how does that work as a growth indicator, are there any known organizations that track your growth based on how many job postings you do, and then use that data to indicate your growth?
I don't doubt that it could happen, but if it did we would have to know about it, I also don't doubt that I don't know about it, but I would like to know.
IMHO, these aren't smart investors.. because this should be something that comes up in due diligence, the amount of money left, the current burn rate, and what the company is doing about the latter. If the company was on paper fully staffed, but also actively hiring. That would be for me an indicator that either the hiring is fake, so what else are they faking. Or that the hiring is real, and they are fiscally irresponsible.
There's another angle to all of this, and that's obviously the company isn't fully staffed, there's still some space in the runway for another hire. It's just that right now its a buyers market from the perspective of the company.. So, well, beggars can be choosers.. They're just holding out until that golden candidate comes along. This obviously sucks, and there SHOULD be a maximum length a company can have a job ad out before they have to explain why it's taking so long.
It's not uncommon for countries to require citizens to disclose Who and How many jobs they applied for this week to collect social security.. There should be something similar for companies who have job ads out.
As a wild guess this may be part of the story a company tells itself. Every individual and company needs to tell themselves a nice "story" to feel good about themselves. In case of a company "damn, look how many jobs we're posting, we're growing and doing great" is a nice story to tell. Yeah the owners/manager know it's fake, the people writing the post know it's fake, people receiving applications also know it's fake, yet it still works. On paper officially they can tell each other how great they are doing. This is more likely how a large company would operate.
Another, more positive perspective from a small company I worked for is "ABH" (Always be hiring). That means always post jobs, and continue interviewing, because you might find an exceptional engineer for whom you'd make an exception and hire them. But at least in our case it was always an honest effort every time to sit down and evaluate the candidates, pay them to visit and interview face to face and such. It wasn't a game it indeed took quite a bit of effort on our side.
Effectively a/b testing job adds?
Or trying to get a range of candidates so they can find a good fit?
Let's say you have, like, 10 jobs to do but you're only going to hire two people (either loading them up with more work, or internally reshuffling responsibilities, probably a bit of both).
So you advertise for every role in your ideal team, then get the two candidates who plug the most holes, or look like the best fit.
I feel dirty suggesting it, but it probably happens.
It was always a delicate balance between on the one hand projecting success, and on the other not scaring clients you couldn't meet demand.
How is that not illegal? Pretending to offer jobs just to suck in resumes to some database just seems like it should be illegal. Or just like running scams is illegal but they are in another country "so tough luck, you'll never get us"?
Half the shit companies do that gets them a fine would land any individual in jail for committing the same action, but we let them get away with just paying it off. Simultaneously we give those organizations the same rights.
It’s a system with three classes of citizen where the rich and corporations have a better right to responsibility ratio and the average human has a much worse ratio
In that case the company in charge, Columbia Gas, "exited" the market but all the scuttlebutt I heard in the area was that the Mass government was threatening the corporate execution of revoking their charter, which lead to Columbia gas selling their business off at a loss to Eversource
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NiSource#Massachusetts_gas_lin...
https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1pp0iej/thi...
FF to now and hiring portals silently drop viable applicants for a long list of never disclosed reasons. I know temp agencies that hire, send the employee out on 1 job then never again.
I've never know a time when hiring wasn't crap for entire classes of viable applicants.
The thing is that whether or not a job exists at a point in time is far less black and white than you might naively think.
There are many reasons for it to be somewhat grey and banning the practice doesn’t really mean anything because you would have to quantify precisely under what circumstances a job is allowed to be advertised and as I say, it’s not as clear as you might imagine.
There is absolutely not a one to one relationship between a job and a job ad.
Sounds like you've figured out exactly the problem then. If you're advertising for a job and there isn't a job then you've got a problem.
I applied for some jobs, two of them liked me and I reached the point where they were competing with each other for me, and I was in salary negotiations. One of them, suddenly, decided to stop trading. I still don't know why.
Another time, I started working(!) and getting paid, but after 6 months the person who everyone (including themselves) was expecting to leave and for me to replace had still not found a new job (presumably due to all the ghost jobs), and there wasn't enough money for both me and them. Last in, first out, bye to me.
