hckrnws
28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days
(unlisted.careers)
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by rubatrejo
by rubatrejo
If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that. At a large or fast growing company, we might never stop interviewing and hiring senior software engineers. The listing stays open for a year or more.
There are also specialty roles where hiring takes months. I've had niche roles open where we didn't get any applicants with any experience on the topic for over 90 days on multiple occasions.
If the listing is generic like "senior software engineer" and all of the requirements are generic like being able to program or do teamwork, it's probably a generic listing.
Applying anyway is a safe bet, but I wouldn't invest as much energy into tailoring your resume if it's a 6 month old posting from a 50 person company with a website that looks like it's from 2009. That company probably forgot to take the listing down.
> maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people
This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
The target can also change constantly. At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.
I can believe that your company has a good reason for keeping the job up, but I also know that some job ads are black holes were no one bothers to do the bare minimum including taking the posting down. I have no idea how to differentiate one from the other.
It's not surprising about LinkedIn. They've made applying for jobs too easy so there's too much noise. I wouldn't bother applying for jobs there. LinkedIn is great for recruiters though - just put some effort into your profile, set it to "looking for work", and then reply to interesting recruiter spam. That's how I got my last 3 jobs.
Maybe I'm thinking a bit too much of myself, but it doesn't seem like they are that interested in really filling it.
They've got a few open spots if you're interested in relocating to Springfield, MO (and even some entry level IT positions https://careers.oreillyauto.com/us/en/job/R203370/IT-Support... - that one was posted 09/21/2026)
So what would happen is I'd have say 10 real openings, I may have 5 different job postings, and all of them would stay open until I filled all 10 openings.
But to find the actual candidate who fills the role? yeah potentially months.
Entry to mid level was exploding -- 800+ applicants each time -- but for mid-to-high or manager roles we'd get 40 apps and maybe 2 were fits.
If we’re hiring 10 senior software engineers, I’ll have 10 position IDs at the start, but we’ll only have one job posting for Senior Software Engineer (assuming there is no difference in the JD).
I can’t imagine going onto a company site that’s hiring 10 Senior SWEs and seeing 10 identical listings. That would make me doubt their competence.
At one point I flatly threatened to hiring agency I am quitting the process if this goes on further, and all was finished within a week or two.
Corporations work in mysterious (aka chaotic) ways. Even though it usually boils down to specific manager being lazy ass.
How on earth am I, a potential job seeker, supposed to be able to figure out if your year-old job posting is still up because you: couldn't find anyone after a year, are constantly hiring and never take it down, actually hired your quota six months ago and HR forgot to take the listing down, the job listing isn't for a real job and is just a trap to collect resumes, the listing is for a ghost job to placate the overworked current staff, some other reason?
I don't think anyone reasonable is saying that you can't or shouldn't be able to do that -- just that there should be good faith disclosures.
because luckily in the UK market - companies books are open to the public.
WTF do these people doing hiring actually do?
I mean, naïvely you’d think encouraging more higher quality applicants would be important somehow, but no.
I'm not confused that's just a red flag not to work for your company.
The only issue is that it's never one factor. Rising interest rates, s174, ghost jobs, outsourcing: them and many more factors all add up.
This is really shitty behavior. If you aren't hiring, remove the posting.
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You could argue that AWS doesn't know what they're doing but they also hire way more software developers than all but a handful of other companies
Companies don't need a "software engineer" x100.
Large companies have teams, and every team puts out a different job description based on their particular requirements, stack, desired experience, etc.
I've never encountered a scenario where someone wants engineers in bulk and then they'll decide where to place them within the organization.
It's happened so many times. Apply for a job, within an hour get an email that says I am not qualified (not true), and then a week later the same job gets posted again.
I'm normally a pretty free-market guy, but it should be illegal. It's clear-cut fraud - they are advertising something that doesn't exist, specifically to game numbers. And what's more, governments report on these numbers as if they are real job opportunities in the economy.
He said: Oh, I have 23 recs on the job site but none of them are open. They just keep them there to make us look like we're still hiring like crazy.
Feel like any test nowadays should INCLUDE ai, but you likely just want insight into how they are getting from A to B. I don't wanna assume what you mean by cheating with AI, could be as simple as answering live questions with cheating software or whatever, which is obviously a huge issue. I wanna respond and say it should be expected for any take home type stuff, and be rolled into the expectations if anything, but that could be way off of what you mean.
both sides of the entire process is just a nightmare now, one side has all this noise to sift through, and the other side is pressured to mass apply because of all the competing noise they can't be seen through. I was listening to something about AI generated responses, and they seemed to have no empathy for the people who gave human responses, but used AI to give them an overview of the company and what it does for the question "why do you want to work at x?", and sorta mocked the person because they can tell they asked for a generic description of what the company does.
There has to be some give and take, initial applications if you are spending hours researching a single company, you are setting yourself up to be absurdly let down if that same company sends you an automated rejection within a day. A reasonable person will only do that so many times, before just giving up and waiting for the other side to be the first mover instead.
It took about 100 apps/interview last year. These ghost jobs wasted about 6 months of my life.
I'd drop $10k+ on a solution to this problem.
I've switched to finding companies + jobs on LI, then applying directly on the company's website.
> Hospitality postings sit the longest: 43.9% have been open more than 90 days, median 65 days. Healthcare turns over fastest at 19.7%.
(kudos to unlisted for aggregating and reporting, this gives me a data point to offer to jurisdictions and regulators interested in compliance monitoring in this context)
Probably I also forgot some more categories of crazy hiring processes in my enumeration.
From what I can tell the job posting have been opened for a while, companies are inundated with CVs thanks to them offering remote and form the screening feedback I had (when I was lucky to get any feedback) it was basically that they can be as picky as they want and hire people who matches every single one of their requirements.
