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.
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.
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.
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!
Companies didnt pay to put the ad in the paper every day once the vacancy was filled.
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.
I agree, I should have written a bit more, apologies.
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).
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)
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.
Has anyone else heard of/seen this, or can explain where it's coming from or if it means anything?
Probably I also forgot some more categories of crazy hiring processes in my enumeration.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
In the age of LLMs every one is "tailoring" their resume to every posting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The main reason the jobs are reposted are to get them to the top of the feed
toomuchtodo•1h ago
> 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)
dofm•39m ago
toomuchtodo•38m ago
mixdup•31m ago
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
renjimen•28m ago