When I was applying for work a few months ago, it was very clear many companies that sat me for an interview had no intention of hiring. I believe we need to call out this bad behavior to end it.
One example is Snapchat. They gave a leetcode hard for an MLE role, which is absurd. I have an MLE friend who actually solved their LC hard problem but was still failed in that interview.
There were several others which were clearly not interested in hiring. And others which were but I failed anyways, which I know because I know people who passed.
You might call this sour grapes but I strongly believe it is commonplace to waste engineers’ time (on both sides of the table) with fake interviews.
And don’t even get me started on take home assignments. Half of them are startups that are fishing for innovation because as it turns out you could get VC money for a while without it.
Not sure what the terminology is but it’s not like giving people fake interviews is any better in my opinion. If anything, it’s worse because it’s a waste of time.
TBH, this doesn't really pass the smell test to me. Most people here seem to find it morally abhorrent, so the idea that 70% of "hiring managers" would find it acceptable is surprising, especially since most of these will be line managers who probably were ICs not that long ago. Also it says 68% reported a positive impact on revenue, which doesn't make any sense.
Ultimately, this is first and foremost a piece of content marketing, so their incentive is to get the biggest response not to be the most accurate.
The results are from pollfish which is one of those places you can get paid less than a $1 to take surveys. People who take these things are afraid of being disqualified from being paid because they need that $1 so I would not be surprised if there were a lot of very obvious leading questions.
Depending on which jurisdiction you are in, absolutely.
It could constitute bait advertising. The practice of using fake advertisements to get customers into your store for the purpose of trying to sell them something else.
Possibly, but per [1] it would come down to: "(1) whether the practice injures consumers; (2) whether it violates established public policy; (3) whether it is unethical or unscrupulous."
e.g. it might be deemed "unfair" if you're promoting vaporware to try to slow down sales of a competitor's actual product, and someone could prove consumers suffered "substantial" injury by holding off on purchasing something useful while waiting indefinitely for something else that you had no intention to actually sell. (Proving this would be hard, but I'm sure it's possible.) On the other hand, advertising a joke product—where a reasonable consumer is unharmed because they should have known it's a joke—is almost certainly legal.
Complaining to your state's Attorney General might also be effective, depending on state law and your AG's priorities with regard to enforcing it.
If you can prove you suffered actual damages due to a fraudulent job posting, you could probably go after the company directly, either as an individual plaintiff or as part of a class action.
First off, you can't enforce it without making tradeoffs. To some people, the tradeoffs will be acceptable, to others they won't.
One method would be to require a deposit on job postings. Make it costly to post, but return the money when it's taken down - same concept as a bottle deposit.
Depending on the cost, this may or may not unequally impact small businesses - though one could make the cost proportional to the companys employees.
I hear people talking about this all the time on here, so let me pose a couple scenarios for consideration:
A company has a dev team of 10 people. Hiring typically takes 3-4 months. Retention is ~2 years per employee. Assume the team size is stable. Is it morally acceptable to have an open role listed before anyone has quit?
A company has a team of 500 people. Hiring typically takes 1-2 months. Retention is ~ 2 years per employee. Assume the team size is stable. How many roles is it morally acceptable to have open before people have quit?
Zero and zero. Since you know what your turnover rate is and the lead time to hire, you need to size your team appropriately to provide adequate slack in case of turnover. Then you can hire people in a professional and respectful manner.
At a team size of 500 the number of roles is flexible. Do I hire one senior or two mids? It can depend on the quality applicants. And if an applicant is really exceptional, money can sometimes be found horse-trading with other parts of the org.
As an IC I thought most engineers were decently competent and deserved to be treated well. As a hiring manager I discovered that I had only interacted with engineers who had been good enough to land a job and my sample was biased. It turns out that most applicants are completely incompetent and should have never applied in the first place. The _typical_ experience for me is ~3000 applicants, ~300 phone screens, and ~30 interviews for _one_ hire.
I feel bad for the genuinely capable engineers who don’t get a response. That’s tough. Rest assured it sucks for everyone. If I knew a better way I’d be game. Head-hunting myself is even more time intensive.
You’re replacing half the staff each year. Any given month you expect to lose .5 and 25 employees respectively. With a lead time of 3-4 months in the former, that means during any given hiring cycle you expect to lose 1-2 employees. Anyone interviewing during slot is eligible, even if a role is not open _right that second_. For the latter, 25-50.
