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Ghost jobs are wreaking havoc on tech workers

• harryjadon 2y ago
  [dead]
• zero-sharp 2y ago
  Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41714672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41714672
• lupire 2y ago
  Employees look for new jobs they aren't seriously interested in. Why shouldn't employers do the same? Filtering through a 1000 unemployed people spamming every job listing isn't going to give them useful intel.
  • ryanmcbride 2y ago
    I mean the reason I can think of off the top of my head is that one is wasting the time of people who are looking for a job so they can continue to live, and the other is wasting the time of a person who's job is reviewing resumes?
    • nickff 2y ago
      I don't agree with the attitude of the grandparent poster either, but work at a small company where I've been on the receiving end of many extremely low-effort applications from ineligible individuals, so it definitely goes both ways. Companies are also bombarded with spam from recruiters, just as candidates are.
      • evoke4908 2y ago
        There would be less application spam if there were fewer spam job postings. Because only one in a hundred postings is real, we have to send out hundreds of applications before even getting a rejection. There's no way to tell if a posting is real or if anyone will ever read your application, so the only option available is to apply to everything. A lot of people pose this as a prisoner's dilemma, but it really is not. This problem is not mutual, it's entirely one sided. If companies would only post jobs they intended to hire for, there would be exponentially fewer spam applications. They've fucked around by posting spam and now they're finding out by receiving even more spam. When the average applicant has to send literally hundreds of applications to get any response at all, absolutely nobody is going to handcraft a thought out application to any one posting. There's literally not enough hours in the day. Because we don't even get rejection letters back, the only way forward is to firehose as many applications as possible and just hope you win the lottery by getting your resume in front of a human. It's absolutely terrible for everyone involved and the only ones who can stop it want to act victimized by the problem they created
        • nickff 2y ago
          > "There would be less application spam if there were fewer spam job postings." I disagree with this; in fact, I think there would be more application spam with fewer postings. Most of the application spam is from people who are either completely unqualified and just pressing the 'apply' button (which is made easy by websites which get paid per application), or people looking to move to a wealthier country (without any pre-qualification). I think both of these groups would actually be more aggressive about applying if they were more likely to be reviewed by a hiring manager.
          • johnnyanmac 2y ago
            I think it would bifrucate the obvious spam from the obvious real posters and make your job easier, even if there's more apps to go through. Lot of the worst is that vague middle land of "is this qualified? but it also kind of looks like AI because job applications expect a very specific format of resume". So you'd win out that way. But I also don't sympathize too much as the "unqualifies just pressing apply" was a natural endstate of years of bad job requirement postings.
      • volkk 2y ago
        yeah, but at worst, you waste time on the dime of a company from the recruiter's/hiring manager's POV. on the other side, you're wasting precious capital (time & money) from someone who may instead be hanging out with their kids, or taking care of their sick mother--i understand these are contrived examples. from a pure utalitarian perspective, both are a complete waste of time. but from a moral/ethical perspective, i think there's a clear loser in terms of precious time wasted.
        • nickff 2y ago
          I am an individual who works at a small company, and going through ineligible applications takes away from time I could spend with children or family. I am not an HR professional, but we don't have a massive staff to delegate these matters to. The situations are morally equivalent.
          • volkk 2y ago
            do you do this outside of work hours? sounds more like a failure on how the company operates than the nature of the problem. taking a wild guess that if it weren't for combing through through applications, then those extra hours spent on mindless HR stuff would simply be filled with other work.
            • nickff 2y ago
              It doesn’t matter when you waste someone’s time; work hours are fungible for most professionals. Your ‘wild guess’ seems very convenient with respect to your previous comment, and happens to be incorrect.
      • ryanmcbride 2y ago
        Sure but what I'm saying is that the stakes for a company having to go through spam applications are significantly lower than the people trying to find a job who are getting spammed with dead ends while their savings drain lower and lower.
        • nickff 2y ago
          Maybe for a big company, with an HR department and lots of resources, but not for a small company when >>90% of applications are from ineligible individuals.