On the flip side at my work (FAANG, not remote) we barely get any CVs from people who can pass the technical screening. Most the candidate fail so badly it’s not even funny
Career sites would do well to automatically close job listings after 90 days or so.
Has anyone else heard of/seen this, or can explain where it's coming from or if it means anything?
I don't have a hypothesis for why jobs stay posted for so long, other than that employers are always look for a workers, the roles are generally well-defined, and turnover can be high. I don't think there's anything nefarious within healthcare causing so many postings to stay up for so long. Most healthcare employers are generally desperate for workers. So much so that they pay crazy rates for temporary workers (staffing agencies / travelers). The company I work for helps health systems try to minimize those costs.
1) Roles with high turnover. Likely the posting stays always on. 2) The pay is bad and nobody takes the job. 3) The role is too niche and the candidates in the market with visibility to the role are very few. 4) Aggressive hiring. Candidates have many options and until they actually show up at work, you keep interviewing other candidates. 5) Forgotten posts / ghost posts (my gut feeling says that this is the lowest contributor to the spike we observe, as likely it should be flat over time)
Or companies that are in a perpetual hiring freeze?
Been working professionally for ~15 years or so, and it's never been this bad. Other than "knowing someone" (i.e. a referral, and even that falls through routinely), not sure what the best way to snag a position is these days.
We have AGI before we have general purpose hiring.
The answer is likely moving away from the internet entirely and having actual face to face screening right away. no company wants to commit to that, so its gonna continue to be some weird expectation from both sides where the applicant doesnt wanna be screened with AI, and the hiring team wants X amount of effort put into every initial application.
I think it just must move entirely offline, until some semblance of an answer exists, because right now like i said, we can't even fathom what a solution looks like online.
Whenever you hear of labor shortages, it is almost always a euphemism for a shortage of people desperate enough to tolerate a terrible working arrangement.
The "AI" slop from staffing agencies, lead-generators, applicants, and data scrapers... have dropped the signal to noise ratio into spam number territory. =3
Companies didnt pay to put the ad in the paper every day once the vacancy was filled.
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As an analogy it's kinda like hard drives: when one of my hard drives dies, it's An Event which I need to deal with specifically; I need to order a replacement for that specific drive. At Google's server farms, hard drives dying is just a statistic, you continuously buy hard drives just because you know existing drives are gonna die at some semi-predictable rate.
Large companies exist, but pure software companies or with heavy side of it?
While the 9th largest is 7,777 people reported... all the others are at least 40,000 people and the largest two are over 100,000.
Itaú Unibanco https://www.itau.com.br/download-file/v2/d/42787847-4cf6-446... shows 80,657 employees in Brazil in Q2 of 2026.
And for tech jobs... https://carreiras.itau.com.br/busca-de-vagas/software/35299/...
Is it a big list? No. Is it a bank? Yep... but then Capital One is a large employer of tech in the US. Estimates put Walmart (certainly not a "tech" company) at having 20,000 technical roles.
Discriminating between technology product and technology role at a "regular" industry or service seems a bit biased. I (software developer) haven't worked at a tech company for the past two decades (and frankly, while wages are lower than the tech company jobs my job stability is much higher).
You can, but you’re probably wrong and are wasting your time and effort going through lord knows how many hoops to submit a simple CV.
Were submissions as simple as “here’s my CV, contact me if you like what you see”, then this wouldn’t be a problem. But when you have to sign up to the millionth HR service with the same 50 “please input the info that’s already on the resume you’re submitting” steps over and over again just to never hear back from the company or get rejected 6 months later, “submit away” is not an acceptable answer.
> This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
Yes, it would. Even if only 1 of the 10 spots is available, it still is a valid listing. Not knowing if the listing is valid at all is way worse.
Asking for “common sense” only works if the situation you are in makes sense to begin with. Job listings are a cesspit of bad behaviour, dark patterns, disrespectful processes and incongruous offers.
What we need is some sort of regulation on how job listings are posted and how candidates can and should apply.
While we’re at it, it should be utterly ILLEGAL and absolutely liable to have a job listing up with no salary range or a salary range that’s too wide to give a sense of what compensation looks like—lying about it should trigger serious legal consequences as well.
It’s about time candidates were treated with some dignity.
Signing up for another page is a bit annoying (especially for places that are all using the same platform, like Workday—I understand these are probably self-hosted or kept disconnected on purpose, but still it could be nice if there was a separate global space for applicants, then we could just be imported in).
To some extent it would be nice if it was harder to apply. Like I used to be happy to see a cover letter required, as that’d filter out some of the competition. Now people can just AI generate their cover letters I guess, so I mostly avoid postings that require them unless I’m really excited. (I think LLMs mostly review the applicants these days as well, and I’m pretty sure LLMs prefer LLM-speak, so it’s a losing proposition).
Yeah. I want a job listing to actively tell me how much I stand to gain in exchange for my time and skills. How absolutely entitled of me. Imagine that? A potential employee wanting to know upfront how much their time is worth in the eyes of a potential employer? Nonsense! You get what you get and you don’t get upset.
If that’s your line of reasoning then I can only assume you’re exactly the type of employer that indulges in such practices.
In the age of LLMs every one is "tailoring" their resume to every posting.
But in a good market, sure. You can throw your hat into a random general application and you still might get a call back. Old postings are worth a shot. Any connection with an internal recruiter at least guarantees you start the process.
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Perhaps true in the most literal sense, but you cannot assume that it's true in the practical sense.
Lots of companies have laid off significant numbers of people, particularly in certain roles. There will always be some turnover that requires hiring at a large company but this does not mean that you should assume there are always open positions for your role.
Submitting to a large company for roles that are in secular decline within that company is mostly a waste of time.
It's also not uncommon for natural turnover to be used as an organic way to downsize, with a role for a person who just left remaining unfilled.