One place hired an PM about two weeks before the investors decided to shutter the entire company. (For actual ghost jobs: in my own job hunt after that, I found listings on job boards for that company, that were clearly from several years before I'd joined given the advertised wage range; as the company had told everyone to stop coming in for their notice period, there wasn't even anyone left to ask for those to be deleted).
Back when my dad was around, one of his anecdotes about interviewing candidates was asking the candidate "Why did you leave your last job?" and getting a reply along the lines of "After 6 months, management found out that our entire floor had been hired to do the same thing as the floor next to us. One of the floors had to go."
Isn't this a problem? It means companies are wasting individuals' time (hence money), whereas companies are in a better position to hedge the risk. Would it be legal if I started, for example, posting fake apartment ads and not show up (because the apartment doesn't even exist)? Would it be ethical?
Put a tax of 10% one year's salary on any employee hired without a registry posting. (employers to put the job posting number on the I-9 form)
Put a $1000 tax on any job posting not filled or cancelled within six months. Make that information public.
- the boss has agreed to the role but has reservations, seeing a few candidates solidifies them and permission to hire us withdrawn
- the team is inexperienced at hiring and don't know what they want until they've seen a few candidates
- the company is hiring a new whole team. To make hiring easier, roles that are listed are "representative roles" - the total desired skill set across all roles is accurate but the company doesn't care what the split is, they just want a team that covers it. So a candidate who is a better fit for a listed role can be passed over in favour of one that happens to be the right jigsaw piece.
- circumstances changed since permission to hire was given, and no-one remembered to update the hiring portal; because unless you're actively hiring no-one looks at it.
This last one is quite common, because there are so many applications usually that no-one wants them in their email.
External recruiters might then re-advertise the job with the company name removed, planning to funnel people to the company and collect their 20% commission.
External recruiters with several jobs might merge them into one. $250k job for a senior java developer with 5 years finance experience + $75k job for a junior java developer = advertise $250k job for a java developer.
A company might have a slow, centralised hiring pipeline for some roles. Google has a recruiter check the candidate's resume before putting you into a lengthy 6+ interview gauntlet, but only at the end of it do hiring managers actually check if the resume matches an open job. And if course if it takes 2 months to get through the full pipeline, the jobs open at the end aren't the same as the jobs open at the start.
I am not sure if it's bad or not. It's true that it kinda wastes the candidate's time. In some cases though, the candidate is so good that the company will create a position just for them.
No... it's worse than that; it's THEFT, and monumentally offensive. It's time that everyone, EVERYONE stop giving entities a free pass on stealing from us by deliberately wasting our time.
In every aspect of life, every hour of our day, we're being ripped off. From the assholes blocking the passing lane, to "ghost jobs," to non-functioning subscription-cancellation phone numbers and Web forms... people should be going apeshit about the despicable and unpunished theft of our time.
RTO for the recruiters, eh?
I got one lead where the guy gave me the link for good candidates and all the others were useless.
Not just HR, but actual team leads and members who you can talk to and mutually evaluate each other, face to face. It's a superb event, highly recommended!
(Looks like they've introduced a new digital system too. Intriguing...)
Doing that allows me to send out 5 applications in the time it normally takes me to do 1. Since I've seen no actual correlation between effort and success, I figured quantity will give better results than quality. Of course, I might put in actual effort for an opening that I find really interesting, but that's an exception.
If you can't be bothered with a simple cover letter (a paragraph or two is fine) highlighting why you are a good fit and just send a CV..... Frankly, it comes across as low effort spamming.
You are effectively filtering out the remaining companies that do care from the pool that you're talking to.
I was thinking this would make a positive impression and say hey, I'm really interested and I'm willing to go the extra mile. The person who answered the door and to whom I gave the envelope seemed baffled that anyone would do this... saying, you know you can do this online...
I can only conclude that this is a ghost-job situation, where they didn't envision being called out in person and on site. Otherwise, what kind of dicks don't at least raise a respectful eyebrow at (or at least acknowledge) the guy who drives over to their office to hand-deliver a letter and resume?
After that I knew for sure that I wouldn't want to work for these jagoffs anyway... even if the job were real.