  • hinkley 2y ago
    I haven’t had to resort to applying to jobs I couldn’t or wouldn’t do to fulfill unemployment insurance requirements, but who knows what will happen in December if this goes on.
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    >Why shouldn't employers do the same? proportions. 1 uninterested candidate wastes maybe 5 hours at best of a million dollar company's time. All the while those doing the interviewing were paid anyway. 1 bad post wastes dozens, hundreds of applicant's time. Especially the damn Workday apps. That time is not compensated and only gets worse the farter in you go.
• matt3210 2y ago
  I’m not shocked at all. Another issue is recruiters posting fake jobs and asking for references as step one. Soon as I say “I don’t provide references until the last step, and only to the company hiring” they hang up on me
  • NickC25 2y ago
    Not only fake job postings, it's also companies posting fake jobs when they already have an internal or external candidate all but signed. The amount of spam and fake jobs on LI + other major sites is just disgusting and is ripe for government to come in and crack some heads.
    • nickff 2y ago
      Governments are one of the worst offenders when it comes to posting jobs which have already been basically handed to internal candidates. They do it for the same reason as everyone else: compliance with external regulations or internal rules.
  • zero-sharp 2y ago
    Yea this is a weird one. Some job applications actually require me to fill in reference contact information. I can't submit the application without that detail. Of course, I try to skirt it. Is this normal?
    • CoastalCoder 2y ago
      I don't think I've ever encountered that in the U.S.
      • arp242 2y ago
        By chance I saw it recently; I remember because it stood out. And the job application seemed genuine as the poster was engaging on the "who's hiring" thread here. I would never fill that in, because I wouldn't want to bother my references. I know some of them don't really like doing it, but do it as a favour because we're on good terms. Probably not a rare scenario. I'm okay asking in a "if you provide me a reference, I will get a new job" as the final stage, but not as a "just checking in case I might land a job".
• SoftTalker 2y ago
  Just my own experience but I have never gotten a job with a cold application on a job board. Always been via a recruiter or even better an inside contact.
  • VyseofArcadia 2y ago
    In contrast, I have only once in my career gotten a job via an inside contact. Of the four jobs I've had since school, three of them were with a cold application. I think my secret is working in a specific niche, but I could be wrong.
    • ghaff 2y ago
      Your mileage may vary of course. The jobs I’ve had since an on-campus interview in grad school were all people I had worked with in some capacity. Basically never sent a resume except pro-forma. I became curious long after the fact if a job description for my last job that was written for me was ever posted.
  • shiroiushi 2y ago
    My experience is completely the opposite: I've always gotten jobs from job boards. In one case, my resume was posted somewhere (monster.com I think, many years ago) and the hiring manager saw it and liked it and called me. In all other cases, I applied myself. I've tried working with 3rd-party recruiters, and always found them to be a waste of time, because the companies they worked with weren't good and didn't pay very well.
• b3ing 2y ago
  If it’s a publically traded, report them to the SEC for trying to manipulate the market with the illusion of them hiring a lot as in growing
• itqwertz 2y ago
  Don’t use LinkedIn or Monster or Indeed. You’re better off searching on Google with “ inurl:careers” and finding positions these companies are directly hiring for.
  • stewx 2y ago
    I've gotten 2 good jobs directly or indirectly from LinkedIn. I would argue LinkedIn is probably the one site that you absolutely need to be on.
    • ethbr1 2y ago
      The difference between LinkedIn and other options is that LinkedIn is also a social platform (in a weird, non-interactive way). So LinkedIn approximates (lots of people), not just (people hoping to get hired). If you're hiring, the former is a more talented pool to hire from.
    • zahllos 2y ago
      Agree. Plus recruiters also sometimes reach out. There is quite a high signal to noise as always, but, it can be worth it. You don't need to engage in all the influencer crap at all, just ignore that and use it to be found by recruiters and to see some open positions.
