> Dr Escalera adds that she has also heard examples of companies posting jobs to obtain and sell data.
How is that not illegal? Pretending to offer jobs just to suck in resumes to some database just seems like it should be illegal. Or just like running scams is illegal but they are in another country "so tough luck, you'll never get us"?
Please stop thinking about laws, and think about enforcement. If the cops don't care about something, it's defecto legal. We have all sorts of fancy laws on the books that aren't enforced. Environmental regs, animal welfare regs, anti trust laws, white collar anti fraud laws. Data laws fall into this bucket. Nobody that would actually enforce those laws gives a dam. We won't be able to solve any of our problems with new laws, until we can actually enforce the laws already on the books
The other person who replied to you noted that this is not true in British English, but beyond that, it appears to me that my generation (Millennials) essentially all came to the same conclusion, which is that punctuation should only be included in the quotation if it's literally part of the text being quoted. (This probably has something to do with the programming mindset.) If you write
>The senator said that the bill was "bloated."
your sentence itself doesn't have a period. In order to give it a period you'd have to write:
>The senator said that the bill was "bloated.".
But then you're saying that the senator described the bill using the (non-)word consisting of the nine characters 'b', 'l', 'o', 'a', 't', 'e', 'd', 'PERIOD'. We've decided that this doesn't make sense.
This really has me thinking I ought to just delete my Linkedin. I can't say I've ever got anything out of it except spam and fomo. I don't even like to keep it up-to-date because someone is just ripping that information off.
I believe a LinkedIn profile is mandatory to apply to YC. I could assume you might not be interested in applying to YC, but it’s an interesting fact, and might generalize somewhat for many other applications.
Follow the money, easy payouts for cops and courts is where 95% of enforcement goes. Drug possession is an instant $1000 profit for the local law enforcement, and possibly much more. And if they are poor and challenge it, the extra court fees and court lawyer are also profitable.
Fighting private lawyers is what costs courts money and is why the wealthy get way less criminal punishment.
A defect is a flaw, an error, and "defecto" is Spanish for the English "defect". The meaning of "defecto legal" (English) thus remains in the wind, TBD. But I look forward to it's landing.
I believe it actually is illegal, via a set of more general rules on data collection, on what constitutes a fraud, etc. May not be spelled out exactly like this specific use case, but still very likely covered by law. Just difficult to prove.
I saw this post on reddit where some sketchy AI company (Alpheva AI) is posting jobs and requesting a screenshot of all applicants having left their app a 5-star review in the app store as part of the application process:
This is another thing were it clearly is illegal, but good luck actually trying to sue or get them to stop it. Worst case scenario they'll set up another cheap company on paper, and keep doing the same scam
It certainly would be illegal in Europe under the GDPR - data collected for one purpose (handling of applications) cannot be used for another without explicit, informed consent.
It may be illegal, but shady stuff certainly happens in EU too.
Recently investigative journalists here in Finland found out that a significant percentage of job postings over here are indeed fake. Unsurprisingly, worst offenders were recruitment companies, which sometimes listed fake jobs to generate a pool of applicants they can later offer to their clients. Doing this is easy, as no law requires these companies to disclose who their clients are when creating job postings. It's also very common for same position to get posted multiple times.
Other than wasting applicant's time, this behavior also messes up many statistics, which use job postings to determine how many open positions there are available. Basically the chances of finding a job are even worse for unemployed people than stats would imply.
Oh, I agree that illegal stuff happens in the EU aplenty. The question was whether this is illegal and it almost certainly is. Job postings from recruiters - while morally reprehensible - may just skirt the law, but straight up using applications for profile building, marketing and other purposes almost certainly isn’t permitted
The box would need to be off by default and clearly state the purpose. It would at least be possible to verify it exists and no example has been shown.
Because some animals are more equal than others and the government has decided that companies are not only citizens but the more equal group.
Half the shit companies do that gets them a fine would land any individual in jail for committing the same action, but we let them get away with just paying it off. Simultaneously we give those organizations the same rights.
It’s a system with three classes of citizen where the rich and corporations have a better right to responsibility ratio and the average human has a much worse ratio
> The provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 restricting unions, corporations, and profitable organizations from independent political spending and prohibiting the broadcasting of political media funded by them within sixty days of general elections or thirty days of primary elections violate the freedom of speech that is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. United States District Court for the District of Columbia reversed.
I'm sure we're on the same side, but I want to point out that that case didn't make a huge difference. By that I mean it removed a ban on political broadcasts near elections, most of the "money is speech, super pacs can do anything at all" stuff was already legal.
Right, but if you try to make a gentle, common-sense, broad consensus law and the Supreme Court squashes it as violating the constitution, that also prevents any potential future more stringent regulation.
To add onto this, the single exception I am aware of to this rule is the result of the gas explosions in Massachusetts.
In that case the company in charge, Columbia Gas, "exited" the market but all the scuttlebutt I heard in the area was that the Mass government was threatening the corporate execution of revoking their charter, which lead to Columbia gas selling their business off at a loss to Eversource
You do realize that the decisions at the corporations are made by people. You may try to draw a distinction between people and corporations, but in the end it was some person who decided to ghost someone.
You do realize that the people making those decisions at corporations are largely shielded from the liability of said decisions, and that when companies are treated like citizens they almost never get equivalent punishment like human beings do.
I can draw a distinction between people and corporations because it’s literally encoded in the fucking law.
I actually don’t know how or why you would imply that such a distinction doesn’t exist.
This seems analogous to the following.
A company asks users to fill out an online survey in exchange for participation in some raffle, except the company never pays out any prize.
As with the job application there was never a guaranteed reward, but it's still easy to see the damage. The company induced to you to provide them with an economically valuable asset (filled out survey/application) for which you expected a fair chance at a reward.
It seems plausible that you could claim damages at least up to the expected value.
>So never being offered a job because it doesn't exist doesn't lose you anything.
Ah well look, if the job posting was just to collect resumes with zero intention to actually hire, you did lose some things:
- actual time spent applying to a job that was never open
- emotional damage on focus to try to get this job
- loss of free market value of your data (company profited from this data, when you could have profited from it)
- damages for acquisition of your personal data under a fraudulent basis (when otherwise, maybe you did not want your data shared)
Yeah, you go ahead and sue someone for the few minutes of your time it took to send in a application for a fake job. Then you'll really see what wasting time looks like.
But this is part of the problem with crimes and enforcement in the modern age: sure, I might have only wasted a few minutes of my time. But I'm just one of hundreds or thousands of people who were tricked into wasting that time, by this one act.
Multiply this across all the fraudulent job postings, and it really starts to add up.
It's clear (to me, at least) that we need better laws to handle this sort of wide-but-shallow attack on people. It's analogous to spam.
> Yeah, you go ahead and sue someone for the few minutes of your time it took to send in a application for a fake job. Then you'll really see what wasting time looks like.
1. That is exactly what class actions are for, because small damages multiplied by many people are big damages.
2. That's also why we need punitive damages, so someone can't get away with unlawful actions by deliberately coasting along under the threshold where it makes sense to sue. For instance, IIRC, you can collect something like $5000 from someone who doesn't put you on their "do not call list" when requested. That amount has nothing to do with the value of the "few minutes of your time it took to" answer a telemarketing call.
You are missing a point. The only thing it really does is force people to pursue other forms as online channel is too polluted for anyone with sense/options/skill ( or all of the above ). So it leaves desperate, optionless, those without skills and everyone else who fell through the cracks. Another system undermined for no clear benefit. It does not benefit the employer. It does not benefit the employee. It does benefit some data brokers.. and only then for a bit until the rest of the market catches up..
America has no data protection law, apart from some hyper-specific ones: healthcare, video rental records. That makes all of this data sharing completely legal. As well as that, it is widely agreed there that lying is free speech.
It is not wire fraud because you do not pay to apply. (In general; places that charge applicants are even more scammy.)
Exactly - no national, general data protection law. Although the California one looks pretty similar to the GDPR from the summary, it's not truly national.
it is de facto national because California has the most people and is insanely wealthy; there is no F500 company handling broad consumer data that does not have a presence or customers there.
there have already been CCPA enforcements against companies like Tractor Supply, Sephora, Honda, and Google (tho the GOOG was more of a "violated a lot of stuff including CCPA").
It doesn't have enough teeth to scare FAANGs, who have the money and technical ability to do whatever, but it can definitely keep companies in line.
source: did CCPA compliance and security at multiple F500
Even if there was, under the current regime, the probability of it being enforced is near-zero, especially if you are in the good graces of the child king.
The problem of enforcement doesn't fall only on the executive branch. They're tasked with executing laws passed by congress. Congress is ultimately a check on the executive, and if they care to have their laws enforced they do have actions they could take.
That's a very pessimistic view. That boils our system of three branches of government to a purely partisan game of capture the flag in which we all lose if one team captures all three at one.
SCOTUS is a bit different as it both isn't driven by political parties and justices have a history of more frequently breaking with the party they are seen as aligned with.
That just (to much the same horror and sense of unreality I had watching the 9/11 attacks unfold) leaves the ammo box.
Now, I'm British by birth, a country where even the police are not routinely armed, so the American view that weapons are a "fundamental right" is utterly alien to me, and this difference is one of the reasons why I never seriously considered moving to Silicon Valley at any point in my career.
Trump seems pro 2nd Amendment: is that because he is afraid and needs them to like him, or because isn't afraid as he has an army and a secret service to keep him safe, or does he just plain like guns and hasn't even thought about personal risk despite getting shot at?
I definitely agree our democracy seems to be under attack on multiple fronts, and at least the people I'm often around regardless of political affiliation seem to have lost sight of how our system is intended to work.
A violent civil war wouldn't surprise me, though I don't think we're close to it yet and I hope I never see it happen. Though I would prefer seeing that rather than seeing our system successfully destroyed and replaced with what seems to be coming up, an authoritarian socialism of one form or another.
Hah, oh it isn't optimism. I don't think congress will do anything about enforcement but that is nothing new.
My point was simply that we can't only blame the white house when laws go unenforced, the other branches of government are intentionally a check on the executive.
"healthcare, video rental records" wait what? One of these things, etc. Curious how that came to be? Is it like special rules for (IIRC) onions in finance?
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.
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.
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?
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.
I don't think number interviewed is relevant--I don't care so much about exactly how their screening works, just that it lead to hires. The rest of it, though, definitely, and any job ad must include a link to the database.
But I would add one field: filled internally/externally/H1-B, rather than just "filled".
> 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.
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 :))
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.
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.
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.
HR departments post the jobs other departments tell them to post so unless there's a lot of HR-role ghost posts I would say these things are unrelated.
I didn't realise we still had jobs specific for only women. This is such an out of left field comment that I have to ask for some of your references where you got this. Please tell me one job offer which says "Women Only".
I am not sure if more regulation is a solution, but the lack of respect for job seekers is a real problem.
And not just with ghost jobs. My recent experience as a job seeker was harrowing - even with large, proud companies. I would pass multiple rounds of interviews with senior/director-level interviewers only to never hear back from the company - even after a direct request for an update or feedback. Just total ignorance. Again, this happened with a FAANG+ company.
In the Netherlands by law you have the right to retrieve any written internal correspondence regarding your interviews as to ascertain it was a fair decision and decision making process.