People are becoming much more adverse to bring panhandled or solicited in a way they cannot ignore, in the same way spam calls are more annoying than spam texts. It's not "initiative" or "extra mile" shit, it's taking advantage of someone's politeness to waste their time.
It also looks hopelessly boomerish, up there with expecting the firmness of a handshake to land a job. I've seen this happen dozens of times and the resumes always end up in the trash within minutes. I've never seen anyone hired this way.
Nice bit of ageism there.
Frankly, if desiring to speak to the engineers hiring me is dismissed as "boomerish", then I'm hardly surprised recruiting is in such a mess.
In this case, the short conversation VerifiedReports had proved that, no, he wouldn't be happy working there. QED.
No more requiring the candidate to do 30 minutes of data entry to encode their resumé into your HR system.
Then a ghost job wouldn't really waste much time, since uploading a JSON should take 30 seconds.
The need for a referral to get human eyes on your resume is a different problem that isn't made better by making every application expensive for the applicant. Poor quality applicants have more time, you might say.
What if we imagined that companies charged a fee to apply instead of charging candidate time? Then these ghost positions would be obviously considered fraud. We don't normally pay applicants for their time, but isn't a ghost position requiring substantial time to apply also a fraud on the applicant?
All I'm saying is, by removing the payment in time, you remove the fraud.
Applicant spam is an orthogonal problem that has other solutions. Linked-in could limit applicants to one application every 30 minutes, max 16 per day. Employers can use keyword filtering as they already do.
We really try to spend the time to answer every application, but since AI generated applications have become a thing, we have decided to not answer those. Why should I spent time if you haven’t spent the time?
Making it difficult to apply reduces the number of legitimate applications, however.
Either way, you need an automated first screen.
I feel the biggest blunder would be when applicant gets a take-home, spends some time on it and then there is no answer. Though I never experienced that myself. I never ghosted a candidate when I was on the other side of hiring table, but I was always finding it draining my energy to write the 'no' responses
In most other situations related to money or contracts, it would be a criminal offense punishable by prison time.
What are you thinking of? In most cases, that falls firmly under the category of bullshitting. Annoying. Unprofessional. Dishonest. But rarely criminal.
What makes this possibly illegal (though I'm still unsure if it's crimial) is that it's specifically around employer-employee relations.
And if HR is posting on job boards, that's the original mistake. But gender ratio in HR is so irrelevant compared to the questions 'why is HR posting about engineering open positions' I can say quite confidently: that's not a fair question, at all, and smell like some ragebait or culture war shit.
I could not figure out a way to painlessly gather this info without monitoring users' emails (privacy nightmare) or having users forward emails to the app (too painful/not conducive to user adoption). But if anyone has any ideas how to get around that?
There are also those who are paid by your boss just to see if any of their team members is looking to take off.
I don’t think there is anything new here though. These practice have existed for a while, and there’s not much you can do about it.
This is quite common especially now when the market is bad.
The pattern is a LinkedIn message with vague description (interesting role at a sector), no mention of rate, names or anything else.
And not just with ghost jobs. My recent experience as a job seeker was harrowing - even with large, proud companies. I would pass multiple rounds of interviews with senior/director-level interviewers only to never hear back from the company - even after a direct request for an update or feedback. Just total ignorance. Again, this happened with a FAANG+ company.
I think they have to pay that high because the work sucks so much in reality. That's the equilibrium point between the demand for people to work there, and the supply of people willing to put up with it.
Nothing else is going to fix this.
But those are very hard, company-specific problems to solve, hence my agreement :-)
Side effect of this is also to keep any bias out of the equation and, being on the other side, easier to call out colleagues making inappropriate or downright discriminating comments (which in my experience unfortunately happens everywhere still)
So everyone gets the same form letter.
This. Imagine the bureaucracy. The cure would be worse than the disease.
Random checks and whistleblowing are used in other, more "serious" processes, e.g., tax checks. At least here in Europe.
Sounds like a fraud against investors? That could be a way to attack this problem because in the U.S., many issues get turned into laws and regulations protecting shareholders.
b3ing•4h ago
Some say it’s to raise stock value by fake growth indicators or motivate employees that they are replaceable, but I think those 2 are just partially the case.
nakedneuron•2h ago