Common sense would dictate that a company with 10,000 people has a need for a diverse set of roles, and it would be completely stupid to recycle the same template pretending the role was always the same. In fact, repeating a stale advert suggests the company does in fact not have positions opened and either forgot to pull an old advert or some recruiter is trawling for applications to pretend to be productive.
A large company may have a handful of actually-very-special-role positions open for every hundred generic "our tech stack is this and isn’t going to change" developer roles.
This shows some ignorance on the history of work relations. The bad old days of industrial guilds and company towns are not renowned for quality of life and independence. Your life was tied to the company, and all you could aspire to do in your life would be to toil in the same low paying job while mixing up your corporate structure with your life's social structure. If god forbid you lost your job, you and your family would lose your whole life.
Tell me how this is doing things right.
For those in the US to understand, see how your access to healthcare is tied to your employer, and the impact this have on your life of you are forced out of your job. Now extrapolate this to every single aspect of your life.
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Yes. I recently got a job (IT infrastructure engineer with a non-tech company) on a posting that was 6 months old. they had filled it, and at the same time got approval for a second headcount so they never pulled it down
Small companies may look to fill a certain set of skill-sets, and if that is filled by one person or three doesn't matter much; can puzzle around to make the workload fit what is found. large companies may hire 10 people generically, but may stop at 5 if they don't like the candidates, or hire 16 after a good set of resumes.
Forcing companies to be overly specific in the roles is just making it harder to apply.
The main reason the jobs are reposted are to get them to the top of the feed
Being able to reach out and have a chat with the HR manager either way also makes a candidate more human.
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Surprisingly I had better benefits at the two contracting firms than what employees were getting.
I’m not saying there are no companies that keep non-live job ads up purely for fishing purposes but, in my experience, it’s not the norm. It would really piss jobseekers off and that’s the kind of word that tends to get around and make it harder to hire in future. Maybe not if you’re a FAANG, because so many people want to work for you anyway, but it’s going to cause problems for “normal” companies.
For example, I've personally witnessed situations where the funding for a role gets postponed to next quarter, but my manager just kept it open anyway, either out of fear of missing out on the perfect candidate if they stopped accepting apps, or because it's simply easier than going through the HR process to re-post it in a month.
Let's say I have 50 employees working for $100,000 each.
Why would I not want to replace 25 of them that are willing to work for $50,000 each if they are producing anywhere close to the same quality.
In a case like this always open job listings are a warning to others.
Also there is something called market sampling. Where you put up these job openings and look at the quality of applicants in relation to the employees you already have to ensure you're on the right track internally.
‘Warning this company has management practices oriented around remaining solvent for the long term, rather than providing a sinecure for workers’?
Companies do not have human rights. They are a pleasant fiction the population allows because it's more effective than not having said rules. We the people can revoke those rules the moment the meta-idea of corporations no longer serve the public good.
In the US at least we seemingly have come to believe the corporation is the ultimate organism and all rights should be sacrificed for its eternal cancerous growth.
I honestly can't tell if this a troll or not, but in case it isn't:
Because "number job openings" are used as a signal of company health, Ghost Jobs are far far more common than job listings which companies intend to hire from!
And large cos are always hiring
I agree, I should have written a bit more, apologies.
I think one thing that job seekers often miss is just how ridiculous the firehouse of low quality applications is. They know they’re competent, but they can’t accurately estimate how many others aren’t and have built up (or borrowed) machinery that lets them apply to hundreds of job postings per day. That level of noise is what causes things to have to be automated on the inbound side as well and where automated scoring tools or gates before talking to an actual human come from.
I still agree you should get a reply, but the first two are overwhelmingly likely to be automated.
Hiring has been crazy for years. It's worse with remote jobs because you get a firehose of applicants everywhere.
When I was doing a lot of hiring I tried to be as responsive as possible because you don't want to lose the best candidates. I would try to review applicants as fast as they came in. You have to understand that in that hour I might get 40 resumes. 1 or 2 are amazing, another 2-3 could be worth a look, and another 5 might have made the cut if I didn't just read those 2-5 much better resumes ahead of them.
If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
The simpler explanation is that a tired hiring manager was just clicking buttons to dismiss applicants who didn't make the cut.
This sounds like a dream. We posted a job a couple of weeks ago and had 1200 applications in around 2 days. Most are complete garbage. I'm confused why they took the time to apply at all, even if AI did it for them.
Being unemployed is hard and can be really demoralizing. Try thinking “I’m probably helping someone pay rent until they find a job listing that works for them” when you’re rejecting obviously unsuitable applications. It at least makes the “wtf”-ness of some of them seem a little less weird.
Resumes are only a 1 page summary (2 if you're really experienced) and this kind of market has you doing hundreds of submissions if you lack connections (or your connections are also job searching). You don't have the time to tailor every application for every role.
A shame because LLMs should really be perfect at this. Most current tools are too obsessed with writing for you (and creating a blander resume) instead of just taking a master CV and drag and dropping the most applicable roles/projects/experiences in.
It's always been the case, but now it's more true than ever: your professional network is super important. If somebody on the inside can recommend you, your chances of getting an offer are good compared to throwing your resume on the pile.
That assumes that I am writing my resume for just your job posting. If I am just going to copy and paste the job requirement verbatim on my resume, doesn't that make your job screening applicants for actual experience much harder? Often times the difference is splitting hairs anyway ("we're looking for someone who paints brown houses").
But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them, I would just frankly not have the time to do so.
Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody. The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.
Those regulations aren't perfect, but after working at one it became pretty clear that a lot of these things wouldn't fly if a bank did them.
Falsely advertise a financial offering? Pretty clearly actionable.
Ghost someone after they inquire about one? Deny them for some vague reason? Even just give them an unfavorable rate without specifying as much? None of those things would hold up. You have to send notices of any adverse action you take, not just providing clear communication that you're taking some kind of action against them, but giving a clear and objective reason why.