Side effect of this is also to keep any bias out of the equation and, being on the other side, easier to call out colleagues making inappropriate or downright discriminating comments (which in my experience unfortunately happens everywhere still)
The unintended side effect of this is that HR coaches you to be as vague as possible in responses. I can’t give real feedback because some feedback may seem dissimilar to other feedback and look like discrimination if you blur your eyes.
Isn't the side effect also giving incentive to those companies to just not be honest in internal communication? But do the real conversation via call or different channel?
Unfortunately, many companies have chosen to comply with anti-discrimination laws by not giving any feedback. Nothing is less discriminatory than an empty string.
If you make such request, how can you enforce to get all of the comms? I'm curious, would some government institution step in and audit their mail servers, slack channels, google hangouts and all other channels to obtain all of the information?
The next stage of complaint is actually the local Information Commissioner.
Companies will usually comply with this, because it's very difficult to instruct staff to not comply with the law without leaving any records or risking one of them leaking it. However they will check what the legal minimum is and do that.
If there is regulation, it should be about monopolies in general and not trying to micromanage hiring. Companies behave this way because they are in a position to do so. In a real competitive environment they wouldn’t. Poorly thought through band-aid rules don’t change that, in fact they would almost certainly favour the big monopolies with the worst hiring practices who have big HR departments that can handle and game compliance.
I don't think it's a non-competitive environment, but that the interests are out of alignment. The penalty for the manager who makes a bad hire is a lot worse than the manager who fails to make a hire.
And we also have the same problem that plagues modern life: the glut of choices leading people to think they can do better than they can. The pool is effectively infinite, there must be a better option somewhere. Companies don't hire. Dating has become very hard. Both lie behind very superficial screening gates that do not represent actual value.
I got feedback from FAANG+ once after multiple rounds with director / manager etc.
I just got told I didn't seem "motivated" enough despite spending several rounds / days / hours interviewing and bunch of leetcode questions. Not even that I wasn't skilled or good enough or didn't pass the questions. Pretty sure the last guy just didn't like me for whatever reason.
Definitely one of the As in the FAANG. In fact both the As have terrible recruiting practices. One is a known ghoster and given that you were ghosted after a senior level meeting tells me which one.
I wonder why people still apply to FAANG companies, there is nothing to be won by working for them. Your work has zero impact, you're actively paid to enshittify stuff over making it better, you have horrible bureaucracy within the company, they lay off thousands of people per year so your job never really is secure, all of FAANG is ethically corrupt beyond means. I'd never hire a FAANG employee to be honest, while working there your skill actively declines because all you really do there is play corporate charade and hope not being laid off.
Aside from the fact that you have no real job security anywhere, people take FAANG jobs for money. Both the high pay at the company itself, and the idea that once FAANG is on your resume, it will command the best jobs afterwards too.
I think they have to pay that high because the work sucks so much in reality. That's the equilibrium point between the demand for people to work there, and the supply of people willing to put up with it.
I had good job security doing in house IT for some companies. Never have seen anyone being laid off, could've stayed there for years to come, the stuff I've built was actively being used and made work easier for people. The domain knowledge I gathered even strengthened my job security as it was more efficient to pay me over having to re-train other people. The only risk to my job was me as I left for a startup after a while. Sure, pay wasn't that high compared to FAANG but at least I didn't make peoples life worse while also hating my job.
I'm choosing to leave a job in tech in academia after 15 years.
If I wanted to, I could stay here until I retire (in another 20+ years), barring the complete destruction of the university I work for.
The position I'm moving to is also in academia (this time public sector in the EU), and I'm given to understand that as long as I can make it through the probationary first year, so long as I keep doing a halfway decent job there I can stay there for as long as I want, too. (We will, of course, have to see how true that is!)
Job security does exist; you just have to be willing to leave the Silicon Valley bubble.
As a bright eyed young engineer I worked for a year in FAANG and loved it[1]. Free lunches, all that scale, opportunities to learn, kool-aid, and at that point i truly believed the company cared about making the world a better place [2]. So regarding:
>there is nothing to be won by working for them
As you can see above, not everyone sees it like that. And HR is working hard to pretend you're a big deal and not just a cog. People who read HN are a bit of a bubble in being disillusioned.
>I'd never hire a FAANG employee
Uhh, ok?
[1] but I had enough pride to quit after a year when they pulled off something I was not OK with.
[2] to be fair, I think at that time most employees did
I happen to agree with you, but it's also worth mentioning that solving whatever problem is creating the need to post ghost jobs in the first place would also make posting them unnecessary (presumably insecurity about the company's ability to assess, hire and retain high quality talent.)
But those are very hard, company-specific problems to solve, hence my agreement :-)
Unfortunately, in America, at least, that would be likely to lead to a lot of lawsuits—lawsuits that should be shot down under the SLAPP category, but it takes enough money and time just to respond to a lawsuit that many people would be unwilling to take the risk by posting anything.
It's a multiparty problem. I really wouldn't want to post negative experiences of companies under my and their real name while still looking for jobs elsewhere.
Glassdoor could only possibly be accurate because it was anonymous. Of course, that also makes it easier to fake.
I was an employment counselor in the late 1990s. Even then, ½ to ¾ of realistic, worthwhile jobs were phantoms.
FF to now and hiring portals silently drop viable applicants for a long list of never disclosed reasons. I know temp agencies that hire, send the employee out on 1 job then never again.
I've never know a time when hiring wasn't crap for entire classes of viable applicants.
Talking about "ghost jobs" is like talking about "fake news": everyone that does assumes that only others do, not them. Everyone will somehow always pretend to be "the real thing", even to themselves. It is like misleading propaganda, it will always find a way.
The biggest irony is that the majority of HN's own "Who's Hiring" are ghost jobs.
I won't disappear, it won't even decrease, even with regulation.
How come temp agencies would only send someone out on one job? They make money based on placements so unless that worker has bad feedback from clients it would make sense to place them again.
> How come temp agencies would only send someone out on one job?
There was a clique of employees who were tight with management and got recurring work. This wouldn't have been a problem if the temp agency stopped advertising open jobs when their docket was over-full.
In the US a lot of these are pseudo postings for immigration applications. They are technically posting the job, but in pt 3 for on page 72 of a random newspaper in a hope that nobody sees it and applies so they can say “we couldn’t find anyone so we need a visa/green card.”
That’s starting to get cracked down on, but it’s been a mess and a sham for a while.
> They are technically posting the job, but in pt 3 for on page 72 of a random newspaper
That one is theoretically easy. When you apply, the job you “couldn’t fill” gets auto-posted to a very, very public government-hosted job board (with applicant tracking).
There's another side to it. Imagine a company has a guy somewhere overseas that they hired, and they worked with him for 5 years, and now they want to bring them to the US because it's more convenient and close to the main team. Can they replace it with a US applicant? Not really, unless US applicant can magically gain 5 years of experience with company's products or processes. But by law they must publish a job posting. So they post a fake job posting which nobody ever except one person could possibly fit, and silently hope nobody sees it (because they are not bad guys, they don't want to mislead anybody, they just not need a random worker, they want a very specific person for a very specific position, and they already have the person). The lawmakers meant well, the company means well, but the result is a mess.
When we post a job ad on LinkedIn, I already get 30 spam answers in the first few minutes, people that have obviously spent not a single second reading the requirements. And you want to further automate this? I’ll just ask my people person to automate the response.
We really try to spend the time to answer every application, but since AI generated applications have become a thing, we have decided to not answer those. Why should I spent time if you haven’t spent the time?
Sorry about that! I apply to those jobs because you put out some insane requirements, and I assume you're not actually looking for a single SME with expertise across half a dozen distinct domains and a decade of experience in tech that hasn't existed for half that time.
Unless, you are actually hoping to find a full stack developer that can also serve as the principal engineer for your entire network, storage, VMware infra, plus support basically anything with cord all for ~$80-100k.
Normally when you get to the point of discussing things with a human, you find out what the actual job is. The job ad is almost always completely irrelevant to the actual job.
Standardized data formats would greatly reduce the amount of weeding. The candidate should have compared your wants to their skills already, you cross-check their listed skills vs your wants.
And we need to sort out needs vs wants. Job postings should include the required skills (do not submit if you don't meet them) and a separate listing for additional skills that would be desirable. Don't waste everyone's time with a guessing game where people need to decide if they are close enough to the wish list.
The spammers spend almost no time filling any application, no matter how much work is intended. They have scripts for that. Granted, making it standardized means less skilled spammers can spam too.
Making it difficult to apply reduces the number of legitimate applications, however.
That’s a great idea if you’re hiring locally but we do hire international remote and I suspect no one will snail-mail me an application from the Americas or South Africa to Germany.
My experience is that most of my time goes to writing cover letter (I should probably copy-paste, but instead I always reflect 'why I'm doing this' and write proper letter), never had to spend 30 minutes entering my details...
I feel the biggest blunder would be when applicant gets a take-home, spends some time on it and then there is no answer. Though I never experienced that myself. I never ghosted a candidate when I was on the other side of hiring table, but I was always finding it draining my energy to write the 'no' responses
The employers want applications so badly they are willing to post job ads that don't exist.
The need for a referral to get human eyes on your resume is a different problem that isn't made better by making every application expensive for the applicant. Poor quality applicants have more time, you might say.
I disagree and think that increasing the cost of applying would indeed help this problem. If the number of applications is too high for humans to possibly review, what other possible solution could there be?
The problem posed by this article is that companies are wasting candidates' time by making applying take time while offering no actual position.
What if we imagined that companies charged a fee to apply instead of charging candidate time? Then these ghost positions would be obviously considered fraud. We don't normally pay applicants for their time, but isn't a ghost position requiring substantial time to apply also a fraud on the applicant?
All I'm saying is, by removing the payment in time, you remove the fraud.
Applicant spam is an orthogonal problem that has other solutions. Linked-in could limit applicants to one application every 30 minutes, max 16 per day. Employers can use keyword filtering as they already do.
Start accepting CVs over snail mail. Much more difficult to automate, there is a cost already embedded in the process (72¢ for a stamp) and any attempts to automate this will be obvious.
A referral isn't really useful on its own. Ideally the person doing the referral needs to have the ear of the HM and followup regularly. Otherwise it's an easily missed note on an ATS.
>it’s to raise stock value by fake growth indicators
how does that work as a growth indicator, are there any known organizations that track your growth based on how many job postings you do, and then use that data to indicate your growth?
I don't doubt that it could happen, but if it did we would have to know about it, I also don't doubt that I don't know about it, but I would like to know.
> how does that work as a growth indicator, are there any known organizations that track your growth based on how many job postings you do, and then use that data to indicate your growth?
As a wild guess this may be part of the story a company tells itself. Every individual and company needs to tell themselves a nice "story" to feel good about themselves. In case of a company "damn, look how many jobs we're posting, we're growing and doing great" is a nice story to tell. Yeah the owners/manager know it's fake, the people writing the post know it's fake, people receiving applications also know it's fake, yet it still works. On paper officially they can tell each other how great they are doing. This is more likely how a large company would operate.
Another, more positive perspective from a small company I worked for is "ABH" (Always be hiring). That means always post jobs, and continue interviewing, because you might find an exceptional engineer for whom you'd make an exception and hire them. But at least in our case it was always an honest effort every time to sit down and evaluate the candidates, pay them to visit and interview face to face and such. It wasn't a game it indeed took quite a bit of effort on our side.