      • oh_fiddlesticks 2y ago
        I've gotten 3 separate jobs from linkedin recruiters approaching me cold. I dont engage with the platform, I don't post, I won't connect with recruiters, and yet still... they find you, and inmail you. It's usually local jobs with humane commutes and decent pay. By contrast, I've never gotten a single interview for an application submitted via linkedin, and I've put out hundreds.
  • FireBeyond 2y ago
    Or Dice. Dice is just a spam magnet for "I know you're a PM in Washington looking for remote roles, but we have this two month onsite Kubernetes contract in Indiana, can we talk?"
• Buttons840 2y ago
  On this topic, do y'all think the HN Who's Hiring thread has ghost jobs? I know I've applied to one and never had back (a few years ago).
  • FireBeyond 2y ago
    Absolutely. And a lot of spam. A few months ago there was a little flame war between a few people. Company posted an ad and someone replied "this is spam, and you don't respond, just keep posting the same ad", and the company replied "no, I own the company and hand write this job ad every month to fit our future needs" which was patently a lie (exact same headcount, exact same three positions, every month for the last eight months, and usually a byte-accurate copy of each posting), and several similar. Not to mention it's "discouraged" to call employers out on poor behavior. I know of at least three companies who post pretty steadily who ghosted at final rounds or in one case, "We intend to present a written offer" (though in "fairness", they did eventually inform me that they'd decided to freeze hiring, well, nearly three months later).
    • dang 2y ago
      It's against the rules to call out hiring companies in the thread, primarily because we don't want off-topic arguments and because it would be too easy to exploit it for shenanigans. But since people have been increasingly saying that this is a problem, let's do something about it. My current thought is to add a new instruction at the top asking companies to please only post in the thread if they're committed to responding to every applicant. Other suggestions for addressing this issue are welcome! Edit: since the next Who Is Hiring day is tomorrow, let's get precise. I'm including this text at the top of the thread: NEW RULE: Please only post a job in this thread if you are committed to responding to everyone who applies. Thoughts? Edit per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42011360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42011360: "Please only post a job if you intend to fill a position and are committed to responding to everyone who applies."
      • buffet_overflow 2y ago
        I like this idea. Perhaps let them self select if they will respond or not, but they have to advertise in the posting which path they chose?
• doctor_radium 2y ago
  Of the obvious fake job postings I've seen, I always assumed they were attempts at Russian or Chinese espionage. Example: for a very brief time I was a US DoD contractor.
  • SN76477 2y ago
    Why do they need my home address for an application? I never understand that. Several have asked me for my DL number
    • xboxnolifes 2y ago
      Probably background checks.
• briandear 2y ago
  This should be prosecuted. Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” Posting ghost jobs is a deceptive act.
  • SN76477 2y ago
    I was told earlier this week by an organization > We leave this role posted because it's so critical to our operation and onboard as demand requires, however at this time we don't have enough demand to justify another full time hire.
    • switch007 2y ago
      99% of HR staff will swear till they're blue in the face that's there's nothing wrong with that lol HR is just PR with a different audience.
      • shiroiushi 2y ago
        People who work in HR seem to generally lack ethical principles, from what I've seen.
• neilv 2y ago
  > [...] the majority of them appeared on LinkedIn and the companies’ websites. [...] > While some respondents said employers did it to maintain a presence on job boards and build a talent pool, it’s also used [...] For securities fraud?
  • toomuchtodo 2y ago
    https://www.sec.gov/submit-tip-or-complaint/tips-complaints-resources/report-suspected-securities-fraud-or-wrongdoing https://www.sec.gov/submit-tip-or-complaint/tips-complaints-...
• rightbyte 2y ago
  Hireing and being hired seem to have devolved into a bilateral spamfest. The more applicants per position, the more applications you need to fill. “Always, always, always put networking as one of the top components of your job search strategy,” This is such a strange advice. It is too late when searching for a job. A 'network' takes year to build.
