Yet another Hacker News

28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days

87 points rubatrejo 1 hour ago 110 comments

toomuchtodo 1 hour ago | parent

Ghost jobs! Tremendous dataset. Hospitality and education roles listed near the top are likely strong signal the wages are inadequate and a refusal to raise the wage to a market clearing price. Healthcare is self explanatory, demand is voracious due to a rapidly aging population and wages available and appropriate in many cases.

> 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 1 hour ago | parent

Education roles are also an indication of mandatory listing: they have someone internally in mind for a future vacancy but are legally required to list it.

toomuchtodo 1 hour ago | parent

Any citations are welcome on this for my source of truth knowledge graph. Thank you in advance.

mixdup 59 minutes ago | parent

It's the case for most government jobs (which in the US most education roles are for government institutions--whether it be traditional K-12 schools or universities). The law in most states and at the federal level require opening jobs to the general public to prevent favoritism, encourage diversity, discourage corruption, etc. It usually just results in having a job posting that is filled before it's posted as they will have an internal candidate, and the rest is for show

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 55 minutes ago | parent

My partner is a teacher in rural Canada and this is true here, at least. District admins often design a role with someone in mind, setting very specific requirements to that effect (needs to have shop AND socials training/experience is one that comes to mind). They need to post the job to meet union criteria, but only one person could realistically fit the bill.

legitster 1 hour ago | parent

There are some browser plugins you can use for job sites like LinkedIn to filter out Ghost Jobs. It's been somewhat helpful, but honestly it feels like 90% of tech jobs right now are Ghost jobs.

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.

valgaze 1 hour ago | parent

Sounds super annoying sorry it sucks but who exactly are they defrauding in your view? And what numbers are they gaming?

dgunay 55 minutes ago | parent

The job market should be just that, a market, between buyers and sellers, not people who pretend to be buying in order to look like they've got money.

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.

legitster 51 minutes ago | parent

Investors for one. If these are larger companies, they will often inflate their actual hiring numbers to make it look like they are anticipating more growth than they are actually expecting.

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.

HumblyTossed 46 minutes ago | parent

Investors maybe. Makes your company look better than it is.

badatnames 1 hour ago | parent

The consistent reports I'm getting through friends who have spoken to recruiters is just that standards have increased dramatically. Firms accepting only a single candidate CV from a recruiter instead of 5 or more, and the recruiter downstream working their ass off to ensure it is absolutely the best possible CV, because if it's not then they don't get paid.

legitster 56 minutes ago | parent

> Firms accepting only a single candidate CV from a recruiter instead of 5 or more

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.

SoftTalker 27 minutes ago | parent

I would guess that with bots and AI, a lot of resumes are not even from real candidates, and those that are, are AI slop. I don't envy recruiters or hiring managers these days.

Aurornis 53 minutes ago | parent

> Apply for a job, within an hour get an email

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.

legitster 39 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

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.

shagie 17 minutes ago | parent

Consider the case... I've got a stack of 100 resumes and 2 hours today to select the top 10 candidates from that stack. I'll be ranking those 10 and give them to HR at the end of the day today. Tomorrow, HR will take the top 5 who are available and schedule interviews for next Tuesday. One of them will be selected from those who interview next Tuesday.

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.

legitster 2 minutes ago | parent

That makes sense for the opportunities that actually close after they are posted. I'm talking about jobs that disqualify you as a candidate same day, then repost the same listing next week. And next month. And next year. These are clearly ghost jobs.

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.

Hell, when I worked at a fast food industry as a teenager, all of these were standard practice.

Aurornis 11 minutes ago | parent

> 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?

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.

quadrifoliate 18 minutes ago | parent

At this point why don't you try to go out and contact candidates yourself or via a recruiter rather than posting jobs? It seems to me that with LLM-based tools you are going to find it increasingly difficult to get those 2-3 out of the 40; all 40 will be LLM-written to perfect match your posting.

legitster 14 minutes ago | parent

Especially if the job is posted on LinkedIn. You can already just poll a list of the most qualified candidates and reach out to them with opportunities.