It must fill some purpose though. I doubt it's entirely just marketing in most legitimate companies.
Effectively a/b testing job adds?
Or trying to get a range of candidates so they can find a good fit?
Let's say you have, like, 10 jobs to do but you're only going to hire two people (either loading them up with more work, or internally reshuffling responsibilities, probably a bit of both).
So you advertise for every role in your ideal team, then get the two candidates who plug the most holes, or look like the best fit.
I feel dirty suggesting it, but it probably happens.
I heard an argument that the fake jobs are actually to appease internal employees. "We know you are over-worked, but we are trying to get you some help. Look at these postings -too bad everyone who has applied thus far is a complete dud."
Companies don’t have a legal obligation to publicly disclose revenue in many countries, so if you’re selling business insights you’re always on the lookout for indicators that can be used as a proxy to revenue.
Yes, but also to fake how well they are doing to potential, or current investors.
IMHO, these aren't smart investors.. because this should be something that comes up in due diligence, the amount of money left, the current burn rate, and what the company is doing about the latter. If the company was on paper fully staffed, but also actively hiring. That would be for me an indicator that either the hiring is fake, so what else are they faking. Or that the hiring is real, and they are fiscally irresponsible.
There's another angle to all of this, and that's obviously the company isn't fully staffed, there's still some space in the runway for another hire. It's just that right now its a buyers market from the perspective of the company.. So, well, beggars can be choosers.. They're just holding out until that golden candidate comes along. This obviously sucks, and there SHOULD be a maximum length a company can have a job ad out before they have to explain why it's taking so long.
It's not uncommon for countries to require citizens to disclose Who and How many jobs they applied for this week to collect social security.. There should be something similar for companies who have job ads out.
Maybe they were, but now? I doubt that every investor or even AI takes job postings with a grain of salt or plainy ignores them and just looks at the numbers of employees.
>I would pass multiple rounds of interviews with senior/director-level interviewers only to never hear back from the company - even after a direct request for an update or feedback.
That is very disrespectful and reflects badly on that company.
A lot of head hunters will dangle job offers that don’t exist just so they can get info on the company you’re working at - basically they’re trying to keep tab on who’s in charge of hiring, so they can contact them.
There are also those who are paid by your boss just to see if any of their team members is looking to take off.
I don’t think there is anything new here though. These practice have existed for a while, and there’s not much you can do about it.
> A lot of head hunters will dangle job offers that don’t exist just so they can get info on the company you’re working at - basically they’re trying to keep tab on who’s in charge of hiring, so they can contact them.
This is quite common especially now when the market is bad.
The pattern is a LinkedIn message with vague description (interesting role at a sector), no mention of rate, names or anything else.
I was applying for a while last year. Spending hours to write a cover letter and then either hearing nothing or getting a canned rejection letter is super frustrating. I've come to the conclusion that putting effort into an application is time wasted, so from now on AI is writing pretty much every single one of my cover letters.
Doing that allows me to send out 5 applications in the time it normally takes me to do 1. Since I've seen no actual correlation between effort and success, I figured quantity will give better results than quality. Of course, I might put in actual effort for an opening that I find really interesting, but that's an exception.
A place that physically operates near me posts job openings all the time, for which I'm well-qualified. After applying to several of them (with a very specific and targeted cover letter) and getting no response, my final attempt was to print out a letter and resume and physically take them over to their office.
I was thinking this would make a positive impression and say hey, I'm really interested and I'm willing to go the extra mile. The person who answered the door and to whom I gave the envelope seemed baffled that anyone would do this... saying, you know you can do this online...
I can only conclude that this is a ghost-job situation, where they didn't envision being called out in person and on site. Otherwise, what kind of dicks don't at least raise a respectful eyebrow at (or at least acknowledge) the guy who drives over to their office to hand-deliver a letter and resume?
After that I knew for sure that I wouldn't want to work for these jagoffs anyway... even if the job were real.
Having been on the other end of this repeatedly (as an engineer with a desk near the door, not a hiring manager) and I hate it when people do this.
People are becoming much more adverse to bring panhandled or solicited in a way they cannot ignore, in the same way spam calls are more annoying than spam texts. It's not "initiative" or "extra mile" shit, it's taking advantage of someone's politeness to waste their time.
It also looks hopelessly boomerish, up there with expecting the firmness of a handshake to land a job. I've seen this happen dozens of times and the resumes always end up in the trash within minutes. I've never seen anyone hired this way.
>AI rejects it for unknown reason and HR never sees it
>Go to company HQ to prove I'm human and see the culture
>Seething antisocial neckbeard engineer refuses to shake my hand, throws my resume in trash, and HR never sees it
The fact a simple human action like job hunting makes you boil with hatred and antipathy is shocking. I guarantee you, none of these people are thinking about you hard enough to consider intentionally wasting your time. They want to feed their families just like you.
A few years back, before I was an engineer, I worked at a local learning center franchise for a few years. We accepted online applications, but 99% of the people we hired came in through the front door and handed me a resume. I was not in charge of hiring, I just passed the resume to my boss (the owner). I never felt inconvenienced by this "role" I was given.
Some time after that, I was working for a consulting firm, but my desk was not at the entrance; another engineer's was. I distinctly remember a sharply dressed college student walking in, giving that engineer a resume, saying a few things, and leaving. His resume got passed up the chain and he got hired later. The only person I know who gave a paper resume.
If you're getting a lot of foot traffic that wastes your time, maybe bring that up with your employer?
It also looks hopelessly Gen Z to want all communication to be asynchronous and ignorable. If you guys have your way, we’ll all be connecting via API like 1U machines in a rack somewhere.
Seriously—if you’re going to go overboard, so can I.
WTF is it with everything having to be mediated by a machine these days? People can’t get around without GPS, remember phone numbers, or now even do their work or homework
without 'AI.'
How do you explain how people managed to do all of these things before without assistance? And how do you square that with telling 'boomers'—who were able to do these things—that they’re stupid and that you’re somehow better?
Seriously, it’s like we used to have weightlifting competitions where humans physically lifted weights overhead, and then you guys decided, "Nah, that’s too old and boomerish. From now on, all weightlifting competitions will use forklifts. Anyone who wants to lift the weights themselves is boomerish and stupid."
And where's your solidarity? If you lose your job, you may find yourself wishing you could meet people in person, when all your 'ignoreable,' electronically submitted job applications somehow get thrown away.
Instead of lashing out at people who respect themselves and others, why don't you blame your employer for making you the de-facto receptionist?
Your reaction betrays your embitteredness and naívete, calling others "boomerish" while missing the fact that your ways are in fact already the old ways. I'd say you're the one being mocked, except you're not even getting that much attention... you're hopelessly faffing at an AI firewall and never reaching a human eyeball. But hey, keep pecking that "auto-apply" button like a trained pigeon. Maybe someday you'll get a pellet.
"Taking advantage of someone's politeness?" Hahaha! It's pretty clear you have no idea what politeness is.
I honestly think at least 50% of the blame for ghost jobs in on HR. Ghosts jobs are great if you're an HR person trying to not get laid off. You get to look busy all the time, sending emails that don't matter. I think HR people are the masters of looking busy. It of course also makes the company itself look better, like they're still hiring all the time when they aren't. It also benefits the hiring manager to have ghost jobs, because it makes the current team feel more replaceable
I can tell you that our HR takes the time to write proper responses to every application, but we straight up delete AI written applications. I honor the effort put into any application, but if people haven’t spent the time, then why should we?
Your HR is the exception though, not the rule. I'm willing to risk this, since it allows me to keep my sanity. And if a company really seems awesome I will still put in the effort.
If you can't be bothered with a simple cover letter (a paragraph or two is fine) highlighting why you are a good fit and just send a CV..... Frankly, it comes across as low effort spamming.
As someone currently looking for a new job, I stopped bothering with cover letters because they didn't make the faintest of differences. After many dozens of rejections I am just burnt out about writing them.
If you consider briefly highlighting the relevant parts of your experience to a potential employer as "fucking shit", then perhaps you are unsuitable for the role being offered.
I am sure, you hold the employer to the same standards. For example disclosing salary range information beforehand, or writing rejection letters afterwards, so applicants going through the trouble of doing their part aren't wasting their time and energy.
> I am sure, you hold the employer to the same standards
I most certainly do!
Incidentally, the very idea of not providing a salary range is truly baffling. I'm amazed any such advertisements generate applicants; other than those phoning up the HR department to tell them to stop pissing about and please state the salary.
My guess is that most of these jobs actually exist, in the sense that if a stellar candidate were to present theirselves, the organization would find a way to hire them.
In larger organisations I think they'll usually be able to find work for an additional SuperBob. Perhaps not in smaller organisations, but I'd also expect them to be less likely to put up spurious vacancies.
I worked at a company where managers would endlessly push this argument to open a job posting. Of course there was no budget to hire, but they would delude themselves that the perfect candidate was out there and they'd 'be able to make a case' for the budget with the stellar application in hand. Of course they had no idea what that actually entailed otherwise they would do it in advance. To HR's credit at that company their policy was never to advertise a post unless the budget was signed off. They would patiently explain this each time some deluded optimist showed up at their door. I can easily believe in companies where the rules are less explicit that the delusion would manifest as an endless procession of advertised postings that could never be actually hired because there is no money to fund them.
Part of me thinks its to see what the competition is doing, see how others are using ai, to train ai, steal ideas/clients (common in the ad/marketing/design) world, train staff to hire, get free consulting.
Some say it’s to raise stock value by fake growth indicators or motivate employees that they are replaceable, but I think those 2 are just partially the case.
> "Others, we found, were inflating numbers and trying to show their company is growing, even if it's not."
Sounds like a fraud against investors? That could be a way to attack this problem because in the U.S., many issues get turned into laws and regulations protecting shareholders.
It's hard to imagine that it's gotten worse. My employer imploded in the housing collapse. I got to the point I could screen at least 80% of the supposed job ads as bogus. Many were the same fairly generic thing month after month, some were outright scams (apply for something a bit outside my realm but which I could do, soon I was getting people trying to interest me in training for said role), some were the same job being posted in many manifestations. Maybe the original was legit, but 20 versions of it are 1 job, not 20.
Atleast in Europe there are some basic rules around data collection. In places like India, linkedin is a free for all vacuuming up resume data. I've seen the same jobs on linkedin appear for nearly 4 years with no changes and hundreds of people applying every week.
You cant flag it on linkedin either. I guess LinkedIn's business model likes the fake job postings.
Years ago, there was a job agency advertising an IT banking job in the Caribbean. Every week. For years. Apparently it was just a way for them to harvest CVs. 'Sorry you didn't make the interview for that job, but can I interest you in a role creating TPS reports for a company in Slough?'.
Scummy behaviour. But I guess they got away with it.
Simple solution: company that has at least X employees cannot post more than f(X) job ads per (unit of time), and at least g(f(X)) need to result in hires within (timeframe) unless literally no one responded.
Funny this is posted on HN since the HN hiring threads contains companies that have been posting the same job offer for years straight. Zero due dilligence done. 60-70% of jobs are fake jobs nowadays.
I worked in recruiting for a long time and I can tell you I never saw much in the way of any deliberate strategy to create fake job posts.
The thing is that whether or not a job exists at a point in time is far less black and white than you might naively think.
There are many reasons for it to be somewhat grey and banning the practice doesn’t really mean anything because you would have to quantify precisely under what circumstances a job is allowed to be advertised and as I say, it’s not as clear as you might imagine.