Call around to everyone someone might have worked for or with for references, without their knowledge or consent? See "clear and objective reason why." Also, if you use a third party to do this there are a whole collection of responsibilities under the Fair Credit Reporting Act -- you have to provide people with copies of the information gathered on request, inform them anytime it's used against them, offer some process for disputing incorrect details... And that threshold is from gathering the data, not from scoring it.
Never mind equity compensation, which is somehow special in terms of financial disclosures -- whether that's relative to the same company later offering the same stock to the public, or just more generally to any kind of investment offer.
None of this is any less unreasonable on the employer side.
Why though? I've done hiring before - it takes less than 30 seconds to skim a resume. The recruiters also have no idea what the responsibility is for the jobs they are hiring for - it's a terrible place to bottleneck candidates on.
It sounds like everyone, including recruiters, are being sent on a snipe hunt.
I see a position getting posted for a local company, and within hours the same requirements are showing up for 10 new postings with vague company names like "... is wanted for a local manufacturer" etc.
The company essentially handed the recruiter $10k because they were too bad at reviewing their own applications.
Hiring your own recruiter can be kind of a scam - if you do it on your side they'll want ~10% of your first year's salary. But if you're interested in such a thing, all you have to do is so much as wag a finger on LinkedIn and they'll come swarming.
But I certainly feel ripped off applying for jobs they never intended on filling. If they put up a lot of hoops to jump through to apply (submit a portfolio, set up an account, write a cover letter specific to our company), times that by the 1000 people who have applied, and it's an exorbitant amount of human time getting wasted.
I know this analogy breaks down a little bit since this behavior does actually happen, sort of, in real life p2p markets but the point is, it sucks and if you've ever sold anything on fb marketplace you know how obnoxious it is dealing with people who demand a lot of you but do not intend to actually commit to buying what you're selling.
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In HN's Who's Hiring it is very close to 100%, so I don't look at that thread anymore.
The solution: use AI robots for jobs.
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Companies feel like they have no choice, for two reasons:
1. Jurisdictions where workers must give minimum notice periods before leaving their prior employer - the worker accepts a competing offer, gives notice, waits out the notice period, then starts. And many workers often ask for additional unpaid time between jobs before starting (since no vacation days have been accrued yet at the new job).
2. Hiring happens by committee. In most companies, job candidates must be interviewed by, at the absolute minimum, an HR screener, the hiring manager, and the hiring skip-level; and usually also by people who will be peer teammates, plus an HR "culture" interview. If you need to pass a committee of 3-6 people, interviews must be scheduled with each member of the committee; at one committee member per week, that is 3-6 weeks.
6 weeks (1.5 months) plus background checks plus getting pay packages approved plus 30 day notice periods plus two weeks unpaid vacation is, yes, a multiple month endeavor at minimum to fill a role. The only way to fill a role within a week is to grant full hiring autonomy to the hiring manager and only hire people who are currently unemployed (and therefore have no notice period or desire to take more unpaid time before starting), which in most companies beyond early startup size, is a complete non-starter.
Any manager will tell you, they’d rather not go through the long hiring process.
Grow some balls, do a couple interviews, and just pick the candidate you like the most. You're hiring for a glorified IT guy, not a NASA astronaut. Companies that stretch out the process to a ridiculous degree need to get over themselves.
EDIT: and to be clear, yes, I've been on both sides of the hiring table
It may sound like I'm blaming candidates, and sometimes it might be fair to, but this is also a problem caused by companies not investing in training and hiring junior level employees, which means that people who are unqualified feel forced to apply for more senior roles, as those are the only roles hiring. It's honestly shocking how many candidates I've interviewed in my career who don't even meet the basic bar for the role they've applied for, and are essentially just hoping to get lucky and snag a high-paying tech job even if it ultimately results in them being terminated, they can collect a check for 3-9 months without delivering.
Mass applications, AI cheating, fraudulent representation (e.g. saying you are person X but are actually interviewing on behalf of person X who you are not), lying on resumes and in screeners, and even nation state attacks on hiring (see North Korea trying to farm tech jobs for money to get around sanctions), it's not great on the hiring side either.
It can move faster than months, of course, when everyone's willing to prioritize it. But as anyone who's worked in hiring can tell you, the set of people who want hiring to move faster is much larger than the set of people who are willing to accept inconvenient interviews and fill out their feedback promptly.
Job is posted. You apply along with hundreds of other people. The recruiter/hiring manager needs to spend some time sifting through them along with juggling all the other tasks they have going on. Let's say that this takes 1-2 weeks. Some places may let the opening sit longer to get more applicants.
Several candidates are identified as possible fits. Recruiter reaches out to them to schedule the recruiter screen. Schedules need to line up. This likely takes 1-2 weeks until the recruiter screen happens.
The recruiter needs to schedule the tech screen after a successful recruiter screen. Again, schedules need to line up. This could take another 1-2 weeks.
Feedback needs to be submitted and then the onsite round is scheduled. This could take another 1-2 weeks.
The onsite round will have multiple interviewers. This means more people to collect feedback from which likely increases delays in getting that. A debrief is normally scheduled with everyone who interviewed them. But let's say one week to gather this and make a decision.
An offer is made. It takes some time to prepare and get sign off. There will be time to discuss with the recruiter to explain the details, plus some time needed for negotiation and thinking it over. This could be another 1-2 weeks.
Additionally, some candidates may want to ask for more time during these phases in order to prepare better or align their schedules. This pushes back the process for all other candidates if the company is hiring for a specific job in order to give all candidates a fair assessment against the pool.
Adding this all up, we arrive at 6-10 weeks.
If so, 14 days is unheard of. Tell us more.
IMO the reason it takes longer now is because multiple people are getting interviewed simultaneously.
Considering job postings are getting 10x more resumes than before, I'm not surprised companies are hedging their bets and interviewing way more people for the same position.
These companies have lost their minds.
