindsight I am confident that earlier in my career I had applied to at least one such fake role. One not-well-known advantage of working with a recruiter as a job seeker in such a field is the recruiter will have back-channel information to know to ignore such fake job postings.
- CommanderData 2y ago
  Should be illegal but I'm sure tech companies want this loophole to remain. Anyone based in the US/UK should be an advocate for keeping jobs local for their own long term job security. Anyone who argues the opposite baffles me (sometimes for the sake of it).
  - librish 2y ago
    While it might be better for your job security to keep your own field hiring locally, it could be better for your life if all other fields hire the best regardless of nationality.
  - bpodgursky 2y ago
    [dead]
  - deepsun 2y ago
    But then I would also argue that work restrictions are illegal as well. Why would we want to restrict any high-skilled already wanted candidates from any country in the world? Why we forbid them working and paying taxes here? Bums on the streets don't pay taxes (for many reasons), but we give them permission to work. While we at the same time forbid foreign highly paid professionals to pay taxes here?
dav43 2y ago
In Singapore it’s a lot higher than this. There are government mandates that roles must be advertised - so companies planning on hiring internally will advertise roles, interview candidates then justify why no candidates are good fit then hire the original internal candidate. It’s laughable.
jaco6 2y ago
[dead]
salynchnew 2y ago
One interesting part of this is a small number of companies will post multiple job listings with different locations listed for a single open headcount, to get maximum expsosure on Indeed and LinkedIn (both of which have some sense of geo-based or onsite/remote-based recommendations for job seekers).
esher 2y ago
Not sure if that is mentioned with the comments already. I am currently trying to hire a remote developer (real posting) and I have to battle with 'fake applications' with super generic CVs and intros, individually created by AI for specific jobs [2,3,4]. I assume that there are humans behind it in most cases. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42655183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42655183 - my rant [2] https://www.rezi.ai/ https://www.rezi.ai/ [3] https://flowcv.com/ai-resume-builder https://flowcv.com/ai-resume-builder [4] https://www.jobscan.co/ https://www.jobscan.co/
blobbers 2y ago
At any given time, the PERM process in the greencard system creates an inflated number of tech job postings. I'll outline the envelope math. Assuming all H1B slots are filled, that's 85,000 per year based on the recent 10 year cap. H1B visas last about 6 years. In order to get a green card, part of the process is the PERM. You post the H1B holder's job in a newspaper or on websites and have legal review the applicants and determine why no american applicants are suitable. Assume that all H1B people want to get into the perm process, but it can generally take a few years to happen. So at any given time, there may be up to 510,000 (85K6) people applying for PERM status. During that time, we can assume about half are in the PERM process, meaning we have at least 255,000 fake* postings that are specifically tailored to a candidate in order to reject other candidates. TLDR; PERM process creates at least 0.25M fake job postings at any given time, mostly in technology.
- howdoesoneknow 2y ago
  How does one know that this is happening so that they are not wasting their time applying for positions that they will never get?
  - blobbers 2y ago
    Usually they try to tailor the job description very specifically to the PERM person's skills, and they're allowed to discriminate based on someone not having a specific skill. You need to tick all the boxes in order to not get disqualified or to disqualify the PERM candidate. The job description may still have some generic text about how we don't expect you to have everything; that's gobbledygook, ignore it. You need to have everything. If a job description looks too specific, it may be a PERM job post. I don't think there is a clear cut way to avoid it. Probably the best way to get around it is referrals; people might know the hiring manager and know if the req is real.
jedberg 2y ago
Part of the problem is that investors use "total open job listings" as a factor for making an investment decision. If there are a lot then the business must be healthy! VCs actively encourage putting up fake listings, under the guise of "opportunistic hiring".
EatDevSlay 2y ago
I turned down an offer of 500 dollar flat fees for doing a successful interview for outsourced developers. Who knows how that all technically works out. Surely they couldn't just send some completely other dude? Whole thing is pretty scammy.
yobbo 2y ago
Here is one article stating an estimated 80% of jobs are filled through networks: https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2020/10/15/networking-its-not-what-you-think/ https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2020/10/15... That would be consistent with 4/5 job postings being "fake", though the article also says "are 70-80% are never posted". So unclear.
wyclif 2y ago
This is why I don't write custom cover letters anymore, even though I'm pretty good at it. It's just too exhausting when you know a lot of them are going to fake postings. I'll do it if I'm working with a solid recruiter who is working with legit companies. But I'm not doing it anymore if I haven't heard of the company in question and I'm blind applying.
rldjbpin 2y ago
feels like i somehow only applied to the fake ones during my last job search. outside of the us for context, so should rule out the h1b explanation. seen many of them staying up for months on end, and getting reposted on job sites as if something just came up. many happen to send rejection mails when they finally bother closing them in their crm. while i still worked on applying and writing custom cv/cover letters the "old-fashioned way", i don't envy the past where you'd do the same paperwork physically. but it is very draining and frustrating given how many more openings you end up applying for compared to the analogue yesteryears. getting on the employment train is hard, but for most people you could then just rely on personal network and getting reached out for newer opportunities.
GuB-42 2y ago
To be honest, I expected more. There are many reason for job postings to never get filled. They can be fake for various reasons: visas, to make the company appear to grow, for data collection, etc... It can turn out the job wasn't needed after all. They may not have found any appropriate candidate. The job may have been filled in another way (ex: cooptation) but they forgot to remove the original posting. And job postings that are never filled are not that bad by themselves. It starts becoming a problem when they lead to fake interviews, where significant effort is made for nothing. In other word, 4 in 5 online job posting are real, which doesn't sound that bad.