There is absolutely not a one to one relationship between a job and a job ad.
>There is absolutely not a one to one relationship between a job and a job ad.
Isn't this a problem? It means companies are wasting individuals' time (hence money), whereas companies are in a better position to hedge the risk. Would it be legal if I started, for example, posting fake apartment ads and not show up (because the apartment doesn't even exist)? Would it be ethical?
Some anecdotes, specific ways it can be unclear how many job openings exist:
I applied for some jobs, two of them liked me and I reached the point where they were competing with each other for me, and I was in salary negotiations. One of them, suddenly, decided to stop trading. I still don't know why.
Another time, I started working(!) and getting paid, but after 6 months the person who everyone (including themselves) was expecting to leave and for me to replace had still not found a new job (presumably due to all the ghost jobs), and there wasn't enough money for both me and them. Last in, first out, bye to me.
One place hired an PM about two weeks before the investors decided to shutter the entire company. (For actual ghost jobs: in my own job hunt after that, I found listings on job boards for that company, that were clearly from several years before I'd joined given the advertised wage range; as the company had told everyone to stop coming in for their notice period, there wasn't even anyone left to ask for those to be deleted).
Back when my dad was around, one of his anecdotes about interviewing candidates was asking the candidate "Why did you leave your last job?" and getting a reply along the lines of "After 6 months, management found out that our entire floor had been hired to do the same thing as the floor next to us. One of the floors had to go."
- the boss has agreed to the role but has reservations, seeing a few candidates solidifies them and permission to hire us withdrawn
- the team is inexperienced at hiring and don't know what they want until they've seen a few candidates
- the company is hiring a new whole team. To make hiring easier, roles that are listed are "representative roles" - the total desired skill set across all roles is accurate but the company doesn't care what the split is, they just want a team that covers it. So a candidate who is a better fit for a listed role can be passed over in favour of one that happens to be the right jigsaw piece.
- circumstances changed since permission to hire was given, and no-one remembered to update the hiring portal; because unless you're actively hiring no-one looks at it.
This last one is quite common, because there are so many applications usually that no-one wants them in their email.
A company has a graduate scheme, they might be hiring 4 graduates this year, they might be hiring 40. Only one job advert.
External recruiters might then re-advertise the job with the company name removed, planning to funnel people to the company and collect their 20% commission.
External recruiters with several jobs might merge them into one. $250k job for a senior java developer with 5 years finance experience + $75k job for a junior java developer = advertise $250k job for a java developer.
A company might have a slow, centralised hiring pipeline for some roles. Google has a recruiter check the candidate's resume before putting you into a lengthy 6+ interview gauntlet, but only at the end of it do hiring managers actually check if the resume matches an open job. And if course if it takes 2 months to get through the full pipeline, the jobs open at the end aren't the same as the jobs open at the start.
I might need four different (distinct) roles filled but only have budget for three employees. I’d be prone to advertise (and genuinely recruit) all four roles, and hire the first three that I find a good fit for, delaying the fourth until/if additional budget frees up.
I might be willing to hire for two different levels of seniority/experience, but only one xor the other, not both.
Or be willing to hire for a role in Boston, London, or Zurich, but only one of those.
I just don't want to deal with all the bs of applying, and playing nice with recruiters. Either they need me or they don't. I don't want to play games.
I don't have the privilege of having a degree or being well networked, or being a great developer.
My first job was in an industry where "ghost jobs" had a different meaning. Local mafia used to add fictitious names to the worker register at work sites, and someone would come and collect the pay in cash every month. The daily work reports would show these workers as engaged in some house-keeping work.
It simply should be required to post all job openings with a government agency that will negotiate the terms and fine you horrifically if your offer smells like bullshit. It should go as far as to force the company to hire the best fitting candidate. Elaborate investigations if the candidate turns out a poor fit. Lavish unemployment benefits but you do have to show up at the agency at 8am 5 days per week to follow courses and take tests. If we don't have the employee you need in stock we will build one.
Can we please get back to using job fairs already? Why are companies so irritatingly resistant to getting back to doing things in-person and real-time?
Job fairs? You meen those gigs for meeting the junior HR promo girls that hands you a flyer with the company's carreers url, some branded post-it's and a mini pouch of gummi bears?
Not just HR, but actual team leads and members who you can talk to and mutually evaluate each other, face to face. It's a superb event, highly recommended!
(Looks like they've introduced a new digital system too. Intriguing...)
Even job fairs are useless now. I'm a current student and when I show up a lot of companies seem to just send an intern or 3rd party recruiter out with a bunch of generic company fliers. You can't ask any questions about the job because the recruiter won't know the answer, they don't work in the department or even worse they don't work for the company, and when you find a company you want to join they tell you to apply online anyway. Sometimes you get a special link for applying, which I think is how they differentiate between job fair applications and the others.
At least the few smaller companies that show up seem more immune to this, but they have the problem of wanting to pay an electrical engineer about $50,000-$60,000 for starting pay, which just isn't worth it. So everyone still puts up with the recruiters that know nothing because at least then you have a shot of earning a market rate salary.
I know companies that are posting vacancies that currently don't exist in order to keep good candidates on the hook. They tell the candidate that we should keep in touch for when the company is ready to hire them.
I am not sure if it's bad or not. It's true that it kinda wastes the candidate's time. In some cases though, the candidate is so good that the company will create a position just for them.
No... it's worse than that; it's THEFT, and monumentally offensive. It's time that everyone, EVERYONE stop giving entities a free pass on stealing from us by deliberately wasting our time.
In every aspect of life, every hour of our day, we're being ripped off. From the assholes blocking the passing lane, to "ghost jobs," to non-functioning subscription-cancellation phone numbers and Web forms... people should be going apeshit about the despicable and unpunished theft of our time.
I feel like if it’s clear from the listing that it’s a catch-all that might not correspond to any real vacancies, it’s fine. Otherwise I think it’s bad, since it’s lying.
> Dr Escalera adds that she has also heard examples of companies posting jobs to obtain and sell data.
How is that not illegal? Pretending to offer jobs just to suck in resumes to some database just seems like it should be illegal. Or just like running scams is illegal but they are in another country "so tough luck, you'll never get us"?
Please stop thinking about laws, and think about enforcement. If the cops don't care about something, it's defecto legal. We have all sorts of fancy laws on the books that aren't enforced. Environmental regs, animal welfare regs, anti trust laws, white collar anti fraud laws. Data laws fall into this bucket. Nobody that would actually enforce those laws gives a dam. We won't be able to solve any of our problems with new laws, until we can actually enforce the laws already on the books
">* If the cops don't care about something, it's defecto legal. *<"
Ahhhh! A new English expression, "defecto legal". I like it! It should be the name of a website, defectolegal.com, for purposes TBD later.
The proper term is "de facto": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/de%20facto
"Defecto" is Spanish for the English "defect", a flaw, an error.
Don't get me started about "giving a dam".
In English we don’t write commas or periods outside the quotes. The proper way is to write them inside the quotation.
- “defect,” a flaw, an error.
- about giving a dam.”
Don’t get me started about “for purposes TBD later.”
The other person who replied to you noted that this is not true in British English, but beyond that, it appears to me that my generation (Millennials) essentially all came to the same conclusion, which is that punctuation should only be included in the quotation if it's literally part of the text being quoted. (This probably has something to do with the programming mindset.) If you write
>The senator said that the bill was "bloated."
your sentence itself doesn't have a period. In order to give it a period you'd have to write:
>The senator said that the bill was "bloated.".
But then you're saying that the senator described the bill using the (non-)word consisting of the nine characters 'b', 'l', 'o', 'a', 't', 'e', 'd', 'PERIOD'. We've decided that this doesn't make sense.
Your point that this is a generational change is interesting and reminds me of boomers who still write double space after a period.
That’s only the case for American English. British English places periods and commas outside the quotes, unless part of a literal quotation.
There are lots of forms of 'don't care'. Don't care because:
- they have limited resources and they are prioritising something else,
- there is little realistic chance of getting a conviction.
- it's not one of their politically set department targets
- they fundamentally don't think it should be illegal - say historic blasphemy laws still on the books.
Is your main concern resources or enforceability, lack of political focus or some combination of all of the above?
This really has me thinking I ought to just delete my Linkedin. I can't say I've ever got anything out of it except spam and fomo. I don't even like to keep it up-to-date because someone is just ripping that information off.
I believe a LinkedIn profile is mandatory to apply to YC. I could assume you might not be interested in applying to YC, but it’s an interesting fact, and might generalize somewhat for many other applications.
I think that is a mutually beneficial signal probably.
FWIW - I deleted my linkedin about a year ago and I've received more spam since I deleted it than when it was active.
Follow the money, easy payouts for cops and courts is where 95% of enforcement goes. Drug possession is an instant $1000 profit for the local law enforcement, and possibly much more. And if they are poor and challenge it, the extra court fees and court lawyer are also profitable.
Fighting private lawyers is what costs courts money and is why the wealthy get way less criminal punishment.
">If the cops don't care about something, it's defecto legal.<"
Ahhhh! A new English expression, "defecto legal". I like it! It could be the name of a popular website.
The proper term is "de facto": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/de%20facto
A defect is a flaw, an error, and "defecto" is Spanish for the English "defect". The meaning of "defecto legal" (English) thus remains in the wind, TBD. But I look forward to it's landing.
s/it's/its/g
You want the possessive ("its"), not the shortened form ("it is") which would make that sentence:
"...look forward to it is landing"
Thank you for sharing the Spanish interpretation, TIL :)
I believe it actually is illegal, via a set of more general rules on data collection, on what constitutes a fraud, etc. May not be spelled out exactly like this specific use case, but still very likely covered by law. Just difficult to prove.
I saw this post on reddit where some sketchy AI company (Alpheva AI) is posting jobs and requesting a screenshot of all applicants having left their app a 5-star review in the app store as part of the application process:
https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1pp0iej/thi...
This is another thing were it clearly is illegal, but good luck actually trying to sue or get them to stop it. Worst case scenario they'll set up another cheap company on paper, and keep doing the same scam
It certainly would be illegal in Europe under the GDPR - data collected for one purpose (handling of applications) cannot be used for another without explicit, informed consent.
It may be illegal, but shady stuff certainly happens in EU too.
Recently investigative journalists here in Finland found out that a significant percentage of job postings over here are indeed fake. Unsurprisingly, worst offenders were recruitment companies, which sometimes listed fake jobs to generate a pool of applicants they can later offer to their clients. Doing this is easy, as no law requires these companies to disclose who their clients are when creating job postings. It's also very common for same position to get posted multiple times.
Other than wasting applicant's time, this behavior also messes up many statistics, which use job postings to determine how many open positions there are available. Basically the chances of finding a job are even worse for unemployed people than stats would imply.
Oh, I agree that illegal stuff happens in the EU aplenty. The question was whether this is illegal and it almost certainly is. Job postings from recruiters - while morally reprehensible - may just skirt the law, but straight up using applications for profile building, marketing and other purposes almost certainly isn’t permitted
Im sure it isnt that hard to get candidates to tick another check box that says the data can be used for other stuff.
The box would need to be off by default and clearly state the purpose. It would at least be possible to verify it exists and no example has been shown.
”We and our 972 partners…”
Corporations are people, and very promiscuous ones at that.