The problem is companies would actually have to make compelling offers to qualified people.

pixl97 11 minutes ago | parent

>via a recruiter

While not as bad as applying yourself, they can be pretty damned awful.

Aurornis 7 minutes ago | parent

I do reach out to LinkedIn profiles and some social media accounts, but I'd never use LLM-written text to do so.

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.

MarleTangible 49 minutes ago | parent

There are also a lot of reposts coming from recruiting companies.

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.

legitster 46 minutes ago | parent

The way I got my current job is that the company I applied for rejected my application and then hired a recruiter who brought me in with the same application.

The company essentially handed the recruiter $10k because they were too bad at reviewing their own applications.

destitude 34 minutes ago | parent

After I scheduled an appointment which I realized was a "recruiter" the zoom link showed the local time zone for the recruiter was from some West African country. I cancelled the appointment.

justinator 1 hour ago | parent

I was under the impression a large % of jobs posted on jobs sites are done simply for compliance reasons and because HR has some "bullshit jobs" parts to it and the companies will usually simply hire from within the company itself.

reticulates 1 hour ago | parent

Sometimes that can happen but it is not common, certainly not a large % of job posts.

Bratmon 55 minutes ago | parent

Do you have a source on that?

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!

mgaldys4 1 hour ago | parent

At least in my country, a job posting that stays up forever isn't a ghost job. It's a company that can't keep people. Either the conditions are brutal or the pay is garbage.

alightsoul 1 hour ago | parent

What country is it?

mgaldys4 1 hour ago | parent

China

pixl97 7 minutes ago | parent

Heh, this sounds like the more human case where if you see a person that is single you don't want to go out with them as there's a rather serious reason why they are single.

AznHisoka 1 hour ago | parent

How do we know if this is normal or not? You really need a historical time series to know if it has always been like this or not

blitzar 1 hour ago | parent

Historically the ad was in a newspaper and you would sit and circle them with your breakfast while listening to the wireless.

Companies didnt pay to put the ad in the paper every day once the vacancy was filled.

jrochkind1 37 minutes ago | parent

Hey, historically your "employer" would flog you if you tried to change "jobs".

pixl97 2 minutes ago | parent

Job postings in the past were made in places with relatively limited space hence higher costs.

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?

Aurornis 1 hour ago | parent

This statistic constantly confuses people who haven't done hiring.

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.

prerok 1 hour ago | parent

That's fair but still indicates shortage, no?

flockonus 1 hour ago | parent

Not necessarily indicates any 1 thing; it can be fake job posts to signal growth, could be an extra picky hiring manager, even a decrepit company that forgot to close it.

prerok 57 minutes ago | parent

I agree with that, just responding to the parent who wrote that their company keeps the hiring listed. So, in their case it's true but in other cases it is not.

I agree, I should have written a bit more, apologies.

firesteelrain 1 hour ago | parent

It’s a pipeline requisition or feeder requisition. Sometimes companies will close and refresh it. Can’t rely on job listings alone

Bratmon 52 minutes ago | parent

No, the exact opposite! A high percentage of ghost jobs indicates that there are very few actual jobs open in the field, which suggests an oversupply of workers.

vanuatu 21 minutes ago | parent

if the listings are open for the reasons OP stated, then yes it does indicate a shortage. if companies hired all the SWEs they wanted they wouldn't still have the listings

pixl97 13 minutes ago | parent

100% untrue.

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.

alightsoul 1 hour ago | parent

So you should apply to old job postings? Consensus in LATAM seems to be, they just forgot to take them down and they already have someone or in Latin America if you repost the same opening over and over the consensus seems to be the company is toxic they have a turnover problem, maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people

mixdup 1 hour ago | parent

> So you should apply to old job postings?

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

Aurornis 1 hour ago | parent

Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.