418 points by belter 2y ago

This is clearly fraud and needs to stop. Companies behaving like this demand regulation. Instead of whining about regulation, read the room and don't bring it on yourselves.

hunglee2 2y ago

The outrage from job seekers is justified but Gizmodo doesn't help matters by categorising fraud (fake jobs) with failure (never filled). Hiring is hard, as anyone who has ever done it will attest, and very many vacancies opened in good faith are not filled for a variety of reasons - budget pulled, hiring manager won't make a decision, internal candidate appears at late stage etc. We also need to draw a distinction between employers posting jobs directly vs 3rd party agencies posting jobs for the company's they represent, or purport to represent. There is a disincentive for the former to post 'fake jobs' - who wants to deal with the applicant flow, but an incentive for the latter to do so - harvest resume's, build a database. Anyways. My point is, there _is_ a problem but mainstream magazine treatment like this from Gizmodo serves to add smoke when there's already a fire

reptation 2y ago
Sure, hiring is hard but the factors you mention are rare, and teams are extremely motivated to fill vacancies.
- derektank 2y ago
  Teams are also strongly motivated to not hire a bad team member that drags down morale and wastes resources. I want to say this is more true in government hiring, where it's difficult to fire people, but I've seen private companies hold out for a long time until they find someone with the right combination of cultural fit and technical skills.
  - spratzt 2y ago
    It’s extraordinary how frequently companies discuss the cost of a bad hire and never consider the opportunity cost of a no-hire. Companies that keep waiting for Mr. Right are really saying that the opportunity cost of not completing their project is very low. In other words it’s not really that important at all.
    - danaris 2y ago
      On the contrary. "Not completing the project" is not an option—if they don't hire someone to fill a vacancy on the team, the rest of the team will just be expected to work extra hours to keep up. Oh, not with overtime—you're salaried, remember? (Alternate version: Oh, no, you can't actually log the extra hours; we don't have the budget for overtime, and I, the manager, can't be seen asking for more money, or it would affect my bonus!) And you'd better step up and work those hours. You want to be seen as a team player, right?
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        >Not completing the project" is not an option—if they don't hire someone to fill a vacancy on the team, the rest of the team will just be expected to work extra hours to keep up. And that's the opportunity cost we don't talk about. The cost isn't "we slow down on a project from a bad hire". It's "demoralize/burned out engineers quit to a point where the deadline is impossible to reach". You can't force overtime to engineers that leave and take their institutional knowledge with them There's also a lot of fake job postings as a sort of carrot to overworked engineers that "promise more help is coming". Which is just as ingenuous to existing employees as it is to applicants.
NVHacker 2y ago
The way I read it, Gizmodo cannot tell whether those jobs are fake or just never filled. How could anyone tell from outside ? The visible fact is that no-one is hired for those jobs.
spandrew 2y ago
Disagree. If you post a job then reneg on it that still leaves folks out in the cold who are, in earnest, looking for work. Mistakes happen, and I don't blame hiring managers for the shifting financial landscapes they often have to face. But that job wasn't solid enough to count as a real position. Lump them together.
- lazide 2y ago
  A posting which was never intended to be filled is still different than one that was intended to be filled, but never actually happened. Good luck telling them apart however. If you make it so every posting has to be filled or it’s ‘fraud’, it will be an even bigger mess.
  - kylebenzle 2y ago
    Maybe, but it's too hard to distinguish between the jobs that were posted with intention to not be filled and jobs that were posted with intention to be filled but through other circumstances weren't. So the distinction is moot. It's a lot like this website. It used to be pretty obvious which comments were trolls and which are real people but more and more the people have gotten dumber and the trolls gotten smarter so it's almost impossible to tell the difference between maliciousness and stupidity and for the rest of us it doesn't really matter one way or the other. A person wasting our time is a person wasting our time, the intentions aren't important.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      different is a matter of use case. The difference doesn't matter to the applicant. It probably does if you propose the death penalty for posting fake listings.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        A fine large enough to make bad job postings (genuine or not) unprofitable is fine. We don't need reducto ad absurdum here. Just make businesses put thought into their postings and not let someone who has no idea of the qualifications right them up themselves.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
If you get hundreds of apps and you can't get a single qualified candidate, you either have a horribly inefficient recruiting system or your job needs are so specific that general job boards won't help you anyway. If you have years of inefficiencies happening without being addressed, at what point to we just call it fraud instead? Or possibly you highly overestimate your job needs vs. The requirements posted. Which is endemic of the above reasons anyway.

juujian 2y ago

That would actually be a surprisingly low figure as far as I'm concerned.

pelagicAustral 2y ago
I'm thinking exactly the same. Feel like it's more like 3 in 5, if not 4 in 5. I recently commented on another thread about how I managed 2 interviews and 1 offer out of ~500 applications. Which is kind of telling, since it only took 2 actual interviews to get another job (alas for less money that I make right now anyway)... If the jobs were real, it should be far easier to get them.
- convolvatron 2y ago
  The part I don’t get is that 6 months later I get responses to applications. I’ve talked to recruiters and the picture they paint is hundreds or thousands of resumes in the inbox. They keep shuffling their search criteria and sometimes someone interesting pops out. That doesn’t entirely make sense to me, but something is clearly quite broken, and it seems to be as much due to incompetence as fraud
  - daseiner1 2y ago
    I’ll never forget getting a boilerplate rejection email from Lockheed Martin 13 months after I applied for an internship for the upcoming summer.
    - b112 2y ago
      I'll try to upstage that! 20+ years ago I applied, and interviewed for a Federal Gov of Canada job. 18 months later they called me to tell me I got the job. I'd been at another job for 16 months! Glad I didn't take it. Government and traditional big corp are very stodgy, slow to change.
      - ryandrake 2y ago