Don't ignore free speech of job search applicants .!
I think there’s a good chunk of the SF tech event scene built around pulling in qualified email addresses, too. “Apply to attend”
Because some animals are more equal than others and the government has decided that companies are not only citizens but the more equal group.
Half the shit companies do that gets them a fine would land any individual in jail for committing the same action, but we let them get away with just paying it off. Simultaneously we give those organizations the same rights.
It’s a system with three classes of citizen where the rich and corporations have a better right to responsibility ratio and the average human has a much worse ratio
Citizens United, a monumental betrayal of every citizen.
> The provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 restricting unions, corporations, and profitable organizations from independent political spending and prohibiting the broadcasting of political media funded by them within sixty days of general elections or thirty days of primary elections violate the freedom of speech that is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. United States District Court for the District of Columbia reversed.
I'm sure we're on the same side, but I want to point out that that case didn't make a huge difference. By that I mean it removed a ban on political broadcasts near elections, most of the "money is speech, super pacs can do anything at all" stuff was already legal.
Right, but if you try to make a gentle, common-sense, broad consensus law and the Supreme Court squashes it as violating the constitution, that also prevents any potential future more stringent regulation.
> it removed a ban on political broadcasts near elections,
Propaganda works, and this was a BIG change, as it now let unlimited shady corpo money spam agit-prop with no consequence.
this was step 1 on living in a post-truth world.
While this is true, the first such betrayal came in 1976, with Buckley v Valeo.
This was (AIUI) the US Supreme Court decision that established the precedent that money counts as protected speech.
So much of the rot that has occurred since then can be traced back to this.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckley_v._Valeo>
To add onto this, the single exception I am aware of to this rule is the result of the gas explosions in Massachusetts.
In that case the company in charge, Columbia Gas, "exited" the market but all the scuttlebutt I heard in the area was that the Mass government was threatening the corporate execution of revoking their charter, which lead to Columbia gas selling their business off at a loss to Eversource
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NiSource#Massachusetts_gas_lin...
You do realize that the decisions at the corporations are made by people. You may try to draw a distinction between people and corporations, but in the end it was some person who decided to ghost someone.
You do realize that the people making those decisions at corporations are largely shielded from the liability of said decisions, and that when companies are treated like citizens they almost never get equivalent punishment like human beings do.
I can draw a distinction between people and corporations because it’s literally encoded in the fucking law.
I actually don’t know how or why you would imply that such a distinction doesn’t exist.
I swear to god a couple of the interviews I have been in lately have felt more like free consultations rather than me applying for a job.
Its straight up wire fraud.
It's technically fraud, but there aren't any damages.
This seems analogous to the following. A company asks users to fill out an online survey in exchange for participation in some raffle, except the company never pays out any prize. As with the job application there was never a guaranteed reward, but it's still easy to see the damage. The company induced to you to provide them with an economically valuable asset (filled out survey/application) for which you expected a fair chance at a reward. It seems plausible that you could claim damages at least up to the expected value.
Except a job offer is generally non binding, so they could interview you, offer the job, then withdraw it.
So never being offered a job because it doesn't exist doesn't lose you anything.
>So never being offered a job because it doesn't exist doesn't lose you anything.
Ah well look, if the job posting was just to collect resumes with zero intention to actually hire, you did lose some things:
- actual time spent applying to a job that was never open - emotional damage on focus to try to get this job - loss of free market value of your data (company profited from this data, when you could have profited from it) - damages for acquisition of your personal data under a fraudulent basis (when otherwise, maybe you did not want your data shared)
Spotted the HR worker posting ghost jobs
In the UK at least Fraud doesn't require any damages, just an intent to gain something of value on the criminals side.
Your time might be worthless but mine isn't.
Yeah, you go ahead and sue someone for the few minutes of your time it took to send in a application for a fake job. Then you'll really see what wasting time looks like.
But this is part of the problem with crimes and enforcement in the modern age: sure, I might have only wasted a few minutes of my time. But I'm just one of hundreds or thousands of people who were tricked into wasting that time, by this one act.
Multiply this across all the fraudulent job postings, and it really starts to add up.
It's clear (to me, at least) that we need better laws to handle this sort of wide-but-shallow attack on people. It's analogous to spam.
I recently learned of [1], which is a good example of "too small for me to sue" but still worth going through it collectively.
1: https://www.canadianbreadsettlement.ca/
> Yeah, you go ahead and sue someone for the few minutes of your time it took to send in a application for a fake job. Then you'll really see what wasting time looks like.
1. That is exactly what class actions are for, because small damages multiplied by many people are big damages.
2. That's also why we need punitive damages, so someone can't get away with unlawful actions by deliberately coasting along under the threshold where it makes sense to sue. For instance, IIRC, you can collect something like $5000 from someone who doesn't put you on their "do not call list" when requested. That amount has nothing to do with the value of the "few minutes of your time it took to" answer a telemarketing call.
You are missing a point. The only thing it really does is force people to pursue other forms as online channel is too polluted for anyone with sense/options/skill ( or all of the above ). So it leaves desperate, optionless, those without skills and everyone else who fell through the cracks. Another system undermined for no clear benefit. It does not benefit the employer. It does not benefit the employee. It does benefit some data brokers.. and only then for a bit until the rest of the market catches up..
But was it worth it?
America has no data protection law, apart from some hyper-specific ones: healthcare, video rental records. That makes all of this data sharing completely legal. As well as that, it is widely agreed there that lying is free speech.
It is not wire fraud because you do not pay to apply. (In general; places that charge applicants are even more scammy.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Ac...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Educational_Rights_and_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Credit_Reporting_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm%E2%80%93Leach%E2%80%93Bl...
Exactly - no national, general data protection law. Although the California one looks pretty similar to the GDPR from the summary, it's not truly national.
it is de facto national because California has the most people and is insanely wealthy; there is no F500 company handling broad consumer data that does not have a presence or customers there.
there have already been CCPA enforcements against companies like Tractor Supply, Sephora, Honda, and Google (tho the GOOG was more of a "violated a lot of stuff including CCPA").
It doesn't have enough teeth to scare FAANGs, who have the money and technical ability to do whatever, but it can definitely keep companies in line.
source: did CCPA compliance and security at multiple F500
Even if there was, under the current regime, the probability of it being enforced is near-zero, especially if you are in the good graces of the child king.
The problem of enforcement doesn't fall only on the executive branch. They're tasked with executing laws passed by congress. Congress is ultimately a check on the executive, and if they care to have their laws enforced they do have actions they could take.
The branches (including SCOTUS) are not meaningfully different when they are controlled by the same party.
That's a very pessimistic view. That boils our system of three branches of government to a purely partisan game of capture the flag in which we all lose if one team captures all three at one.
SCOTUS is a bit different as it both isn't driven by political parties and justices have a history of more frequently breaking with the party they are seen as aligned with.
2024 has not been a year for optimism about the American system of checks and balances functioning as advertised.
Even more broadly, there's an old quote:
The soap box is under threat: https://reason.com/2025/12/18/this-tennessee-man-spent-37-da... and https://www.npr.org/2025/04/08/nx-s1-5349472/students-protes...The ballot box is under threat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding_in_the_...
Judiciary is under threat: https://www.gov.harvard.edu/2025/07/24/the-u-s-judicial-cris... and https://judicature.duke.edu/articles/judicial-independence-t...
That just (to much the same horror and sense of unreality I had watching the 9/11 attacks unfold) leaves the ammo box.
Now, I'm British by birth, a country where even the police are not routinely armed, so the American view that weapons are a "fundamental right" is utterly alien to me, and this difference is one of the reasons why I never seriously considered moving to Silicon Valley at any point in my career.
Trump seems pro 2nd Amendment: is that because he is afraid and needs them to like him, or because isn't afraid as he has an army and a secret service to keep him safe, or does he just plain like guns and hasn't even thought about personal risk despite getting shot at?
Well no disagreement there, unfortunately.
I definitely agree our democracy seems to be under attack on multiple fronts, and at least the people I'm often around regardless of political affiliation seem to have lost sight of how our system is intended to work.
A violent civil war wouldn't surprise me, though I don't think we're close to it yet and I hope I never see it happen. Though I would prefer seeing that rather than seeing our system successfully destroyed and replaced with what seems to be coming up, an authoritarian socialism of one form or another.
Congres is a rabbit caught in the headlights of the MAGA cult but I admire your optimism.
Hah, oh it isn't optimism. I don't think congress will do anything about enforcement but that is nothing new.
My point was simply that we can't only blame the white house when laws go unenforced, the other branches of government are intentionally a check on the executive.
"healthcare, video rental records" wait what? One of these things, etc. Curious how that came to be? Is it like special rules for (IIRC) onions in finance?
Someone leaked some politician’s video rental history back in the day (there wasn’t even anything controversial): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
Haha, that's unlikely.
I don't think number interviewed is relevant--I don't care so much about exactly how their screening works, just that it lead to hires. The rest of it, though, definitely, and any job ad must include a link to the database.
But I would add one field: filled internally/externally/H1-B, rather than just "filled".
Yes to how filled.
> 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.
> 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.
Fraud is very illegal.
> 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.
Only when done by individuals, or against rich people.
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 :))
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.
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I'm not sure I'm following. How would does the gender balance of HR have a role to play here?
Incredible levels of misogyny from the tech world, even on the "respectable" side of HN.
Nothing. It has nothing to do with this.
Maybe it does. It's a fair question.
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.
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.
I can assure you plenty of male managers have wasted my time.
HR departments post the jobs other departments tell them to post so unless there's a lot of HR-role ghost posts I would say these things are unrelated.
Use that to your advantage. Learn techniques that work better on women. Assuming there is a job opening at all in there somewhere.
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> Most jobs for women are basically daycare.
I didn't realise we still had jobs specific for only women. This is such an out of left field comment that I have to ask for some of your references where you got this. Please tell me one job offer which says "Women Only".
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I am not sure if more regulation is a solution, but the lack of respect for job seekers is a real problem.
And not just with ghost jobs. My recent experience as a job seeker was harrowing - even with large, proud companies. I would pass multiple rounds of interviews with senior/director-level interviewers only to never hear back from the company - even after a direct request for an update or feedback. Just total ignorance. Again, this happened with a FAANG+ company.
In the Netherlands by law you have the right to retrieve any written internal correspondence regarding your interviews as to ascertain it was a fair decision and decision making process.
Side effect of this is also to keep any bias out of the equation and, being on the other side, easier to call out colleagues making inappropriate or downright discriminating comments (which in my experience unfortunately happens everywhere still)
The unintended side effect of this is that HR coaches you to be as vague as possible in responses. I can’t give real feedback because some feedback may seem dissimilar to other feedback and look like discrimination if you blur your eyes.
So everyone gets the same form letter.
Isn't the side effect also giving incentive to those companies to just not be honest in internal communication? But do the real conversation via call or different channel?
Unfortunately, many companies have chosen to comply with anti-discrimination laws by not giving any feedback. Nothing is less discriminatory than an empty string.
If you make such request, how can you enforce to get all of the comms? I'm curious, would some government institution step in and audit their mail servers, slack channels, google hangouts and all other channels to obtain all of the information?
The next stage of complaint is actually the local Information Commissioner.
Companies will usually comply with this, because it's very difficult to instruct staff to not comply with the law without leaving any records or risking one of them leaking it. However they will check what the legal minimum is and do that.
