4 ms·

Ghost jobs are essentially the 'vaporware' of the HR world. In any other department, misrepresenting your intent to engage in a transaction would be seen as a b

Ghost jobs are essentially the 'vaporware' of the HR world. In any other department, misrepresenting your intent to engage in a transaction would be seen as a breach of professional ethics. The fact that it has become a standard KPI for HR departments to 'keep the pipeline warm' at the expense of thousands of hours of unpaid candidate labor is a massive market failure.

p-e-w 10mo ago
> In any other department, misrepresenting your intent to engage in a transaction would be seen as a breach of professional ethics. In most other situations related to money or contracts, it would be a criminal offense punishable by prison time.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
  > In most other situations related to money or contracts, it would be a criminal offense punishable by prison time What are you thinking of? In most cases, that falls firmly under the category of bullshitting. Annoying. Unprofessional. Dishonest. But rarely criminal. What makes this possibly illegal (though I'm still unsure if it's crimial) is that it's specifically around employer-employee relations.
  - pharrington 10mo ago
    Fraud is very illegal.
    - Nextgrid 10mo ago
      Only when done by individuals, or against rich people.
    - JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
      > Fraud is very illegal Fraud requires intent. And a lot of commercial bullshitting either does not have fraudulent intent, or has it but in an entirely unprovable way.
whatsupdog 10mo ago
[flagged]
- 3D30497420 10mo ago
  I'm not sure I'm following. How would does the gender balance of HR have a role to play here?
  - vkou 10mo ago
    Nothing. It has nothing to do with this.
    - Ylpertnodi 10mo ago
      Maybe it does. It's a fair question.
      - orwin 10mo ago
        Is HR the department that post jobs and requirements in your company? Because at mine, HR is involved during recruitment, but they sure don't fill job posting or look at CV, that's just isn't their job. They are mostly involved if the company wants to transfer your contract from contractor to permanent employee. And if HR is posting on job boards, that's the original mistake. But gender ratio in HR is so irrelevant compared to the questions 'why is HR posting about engineering open positions' I can say quite confidently: that's not a fair question, at all, and smell like some ragebait or culture war shit.
  - pjc50 10mo ago
    Incredible levels of misogyny from the tech world, even on the "respectable" side of HN.
- hhh 10mo ago
  what kind of redpill schizophrenia is this? no business is going to care about unpaid peoples time, and if they have to list a job publicly even if they have internal hires it only makes it worse.
wombatpm 10mo ago
Seems like participation in unemployment should require every job posting to be recorded as to date open, date filled, number of candidates applied, number interviewed. Such information should be public and weekly updated. Companies that do not comply should pay a higher rate.
- firstplacelast 10mo ago
  Earlier this year was playing around with the idea of creating an app to track job applications and the subsequent interview process for candidates. Then using the data to give users insights into companies and roles and how responsive they are. So (with enough adoption) one could see how long they take to respond or even see other candidates they had responded to for a specific position (maybe even allow competing candidates to chat? or see where others are in the interview pipeline). I could not figure out a way to painlessly gather this info without monitoring users' emails (privacy nightmare) or having users forward emails to the app (too painful/not conducive to user adoption). But if anyone has any ideas how to get around that?
  - Manozco 10mo ago
    Maybe by providing a unique email to the user that he/she will use for the company. Be sure to forward emails to the user also :D
    - ZuoCen_Liu 10mo ago
      Haha, that's unlikely.
  - ZuoCen_Liu 10mo ago
    I think the primary obstacle isn't the data ingestion method, but the fact that companies treat the recruitment lifecycle as a proprietary black box. From an HR perspective, transparency is a liability, not an asset. They have zero incentive to cooperate with an external 'tracking' tool because: 1Information Asymmetry is Power: If candidates knew exactly where they stood or how many 'ghost' positions existed, the company would lose its leverage in salary negotiations and timeline control. 2Legal and PR Risk: Making the pipeline visible exposes a company to accusations of bias or 'unfavorable' hiring patterns. 'Privacy' is often used here as a convenient shield to hide inefficiency or lack of intent. Even if you solved the email-scraping problem, you'd likely face Terms of Service (ToS) roadblocks or even legal threats from major corporations claiming you are 'scraping' or 'misrepresenting' their internal processes. The 'pain' of user adoption isn't just about email forwarding; it's about the fact that candidates are often too intimidated to participate in a system that might be seen as 'adversarial' to the very companies they are trying to join. We aren't just missing a tool; we are missing a safe harbor for candidate data sharing.
sershe 10mo ago
How is it different in terms of breach of professional ethics than practice interviews many in tech do, never intending to take the offer? I personally have never done them (part laziness, part ethics, part lucky to have little experience of job insecurity), but have been told a few times by people that do that is stupid that I should stay sharp (and waste 5 people's time to help me for free :))
- ZuoCen_Liu 10mo ago
  I see the parallel, but there’s a key difference in intent and scale. A candidate doing a practice interview is often a defensive reaction to a volatile market—a way to maintain a personal skill. A company posting 'ghost jobs' is a systematic corporate strategy that pollutes market data and wastes thousands of collective hours. One is an individual trying to survive the system; the other is the system itself failing to act in good faith.

p-e-w 10mo ago

> In any other department, misrepresenting your intent to engage in a transaction would be seen as a breach of professional ethics. In most other situations related to money or contracts, it would be a criminal offense punishable by prison time.

JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
> In most other situations related to money or contracts, it would be a criminal offense punishable by prison time What are you thinking of? In most cases, that falls firmly under the category of bullshitting. Annoying. Unprofessional. Dishonest. But rarely criminal. What makes this possibly illegal (though I'm still unsure if it's crimial) is that it's specifically around employer-employee relations.
- pharrington 10mo ago
  Fraud is very illegal.
  - Nextgrid 10mo ago
    Only when done by individuals, or against rich people.
  - JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
    > Fraud is very illegal Fraud requires intent. And a lot of commercial bullshitting either does not have fraudulent intent, or has it but in an entirely unprovable way.

whatsupdog 10mo ago

[flagged]

3D30497420 10mo ago
I'm not sure I'm following. How would does the gender balance of HR have a role to play here?
- vkou 10mo ago
  Nothing. It has nothing to do with this.
  - Ylpertnodi 10mo ago
    Maybe it does. It's a fair question.
    - orwin 10mo ago
      Is HR the department that post jobs and requirements in your company? Because at mine, HR is involved during recruitment, but they sure don't fill job posting or look at CV, that's just isn't their job. They are mostly involved if the company wants to transfer your contract from contractor to permanent employee. And if HR is posting on job boards, that's the original mistake. But gender ratio in HR is so irrelevant compared to the questions 'why is HR posting about engineering open positions' I can say quite confidently: that's not a fair question, at all, and smell like some ragebait or culture war shit.
- pjc50 10mo ago
  Incredible levels of misogyny from the tech world, even on the "respectable" side of HN.
hhh 10mo ago
what kind of redpill schizophrenia is this? no business is going to care about unpaid peoples time, and if they have to list a job publicly even if they have internal hires it only makes it worse.

wombatpm 10mo ago

Seems like participation in unemployment should require every job posting to be recorded as to date open, date filled, number of candidates applied, number interviewed. Such information should be public and weekly updated. Companies that do not comply should pay a higher rate.

firstplacelast 10mo ago
Earlier this year was playing around with the idea of creating an app to track job applications and the subsequent interview process for candidates. Then using the data to give users insights into companies and roles and how responsive they are. So (with enough adoption) one could see how long they take to respond or even see other candidates they had responded to for a specific position (maybe even allow competing candidates to chat? or see where others are in the interview pipeline). I could not figure out a way to painlessly gather this info without monitoring users' emails (privacy nightmare) or having users forward emails to the app (too painful/not conducive to user adoption). But if anyone has any ideas how to get around that?
- Manozco 10mo ago
  Maybe by providing a unique email to the user that he/she will use for the company. Be sure to forward emails to the user also :D
  - ZuoCen_Liu 10mo ago
    Haha, that's unlikely.
- ZuoCen_Liu 10mo ago
  I think the primary obstacle isn't the data ingestion method, but the fact that companies treat the recruitment lifecycle as a proprietary black box. From an HR perspective, transparency is a liability, not an asset. They have zero incentive to cooperate with an external 'tracking' tool because: 1Information Asymmetry is Power: If candidates knew exactly where they stood or how many 'ghost' positions existed, the company would lose its leverage in salary negotiations and timeline control. 2Legal and PR Risk: Making the pipeline visible exposes a company to accusations of bias or 'unfavorable' hiring patterns. 'Privacy' is often used here as a convenient shield to hide inefficiency or lack of intent. Even if you solved the email-scraping problem, you'd likely face Terms of Service (ToS) roadblocks or even legal threats from major corporations claiming you are 'scraping' or 'misrepresenting' their internal processes. The 'pain' of user adoption isn't just about email forwarding; it's about the fact that candidates are often too intimidated to participate in a system that might be seen as 'adversarial' to the very companies they are trying to join. We aren't just missing a tool; we are missing a safe harbor for candidate data sharing.

sershe 10mo ago

How is it different in terms of breach of professional ethics than practice interviews many in tech do, never intending to take the offer? I personally have never done them (part laziness, part ethics, part lucky to have little experience of job insecurity), but have been told a few times by people that do that is stupid that I should stay sharp (and waste 5 people's time to help me for free :))

ZuoCen_Liu 10mo ago
I see the parallel, but there’s a key difference in intent and scale. A candidate doing a practice interview is often a defensive reaction to a volatile market—a way to maintain a personal skill. A company posting 'ghost jobs' is a systematic corporate strategy that pollutes market data and wastes thousands of collective hours. One is an individual trying to survive the system; the other is the system itself failing to act in good faith.