Havoc 2y ago

That’s better than I would have guessed frankly. Internet is making it sound like 4 out of 5

nsagent 2y ago
Well, my recruiter callback ratio is likely 1 out of 5, despite having a very VERY niche profile: a PhD focused on NLP for creative text generation, especially in video games, and a prior career as a game developer. Needless to say, I've only focused on roles that fit that narrow profile. One of the recruiters that contacted me didn't even know I worked in games, despite it making up the bulk of my work experience (including as a lead developer). Considering how closely I match this narrow profile, and the number of people that likely do, it's weird how low my callback ratio has been.
- sumtechguy 2y ago
  > One of the recruiters that contacted me didn't even know I worked in games I get that all the time with my setup. "you look like a good fit and have lots of experience for XYZ tech". Nowhere on my resume does it even mention it. Sometimes I have to look it up and see what they are talking about. One of them even went on and on about my current job. Despite it only having the start date in that spot and no exp on what I do here. It is blindingly obvious they did not read my resume. They are keyword scumming and hoping for the best.

Glyptodon 2y ago

I think the rate of non-fill is higher. But the reasons for it are all over the map. Everything from "we always leave a posting up even when we're not really looking just in case the perfect candidate happens to walk through the door" but in the mean time nobody really pays attention to applicants, to "we weren't getting the applicants we wanted with this posting, so we took it down and are trying a new posting," to "we're legally obligated to post this, but we already have a plan about hiring" whether it's someone connected, someone internal, or a preference for H1B workers, to all kinds of other scenarios. Anybody who has ever applied for a dozen jobs, sent literate applications and outreach, and has heard from most of them never to months later regardless of actual fit for the job knows this.

fifilura 2y ago
I think "looking for the perfect candidate" is the most common reason by far. Great developers with domain knowledge are always possible to fit in, simply because they are money generators rather than a cost.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  100% agree. A big issue with tech is there are so many options and domains that for any particular job it can easily take even an amazing developer 6-9 months to get up to speed if they're unfamiliar with your particular tech stack or business area. That's not the case with most other professions - if I'm, for example, a professional violin player, I can play in basically any orchestra in the world and be proficient from day 1. So if you happen to find that unicorn who is not only a great developer but is also expert in the major areas of your tech stack and your business domain, you hire them in a heartbeat.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Sounds like something many technical professions have to deal with. Even with all the licenses and certs in the world, very few lawyers or doctors are just walking in and learning the process in a week. Other types of engineering need to understand the pipeline in another firm compared to their old one. A firefighter needs time to mesh with the team and figure out what equipment and tools are available here. But then again, I bet most of those also aren't trying to rely on AI to find talent.

dyauspitr 2y ago

You also have companies like mine (very large) where we don’t even post job descriptions online but just hire through internal referrals.

OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago

At one of my previous companies, I recall suggesting to my CEO that we open some job postings "just in case" the right person comes along. He candidly noted that we already have open job postings, and gave me access to the email they all went to. I saw over 3,000 applications made over the last 2-3 years. Tailored resumes. Cover letters. This wasn't some LinkedIn "quick apply", these were direct "Fill out the form" on our website. Not a single one of these applications got read.

f1shy 2y ago
This is making that company not look very good, is it?!
- grajaganDev 2y ago
  It is not making that company look very good. Enticing job seekers to waste their very precious time is not ethical. Edit: fix double negative.
  - b112 2y ago
    Just an FYI.. the double negative means you said it makes the company look good. (I don't think you intended that)
    - grajaganDev 2y ago
      Thank you - fixed it.
- duxup 2y ago
  Doesn't hurt them either I don't think. Nobody knows. It sucks because the whole job hunting system is borked.
  - chgs 2y ago
    If 500 people apply for a fake job and don’t get to an interview or personal response stage, then when they need a real job filling they’ve already wiped out a lot of applicants who won’t bother applying next time.

robcohen 2y ago

This is a spam problem. Spam problems are easily solved by simply charging for attention. Job postings should pay me to view them, and I should pay job postings to apply to them. The only reason why ghost postings exist is because the marginal cost to the company is so incredibly low to do it. In demand people should get paid for their attention. What I don't understand is why are there no systems that actually implement this? Most likely because the user education problem of cryptocurrency wallets and the various UI/UX issues it presents, but there's no mainstream apps that I can think of that actually try this. Seems like it would work in dating apps, in advertising, in CRMs, in social networks of all types. Why hasn't it been done? My guess is because we've only solved half of the problem with crypto. We have the cheap value exchange, but we don't have identity figured out quite yet.

shultays 2y ago
(paypal me 0.1$ to see this reply)
- airstrike 2y ago
  I really wish that's how (a subset of) the internet worked. Not for replies, but for quality website access. Think newspapers and other primary sources of information. Fill up your browser tank and go visit these websites. The site then gets paid per view, or per duration of stay. Details are tricky though.
  - seabass-labrax 2y ago
    In my opinion a big barrier to the success of such systems is that newspapers often aren't primary sources. Most outsource the reporting to press agencies and (increasingly) to social media. Press agencies usually do sell individual stories with primary reporting, but not at the prices you and I can afford. For mainstream press though, is it worth the pennies of a microtransaction to read someone's re-hashing of public records and social media posts? That is very much dependent on both the reader's personal expertise and the author's, and if they are mismatched the article becomes worthless to the reader. An article explaining what HN is would be illuminating to many, but entirely unworthy even of pennies to you and I.