IME (hiring, not interviewing) it's always been 3-4 rounds. First is an HR phone screen (usually 20-30 minutes on the phone), 2nd with hiring manager, 3rd with a senior engineer/architect, and a 4th with the hiring VP. And those are almost always combined into a single morning or afternoon(2+3 or 3+4) and the final round doesn't always happen (VP's choice).
Sounds like asking a lot from candidates but unfortunately candidates lie a lot and the cost of hiring candidates that don’t match up to the requirements when paying $300k-$500k/year is just too high. Firing people is hard and takes a long time, especially in management roles. My personal guidance to managers is to have rounds match the level and experience required for the job. You can hire an intern with 2 rounds after the hiring manager conversation but a staff IC probably needs 5, directors need 7.
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Real job you have ai, so no point to ask too many things that ai can answer anyway.
Ok, some big level stuff like node has an event loop.
I've also caught a few people using LLM cheating software accidentally revealing it.
Or is this another arbitrary power play to suffer?
The reality is most companies will force you to use AI in various forms likely from day 1, so the hypocrisy is quite stark
I mean in University there were tests where you were allowed to bring a cheat sheet, or even a bag full of books. So called bag tests. And people were still able to fail. Although I never had the latter in my curriculum.
I think it's necessary that teams for which people are hired for brainstorm up-to-date tests. Just recycling the same challenge from 3 years ago isn't good enough.
It would be genuinely shocking to me if someone came up with evidence that the majority of jobs on job sites were made by companies that actually intended to hire the best candidate that applied through that site!
Every company I’ve worked at, from startups to big tech have had job listings open when they want to hire someone. Sometimes a job post will stay open for months or even years, not because it is fake but because finding the right candidate is far more important than finding a candidate.
I empathize with the frustrating experience of seeing job listings that you’re qualified for and not being hired, and certainly a lot of companies half-ass their hiring and do not review every applicant, but fake job listings make very little sense. When they do occur, it’s for obscure reasons, not because that is standard operating procedure.
The whoishiring thread here on HN regularly sees candidates accuse regularly posting companies of not actually hiring, even though there’s ample evidence these companies are hiring.
Re: the original claim about job posts being created when the company already has an internal candidate, there are very few organizations where that is necessary. A private company rarely has an obligation to consider outside candidates, it is mostly seen in government recruitment and for visa reasons. Job sites charge lots of money to list, a company wouldn’t waste money advertising a job they don’t intend to hire for.
https://clarifycapital.com/job-seekers-beware-of-ghost-jobs-...
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12977
I'm still waiting for they evidence they don't exist, which was conspicuously absent from your post despite its length.
And to reflect that, the jobs I've gotten were the ones you'd only accept if you were really desperate.
(Covid Times, man: Covid Times.)
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.
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Source of truth from this one is I've worked in public higher ed in two states in the US and gone through this process personally
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Same experience in multiple YC startups whose payment isn't even that competitive. Half of the resumes don't match the qualification, and on top of that the freelancing recruiter doesn't even seem to care. Lately I resorted to hiring from my own network.
Managers: keep in touch with the best people and just hire them on your next job for more than they were getting paid. Win-win.
It's not easy for everyone, if you don't interact with colleagues outside the job it's probably impossible.
As the other reply said, it really comes down to "hang out with them outside of work". Not often, just enough that you know more about the person than what's related to the job. Working colleagues already work with you so they can speak to your technical skill.
Outside of work colleague, you gotta meet people. So find soke tech communities locally or some FOSS projects you can contribute to.
In any case, it's a slow process and stuff rarely happens immediately. It's something best to do when you don't need a job.
I recently met the CTO of a unicorn in a social function, and they urged me to apply, he would fast track. I interviewed there before, got an offer but decided to go somewhere else. Even with a face-to-face invitation from the CTO and obviously having passed an interview in the past, they rejected me.
There is no end to incompetence in modern business.
Their job postings are currently still up on their site and linkedin.
“US business continues to boom,” S&P Global Market Intelligence chief business
economist Chris Williamson said in a statement. “To put the growth surge in
context, barring the spike in demand following the opening up of the economy
after the COVID-19 lockdowns, the latest improvement in business activity
is the greatest recorded since early 2015. Business is clearly booming now in
both manufacturing and services.”
Is it booming for everyone except software developers? I keep hearing about developers who have been looking for a job for 6 months or longer and don't get responses to applications.
Or is it some process failure (which you hint at) that is making it difficult to capitalize on that boom?
Business doing good doesn't automatically mean populations of humans are doing good themselves.
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You can't solve incentive-incompatibility with technology.
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The internet has turned the cost of the vast majority of job postings to almost nothing.
Based on that information you tell me how you think the incentives will work?
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https://basecareer.co/ is basically the same slop.
Tell that to the last 3 years of new grads.
I can't send or recieve documents as email attachments anymore to external stakeholders, everything must be via sharepoint link.
That, plus a decade of compulsory anti phishing training means no half competent HR person should be blind opening an attachment that says 'CV'.
You get rejections? When I was jobhunting, half of the companies I applied to never replied to me.
I have applied for, and got, 3 jobs in the last 8 years. So yeah I think I am allowed an opinion on it without people telling me Im wrong.
literally the first thing I talk about with recruiters during an initial phone screen.
yeah okay there may be a ~5-10k, maybe even a little more, bit of wiggle-room but if I can't make a reasonable guess where I'll land why would I even consider interview #2 when I already have an existing role?
They have the time to train someone into a role and typically don't have to worry about going to work for a competitor after they get out of AIT or A school.
While there's nothing wrong with those companies paying such, it drastically changes the incentives for the regular employee. Going to work in Big Tech can be like winning the lottery (in the dot com boom, I had about 6 million on paper... that I didn't sell before the crash).
That there is drastically different industries with correspondingly different levels of compensation has incentivized the person who can change jobs to move from a $60k job to a $120k job to a $250k job to do so.