One thing applicants don’t realize is that by keeping the pipeline full I can fill a position “immediately” upon vacancy. If it had to start up a hiring pipeline it’d take 3 months. This means that in aggregate the hiring process is _more efficient_ than it otherwise would be. This means that _you get hired_ more quickly than you otherwise would. A cold-start wouldn’t necessarily improve your odds, it’d just make the whole process longer and more expensive for everyone.
It improves the efficiency for the company at the expense of all of the people who spent time applying for something other than what was stated.
For example, you could not tell them that you would or would not hire them after a certain point in time -- which is something they will ask about and you will be unable to disclose, and so you'll wrap your lie in some vague language.
If these kinds of pipeline hirings were disclosed as such then your math would be correct. But, as stated, the purposeful information asymmetry (lying by another name) means that you are externalizing the uncertainty to the job-seeker.
You're making a trade-off, not getting a free lunch -- that trade-off is just at the expense of someone you are not legally obligated to expose this to.
It isn't nice.
(disclaimer: I've never done it, but I have talked to people who have; additionally I've never applied to a ghost/pipeline rec)
My experience is that it’s quite a bit more nuanced and complex than that.
The uncertainty works both ways. I don’t know at the moment I open a position when or if someone qualified will apply or be hired. I don’t even know with precision exactly when positions open up. How long is the grace period for taking down open job positions after one is filled? 3 days? 1? An hour? Just the mechanics of filling out HR paperwork means there’s lag between reality and the job posting. If I’m constantly opening/closing positions (as one would be at a team size of 500) there’s just as much chance of a position actually being open and not having a listing as the other way around if I’m attempting to always update the posting.
I do know that a chunk of applicants will be baristas, uber drivers, and construction works, another chunk will have keyword-optimized resumes that are incomprehensible, and many more will simply be too junior for a role because everyone is aiming high hoping to make to their next move. Employers are absolutely flooded with garbage.
Similarly, when trying to hire I spend most of my time on it between resume reviews, phone screenings, and actual interviews. It’s incredibly labor intensive to hire good engineers and/or technical managers. I’m working just as hard as the applicants.
I don’t use vague language. If it’s the case that I don’t have a position open at the moment of a phone screen, I tell an applicant when and how many positions I expect to have open.
And it’s not just the time spent on the process. It takes weeks to months to restart the process after it’s shut down. You have to update job descriptions, train your talent team on what to look for in resumes, train engineers on how to do technical interviews, and may sure they are “calibrated”. If they are out of practice they fumble the interviews and the company looks bad to applicants, and they tend over-estimate an interviewee’s performance because they don’t have a recent point of comparison to work with. This means I have to do 5-10 throw-away interviews to grease the wheels. If I fully stopped a pipeline and treated each position as a special snowflake, and everyone else in the world did the same, it’d just create even _more_ overhead for all parties involved.
I’m not saying it’s a good system. But humans are human and on balance any system is going to be gamed. There’s no way around that. For every one applicant who’s only applying to jobs they are interested in and qualified for there's 10 more just spamming every posting they come across. As a hiring manager I have to deal with that reality. The only way I know to reduce that overhead is to not add more by grinding the hiring pipeline to a halt whenever a position is filled.
As a hiring manager you are being paid to do that work, while the job-seeker is doing it on speculation. These are not equal positions, even though your falsely equate them.
Think about this: If you are not externalizing the costs, why not disclose in the job listing that this job posting does not correspond to a job opening ? What do the company gain ? What does the job-seeker lose ?
As someone who has done hundreds of interviews and built a team from the ground up for my current startup as well as others, the rest of your post just strikes me as hyperbole and excuses.
I can’t speak to your experience. If you haven’t been completely inundated with junk applications you’ve discovered a process I never have, and I would love to hear about it. How do you go about hiring at scale?
100s of interviews a month is typical for my org. If you believe that’s hyperbole, I don’t know what to say. Believe as you wish.
"Hey John, thanks for sending in an application. Unfortunately the role is not currently available. We haven't had the resourcing to keep our ATS as up to date as we would like."
Send an email to the applicant. Automate it so it's near zero-cost. It's called human decency.
Hiring managers are incapable of doing this. It's not that the industry can't do this, it's that they're lazy, incompetent, and immoral.
That pretending someone with honest and constructive intent doesn't exist has become a default response mechanism is gross in most circumstances.
What's your point?
These questions seem to be statements masquerading as questions.
If you're interested in making a survey, I apologize and would recommend using a survey tool instead.