CretinDesAlpes 2y ago

I've been on a career break / job search for about a year. I used to work in "AI" before it became fashionable, here are some observations of the tech job market: 1) There are so much BS jobs in BS companies it's hard to understand if those are even companies doing real thing (cf. David Graeber) 2) 80% of jobs in my field are about LLMs and technology no one understand or in companies that don't even know if they need it but are just following the trend 3) I've seen big and small companies posting over and over the same job ad. For example a big consulting group has been posting the exact same job for more than a year (really) on linkedin and elsewhere - each time there are more than 100+ applicants on linkedin. 4) Recruiters from 'serious' agencies told me it was the worst job market they know of 5) There is also a rise of fake recruitement agencies, it's very easy and quick to set up a page on Linkedin now with fake workers, fake images, fake jobs, etc. 6) The supply demand imbalance allows some small companies (startups) to ask for insane technical assignement that takes hours, which at the end looked like free consultancy. I had one that did not even provide feedback after a rejection, and when asked said "because we don't" 7) The increase of centralised platform such as Linkedin has increased competition. Everyone is applying to the same jobs, and many candidates uses AI to beat the HR platform. [This has been reported by FT - https://www.ft.com/content/1429fcb2-e0ef-4e47-b2b8-8bd225ac2fe2 https://www.ft.com/content/1429fcb2-e0ef-4e47-b2b8-8bd225ac2... ]. Same problem as in the online dating market. 8) There is so much ghosting, that can happen at any stage of the process. Again, same problem as in the online dating market.

y-curious 2y ago
What is the point of a fake recruiting agency? I've heard claim of this but I wonder what the endgame is. Is it to harvest contacts? Scam people? Waste people's time?
- CretinDesAlpes 2y ago
  My bet is the collection and reselling of personal information, legally or illegally. Many (most?) people do put their real name, real address, real phone number and real email on their resume. You automate this on linkedin and can get a lot of CVs, I don't think this is a crazy idea.

ge96 2y ago

I forgot to make a meme about it but I still get these "We're sorry we went with someone else" months later from jobs I applied to but it's alright I have a job now. The joke of the meme is I feel ashamed/disappointed but I forget I'm fine.

f1shy 2y ago

I have seen that happening inside a company (big one). There is an internal job market, and I would say the ratio is about 20% or more fake. From every 20 applications to postings that seem like a copy of my resume, I get 5 replies (the rest is black hole, or come a reply 10 months later) from the replies, eventually 2 interviews.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
Weird, I really don't see the reason an internal job board does this. They know all the people and their experiences. Is this just some hr compliance so they can search outwards?
- f1shy 2y ago
  One option is HR compliance with some kind or procedure. One other thing I've seen (many times) is to pacify an over-worked team: the team is working crazy over hours, demotivated, asking for help. The manager knows is impossible to hire (head count / budget limits) and so they open a Job Offer, where they can show "we are searching for help, but nobody comes". How do I know? once I was in such over exploited team, so each of the team made a fake resume that was, of course, like a glove for the position. Nobody got a call back. When we confronted the manager, he had to confess. [in case somebody asks himself, 6 months later the whole team was gone]. Then same company, I applied for a job, where my resume was really perfect for the position. As I received the canned response, I called the manager, pressed a little bit, and also said "we had to do as we are searching, but we are really not". Yet another one I know of, because of reasons: HR consulting companies and also some HR departments want to test if they are paying too much/too little, want to have some "market measurement". They fake jobs, fake interviews, and they would inconspicuously ask "how much are you earning now" and/or "how much do you want to earn" and that is all they want from you really.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Yeah I've heard that angle too. Really nasty. Glad the team wassable to stand up for themselves and walk away from the abuse. Sure wish that could be the outcome more often; it'd fix a lot of things overnight.

lambdaone 2y ago

One in five seems to be an under-estimate. Based on my experience of Upwork, at least 50% would be a better estimate.

iknownthing 2y ago

I worked at a company that created fake job postings for H1B reasons.

aprilthird2021 2y ago
This is for PERM, not H1B. Many companies did and still do this. Imo, the concept of PERM is flawed, which causes companies to do this stuff. Some have had to settle with the gov't and can no longer do this (Meta). Also, the jobs are not fake, they are labor market test jobs, designed to show that no citizen meets the job requirements thus validating a green card for the H1B visa holder. They are "fake" in that they are designed so no one applies for or gets the job. Imo, labor market test should be part of the visa granting process, not the naturalization.
- dzdt 2y ago
  I have been required to create such fake job postings. From the line manager perspective, how it looks is you have a colleague who has been working with you for several years who is on a H1B visa. They want to get a green card and become a permanent resident. To support this, we are required to post a fake job ad for their position, and invent a reason to reject any US citizens who apply for the position. (Non-US applications are ignored.) Our legal advice was that the job posting had to be contain only legitimate requirements for the role, so it could not be highly tailored to only match the resume of the employee seeking PERM status. The result was phone screen interviews were required to reject 8-10 on-paper-potentially-qualified US applicants for the fake position. This is for a highly specialized area within finance, where in real hiring there is an immense effort to find the strongest candidates regardless of nationality. In hindsight I am confident that earlier in my career I had applied to at least one such fake role. One not-well-known advantage of working with a recruiter as a job seeker in such a field is the recruiter will have back-channel information to know to ignore such fake job postings.
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    Yep, this is how it is done. I think it really needs to be revisited because everyone is faking the labor test because you have an employee who is great, who's been here for years and years, probably even had kids here, and if in the 10-15 years since the employee was hired, one US citizen could do the same job now, he gets sent back? It should be a requirement for the visa, not the residency. Residency should be done like Canada where you earn points to get it to foster assimilation.

tiffanyh 2y ago

Does cross posted job listing mess up this data? Because it's common for the same job to be listed on multiple job sites.