I take it you are unfamiliar with the legal process of "discovery" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_(law)
I wonder, is there a precedence of applicant dragging the company to court over their response to such request?
Yes, it's very common when dealing with smaller businesses that don't have great legal compliance to get a court order forcing production of documents
If there is regulation, it should be about monopolies in general and not trying to micromanage hiring. Companies behave this way because they are in a position to do so. In a real competitive environment they wouldn’t. Poorly thought through band-aid rules don’t change that, in fact they would almost certainly favour the big monopolies with the worst hiring practices who have big HR departments that can handle and game compliance.
I don't think it's a non-competitive environment, but that the interests are out of alignment. The penalty for the manager who makes a bad hire is a lot worse than the manager who fails to make a hire.
And we also have the same problem that plagues modern life: the glut of choices leading people to think they can do better than they can. The pool is effectively infinite, there must be a better option somewhere. Companies don't hire. Dating has become very hard. Both lie behind very superficial screening gates that do not represent actual value.
> I am not sure if more regulation is a solution,
But if we do create more legislation, make sure it's regulatory capture in a weak disguise but celebrate it with lots of political spin!
I got feedback from FAANG+ once after multiple rounds with director / manager etc.
I just got told I didn't seem "motivated" enough despite spending several rounds / days / hours interviewing and bunch of leetcode questions. Not even that I wasn't skilled or good enough or didn't pass the questions. Pretty sure the last guy just didn't like me for whatever reason.
Apple did that to me as well.
Definitely one of the As in the FAANG. In fact both the As have terrible recruiting practices. One is a known ghoster and given that you were ghosted after a senior level meeting tells me which one.
Care to share with the rest of the class?
Glassdoor pulled that crap with me ironically after a lot of interviews for a senior position that they reached out to me for.
I wonder why people still apply to FAANG companies, there is nothing to be won by working for them. Your work has zero impact, you're actively paid to enshittify stuff over making it better, you have horrible bureaucracy within the company, they lay off thousands of people per year so your job never really is secure, all of FAANG is ethically corrupt beyond means. I'd never hire a FAANG employee to be honest, while working there your skill actively declines because all you really do there is play corporate charade and hope not being laid off.
Aside from the fact that you have no real job security anywhere, people take FAANG jobs for money. Both the high pay at the company itself, and the idea that once FAANG is on your resume, it will command the best jobs afterwards too.
I think they have to pay that high because the work sucks so much in reality. That's the equilibrium point between the demand for people to work there, and the supply of people willing to put up with it.
I had good job security doing in house IT for some companies. Never have seen anyone being laid off, could've stayed there for years to come, the stuff I've built was actively being used and made work easier for people. The domain knowledge I gathered even strengthened my job security as it was more efficient to pay me over having to re-train other people. The only risk to my job was me as I left for a startup after a while. Sure, pay wasn't that high compared to FAANG but at least I didn't make peoples life worse while also hating my job.
I'm choosing to leave a job in tech in academia after 15 years.
If I wanted to, I could stay here until I retire (in another 20+ years), barring the complete destruction of the university I work for.
The position I'm moving to is also in academia (this time public sector in the EU), and I'm given to understand that as long as I can make it through the probationary first year, so long as I keep doing a halfway decent job there I can stay there for as long as I want, too. (We will, of course, have to see how true that is!)
Job security does exist; you just have to be willing to leave the Silicon Valley bubble.
I was going to say "money" then post some links to example jobs .. but of course FAANG for US/CA jobs don't advertise salaries.
I can think of hundreds of thousands of reasons per year that people might seek employment at a FAANG company.
Money, mostly
Money.
As a bright eyed young engineer I worked for a year in FAANG and loved it[1]. Free lunches, all that scale, opportunities to learn, kool-aid, and at that point i truly believed the company cared about making the world a better place [2]. So regarding:
>there is nothing to be won by working for them
As you can see above, not everyone sees it like that. And HR is working hard to pretend you're a big deal and not just a cog. People who read HN are a bit of a bubble in being disillusioned.
>I'd never hire a FAANG employee
Uhh, ok?
[1] but I had enough pride to quit after a year when they pulled off something I was not OK with.
[2] to be fair, I think at that time most employees did
> Free lunches, all that scale, opportunities to learn, kool-aid
Lmao.
“No one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”
This sounds like a cope.
This sounds like a bootlicking
>I am not sure if more regulation is a solution
Nothing else is going to fix this.
I happen to agree with you, but it's also worth mentioning that solving whatever problem is creating the need to post ghost jobs in the first place would also make posting them unnecessary (presumably insecurity about the company's ability to assess, hire and retain high quality talent.)
But those are very hard, company-specific problems to solve, hence my agreement :-)
Sometimes it's sending false market signals: a company that's hiring must be doing well, right?
Not really. Make posting fake jobs illegal. Strengthen some whistleblowing laws. Watch as it stops.
Maybe official 'name and blame' service where anybody could post their experience under their real name?
Unfortunately, in America, at least, that would be likely to lead to a lot of lawsuits—lawsuits that should be shot down under the SLAPP category, but it takes enough money and time just to respond to a lawsuit that many people would be unwilling to take the risk by posting anything.
It's a multiparty problem. I really wouldn't want to post negative experiences of companies under my and their real name while still looking for jobs elsewhere.
Glassdoor could only possibly be accurate because it was anonymous. Of course, that also makes it easier to fake.
It'd actually be easier for a government app to verify identities and (especially if mandated by law) protect your anonymity.
The private sector is great at lots of stuff but running a clean marketplace isnt one of them - the incentives are off.
I was an employment counselor in the late 1990s. Even then, ½ to ¾ of realistic, worthwhile jobs were phantoms.
FF to now and hiring portals silently drop viable applicants for a long list of never disclosed reasons. I know temp agencies that hire, send the employee out on 1 job then never again.
I've never know a time when hiring wasn't crap for entire classes of viable applicants.
Talking about "ghost jobs" is like talking about "fake news": everyone that does assumes that only others do, not them. Everyone will somehow always pretend to be "the real thing", even to themselves. It is like misleading propaganda, it will always find a way.
The biggest irony is that the majority of HN's own "Who's Hiring" are ghost jobs.
I won't disappear, it won't even decrease, even with regulation.
How come temp agencies would only send someone out on one job? They make money based on placements so unless that worker has bad feedback from clients it would make sense to place them again.
> How come temp agencies would only send someone out on one job?
There was a clique of employees who were tight with management and got recurring work. This wouldn't have been a problem if the temp agency stopped advertising open jobs when their docket was over-full.
You seem to underestimate their pool of applicants
In the US a lot of these are pseudo postings for immigration applications. They are technically posting the job, but in pt 3 for on page 72 of a random newspaper in a hope that nobody sees it and applies so they can say “we couldn’t find anyone so we need a visa/green card.”
That’s starting to get cracked down on, but it’s been a mess and a sham for a while.
> They are technically posting the job, but in pt 3 for on page 72 of a random newspaper
That one is theoretically easy. When you apply, the job you “couldn’t fill” gets auto-posted to a very, very public government-hosted job board (with applicant tracking).
Yup, just holding the data up to the light of day would go a long ways towards preventing problems.
There's another side to it. Imagine a company has a guy somewhere overseas that they hired, and they worked with him for 5 years, and now they want to bring them to the US because it's more convenient and close to the main team. Can they replace it with a US applicant? Not really, unless US applicant can magically gain 5 years of experience with company's products or processes. But by law they must publish a job posting. So they post a fake job posting which nobody ever except one person could possibly fit, and silently hope nobody sees it (because they are not bad guys, they don't want to mislead anybody, they just not need a random worker, they want a very specific person for a very specific position, and they already have the person). The lawmakers meant well, the company means well, but the result is a mess.
In the US, there are a ton of them on major online job boards, not just some random newspaper.
We could at least require that all applications have a standardized format for resumé and a list of legally allowable questions.
No more requiring the candidate to do 30 minutes of data entry to encode their resumé into your HR system.
Then a ghost job wouldn't really waste much time, since uploading a JSON should take 30 seconds.
When we post a job ad on LinkedIn, I already get 30 spam answers in the first few minutes, people that have obviously spent not a single second reading the requirements. And you want to further automate this? I’ll just ask my people person to automate the response.
We really try to spend the time to answer every application, but since AI generated applications have become a thing, we have decided to not answer those. Why should I spent time if you haven’t spent the time?
Sorry about that! I apply to those jobs because you put out some insane requirements, and I assume you're not actually looking for a single SME with expertise across half a dozen distinct domains and a decade of experience in tech that hasn't existed for half that time.
Unless, you are actually hoping to find a full stack developer that can also serve as the principal engineer for your entire network, storage, VMware infra, plus support basically anything with cord all for ~$80-100k.
Normally when you get to the point of discussing things with a human, you find out what the actual job is. The job ad is almost always completely irrelevant to the actual job.
Standardized data formats would greatly reduce the amount of weeding. The candidate should have compared your wants to their skills already, you cross-check their listed skills vs your wants.
And we need to sort out needs vs wants. Job postings should include the required skills (do not submit if you don't meet them) and a separate listing for additional skills that would be desirable. Don't waste everyone's time with a guessing game where people need to decide if they are close enough to the wish list.
The spammers spend almost no time filling any application, no matter how much work is intended. They have scripts for that. Granted, making it standardized means less skilled spammers can spam too.
Making it difficult to apply reduces the number of legitimate applications, however.
Either way, you need an automated first screen.
I've always thought the easiest way to stop spam applications would be to require paper application.
That’s a great idea if you’re hiring locally but we do hire international remote and I suspect no one will snail-mail me an application from the Americas or South Africa to Germany.
Perhaps they could fax it
But that would filter for German applicants. Who else would have a fax?
No idea, though it's interesting that it may yet outlive posting a letter from their Danish neighbors.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg8jllq283o
Japan as far as I know - old allies and such ;)
That is good to remember - I'll keep that in mind if I ever want to hire in [Germany, Japan] without spelling this out for some reason.
Did you even read the comment you are responding to?
My experience is that most of my time goes to writing cover letter (I should probably copy-paste, but instead I always reflect 'why I'm doing this' and write proper letter), never had to spend 30 minutes entering my details...
I feel the biggest blunder would be when applicant gets a take-home, spends some time on it and then there is no answer. Though I never experienced that myself. I never ghosted a candidate when I was on the other side of hiring table, but I was always finding it draining my energy to write the 'no' responses
Companies already get so many applications that applying is a crapshoot without a referral. I feel like this is the opposite of what we need.
The employers want applications so badly they are willing to post job ads that don't exist.
The need for a referral to get human eyes on your resume is a different problem that isn't made better by making every application expensive for the applicant. Poor quality applicants have more time, you might say.
I disagree and think that increasing the cost of applying would indeed help this problem. If the number of applications is too high for humans to possibly review, what other possible solution could there be?
The problem posed by this article is that companies are wasting candidates' time by making applying take time while offering no actual position.
What if we imagined that companies charged a fee to apply instead of charging candidate time? Then these ghost positions would be obviously considered fraud. We don't normally pay applicants for their time, but isn't a ghost position requiring substantial time to apply also a fraud on the applicant?
All I'm saying is, by removing the payment in time, you remove the fraud.
Applicant spam is an orthogonal problem that has other solutions. Linked-in could limit applicants to one application every 30 minutes, max 16 per day. Employers can use keyword filtering as they already do.