  • toomuchtodo 2y ago
    So, this is the problem. We are doing a Kabuki dance where there is an illusion of good faith and meritocracy, when really, it's just a brutalist labor order book between employers and employees, unless you have a network (which takes years to build and might still prove useless if you can't refer someone into your org because blah blah hiring pipeline that is really just garbage anyway). For example, someone at the VP level at Slack recently posted on LinkedIn for a job req that all candidates have to go through the formal process to avoid unfairness (no informal resume reviews or interviews would be had). If you offer up a job req, there should be punitive consequences if it is not legitimate. You are incurring cost and harm on job seekers spending time engaging with said post, at no cost to the employer. This is to be solved for, just as pay transparency is slowly being solved for with regulation and statute. If you have policy suggestions, I'm interested, as someone who engages with policymakers.
    • FredPret 2y ago
      There is a cost to the employer. Any smallish 1-2 hour meeting with a couple of people on it can easily cost thousands if you work out people’s hourly wage. Add on the context-switching costs impacting the rest of their workdays. Then add the reputational damage among jobseekers - when word gets out that a company is a timewaster, qualified people will be less likely to apply.
      • toomuchtodo 2y ago
        Talent acquisition is the cost of being in business. Hiring is hard, I admit. Being efficient while remaining within legal and regulatory frameworks is fine and expected, fraud and misrepresentation through job postings with no intent to hire is not.
• 5350-uiop-1130 2y ago
  > 62% companies posted them specifically to make their employees feel replaceable wow, HR and management really have a lot of contempt for their staff. i deleted my ln in 2022. i have a deep mistrust of all web platforms. i know what i do on the UI and what happens in the code are not the same.
• fluorinerocket 2y ago
  What kind of political action can we take to stop this infuriating practice?
  • Uncouple4063 2y ago
    One approach: https://code-cwa.org/ https://code-cwa.org/
  • evilfred 2y ago
    union
    • Uncouple4063 2y ago
      Or this
    • johnnyanmac 2y ago
      All for unions. But how does a union stop this?
• iamsanteri 2y ago
  I agree with others that this can be seen as market abuse since it disrupts the essential functioning of our labor markets. After completing my Master's, I've since struggled to find a job, only signing a contract yesterday thanks to my past connections and proven work from before I returned to academia. The current job market in my country has been absolutely brutal. I've applied to hundreds of roles. For many interviews, I traveled to other cities only to learn later that the positions I was being interviewed for were canceled entirely, with no one hired. But the real issue are these "ghost" job postings where there's no intention to hire anyone at all in the first place. Some companies use them to, I guess, just gather some data and CVs + salary expectations, while others want to appear active and growing to investors, but don’t engage whatsoever when people spend time and apply. This distorts the job market and creates a lot of frustration in applicants. 90% of people I know here and more broadly in Europe have gotten their jobs via connections and people they know. I wouldn’t be surprised if some regulation comes soon, as I doubt I'm the only one impacted by this situation.
• DebtDeflation 2y ago
  Many companies have policies requiring that all jobs have to be posted both internally and externally before being filled. The intent is to prevent Sam the VP from just slotting his buddy into the job. At the end of the day, Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them. Same thing happens with H1B/PERM, except now it's the law requiring it rather than company policy. The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it. Terrible situation for all involved.
  • iancmceachern 2y ago
    Not only posted, but often they require that several folks are actually interviewed.
  • thrw42A8N 2y ago
    In Europe jobs have to be published. Even if there is no intention of filling it from the public. And companies also publish bullshit jobs which are used to manipulate regulatory requirements if needed (eg. if you want to hire a foreigner, you must prove you couldn't fill the position locally - by publishing it for 3 months).
    • orwin 2y ago
      > In Europe jobs have to be published No. If you publish it, you have to give an estimation of the salary, but that's the only limitation, at least in my country. Companies have internal guidelines, like in mine, you can't hire a relative to your own department, but the job i got wasn't on a public listing, it's my agent who gave my CV to my current team leader, he was interested, organized an itw, then 3 month later i hoped to my current job (and i am way better for it).
      • thrw42A8N 2y ago
        Yes, just not everywhere.