RainyDayTmrw 2y ago

In trading, spoofing[1] is placing insincere orders to generate a signal, and presumably influence other participants' behavior, without an intention of actually having those orders filled. Bad actors spoof trades because it works. Spoofing is illegal, and rightly so, although enforcement may be a bit lax. I guess, we're now seeing the rise of spoofing in job postings. I, for one, find it quite tiring. I think there's a parallel. Bad actors spoof job postings because it works. What can we do to make it less effective or less worthwhile? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoofing_(finance) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoofing_(finance)

esafak 2y ago
Job posting boards can punish them if they detect them as being spoofed through response rates.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Can. Won't. If trading has lax enforcement where this can cost people millions, why would a job board getting paid to post fake jobs care?

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

> The job market has become more soul-crushing than ever. I have often stated that the fact that I was basically evicted from the job market was one of the best things that ever happened to me (I didn't think so, at the time it was happening), and every time I read something like this, it reinforces that. But I was one of the fairly rare (it seems) people that could afford to have that happen. My heart goes out to the folks that have to endure this stuff. One of the saddest things, is that really good workers, that would take their job seriously, and be excellent employees, are being knocked out of the game, and the unproductive, disloyal, rapacious sharks that have learned to game the system, are taking all the fish food.

dirtybirdnj 2y ago
> really good workers, that would take their job seriously, and be excellent employees, are being knocked out of the game, and the unproductive, disloyal, rapacious sharks that have learned to game the system, are taking all the fish food. This needs to be made illegal or at the very least cost prohibitive. It's literally why the CEO lost his life. One side is destroying the livlihood of the other and even basic levels of "please stop" are hand waved away by the needs of the shareholders and YOY hockey stick growth. For some reason "it's business" is a valid and ethically clean reason to build an economic model on top of suffering. Honesty and dignity need to become fashionable and valuable again. Until we can wean people off the cult of personality around narcissists and psychopaths we're just carrying water for the people who do the worst abuse and will never change unless confronted at figurative or literal gunpoint.
- NickC25 2y ago
  >"This needs to be made illegal or at the very least cost prohibitive." How? Any mechanism to make it illegal will be vigorously fought by the same forces who currently benefit from it. Those forces have unlimited funds to "lobby" lawmakers. >"hand waved away by the needs of the shareholders and YOY hockey stick growth." Not needed, but desired. Corporations acting as responsible stewards of capital aren't mandated to grow at a given percentage, just that the capital doesn't decrease. We need to remind corporate America that perpetual double digit growth is impossible, and they can and should be happy with any growth at all.

selimthegrim 2y ago

I applied to some New York City series B start up with a Director literally looking over my shoulder after she assured me the job postings weren’t fake. Plot twist: they were fake they just weren’t in her department so she didn’t know and the only job they were really hiring for according to LinkedIn was an Azure contractor for $60 an hour

ulfw 2y ago

Way way way way more than 1 in 5. Honestly.

smel 2y ago

I would say 4 out of 5 to be honest

extr 2y ago

I've found almost all my career positions through recruiters. I find it's about 100x more productive of an experience. You know the job exists because they're paying someone to fill it. You get to talk to someone on the phone about the job before you have to lift a finger. If you sound good on the phone, they just put you right through to the hiring manager/interview process, and also are materially invested in your success. Getting the formatting right on your resume is an afterthought. They'll give you an entire gameplan and tips on this company's specific process. People hate on LinkedIn but having a presentable profile and using the right keywords is worth it's weight in gold IMO. Even if it doesn't work out, they'll keep you in their rolodex and hit you up for jobs long into the future.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
Main issue is that recruiters can get every bit as bougy as applicants can get when the market sways in their favor. So in a market like this, you may have less than a 10% response rare from messaging recruiters. Whereas 2021-2022 you'd almost always at least get a reply when you messaged a human.
- extr 2y ago
  I never message recruiters cold. Only wait for them to message me, or hit up recruiters I have existing relationship with.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Yeah, tried that early on. Messaged 4 recruiters I thought I had food relations with. 2 didn't have any jobs. 2 were no longer working as a recruiter. Oh and one ghosted me for... Almost 2 years.
mywittyname 2y ago
Same here, but have you looked for a position in the past 2 years? It's dramatically worse than I've experienced in my 20 years as a dev. I only ever apply to jobs that I know I'm qualified for and know that I can demonstrate it, so my application -> offer ratio was historically pretty high. In my last job search, I sent out 99% of the applications I've ever sent out in my career. The tech job market enshitified rather quickly.

tombert 2y ago

I've posted this story before, but it's relevant. About two years ago, I was looking for a job, and a recruiter reached out about a software engineering position at a prominent newspaper [1]. I told the recruiter to apply me, they did, and they made me sit through a two hour video course on ethics and sexual harassment, which was weird considering that I hadn't even done an interview yet. About a week later, the recruiter gets back to me, and they declined me because my resume "reads too much like a manager, no hands-on coding experience". I was extremely confused, because most of the time people say the opposite, that my resume is too in the weeds, and I need to focus on high-level stuff. Moreover, I don't have any managerial experience on my resume...every role says something like "software engineer". And then it hit me: the hiring manager never read my resume. He already knew who he wanted to hire for the role, and for either legal or compliance or bureaucratic reasons, he had to make it look like he was looking for other candidates, and in the process, he wasted my time and the recruiter's. [1] Not going to say which one but you've definitely heard of it.