In the 90s I was making $50k/year ($50k '95 -> $109k '26 https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm ).
The companies where people used to work a decade or two or three are still there and in many cases, largely unchanged.
You don't get stability by laying off workers every 2 years .
I could believe this if you were in a population 5,000 town with few employers and the person applying had to work in person.
In our industry, where there are 1000 different remote job listings available to anyone at any time, there is no justification for this.
Do you mean that there's no reason to send resumes or to wherever or that there's no reason to be unemployed given the theoretically endless number of postings?
While not as bad as applying yourself, they can be pretty damned awful.
The problem is companies would actually have to make compelling offers to qualified people.
Now people act like they must have this ridiculous firehose of resumes to sort through, then have non-technical HR gals sort and filter out based on whatever random criteria they use, and then by the time it gets to the hiring managers - they still have no idea if this person is a complete idiot or has any skills at all. The qualified people you actually want to hire don’t want to be treated like idiots or liars either.
I just don’t feel it has to be this way - there is zero value in a firehose unless you were looking for desperate and cheap people.
However I'll agree with you, the non-technical people sorting CVs on unknown criteria is something that became very widespread lately, and is certainly part of what's contributing to the problem.
Perhaps managers starting to do it by themselves rather than having HR in the middle is the answer to the problem.
You have to appear like a real human. The candidates in demand get recruiter spam all week long. If you go LLM slop canon on their inbox they're not going to respond.
Cold outreach has a low response rate. It's worth doing, but you can't rely on it. You have to go through all angles.
Typically I'd be doing a mix of my own cold outreach, public job postings, an internal company referral program, and for difficult roles a trusted external recruiter who I know is good for candidates.
What can you do to increase the odds that you're in the top 10 (and preferably top 5)?
It's possible that a superficial reason was used to separate number 10 from number 11 ... and maybe number 11 would have been a great candidate and future employee. What I don't have is three weeks to do all day 9-5 1h long interviews for every candidate.
Regardless - it would be nothing to show some basic human decency and respect:
- Review them more often until you get the 5 quality candidates to interview (there's no way in hell you actually review all 100 resumes fully - quit sitting on them for weeks and weeks)
- Take down the posting after resumes are reviewed
- Submit a basic and honest response for the people who's resumes didn't make the consideration
- A simple human note for the candidates who were considered but didn't make the interview
- Timely closer for the interviewed candidates who didn't get the job
None of these add any substantial time to the hiring process, but can go a long way to remember the human in a job market that's an absolutely brutal and soulless Leviathan right now.
After two weeks, the posting is taken down.
> - Submit a basic and honest response for the people who's resumes didn't make the consideration
If you have 200 resumes in the pool and 100 of them weren't passed on for additional consideration because they didn't meet the requirements (education, needing visa sponsorship, outside of the country, not following the instructions for the application), how long will that take?
Furthermore, in the litigious nation we live in, that information when provided honestly has tended to lead to lawsuits ("I wasn't considered because...").
> - A simple human note for the candidates who were considered but didn't make the interview
That's another 100 candidates. Three minutes each to write the email? That's three hours of someone's day. Again, this gets to the litigious situations. It only takes the allegation of bias to lead to a lawsuit - that costs way more than three hours of my day.
This is the public sector, we don't pay a lot - that's why it's only 200 applications. In the private sector it wouldn't be hard to multiply that number by 3 or 4.
> - Timely closer for the interviewed candidates who didn't get the job
This is something that we're good at. The people who were interviewed know by the end of the week. Job posting opening to the selection being made is four weeks.
I can understand the justification for all of the other choices. But it doesn't mean I have to like it. The whole process is degrading and dehumanizing, and it's something that has gotten much, much worse in the last decade.
Generic rejections like "we moved with other candidates" tells me nothing. So noise remains because candidates don't have feedback to improve upon. All because HR wants minimize lawsuits through obscurity.
It doesn't make the hiring manager's job harder if you decline to customize your resume. They press reject and move to the next resume.
> Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody.
If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.
If there was a hidden requirement to know Python but the job listing didn't ask for it, you get a lot of applicants that don't fit. Smart hiring managers will update the job listing as they review candidates. There are some lazy companies that will have secret requirements that they don't put in the job listing, but that only creates more work for everyone involved. It's not a secret trick they're pulling to be mean. They're just bad at their jobs.
> The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.
Unpopular opinion around these parts, but there's a high correlation between the best candidates and people who take the time to review the job posting and customize their resume before submitting.
I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
> But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them,
Complaining about low response rates and refusing to tailor your resume are highly correlated, in my observation.
The thing though is it's a bad requirement. There are any number of great candidates who could be proficient in Python - the skills are very transferrable. (It's like trying to find a painter and filtering out people who have never painted a brown houses)
The thing you're screening for by being so specific is not finding the most qualified person, you're going to end up with the person with the most time and patience to fib or lie on their resume.
> I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
That's exactly wrong - the best candidates are going to be busy people who are great at their job - the people jumping through HR hoops to get hired are by nature going to be worse candidates.
I live in a country where the probational period is 6 months (Germany), so the law says people can get fired without cause or justification, just give them 2 weeks notice or 2 weeks garden leave.
Even with that, it's a very arduous process to fire people. Even in cases where they repeatedly refused to show up for work, I've seen HR departments asking managers to "try harder". This only makes both the employee and the manager suffer.
The reason for that is simple: HR departments are extremely inefficient machines.
At least in (Northen) Europe ghost jobs are a pain on the ass in most industries, even for low-skilled labour. Hiring companies - not the actual companies that need a worker, but an intermediate - try to just amass a database of workers so they can say to their client that we have hundreds of people with these qualifications ready to come to work for you. It’s not even legal, but they still do it.
I think a lot of these problems are created by the companies themselves, and to lesser degree by candidates. Posting ghost jobs, asking for insane qualifications to run a simple website, interview process lasting 3 months… And candidates firehosing the job ads with bs CV’s generated by LLMs does not help. Currently I think you need to know somebody inside the company pretty well to get hired.