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.

tempest_ 55 minutes ago | parent

Often you pay to have that posting. For a smaller company they def know that posting is still up. Likely they are just getting poor applications (or need to improve their posting because the right people are not seeing it)

In the age of LLMs every one is "tailoring" their resume to every posting.

mort96 52 minutes ago | parent

This depends a ton on if we're talking about a company's own website's job listings or if it's on some dedicated job listing site.

CharlieDigital 36 minutes ago | parent

Company's own website job listings are likely actually in an applicant tracking system (ATS) like Greenhouse or Ashby because they need to manage the pipeline, not just list the job.

mort96 52 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

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.

Sharlin 9 minutes ago | parent

Or a more morbid analogy: military casualties in a war.

alightsoul 52 minutes ago | parent

No this is not common sense. No company in LATAM has 10000 people. Large companies just aren't a thing here. Most companies here are the 50 people companies you mention so the normal thing is to hire occasionally. And LATAM never had an industrial revolution so software positions are just rare unless the company is larger than the local average. If you do find one, it's not a pure one or is service oriented, not to build a product. What I mean is, building a technological product is rare let alone as a product company in LATAM and most technical positions are service or outsourcing oriented. If you find a technical product role like being a mobile developer, it's often not at a company that offers a technological product but a service in another industry like a bank

alt227 49 minutes ago | parent

I googled and literally the first result was LATAM Airlines who have 44,000 employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LATAM_Airlines

alightsoul 44 minutes ago | parent

Airlines and state owned companies seem to be the exception

alt227 27 minutes ago | parent

ok, that statement seems a bit different than your previous one of "No company in LATAM has 10000 people."

benjojo12 49 minutes ago | parent

Petrobras?

mort96 45 minutes ago | parent

You don't think MercadoLibre has job postings open all the time just to replace the people who are leaving? They're around 120 000 people, is each of those people hand-picked for a particular position and not just hired because they know they need to replace some percentage of workers who'll leave?

shagie 33 minutes ago | parent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Brazilian_comp...

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).

oejxiwjxjwjd 51 minutes ago | parent

> you can assume that they're always hiring.

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.

alt227 48 minutes ago | parent

This kind of attitude is why some people cant find jobs. Meanwhile the ones who just emailed their cv and didnt overthink it are happily working.

oejxiwjxjwjd 44 minutes ago | parent

What kind of attitude? Wanting employers to respect my goddamned time? Wanting to know how much employers are willing to pay for my services?

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.

SoftTalker 29 minutes ago | parent

Good luck on your job hunt.

oejxiwjxjwjd 26 minutes ago | parent

Very kind of you good stranger. I’m not job hunting at the moment but I appreciate the support!

alt227 25 minutes ago | parent

The UK is currently passing laws to make every job listing include salary:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg7gg2zdexo

oejxiwjxjwjd 24 minutes ago | parent

That’s a good start.

Avicebron 35 minutes ago | parent

This is not helpful and untrue, if you've tried to apply for jobs within the laat ~6+ years you will know it's screaming into the void. New accounts for the N+ glassdoor/indeed/bamboo/handshake/yougettheidea clones. Poorly pulling information from an uploaded resume, requiring manually editing or adding the info _every_ time. If your dilligent/dumb you writing a cover letter for each one (no AI the signal is too bad), then you submit it and wait an arbitrary amount of time for the rejection. There is a good reason people are complaining, it's asinine to put this on jpb seekers.

alt227 28 minutes ago | parent

> if you've tried to apply for jobs within the laat ~6+ years you will know it's screaming into the void

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.

oejxiwjxjwjd 25 minutes ago | parent

Two things can be true. I’ve applied to a few jobs in the last few years and got a few of them as well. Does not mean that the hoops I had to jump through were any less demeaning, disrespectful or downright stupid.

locknitpicker 44 minutes ago | parent

> Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.

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.

maccard 46 minutes ago | parent

You should, but you should always apply as early as possible.