stronglikedan 2y ago
> Not going to say which one Nothing will change until online naming and shaming is not considered taboo.
- tombert 2y ago
  I just don't want my name ASSOCIATED with that kind of PRESS, ok??
  - the-chitmonger 2y ago
    I'm glad you clarified - I was expecting NYT!
    - tombert 2y ago
      I don't know what you're talking about :)
  - 2y ago

redleggedfrog 2y ago

Makes me want to use an LLM to apply for a gajillion jobs. See how they like their own medicine.

matchagaucho 2y ago

I've noticed sites like Indeed are still showing job listings scraped from our website 5 years ago. I've not chased down every scraper and submitted a remove request. But I can easily see how 20%+ of job listings are dead-ends.

taeric 2y ago

There is a big gulf between "fake" and "never filled" that I don't like being washed here. Specifically, there are plenty of reasons you might have a position not get filled that are not nefarious. Could be an aspirational. Could be a company that is so under water that they can't manage a hiring pipeline. Could be one that isn't under water, but doesn't know how to manage a hiring pipeline. Could have been overcome by other events. Plenty of options. Yes, I'm sure there is some fraud. I'd love to see data that went into that detail. I'm assuming it is rather lower than 1 in 5.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
If companies were as honest about "low priority" evergreen work over the constant need help immediately, that may be acceptable. But I've never see anyone say that in a job posting. If you're indistinguishable from the behavior of a fraudster, that still reflects poorly and has the same results on applicants. (well, okay. Actually honest. How many of those "urgent" postings eve felt urgent?)
Joel_Mckay 2y ago
In general, some people want ghost-workers for working visa scams. i.e. some desperate individuals pay to not even work in a country to get around immigration rules. This scam was outed by some undercover East Indian journalists. Its gross because cons exploit people, and suppress domestic economic reality by bidding down wage rates. Nothing was done about this by the way... nothing... =3

maybeculdbeyeah 2y ago

Maybe they are there to fake a good faith effort to justify their H1B hires.

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neom 2y ago

I'm starting to wonder if this is something that could/should be regulated...? I can't think of a great reason for allowing this from industry. It seems least reasonable you could be required to go back and remove postings when the position is filled or no longer available??

johnnyanmac 2y ago
It absolutely should be regulated. Especially since there's so many ways companies exploit this for a variety of factors. I can't think of one benefit to applicants. Wastes their time, the increasingly AI-submitted rejections are useless noise instead of feedback on how to improve, and the rise of "video interviews" just give more data than necessary to a company without ever needing to send a human to talk to them. The application market needs an entire overhaul.

ethin 2y ago

It wouldn't surprise me if this was a significant under-count. I've been applying for jobs for, what, 3-4 years now, both when I was in Uni and after. I don't even know how many job applications I've submitted but I think I've gotten maybe 10-15 interviews at most? I have of course gotten the typical advice: "Build your network", "Submit a cover letter", blah blah blah, but the first bit is completely useless to me (I don't have the finances to go to conferences for example) and I've tried the second bit and haven't gotten anywhere. I've been told to tailor my resume but... Yeah, I'm not doing that when I'm supposed to be submitting hundreds of applications per day or something. Honestly it's hard to muster up the motivation now to apply for jobs instead of working on open-source projects and (maybe) posting something freelance-ish on fiver or something because at least with open-source projects I'll get somewhere and it's something I enjoy; with job hunting and all the automation at play, and with even more things getting automated, it's a lot harder to answer the question of "why should I even bother" when companies are slashing headcount like crazy and aren't fined heavily by these platforms for posting ghost jobs and wasting my time (or some equally as harsh punishment that makes them actually pay attention). I still apply occasionally, but given how horrible the market is I know my job application count has significantly fallen. I just hope the market turns around and we see some huge crackdowns on all this automation because it's massively disincentivizing applicants (after all, why apply when you can only submit an application every 10-30 seconds while a bunch of people can submit 10000 applications per minute?).

Glyptodon 2y ago
If you're submitting a hundred applications a day, you're doing it wrong. You should get better results aiming for just a few a day, but each tailored. (Though obviously it's just not a great time right now, I'd argue not being bot-fodder and obvious chaff is extra worth it if any human ever does actually look.)
- ethin 2y ago
  Your the first person who's told me the opposite of the advice that I've been told. It's hard to figure out which advice I should actually consider and what should be thrown out. I'm honestly unsure how tailoring would change my resume all that much. I'm a new college grad (graduated about 2 years ago, will be 3 in May) so... Shrug. Honestly I'm wondering if I should just keep doing what I'm doing, maybe? Idk nowadays, and I doubt the automation problem is going to go away.

indiantinker 2y ago

I have been applying to this job at major brick making toy company for the past 3-4 years that is super dope. But i never get it and neither does anyone else.

rdtsc 2y ago

> actually a corporate strategy designed to make the businesses posting them seem like they’re growing Assume these companies don't have morals (that should be the default, btw) and ask yourself why wouldn't they generate 1000s of open job postings? Especially if many steps in the initial process can be automated. This makes them look like they are growing, and maybe their filter might find some rare great candidate and they'll find an opening for them. All upsides and almost no downsides. One downside is having to manage applications. But that can be outsourced or automated. It's immoral, disheartening to potential job seekers and skews job number stats, but that means nothing unless it's illegal. Once they start fearing of getting in legal trouble, they'll keep doing the same.

eterm 2y ago

I got an email from LinkedIn prompting me to "unsubscribe from job alert <X> because you haven't viewed it in 3 months". Indeed I haven't, because every week they email me the same list of the same jobs that have been listed since the first week I signed up. And also because setting "remote" effectively turns off the radius, even though I ideally want a job that is remote but also local if possible.