• erulabs 2y ago
  What we need is, is Job-postings-as-code so that we can automate the deployment of Linkedin postings such that when a recruiter is let go, we can automatically identify their postings and clean them up. We'll call it DevHiringOps Seriously tho, always use the companies website instead of believing whatever is on some job posting website.
• makeitdouble 2y ago
  > They also made ads to “trick overworked employees” into believing that more people would be brought on to alleviate their overwhelming workload. The part of the picture I'm more interested about is how the managers see it. There must be a lowly manager actually trying to do something about their overworked team, and I assume they have access to HR and know which positions are real which aren't. And they know the company not only doesn't intend to hire, but is also gaslighting them, and they're made part of it. It feels so gloom and just depressing beyond words.
• VyseofArcadia 2y ago
  I wish we could do more to disincentivize this kind of blatantly unethical behavior from companies.
• Animats 2y ago
  This wasn't thought of when false advertising laws were drafted. California: 17500. It is unlawful for any person, firm, corporation or association, or any employee thereof with intent directly or indirectly to dispose of real or personal property or to perform services, professional or otherwise, or anything of any nature whatsoever or to induce the public to enter into any obligation relating thereto, to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated before the public in this state, or to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated from this state before the public in any state, in any newspaper or other publication, or any advertising device, or by public outcry or proclamation, or in any other manner or means whatever, including over the Internet, any statement, concerning that real or personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, or concerning any circumstance or matter of fact connected with the proposed performance or disposition thereof, which is untrue or misleading, and which is known, or which by the exercise of reasonable care should be known, to be untrue or misleading, or for any person, firm, or corporation to so make or disseminate or cause to be so made or disseminated any such statement as part of a plan or scheme with the intent not to sell that personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, so advertised at the price stated therein, or as so advertised. Any violation of the provisions of this section is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or by both that imprisonment and fine. The language is broad, but they didn't cover the case of ads where no transaction was even contemplated. This is a bug.
• nickdothutton 2y ago
  Noticed this trend a few years ago from startups keen to look like they were growing much faster than they really were. Personally I wouldn’t begin the process unless an insider had confirmed that a position was a) Real, and b) I would not be disfavoured somehow, meaning that I would be applying on a level playing field.
• hannob 2y ago
  The article doesn't really discuss the legality of this, which I'd be curious to hear the opinion of a lawyer. In other cases, it's considered criminal if a company deliberately puts out false information about itself. E.g., if you lie about your companies products (like Theranos), it's pretty clear that this is not legal. I don't see why it should be legal to lie about your job opportunities.
  • kaibee 2y ago
    ah the ol “Everything is securities fraud”. I could see it. Company posts jobs for department that is being divested/going out of business/etc, this misleads investors, ergo: securities fraud.
• de6u99er 2y ago
  What a colossal waste of everybody's time. I wonder how demoralizing this must be on HR workers, having to post a job, screen CV's, trying to stay professional while knowing that the hiring manager actually doesn't care, having to constantly put people with hopes off, and ultimately let people feel they are not good enough just because some C-hole wants to bring in his buddy who's most likely not half as competent as the people who were rejected.
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    I'll bite my tongue on my HR thoughts, but AFAIK HR incentives are saving a company money, or making the company a lot of money. You don't necessarily need to hire people if you're focused on cost saving measures.
  • drillsteps5 2y ago
    Recruiting (which is typically part of HR) lives and dies by the need to search for candidates for open positions. No open positions - they're out of a job. So I very much doubt they feel bad doing the job they were hired to do.
• thegrim33 2y ago
  Well I opened the article, near the beginning I saw the text: "81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled." Instantly that felt completely insane to me, my bullshit detector went off the chart, so since they provided a source, I followed up on the source to see the evidence for myself. What do you know, the source is from a "my perfect resume" website that apparently conducted a study on the issue, but they aren't providing the details of the study, aren't providing a paper , aren't providing the methodology or questions asked, aren't providing any details whatsoever, the only thing they provide is the "conclusions" of their study. So, apparently because this random website supposedly conducted a study, and they say the result was "81% posted fake jobs", that makes it true. Hey, I also conducted a study, and 14% posted fake jobs. There, my claim has just as much backing as theirs does. Instantly lost interest in the "study" and the article based on it.
  • PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    > Well I opened the article, near the beginning I saw the text: "81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled." I love San Francisco to death, but there's no reliable local newspaper. It drives me nuts.
  • joe_the_user 2y ago
    I've done tech interviewing for years. Job listing that are to various degree fake are quite common. Of course, fakeness comes in many flavor, from listings posted just to "see if there's anyone out there" (I had a boss who did this regularly) to jobs a supervisor really does want to fill but which they know they won't because the bureaucracy has forced impossible requirements on them. An example: "Junior programmer, 10 years experience in language X" (that's existed for five years).
    • zero-sharp 2y ago
      This is another personal anecdote, but I had an interview earlier this year for a database related role. The job ad had a huge salary range and the interview had nothing to do with the role. I wasn't asked any behavioral or technical questions. The two people on the call just wanted to get to know me. We probably spent several minutes talking about sports. A few days later I got rejected. What the hell?
• benreesman 2y ago
  This is just one example. While tech jobs are diverse, the well-heeled players substantially set the tone and they have gone berserk: over the last few years they have neutron bombed entire zip codes claiming hard times, then posted record-shattering EPS beats, then hired back a bunch of people at substantially lower compensation in a phenomenon so pervasive to have a catchy name: “boomerang”. It’s not even the first time recently got popped for wage fixing, Don’t Poach Gate was like 15 years ago. They’re giving us all the finger in the Crimson, and we will do nothing because we can do nothing. It’s a trivial abuse of monopsony pricing power, it’s illegal in the sense that the laws as written prohibit it on a common-sense, “intended by the legislature” sense, a lawyer can tell you if it’s maybe legal via stare decis via activist judges bench legislating. But more importantly it has destroyed what loose social contract there was: they cannot in fact run these businesses at 60-70% of peak headcount sustainably: they can merely coast on previous investments long enough to crush salaries and then clean up the mess because there isn’t any real competition. They can distort hiring to where McCarthyist vibe checks and loyalty tests hit a precision/recall that is Pareto optimized for the minimum amount of competence that admits an endorsement of their nepo baby “nice trumps kind” mythology. And they’re going to get away with it at the level that matters: the individual incentives of executives are nothing to do with the long term interests of shareholders or the commons on this: progress is stalling out in a way that will never show up on a quarterly report in time to matter to the executives. And you can see it in real time: we haven’t had such an embarrassing crop of people who were someone’s roommate at Harvard running the show in at least 30 years, the outcomes are awful, the software sucks, the products suck, and the game is soft communist friction around leaving the platform.
  • hinkley 2y ago
    Unions
• sdenton4 2y ago
  burn it all down, start worker coops.
• SeattleAltruist 2y ago
  Post makes errors around what nonprofits are and can do. (IANAL, but I do set up and run nonprofits for a living.) Error 1: "In the US, non-profits are heavily regulated in their operations..." Correction: There are no more or less regulations than other sectors, but there is almost ZERO enforcement, so if anything, the nonprofit sector is more accurately described as very lightly regulated. Error 2: ", and exempt from income tax." Correction: Nonprofits are NOT exempt from income tax on revenue from earned activity that is not mission related, known as Unrelated Business Income. Error 3: "Across the many different structures, though, non-profits have one thing in common: They don't have owners." Correction: Oversimplification - nonprofits are run and functionally owned by a board of directors, people who hire and fire the CEO, decide how revenue is allocated, and approve any merger or dissolution. Nonprofits can also own for-profit subsidiaries (see OpenAI) so there are a lot of gray areas here. In sum, nonprofit status is far more complex that OP thinks and there are a ton of opportunities for skulduggery - just because Ghost is a nonprofit does NOT mean it is free of conflicts or other bad things than companies do. If Ghost really wants to demonstrate its transparency, it should publish its tax returns (IRS form 990) and also an itemized P&L -- then they can stake a claim to being holier than the typical business. People often think that "non-profit" means that the company can't make a profit. It actually means that the company doesn't have any owners who can personally take the profits. Any revenue earned can only be reinvested.