Start accepting CVs over snail mail. Much more difficult to automate, there is a cost already embedded in the process (72¢ for a stamp) and any attempts to automate this will be obvious.
A referral isn't really useful on its own. Ideally the person doing the referral needs to have the ear of the HM and followup regularly. Otherwise it's an easily missed note on an ATS.
We could make the referrer's company email a field in the ATS
>it’s to raise stock value by fake growth indicators
how does that work as a growth indicator, are there any known organizations that track your growth based on how many job postings you do, and then use that data to indicate your growth?
I don't doubt that it could happen, but if it did we would have to know about it, I also don't doubt that I don't know about it, but I would like to know.
> how does that work as a growth indicator, are there any known organizations that track your growth based on how many job postings you do, and then use that data to indicate your growth?
As a wild guess this may be part of the story a company tells itself. Every individual and company needs to tell themselves a nice "story" to feel good about themselves. In case of a company "damn, look how many jobs we're posting, we're growing and doing great" is a nice story to tell. Yeah the owners/manager know it's fake, the people writing the post know it's fake, people receiving applications also know it's fake, yet it still works. On paper officially they can tell each other how great they are doing. This is more likely how a large company would operate.
Another, more positive perspective from a small company I worked for is "ABH" (Always be hiring). That means always post jobs, and continue interviewing, because you might find an exceptional engineer for whom you'd make an exception and hire them. But at least in our case it was always an honest effort every time to sit down and evaluate the candidates, pay them to visit and interview face to face and such. It wasn't a game it indeed took quite a bit of effort on our side.
It must fill some purpose though. I doubt it's entirely just marketing in most legitimate companies.
Effectively a/b testing job adds?
Or trying to get a range of candidates so they can find a good fit?
Let's say you have, like, 10 jobs to do but you're only going to hire two people (either loading them up with more work, or internally reshuffling responsibilities, probably a bit of both).
So you advertise for every role in your ideal team, then get the two candidates who plug the most holes, or look like the best fit.
I feel dirty suggesting it, but it probably happens.
I heard an argument that the fake jobs are actually to appease internal employees. "We know you are over-worked, but we are trying to get you some help. Look at these postings -too bad everyone who has applied thus far is a complete dud."
I've heard in the sales world, the way to hire two sales people is to hire three, then fire the bottom performer after a month or a quarter.
Traditionally the 'Carreers' tab on the website had to exist to project the image of a succesfull growing company.
It was always a delicate balance between on the one hand projecting success, and on the other not scaring clients you couldn't meet demand.
Companies don’t have a legal obligation to publicly disclose revenue in many countries, so if you’re selling business insights you’re always on the lookout for indicators that can be used as a proxy to revenue.
So, they’re just lying to make more money. Got it.
Yes, but also to fake how well they are doing to potential, or current investors.
IMHO, these aren't smart investors.. because this should be something that comes up in due diligence, the amount of money left, the current burn rate, and what the company is doing about the latter. If the company was on paper fully staffed, but also actively hiring. That would be for me an indicator that either the hiring is fake, so what else are they faking. Or that the hiring is real, and they are fiscally irresponsible.
There's another angle to all of this, and that's obviously the company isn't fully staffed, there's still some space in the runway for another hire. It's just that right now its a buyers market from the perspective of the company.. So, well, beggars can be choosers.. They're just holding out until that golden candidate comes along. This obviously sucks, and there SHOULD be a maximum length a company can have a job ad out before they have to explain why it's taking so long.
It's not uncommon for countries to require citizens to disclose Who and How many jobs they applied for this week to collect social security.. There should be something similar for companies who have job ads out.
Maybe they were, but now? I doubt that every investor or even AI takes job postings with a grain of salt or plainy ignores them and just looks at the numbers of employees.
>I would pass multiple rounds of interviews with senior/director-level interviewers only to never hear back from the company - even after a direct request for an update or feedback.
That is very disrespectful and reflects badly on that company.
A lot of head hunters will dangle job offers that don’t exist just so they can get info on the company you’re working at - basically they’re trying to keep tab on who’s in charge of hiring, so they can contact them.
There are also those who are paid by your boss just to see if any of their team members is looking to take off.
I don’t think there is anything new here though. These practice have existed for a while, and there’s not much you can do about it.
> A lot of head hunters will dangle job offers that don’t exist just so they can get info on the company you’re working at - basically they’re trying to keep tab on who’s in charge of hiring, so they can contact them.
This is quite common especially now when the market is bad.
The pattern is a LinkedIn message with vague description (interesting role at a sector), no mention of rate, names or anything else.
> vague description (interesting role at a sector), no mention of rate, names or anything else.
Consultancies does that when they recruit for likely or ongoing leads too, though. To not leak the lead.
I was applying for a while last year. Spending hours to write a cover letter and then either hearing nothing or getting a canned rejection letter is super frustrating. I've come to the conclusion that putting effort into an application is time wasted, so from now on AI is writing pretty much every single one of my cover letters.
Doing that allows me to send out 5 applications in the time it normally takes me to do 1. Since I've seen no actual correlation between effort and success, I figured quantity will give better results than quality. Of course, I might put in actual effort for an opening that I find really interesting, but that's an exception.
A place that physically operates near me posts job openings all the time, for which I'm well-qualified. After applying to several of them (with a very specific and targeted cover letter) and getting no response, my final attempt was to print out a letter and resume and physically take them over to their office.
I was thinking this would make a positive impression and say hey, I'm really interested and I'm willing to go the extra mile. The person who answered the door and to whom I gave the envelope seemed baffled that anyone would do this... saying, you know you can do this online...
I can only conclude that this is a ghost-job situation, where they didn't envision being called out in person and on site. Otherwise, what kind of dicks don't at least raise a respectful eyebrow at (or at least acknowledge) the guy who drives over to their office to hand-deliver a letter and resume?
After that I knew for sure that I wouldn't want to work for these jagoffs anyway... even if the job were real.
Having been on the other end of this repeatedly (as an engineer with a desk near the door, not a hiring manager) and I hate it when people do this.
People are becoming much more adverse to bring panhandled or solicited in a way they cannot ignore, in the same way spam calls are more annoying than spam texts. It's not "initiative" or "extra mile" shit, it's taking advantage of someone's politeness to waste their time.
It also looks hopelessly boomerish, up there with expecting the firmness of a handshake to land a job. I've seen this happen dozens of times and the resumes always end up in the trash within minutes. I've never seen anyone hired this way.
> Submit resume through company site
>AI rejects it for unknown reason and HR never sees it
>Go to company HQ to prove I'm human and see the culture
>Seething antisocial neckbeard engineer refuses to shake my hand, throws my resume in trash, and HR never sees it
The fact a simple human action like job hunting makes you boil with hatred and antipathy is shocking. I guarantee you, none of these people are thinking about you hard enough to consider intentionally wasting your time. They want to feed their families just like you.
A few years back, before I was an engineer, I worked at a local learning center franchise for a few years. We accepted online applications, but 99% of the people we hired came in through the front door and handed me a resume. I was not in charge of hiring, I just passed the resume to my boss (the owner). I never felt inconvenienced by this "role" I was given.
Some time after that, I was working for a consulting firm, but my desk was not at the entrance; another engineer's was. I distinctly remember a sharply dressed college student walking in, giving that engineer a resume, saying a few things, and leaving. His resume got passed up the chain and he got hired later. The only person I know who gave a paper resume.
If you're getting a lot of foot traffic that wastes your time, maybe bring that up with your employer?
It also looks hopelessly Gen Z to want all communication to be asynchronous and ignorable. If you guys have your way, we’ll all be connecting via API like 1U machines in a rack somewhere.
Seriously—if you’re going to go overboard, so can I.
WTF is it with everything having to be mediated by a machine these days? People can’t get around without GPS, remember phone numbers, or now even do their work or homework without 'AI.'
How do you explain how people managed to do all of these things before without assistance? And how do you square that with telling 'boomers'—who were able to do these things—that they’re stupid and that you’re somehow better?
Seriously, it’s like we used to have weightlifting competitions where humans physically lifted weights overhead, and then you guys decided, "Nah, that’s too old and boomerish. From now on, all weightlifting competitions will use forklifts. Anyone who wants to lift the weights themselves is boomerish and stupid."
And where's your solidarity? If you lose your job, you may find yourself wishing you could meet people in person, when all your 'ignoreable,' electronically submitted job applications somehow get thrown away.
> It also looks hopelessly boomerish
Nice bit of ageism there.
Frankly, if desiring to speak to the engineers hiring me is dismissed as "boomerish", then I'm hardly surprised recruiting is in such a mess.
In this case, the short conversation VerifiedReports had proved that, no, he wouldn't be happy working there. QED.
Instead of lashing out at people who respect themselves and others, why don't you blame your employer for making you the de-facto receptionist?
Your reaction betrays your embitteredness and naívete, calling others "boomerish" while missing the fact that your ways are in fact already the old ways. I'd say you're the one being mocked, except you're not even getting that much attention... you're hopelessly faffing at an AI firewall and never reaching a human eyeball. But hey, keep pecking that "auto-apply" button like a trained pigeon. Maybe someday you'll get a pellet.
"Taking advantage of someone's politeness?" Hahaha! It's pretty clear you have no idea what politeness is.
I honestly think at least 50% of the blame for ghost jobs in on HR. Ghosts jobs are great if you're an HR person trying to not get laid off. You get to look busy all the time, sending emails that don't matter. I think HR people are the masters of looking busy. It of course also makes the company itself look better, like they're still hiring all the time when they aren't. It also benefits the hiring manager to have ghost jobs, because it makes the current team feel more replaceable
I can tell you that our HR takes the time to write proper responses to every application, but we straight up delete AI written applications. I honor the effort put into any application, but if people haven’t spent the time, then why should we?
Your HR is the exception though, not the rule. I'm willing to risk this, since it allows me to keep my sanity. And if a company really seems awesome I will still put in the effort.
I believe you have entered a race to the bottom and while I understand why, I'm pretty certain you can't win this way.
You are effectively filtering out the remaining companies that do care from the pool that you're talking to.
Cover letters are dead imho. Even before AI came to play.
Total opposite here.
If you can't be bothered with a simple cover letter (a paragraph or two is fine) highlighting why you are a good fit and just send a CV..... Frankly, it comes across as low effort spamming.
As someone currently looking for a new job, I stopped bothering with cover letters because they didn't make the faintest of differences. After many dozens of rejections I am just burnt out about writing them.
That's in ideal world. In real world there's maybe 1% chance your cover letter will reach a human being.
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If you consider briefly highlighting the relevant parts of your experience to a potential employer as "fucking shit", then perhaps you are unsuitable for the role being offered.
I am sure, you hold the employer to the same standards. For example disclosing salary range information beforehand, or writing rejection letters afterwards, so applicants going through the trouble of doing their part aren't wasting their time and energy.
Right?
> I am sure, you hold the employer to the same standards
I most certainly do!
Incidentally, the very idea of not providing a salary range is truly baffling. I'm amazed any such advertisements generate applicants; other than those phoning up the HR department to tell them to stop pissing about and please state the salary.
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translated: stop questioning why the economy depends on the Infant Crushing Machine continuing to Crush Infants
My guess is that most of these jobs actually exist, in the sense that if a stellar candidate were to present theirselves, the organization would find a way to hire them.