The fix would be pretty simple: > Grow some balls, do a couple interviews, and just pick the candidate you like the most.
2 months later recruiter from the same company hit me up. Told them I already passed the interview just give me the job already. Oops no roles, you just have to wait! So why are you reaching out? Couldn’t give me an answer.
Well, no. Because we abandoned the idea of fostering talent. We instead insist natural talent exists who will swoop in, be productive in our proprietary systems day one, and outdo all the pathetic engineers who spent years at the company. Almost like we're drafting for a sports team instead of training a workforce.
But at least sports teams spend time making teams feel like teams.
Last place I applied to, one screening and two interviews, took several months, and in the end came second even though I was ready to take 700€ paycut. The job was basic AV&network upkeep, felt like I was applying to become an astronaut.
But it still doesn't sound like a very effective process typed out like this.
What would you do to make it more effective?
Starvation's a very powerful motivator for most people.
But if you can’t talk about your personal experience without AI telling you what to say, then I don’t want to hire you.
I know hiring managers on HN love to wade in to these topics all haughty and boasting who they don't hire, acting the mr big shot etc. It's a shame that this is that yet again
At least you implicitly admit it's an arbitrary line and a power play of sorts.
Even within this HN post there are people claiming that almost 100% of the whoishiring jobs are fake which is demonstrably untrue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49823091
1. (Actual feedback I got in an interview two weeks ago, for a position no sane person would want to stay in for longer than two years.)
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What's the difference between those job types? It's that software development and IT have a multimodal salary with much greater discrepancy between the companies that fall into the distribution around the lowest mode and the highest mode.
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal
If you switch from working at a local area company to Big Tech, you significantly increase your salary. For other careers, going from the local job to the national big company will likely give a much smaller boost.
Here are the stats for tenure: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf
Table 6 (last page) shows the median tenure by job classification. Computer and mathematical occupations are the ones that were going down between 2014 and 2020. The others were holding fairly constant.
Table 2 shows 21% of people 35 and older have 10 years or more of tenure at their employer. At 45 years old, it's 45%.
I still hold that software development is the outlier for shorter tenure and the largest factor driving that is that you can quit your job and get a new one that pays twice as much.
Do you have an alternate explanation for this data or published data that contradicts this?
The US-style neoliberal attitude towards decimating the workforce at a drop of a hat for PR purposes does have a chilling effect on any employee's trust.
But don't fool yourself: one of the most important tools anyone has to improve their life and wellbeing is the ability to switch jobs. It can create career opportunities you would otherwise not have, and even unblock career progression by sidestepping your current job's corporate constraints.
no shit I work with multiple people that dipped out of their old gig, did 2 years somewhere else, and came back at a much more senior level to their old job because HR limits how often you can get promoted or increases inside a bracket.
jumping matters, as does the potential threat of jumping.
These lawsuits aren't a myth, if you hire a lot of people it'll eventually happen, even if you're not violating any laws. The lawsuits, even when you win, waste time and money. Giving reasons, especially customized "human" responses is absolutely going to increase your chances of being sued.
As you said, lawsuits take a lot of time and money. Individuals don't have that and would prefer to settle things privately. But if they don't trust institutions to do that, then the only thing to trust is the contract of a lawyer.
It did not take long for one of them to try to turn it against me with threats. We would have easily won the case, but having a lawsuit hanging over my head and a target on my back as a liability for the company was not a good feeling.
I no longer give specific feedback.
Minor nit, but it’s even worse than that: 300 minutes is five hours of someone’s day.
Regardless of whether it’s due to a low-trust society, a litigious society, or El Niño, I will refrain from giving specific feedback if that puts those groups at risk.
Out of those about half had no experience in backend or python, plus weren't senior enough for us to consider. Or forgot to include all that in their CV. They get filtered out in the first filter phase.
While I'm sure a portion of those could do the job, I can't realistically interview those 300 people when there are other 300 who happen to have at least written that in their CV.
Dear lord the job market is an absolute disaster right now.
People are clambering for the last helicopter out of Saigon.
Indeed it is, I don't know and would never like to know the levels of desperation one needs to reach to accept writing Python as a career. (I jest, I jest)
In all seriousness, Python (and the same goes for with Javascript/Typescript) is a popular language that is taught at many bootcamps. I'm sure that has lots to do with the number of applications for these kinds of roles.
Honestly the only language we do that gets a normal amount of candidates is C++, but the team that does it complains about quality too, a lot of CVs from people exaggerating their expertise.
I don't think you understand.
You have to prioritize. You can't interview everyone.
There may be someone in the rejection pool who might be able to pick up Python quickly and enjoy it. It does not matter if I have 10 people who can bring 5 years of Python experience to the first day on the job, and 1-2 more people who can bring 10+ years and probably teach us something about Python.
> the skills are very transferrable. (It's like trying to find a painter and filtering out people who have never painted a brown houses)
I've painted houses. I've done programming. This analogy is not good at all. Some people don't adapt well to new programming languages. Some people try, then decide they hate the new language and start looking for new jobs. You don't have to risk any of this when you already have more Python applicants than interview slots.
Like, it's obvious to me why a true Jack of all trades would use different resumes for applying to a plumber role vs a carpenter role, but less clear why a career plumber would tailor resumes for applying to two plumber roles at slightly different companies.
Go to the most popular LLM (ie Claude). Give it the job description. Give it your resume. Ask it for percentage match, it will give you a number. Then ask for advice on improving your resume, you can either ask to rework the resume by itself (if you're in a hurry) or you can work with the thing to modify the sections/entries yourself, one by one, if you have time. With each modification you will get better and better percentage match. Ideally you need to get to high 80% or maybe even 90%.