• rqtwteye 2y ago
  This is not only a problem for tech workers, but for all industries. The stories I hear from non-tech friends are pretty crazy.
• ugh123 2y ago
  >81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled Ah... recruiters at it again.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• singlepaynews 2y ago
  I think there’s a legitimate market opportunity here. I am seeking a cofounder to build the job board that vets employers, and makes money by charging candidates to access it. The problem to be solved, imo, is ghost listings. - I don’t care if a company ghosts me because they hired someone else - I care if I spend time filling out applications for jobs that don’t exist I’m not sure how to make participation by the employer tractable. They can’t exactly be mandated to hire, can they? Unless I’m trapped in a prison of the mind that seems like too risky of a proposition for them. That said, as a candidate I would happily pay $USD/month for access to a job board where I know that the job as posted is definitely for real and definitely getting filled in a certain timeframe. I don’t care if my particular resume gets read, or replied to. I only care that the phenomena of “ghost job” is nonexistent in the walled-garden that I’m paying for access to.
  • hiatus 2y ago
    This sounds similar to a problem dating sites face—solving the user's problem leads them away from the service. But you have the added difficulty that people looking for employment may not have the resources to spend on another monthly subscription. It sounds interesting though, good luck!
  • tmn 2y ago
    Incentivize the employer to only provide real listings by having them pay to advertise a listing. Let them be reimbursed if it's filled via the platform. You don't need to solve the problem 100%. An employer can still drag their feet and not fill a listing. But by aligning all incentives you can drastically reduce the problem.
    • singlepaynews 2y ago
      My understanding is that employers already do pay to post on LI, indeed, etc. It simply works out that paying for ghost jobs is worth it, so the enforcement mechanism needs to be a ban/other thing that doesn't rely on pricing
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
• neonrider 2y ago
  I'd love to go back to times where it was fine for a candidate not to have a LinkedIn. Currently, regardless of your blog, or your multiple StackOverflow answers, or your GitHub, or your posts on any of the other tech-focused communities, if HR doesn't see your LinkedIn, it's as if you're off-planet. The tech field is centered around skills. You're under pressures to keep them sharp and up to date. When you're looking for work and you're done polishing the resume, updating the blog posts, doing your leetcode drills, do you really want to add playing LinkedIn games to the mix? It seems to me that tech workers would benefit from having really tech-focused job networks. Not these hybrid platforms. LinkedIn, Indeed, and friends. They don't particularly care about you as a tech worker. They don't even understand you or your skillset. You're a backend dev with many years of OOP, FP, Agile, Kanban, Python, Go, SQL, JavaScript, and a slew of other relevant skills for the job, but they'll gladly inform you that you're missing a few skills to better match the list in the ad: go-getter, team-player, positive-attitude. Ok, sure, whatever... Another thing, seeing an ad that asks for Python, Go, Node.js, SQL, React, Terraform, Kubernetes as an "Intermediate position" just tells me that no one in charge cares.
  • whamlastxmas 2y ago
    A tech focused network who have zero HR people so it wouldn’t help
  • punkbit 2y ago
    Hi, I never had a LinkedIn account or profile. Been working professionally for more than 15 years. It’s a good way to avoid distractions. You might miss on being told about opportunities, but other than that, are you sure you’re being cancelled for not having one? When I interview, I often ask the recruiter to share the cv, portfolio, and GitHub/other. As they often just share a LinkedIn URL but that’s up to the interviewer and team to decide if enough to compromise theirs and the candidates time.
• tennisflyi 2y ago
  Par for the course for non-tech years for years...
• josephd79 2y ago
  Posting fake jobs should be illegal.
  • red-iron-pine 2y ago
    arguably, since its often used to signal financial health for startups and publicly traded companies, it would be considered fraud by the FTC