The job exists, in the sense that Bob is currently doing it. Unless Bob turns in notice, your application will be in vain.
In larger organisations I think they'll usually be able to find work for an additional SuperBob. Perhaps not in smaller organisations, but I'd also expect them to be less likely to put up spurious vacancies.
I want to meet this 'SuperBob', he made me lol.
I worked at a company where managers would endlessly push this argument to open a job posting. Of course there was no budget to hire, but they would delude themselves that the perfect candidate was out there and they'd 'be able to make a case' for the budget with the stellar application in hand. Of course they had no idea what that actually entailed otherwise they would do it in advance. To HR's credit at that company their policy was never to advertise a post unless the budget was signed off. They would patiently explain this each time some deluded optimist showed up at their door. I can easily believe in companies where the rules are less explicit that the delusion would manifest as an endless procession of advertised postings that could never be actually hired because there is no money to fund them.
It's quite rare to read about HR doing something sensible on HN. :-)
I'm pretty sure the technical test for one Job application I had was just to solve a particular android testing problem they couldn't figure out.
Part of me thinks its to see what the competition is doing, see how others are using ai, to train ai, steal ideas/clients (common in the ad/marketing/design) world, train staff to hire, get free consulting.
Some say it’s to raise stock value by fake growth indicators or motivate employees that they are replaceable, but I think those 2 are just partially the case.
Another reason maybe to profile the pool of talent that probably gets hired by your competition.
> "Others, we found, were inflating numbers and trying to show their company is growing, even if it's not."
Sounds like a fraud against investors? That could be a way to attack this problem because in the U.S., many issues get turned into laws and regulations protecting shareholders.
It's hard to imagine that it's gotten worse. My employer imploded in the housing collapse. I got to the point I could screen at least 80% of the supposed job ads as bogus. Many were the same fairly generic thing month after month, some were outright scams (apply for something a bit outside my realm but which I could do, soon I was getting people trying to interest me in training for said role), some were the same job being posted in many manifestations. Maybe the original was legit, but 20 versions of it are 1 job, not 20.
Atleast in Europe there are some basic rules around data collection. In places like India, linkedin is a free for all vacuuming up resume data. I've seen the same jobs on linkedin appear for nearly 4 years with no changes and hundreds of people applying every week.
You cant flag it on linkedin either. I guess LinkedIn's business model likes the fake job postings.
Years ago, there was a job agency advertising an IT banking job in the Caribbean. Every week. For years. Apparently it was just a way for them to harvest CVs. 'Sorry you didn't make the interview for that job, but can I interest you in a role creating TPS reports for a company in Slough?'.
Scummy behaviour. But I guess they got away with it.
At least you don't have to worry about tropical storms in Slough
> Scummy behaviour. But I guess they got away with it.
How could they not get away with it? That's the problem.
Simple solution: company that has at least X employees cannot post more than f(X) job ads per (unit of time), and at least g(f(X)) need to result in hires within (timeframe) unless literally no one responded.
Funny this is posted on HN since the HN hiring threads contains companies that have been posting the same job offer for years straight. Zero due dilligence done. 60-70% of jobs are fake jobs nowadays.
"...wonders how they're actually going to monitor and regulate this. I don't think the government has the resources..."
This. Imagine the bureaucracy. The cure would be worse than the disease.
They sort of address this in the next sentence: "But if people run into problems, they can make a complaint and it will be looked into."
Random checks and whistleblowing are used in other, more "serious" processes, e.g., tax checks. At least here in Europe.
This has been going on for as long as I remember. Often they have decided who will go in but still advertise the position and even interview for it.
I worked in recruiting for a long time and I can tell you I never saw much in the way of any deliberate strategy to create fake job posts.
The thing is that whether or not a job exists at a point in time is far less black and white than you might naively think.
There are many reasons for it to be somewhat grey and banning the practice doesn’t really mean anything because you would have to quantify precisely under what circumstances a job is allowed to be advertised and as I say, it’s not as clear as you might imagine.
There is absolutely not a one to one relationship between a job and a job ad.
>There is absolutely not a one to one relationship between a job and a job ad.
Isn't this a problem? It means companies are wasting individuals' time (hence money), whereas companies are in a better position to hedge the risk. Would it be legal if I started, for example, posting fake apartment ads and not show up (because the apartment doesn't even exist)? Would it be ethical?
Create a state or local job posting registry.
Put a tax of 10% one year's salary on any employee hired without a registry posting. (employers to put the job posting number on the I-9 form)
Put a $1000 tax on any job posting not filled or cancelled within six months. Make that information public.
> There is absolutely not a one to one relationship between a job and a job ad.
Sounds like you've figured out exactly the problem then. If you're advertising for a job and there isn't a job then you've got a problem.
Some anecdotes, specific ways it can be unclear how many job openings exist:
I applied for some jobs, two of them liked me and I reached the point where they were competing with each other for me, and I was in salary negotiations. One of them, suddenly, decided to stop trading. I still don't know why.
Another time, I started working(!) and getting paid, but after 6 months the person who everyone (including themselves) was expecting to leave and for me to replace had still not found a new job (presumably due to all the ghost jobs), and there wasn't enough money for both me and them. Last in, first out, bye to me.
One place hired an PM about two weeks before the investors decided to shutter the entire company. (For actual ghost jobs: in my own job hunt after that, I found listings on job boards for that company, that were clearly from several years before I'd joined given the advertised wage range; as the company had told everyone to stop coming in for their notice period, there wasn't even anyone left to ask for those to be deleted).
Back when my dad was around, one of his anecdotes about interviewing candidates was asking the candidate "Why did you leave your last job?" and getting a reply along the lines of "After 6 months, management found out that our entire floor had been hired to do the same thing as the floor next to us. One of the floors had to go."
Can you explain why this is? Or give some examples?
Not the OP, but here are a few reasons I've seen:
- the boss has agreed to the role but has reservations, seeing a few candidates solidifies them and permission to hire us withdrawn
- the team is inexperienced at hiring and don't know what they want until they've seen a few candidates
- the company is hiring a new whole team. To make hiring easier, roles that are listed are "representative roles" - the total desired skill set across all roles is accurate but the company doesn't care what the split is, they just want a team that covers it. So a candidate who is a better fit for a listed role can be passed over in favour of one that happens to be the right jigsaw piece.
- circumstances changed since permission to hire was given, and no-one remembered to update the hiring portal; because unless you're actively hiring no-one looks at it.
This last one is quite common, because there are so many applications usually that no-one wants them in their email.
A company has a graduate scheme, they might be hiring 4 graduates this year, they might be hiring 40. Only one job advert.
External recruiters might then re-advertise the job with the company name removed, planning to funnel people to the company and collect their 20% commission.
External recruiters with several jobs might merge them into one. $250k job for a senior java developer with 5 years finance experience + $75k job for a junior java developer = advertise $250k job for a java developer.
A company might have a slow, centralised hiring pipeline for some roles. Google has a recruiter check the candidate's resume before putting you into a lengthy 6+ interview gauntlet, but only at the end of it do hiring managers actually check if the resume matches an open job. And if course if it takes 2 months to get through the full pipeline, the jobs open at the end aren't the same as the jobs open at the start.
I might need four different (distinct) roles filled but only have budget for three employees. I’d be prone to advertise (and genuinely recruit) all four roles, and hire the first three that I find a good fit for, delaying the fourth until/if additional budget frees up.
I might be willing to hire for two different levels of seniority/experience, but only one xor the other, not both.
Or be willing to hire for a role in Boston, London, or Zurich, but only one of those.
I wish I had a job
But honestly I settled with my unemployment.
I just don't want to deal with all the bs of applying, and playing nice with recruiters. Either they need me or they don't. I don't want to play games.
I don't have the privilege of having a degree or being well networked, or being a great developer.
It's a market. There can't be a job for everyone.
My first job was in an industry where "ghost jobs" had a different meaning. Local mafia used to add fictitious names to the worker register at work sites, and someone would come and collect the pay in cash every month. The daily work reports would show these workers as engaged in some house-keeping work.
should probably shut up before you end up one of the names used in those ghost jobs
Doesn’t this come under the banner of fraud?
It simply should be required to post all job openings with a government agency that will negotiate the terms and fine you horrifically if your offer smells like bullshit. It should go as far as to force the company to hire the best fitting candidate. Elaborate investigations if the candidate turns out a poor fit. Lavish unemployment benefits but you do have to show up at the agency at 8am 5 days per week to follow courses and take tests. If we don't have the employee you need in stock we will build one.
Can we please get back to using job fairs already? Why are companies so irritatingly resistant to getting back to doing things in-person and real-time?
Job fairs? You meen those gigs for meeting the junior HR promo girls that hands you a flyer with the company's carreers url, some branded post-it's and a mini pouch of gummi bears?
Exactly! I love getting free stuff. I don't care if it's a crappy company-branded pen, give me all the free swag!
Silicon Milkroundabout – in London, UK – is the Real Thing: https://www.siliconmilkroundabout.com/
Not just HR, but actual team leads and members who you can talk to and mutually evaluate each other, face to face. It's a superb event, highly recommended!
(Looks like they've introduced a new digital system too. Intriguing...)
> Why are companies so irritatingly resistant to getting back to doing things in-person and real-time?
RTO for the recruiters, eh?
Even job fairs are useless now. I'm a current student and when I show up a lot of companies seem to just send an intern or 3rd party recruiter out with a bunch of generic company fliers. You can't ask any questions about the job because the recruiter won't know the answer, they don't work in the department or even worse they don't work for the company, and when you find a company you want to join they tell you to apply online anyway. Sometimes you get a special link for applying, which I think is how they differentiate between job fair applications and the others.
At least the few smaller companies that show up seem more immune to this, but they have the problem of wanting to pay an electrical engineer about $50,000-$60,000 for starting pay, which just isn't worth it. So everyone still puts up with the recruiters that know nothing because at least then you have a shot of earning a market rate salary.
Having gone to job fairs recently I found them to be pretty useless.
I got one lead where the guy gave me the link for good candidates and all the others were useless.
job fair for which jobs? there are barely any jobs left.
The biggest irony is that the majority of HN's own "Who's Hiring" are ghost jobs.
That thread is just bullshit.
I know companies that are posting vacancies that currently don't exist in order to keep good candidates on the hook. They tell the candidate that we should keep in touch for when the company is ready to hire them.
I am not sure if it's bad or not. It's true that it kinda wastes the candidate's time. In some cases though, the candidate is so good that the company will create a position just for them.
Let's resolve this right now: It's bad.
No... it's worse than that; it's THEFT, and monumentally offensive. It's time that everyone, EVERYONE stop giving entities a free pass on stealing from us by deliberately wasting our time.
In every aspect of life, every hour of our day, we're being ripped off. From the assholes blocking the passing lane, to "ghost jobs," to non-functioning subscription-cancellation phone numbers and Web forms... people should be going apeshit about the despicable and unpunished theft of our time.
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Some are; I'm not.
I should say way too many are; and they act shocked when you take issue with being stolen from... as if YOU'RE the one with the problem. Pathetic.
Fraud. The word you're looking for is fraud.
Oh I am pretty sure it’s bad. I am actually quite shocked someone would ruminate wherever or not it’s bad.
I feel like if it’s clear from the listing that it’s a catch-all that might not correspond to any real vacancies, it’s fine. Otherwise I think it’s bad, since it’s lying.