The main reason the jobs are reposted are to get them to the top of the feed

CharlieDigital 37 minutes ago | parent

You pay for job listings so it would be silly to not take them down.

tayo42 1 hour ago | parent

I think people just latch onto ideas that try to simplify and make sense of frustrating situations where they dont have control. "Ghost jobs" are thing to blame now, for a while is was that taxcode thing for software engineers.

guywithahat 1 hour ago | parent

I see this for experienced roles too, especially where pay isn't super competitive. If you need a lead software engineer in a certain city for a certain salary, that often means waiting months for them to come across it. 10 junior engineers may apply but ultimately they just can't perform the role required

nitwit005 34 minutes ago | parent

Then you'd still only have a small number of roles up, not the thousands of positions the article is showing for some companies. They'd be hiring hundreds of thousands a year if they were constantly interviewing for all of them, and I don't believe O'Reilly Auto Parts is recruiting people as quickly as a nation at war.

mindtricks 31 minutes ago | parent

I'm curious, for the niche or senior roles, have you personally read through the resumes or do you depend on the recruiter? I hear you on the entry and early-career jobs, but I see Director and VP roles also open for months. With all the layoffs, it's hard to belief there is not SOME talent in there worth hiring or at least training up.

legitster 30 minutes ago | parent

As someone with a niche job and title (and comes pretty decorated), I would expect to hear back on my applications more often and yet I get nothing either. There are some prominent companies (cough Figma, Smartsheet, Stripe cough) who literally have had an open role for exactly my job for nearly 3+ years without filling it.

Maybe I'm thinking a bit too much of myself, but it doesn't seem like they are that interested in really filling it.

thesuitonym 14 minutes ago | parent

This is exactly why hiring is such a mess, lazy managers who don't want to repost job listings or put any effort into hiring. Job seekers need to apply to thousands of jobs because they have no way of knowing if a company is actually hiring. Which means hiring managers (who we have already established are lazy) now are incentivised to find ways to not look at resumes.

mandeepj 13 minutes ago | parent

Your response tells me you haven’t done much hiring, if at all, or, even if you have, you haven’t done it very well. You’re being unnecessarily defensive. Someone who actually knows what they’re doing, when hiring multiple people, keeps a count of the positions and, if they want to be transparent, updates it as people are hired and onboarded. It’s not that hard.

mjr00 9 minutes ago | parent

I've done hiring at AWS and many other companies and the OP is 100% accurate, so I don't know why you speak with such confidence

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

ndiddy 6 minutes ago | parent

You also have to deal with delusional hiring managers. A few months ago I remember seeing a comment on here from someone who had kept job listings up for years while hiring because he couldn't find anyone with the "right experience". Clearly there was no actual imminent need to fill the role and he was just hoping that some superstar would stumble across it, but he kept insisting that this counted as "really hiring for the role".

syntaxing 1 hour ago | parent

I conduct interviews pretty often for various levels. Interviews seems so broken from both sides. Hard to find jobs that aren’t ghost jobs. Hard to find candidates that won’t cheat using AI and actually know their stuff. Just feels like AI has made hiring in tech even more inefficient which says a lot.

gib444 17 minutes ago | parent

Is AI use by current employees considered cheating?

jonas21 1 hour ago | parent

Every time I've hired someone at a big company, it's taken multiple months to get candidates through the pipeline, and it was not uncommon to have to go back to the candidate pool when someone would accept an offer and change their mind before starting. 90 days to fill a role would be considered relatively quick.

jt2190 54 minutes ago | parent

Remember that the average job candidate is absolutely clueless about how positions are created and filled in real life, so seeing bad assumptions like “most positions are filled in under ninety days” shouldn’t be surprising.

esseph 54 minutes ago | parent

I am hearing from multiple people in hiring departments at different companies that they are doing 7-9 rounds of interviews for non-coding tech roles.

These companies have lost their minds.

alistairSH 37 minutes ago | parent

That sounds pretty insane to me.