deleted 2y ago

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CM30 2y ago

Makes sense. Seen an awful lot of jobs on these sites come up time and time again, and it always felt rather suspicious how often that happened. If a job can't be filled within a year or three, that's a pretty good sign that the company isn't particularly interested in filling it. As you may expect, they also tend to be the jobs that don't even respond with a rejection or anything when people apply to them, and where anything submitted seemingly just vanishes into the ether.

ricciardo 2y ago

Seriously contemplating if it is even worth applying in this type of job market. Being young, would it not be more beneficial to just contribute to Open Source projects in which my actual passion for the field comes from and additionally find outside work to just get by? I guess it all comes down to an individual's ambitions and goals in life, but seeing some of my colleagues and friends do nothing but apply to jobs for a straight year seems extremely unfulfilling (mind you this is a perspective of a new-grad in CS).

InkCanon 2y ago
I have similar thoughts. I'd say one big upshot of working in tech was they formed very high talent densities during their peak in the 2010s, so you could learn a lot. But now I'm not so sure. Plus it's a circus getting hired as a fresh grad. I'm largely thinking of masters or PhD - in the right place you get that talent density too.

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goredsox 2y ago

There are companies that scrape linkedin job postings for skills based workforce analytics. These jobs reports are then sent to higher ed institutions to inform classes. So manipulating these markets can signal to higher ed what skills they would like to devalue in the future

woofcat 2y ago

You mean Aha! isn't hiring 100 people in 100 locations world wide at all times?

Glyptodon 2y ago
The one person I know who worked there was very disillusioned.

Aurornis 2y ago

This headline was carefully written to trigger confirmation bias, but the phrase “or never filled” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Most mid-sized companies where I’ve been a hiring manager haven’t had a 1:1 relationship between job postings and hires. Some times we’d post 1 job posting but hire 2-3 people out of it. Other times we’d post 2 or 3 job listings at different levels for 1 headcount because we were open to candidates of wide skill range but a single wide-range posting tends to turn off more experienced candidates. We’ve had situations where an internal candidate expresses interest in a public job posting, so we take it down without filling it and replace it with a different posting for their backfill. So looking back, several of my job postings would be considered “fake or never filled” despite the fact that we were honestly hiring and filling roles. This article and the WSJ article it sources from feel like journalists picking up on a social media trend and working backward to provide fodder for it. There is no 1:1 relationship between a job posting and a hire at many companies, so using job posting data to draw conclusions like this isn’t good logic. It probably feels like vindication to people who are tired of applying to jobs, though.

jstummbillig 2y ago

Companies dirty secret: Job postings are an invaluable signal generator for companies. Knowing how much demand there is for various positions in your company is super helpful to drive business decisions. And unfortunately the company loses most of the signal when they are candid about just gathering potential applicants (because people will not apply and you know a lot less about their interest and potential) Not defending being uncandid, just a heads-up to be realistic about what's going on here. Unless it's made outright illegal, just assume it's happening all the time, because of how fantastic the upside is and how cheap it is to do. The amount of work the company has to invests in screening incoming requests is entirely variable and scales to 0 if they really don't want to hire right now.

beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
Most companies, if not nearly all of them, are just really bad at hiring above "entry-level" in general. The practice of pushing hiring through HR teams and recruiters often leads to the job posting being weird catch-all abstractions because a huge funnel brings in lots of resumes, which makes the HR teams look busy. Really, postings should be astoundingly specific --- literally, "This is exactly what we are looking for and the problem we want to solve. Prove to us you can solve that problem." Generalist hiring teams are usually unable to get that specific, which is why personal references and recommendations are very valuable. The number of applicants you get should be a good sign that your posting is too general or just right. Positions above the junior level should have significantly less applicants. If not, then you can probably simply hire a junior level.
- nextworddev 2y ago
  Can confirm. 90% of L7, L8 hires at AWS between 2021 and 2022 flopped.

siliconc0w 2y ago

Good opportunity for a fakejobs.fyi site that names and shames companies that do this. Send in perfect resumes that 100% match the job req with 10+ years of experience and see which get a response. This of course leads to a tragedy of the commons but that is what unregulated capitalism demands.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

The headline could also apply to the 1990s. I was an employment counselor for a non-profit for a few years. I collected employment listings from multiple sources (Bureau of Labor was a big one) and printed+sorted them to help job seekers. I found a high percentage of distinct jobs that were endlessly listed. If I sent qualified applicants after them, they invariably never got a response. That was just the ghost listings. Another large chunk were problematic for reasons that had nothing to do with applicant qualifications. Maybe 2 listings in 5 were reasonable and competent efforts to find workers.

fsndz 2y ago

The ratio is probably 4/5 for YC Startups

Scoundreller 2y ago

Another 2 in 5 are real, but they’re hoping to replace an existing employee at a lower rate. No net new job but net lower income.

dzdt 2y ago

I have been required to create fake job postings because of US immigration policy. From the line manager perspective, how it looks is you have a colleague who has been working with you for several years who is on a H1B visa. They want to get a green card and become a permanent resident. To support this, we are required to post a fake job ad for their position, and invent a reason to reject any US citizens who apply for the position. (Non-US applications are ignored.) Our legal advice was that the job posting had to be contain only legitimate requirements for the role, so it could not be highly tailored to only match the resume of the employee seeking PERM status. The result was phone screen interviews were required to reject 8-10 on-paper-potentially-qualified US applicants for the fake position. This is for a highly specialized area within finance, where in real hiring there is an immense effort to find the strongest candidates regardless of nationality. In hindsight I am confident that earlier in my career I had applied to at least one such fake role. One not-well-known advantage of working with a recruiter as a job seeker in such a field is the recruiter will have back-channel information to know to ignore such fake job postings.