The idea is that automated ranking tools used by recruiters/HR are ultimately use the very same LLM, so you are improving your ranking assigned to your resume by those ranking systems.
I have to add that now this advice is mostly useless as everybody's using the same technique so you won't be standing up against others but merely be on the same level.
Add to it the fact that many job descriptions are inaccurate and sometimes downright misleading, and hiring managers use their own criteria, and you will understand why connections/referrals is probably the only way to get hired now.
Working in HR-tech, that is definitely happening, and "self-bias" is a thing with LLMs so if you can guess what the employer/screening-process is using then that's a bonus.
That said, we should distinguish between "Hey robot tell me if X matches Y" prompts, versus model-weights comparison. In the second case, the system feeds your resume into a model with no prompt, grabs all the magic math numbers, and statistically compares them to the magic-numbers if the model had been given some "ideal" resumes.
Languages: JavaScript, C#, Python, Java
Languages: Java, C#, JavaScript, Python
> but less clear why a career plumber would tailor resumes for applying to two plumber roles at slightly different companies.
If one company is looking for a plumber to do PEX and another is looking for someone who is experienced with natural gas and black pipe, you might want to make sure that your experience in those two different domains of plumbing are at the front of the experience. They're both plumbers, but the heating and air conditioning company hiring a plumber is looking for different things than the residential new construction plumber.
Do you really think the best candidates are ones who are bothering to cold apply through hiring portals to begin with? The best interviewers, sure.
For people who are actively searching, 10 minutes for 100 applications is 15 hours of work. Reply rates can be as bad as 1 in 500. In this kind of market you want to get that application rate down to 2-3 minutes. There's no time nor point to tailoring towards dream jobs; oods are you dreams were crushed 200 applications ago.
There's no particular reason your time is more valuable. We're all just trying to survive in these tumultuous times.
I've done volunteer resume review and interview coaching in the past.
The only people getting response rates that low either had the most awful resumes you've ever seen, or they were applying for jobs completely out of their league.
Like the 23 year old applying for Staff Software Engineer jobs as the next step up from his junior position (which he was laid off from) with 6 typos in his resume and an e-mail address of ninjadude69@hotmail.com at the top of his resume.
There's also a high correlation between matching the job description perfectly and the resume being AI generated and/or dishonest. Doubly so if the requirements are overly specific or contain pure nonsense as some do (saw "Must have 5 years experience with Claude Code" recently). You can filter out people who blatantly don't match the job and those who obviously just copied the job description. Never seen much correlation between the quality of resumes in the middle (ok to great) and how well they do in interviews.
Not to mention at many places "requirements" are mere suggestions or a low-effort list of technologies taken from the resume of the person who quit. Everybody has their own filtering rules and hiring managers rarely agree with each other much less the HR people usually doing the first round of filtering. The true requirements come out only at the resume filtering or interview stage.
>I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
The "best candidate" a lot of times doesn't mean the best able to do the job. It often means the ones who 1. makes the hiring manager feel good by being enthusiastic about their (statistically) average job for average pay and 2. minimizes their perceived risk of looking bad for their hiring choice.
>If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.
If you're not a FAANGMULA type place then sure. But also if your job posting lists something like "Python 3.14" or "7+ years Python" I know the hiring manager probably doesn't know the first thing about python. In that case I think it's fair for any decent programmer to lie because they will likely surpass the hiring managers knowledge by studying python a bit before the interview.
If the resume is dishonest we find out in the phone screens or first interview rounds, and the candidate is tossed.
>What would you do to make it more effective?
I'd ask companies who have managed to get the process down to 2-3 weeks what they're doing, and then do that. It sounds like you're saying they don't actually care to, though.
Well there it is. Suggestions don't matter if there's no one in power who cares. Have them care and suddenly we'd be able to get people hired in 2-4 weeks.
Otherwise it's not rocket science. And you're not hiring rocket scientists. It shouldn't take more than 3 stages to know if a candidate can do the job:recruiter screen, main interview, negotiation meeting. If you need more people in the know, they join on the main day. If they can't, it clearly isn't important enough for their scope of responsibilities (does a skip manager 3 levels up really need to personally meet a candidate?)
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For developers, if the resumes are largely the same, then you're selecting for the ones that show evidence that they read the job posting and want to work there.
This isn't about hiring the best candidate - it's the least risky candidate that is hired. If you're listing the preferred language of the job and the language that is mentioned in the job posting last, you're more likely to be a risky candidate than one who lists it first. You may not know the language as well. You may not enjoy working on it (there's a reason I don't list php in the languages on my resume).
In a stack with less risky candidates, the one that has the preferred language last won't be at the top of the list for callbacks.
HR people and AIs, as much as I criticise them: would not reject that.
HR is a mixed bag, usually without technical context. I'm sure most engineers in the 00's and 10's have some experience of "Java and JavaScript are similar, right?" In a recruiter call.
You're going to select 10 people out of that list of 100 because you don't have time to call everyone for three weeks to evaluate their skill.
You've also got only two hours to look through all 100 of those resumes today. You're spending about a minute and a half looking at each resume. How are you going to evaluate someone for a Java backend position who's last job was in C# and they list Java last in the list of languages they know?
The one who has actual projects or professional experience in Java? I'm surprised this is such a sticking point. I list my skills last on the resume because it's the least relevant and it was mostly to try and satisfy ATS. But reality is stranger than theory, I suppose.
At least, that was my old approach. I found some advice I really liked and ultimately integrate a tech stack sub-bullet in every experience now. Seems to be a good balance of ATS and human(-skimming) readability.
But more than that, why do you think someone who is terrible at java wouldn't put it first in the list when applying for a java oriented job? Assuming they were aware of this unwritten rule.
The last paragraph makes a great point: if the person has been out of Java the game for long, they will definitely be second to someone who's fresh out of a Java job.
And the reason is exactly as you say: limited time, excessive number of CVs. This completely changes the game.