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).

gib444 20 minutes ago | parent

It's just cruel

pixl97 8 minutes ago | parent

Maybe the cruelty is the point? They are looking for people that will put up with bullshit and suffering?

sporadicism 29 minutes ago | parent

What an absolutely insane way to do business. Everybody is out here trying to squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of software teams to the point of shipping garbage. Meanwhile managers, executives, and hr are operating under the belief that taking literal months to move "candidates through the pipeline" is eminently reasonable.

mattm 8 minutes ago | parent

Most tech companies have a: - recruiter screen - tech screen - multiple interviews during an "onsite" round

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.

SpicyLemonZest 7 minutes ago | parent

Hiring the wrong person in corporate roles is very, very, very expensive. New hires are expected to be unproductive right out the gate, and it's hard to measure productivity in general, so you can easily end up in scenarios where it takes months to notice there's an issue and a year or more before you can get the person back out the door. So you really do have to double and triple check that a prospective hire is the right choice.

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.

pixl97 9 minutes ago | parent

Maybe I'm an old fart, but I've never had a job take over 14 days to get. Stringing people along for 3 months is absolute insanity. This is what happens when people get turned into numbers instead of actual beings with needs and emotions.

whatever1 53 minutes ago | parent

It is clear signal but its causes are multiple and I am not sure what percent attribution each one has:

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)

MarleTangible 47 minutes ago | parent

Reposts from recruiting agencies or other unrelated companies to resell the candidates or simply farm user details for fraud etc.

dgellow 44 minutes ago | parent

So, you’re saying it’s not really a clear signal?

dvt 53 minutes ago | parent

As someone that's currently looking (with plenty of experience, corporate, startup, and contract), can confirm it's pretty rough out there. I think the application process is just becoming enshittified: because HR uses AI to filter, applicants are starting to use AI to apply, so we have volumes and volumes of nonsense flowing back and forth.

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.

nabbed 26 minutes ago | parent

I just read this on CNBC:

  “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.”

From https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/23/treasury-yields-oil-inflatio...

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?

pixl97 5 minutes ago | parent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery

Business doing good doesn't automatically mean populations of humans are doing good themselves.

fHr 45 minutes ago | parent

Yeah because they ask for low level kernel 10yoe specialists AI llm inference training phd people lol

jrochkind1 39 minutes ago | parent

I've been hearing people looking for jobs with (to me) weird theories about fake/ghost job postings, that the employer never plans to fill... they have various theories of why (hypothetical) employers would do this that I don't quite follow.

Has anyone else heard of/seen this, or can explain where it's coming from or if it means anything?

fwlr 21 minutes ago | parent

It is absolutely and undeniably a real phenomenon. Take your pick of explanations, nobody actually knows for sure, but you have to tell yourself something or you’d toss your phone out the window when you get the 40th notification that you might be interested in the exact same job that auto-rejected you the previous 39 times. Speaking from personal experience over the last year.

adamrezich 38 minutes ago | parent

Why is OP being downvoted to [dead] in every single comment here?

petcat 36 minutes ago | parent

Meaningless stat. My company keeps our website job listings open indefinitely and it's because we're always hiring. We're just extremely selective.

mattm 6 minutes ago | parent

Every company is selective

zelphirkalt 33 minutes ago | parent

Probably a lot of those that have remained open will also stay that way, because they are (1) fake job ads, or (2) job ads of companies, where you don't even reach a human soul during the application process, and the companies don't realize how broken their hiring process really is, or (3) job ads of companies, who have so unrealistic idea about what they are looking for and what they themselves are actually offering to attract whomever they are looking for, that almost no one applying meets the criteria.

Probably I also forgot some more categories of crazy hiring processes in my enumeration.

destitude 31 minutes ago | parent

I've about given up looking for a remote job even as a software engineer with over 20+ years of experience especially with macOS since I never seem to get a reply or "no longer accepting applicants".

hn_submit 11 minutes ago | parent

This is common everywhere. Employers are leaving open job listings and just wait and see who comes along.

Career sites would do well to automatically close job listings after 90 days or so.

jedberg 9 minutes ago | parent

I talked to a hiring manager friend at a big company you've definitely heard of. I was looking for a job so I sent him a link to one of his jobs and said "can I interview for this?"

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.