CommanderData 2y ago
Should be illegal but I'm sure tech companies want this loophole to remain. Anyone based in the US/UK should be an advocate for keeping jobs local for their own long term job security. Anyone who argues the opposite baffles me (sometimes for the sake of it).
- librish 2y ago
  While it might be better for your job security to keep your own field hiring locally, it could be better for your life if all other fields hire the best regardless of nationality.
- bpodgursky 2y ago
  [dead]
- deepsun 2y ago
  But then I would also argue that work restrictions are illegal as well. Why would we want to restrict any high-skilled already wanted candidates from any country in the world? Why we forbid them working and paying taxes here? Bums on the streets don't pay taxes (for many reasons), but we give them permission to work. While we at the same time forbid foreign highly paid professionals to pay taxes here?

dav43 2y ago

In Singapore it’s a lot higher than this. There are government mandates that roles must be advertised - so companies planning on hiring internally will advertise roles, interview candidates then justify why no candidates are good fit then hire the original internal candidate. It’s laughable.

jaco6 2y ago

[dead]

salynchnew 2y ago

One interesting part of this is a small number of companies will post multiple job listings with different locations listed for a single open headcount, to get maximum expsosure on Indeed and LinkedIn (both of which have some sense of geo-based or onsite/remote-based recommendations for job seekers).

esher 2y ago

Not sure if that is mentioned with the comments already. I am currently trying to hire a remote developer (real posting) and I have to battle with 'fake applications' with super generic CVs and intros, individually created by AI for specific jobs [2,3,4]. I assume that there are humans behind it in most cases. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42655183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42655183 - my rant [2] https://www.rezi.ai/ https://www.rezi.ai/ [3] https://flowcv.com/ai-resume-builder https://flowcv.com/ai-resume-builder [4] https://www.jobscan.co/ https://www.jobscan.co/

blobbers 2y ago

At any given time, the PERM process in the greencard system creates an inflated number of tech job postings. I'll outline the envelope math. Assuming all H1B slots are filled, that's 85,000 per year based on the recent 10 year cap. H1B visas last about 6 years. In order to get a green card, part of the process is the PERM. You post the H1B holder's job in a newspaper or on websites and have legal review the applicants and determine why no american applicants are suitable. Assume that all H1B people want to get into the perm process, but it can generally take a few years to happen. So at any given time, there may be up to 510,000 (85K6) people applying for PERM status. During that time, we can assume about half are in the PERM process, meaning we have at least 255,000 fake* postings that are specifically tailored to a candidate in order to reject other candidates. TLDR; PERM process creates at least 0.25M fake job postings at any given time, mostly in technology.

howdoesoneknow 2y ago
How does one know that this is happening so that they are not wasting their time applying for positions that they will never get?
- blobbers 2y ago
  Usually they try to tailor the job description very specifically to the PERM person's skills, and they're allowed to discriminate based on someone not having a specific skill. You need to tick all the boxes in order to not get disqualified or to disqualify the PERM candidate. The job description may still have some generic text about how we don't expect you to have everything; that's gobbledygook, ignore it. You need to have everything. If a job description looks too specific, it may be a PERM job post. I don't think there is a clear cut way to avoid it. Probably the best way to get around it is referrals; people might know the hiring manager and know if the req is real.

jedberg 2y ago

Part of the problem is that investors use "total open job listings" as a factor for making an investment decision. If there are a lot then the business must be healthy! VCs actively encourage putting up fake listings, under the guise of "opportunistic hiring".

EatDevSlay 2y ago

I turned down an offer of 500 dollar flat fees for doing a successful interview for outsourced developers. Who knows how that all technically works out. Surely they couldn't just send some completely other dude? Whole thing is pretty scammy.

yobbo 2y ago

Here is one article stating an estimated 80% of jobs are filled through networks: https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2020/10/15/networking-its-not-what-you-think/ https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2020/10/15... That would be consistent with 4/5 job postings being "fake", though the article also says "are 70-80% are never posted". So unclear.

wyclif 2y ago

This is why I don't write custom cover letters anymore, even though I'm pretty good at it. It's just too exhausting when you know a lot of them are going to fake postings. I'll do it if I'm working with a solid recruiter who is working with legit companies. But I'm not doing it anymore if I haven't heard of the company in question and I'm blind applying.

rldjbpin 2y ago

feels like i somehow only applied to the fake ones during my last job search. outside of the us for context, so should rule out the h1b explanation. seen many of them staying up for months on end, and getting reposted on job sites as if something just came up. many happen to send rejection mails when they finally bother closing them in their crm. while i still worked on applying and writing custom cv/cover letters the "old-fashioned way", i don't envy the past where you'd do the same paperwork physically. but it is very draining and frustrating given how many more openings you end up applying for compared to the analogue yesteryears. getting on the employment train is hard, but for most people you could then just rely on personal network and getting reached out for newer opportunities.

GuB-42 2y ago

To be honest, I expected more. There are many reason for job postings to never get filled. They can be fake for various reasons: visas, to make the company appear to grow, for data collection, etc... It can turn out the job wasn't needed after all. They may not have found any appropriate candidate. The job may have been filled in another way (ex: cooptation) but they forgot to remove the original posting. And job postings that are never filled are not that bad by themselves. It starts becoming a problem when they lead to fake interviews, where significant effort is made for nothing. In other word, 4 in 5 online job posting are real, which doesn't sound that bad.