"People waste energy and time applying for them, following up with hiring managers who aren’t actually hiring, and preparing for interviews that aren’t going to happen. That’s exhausting and demoralizing."
Most importantly, it's fraud and theft. It's time people took a much harder stand against entities who deliberately steal their time. Call them out and make it as unpleasant as possible for these scumbags (not that this amounts to much).
Some of the reasons reported for having ghost jobs listed seem morally acceptable for example:
> They’re “always open to new people”: The organization is always on the lookout for potential candidates for future roles, whether or not they’re actively hiring at the moment. This was true of 50% of respondents in one survey from Clarify Capital.
Perhaps a note on the posting could help.
I'm noticing nothing in this article about justification about hiring on visa, which seems like a scummy behavior that would have been relevant.
When I was applying for work a few months ago, it was very clear many companies that sat me for an interview had no intention of hiring. I believe we need to call out this bad behavior to end it.
One example is Snapchat. They gave a leetcode hard for an MLE role, which is absurd. I have an MLE friend who actually solved their LC hard problem but was still failed in that interview.
There were several others which were clearly not interested in hiring. And others which were but I failed anyways, which I know because I know people who passed.
You might call this sour grapes but I strongly believe it is commonplace to waste engineers’ time (on both sides of the table) with fake interviews.
And don’t even get me started on take home assignments. Half of them are startups that are fishing for innovation because as it turns out you could get VC money for a while without it.
> it was very clear many companies that sat me for an interview had no intention of hiring.
Does Ghost Jobs in here actually means getting interview but has not intention of hiring. Which I think is wrong and is wasting everyone's time.
Or simply advertising but not replying? Which some other comments below implied because I thought not getting a reply is pretty normal.
Not sure what the terminology is but it’s not like giving people fake interviews is any better in my opinion. If anything, it’s worse because it’s a waste of time.
I find this idea that shame is the proper course of action, as if the last decade has demonstrated any substantial results.
If you want socially beneficial behaviors, you need rules, regulations _and_ enforcement.
Shame is not going to do anything of merit. As long as there's overwhelming discrepencies, there'll always be people applying to these jobs.
This appears to be the source of the stat: https://www.resumebuilder.com/3-in-10-companies-currently-ha...
TBH, this doesn't really pass the smell test to me. Most people here seem to find it morally abhorrent, so the idea that 70% of "hiring managers" would find it acceptable is surprising, especially since most of these will be line managers who probably were ICs not that long ago. Also it says 68% reported a positive impact on revenue, which doesn't make any sense.
Ultimately, this is first and foremost a piece of content marketing, so their incentive is to get the biggest response not to be the most accurate.
The results are from pollfish which is one of those places you can get paid less than a $1 to take surveys. People who take these things are afraid of being disqualified from being paid because they need that $1 so I would not be surprised if there were a lot of very obvious leading questions.
False advertising is illegal. Ghost job posts should be no different.
Genuine question: Is it illegal to advertise for a product that doesn't exist, can't be bought, and you have no intention of taking money for?
Depending on which jurisdiction you are in, absolutely.
It could constitute bait advertising. The practice of using fake advertisements to get customers into your store for the purpose of trying to sell them something else.
It's a somewhat well-known startup "hack" https://learningloop.io/plays/spoof-landing-pages
Possibly, but per [1] it would come down to: "(1) whether the practice injures consumers; (2) whether it violates established public policy; (3) whether it is unethical or unscrupulous."
e.g. it might be deemed "unfair" if you're promoting vaporware to try to slow down sales of a competitor's actual product, and someone could prove consumers suffered "substantial" injury by holding off on purchasing something useful while waiting indefinitely for something else that you had no intention to actually sell. (Proving this would be hard, but I'm sure it's possible.) On the other hand, advertising a joke product—where a reasonable consumer is unharmed because they should have known it's a joke—is almost certainly legal.
See, generally: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/advertising-...
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/ftc-policy-statemen...
yeah but how do you enforce something like that (something that could actually be done)
In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission can prosecute companies for unfair business practices: https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/contact
Complaining to your state's Attorney General might also be effective, depending on state law and your AG's priorities with regard to enforcing it.
If you can prove you suffered actual damages due to a fraudulent job posting, you could probably go after the company directly, either as an individual plaintiff or as part of a class action.
First off, you can't enforce it without making tradeoffs. To some people, the tradeoffs will be acceptable, to others they won't.
One method would be to require a deposit on job postings. Make it costly to post, but return the money when it's taken down - same concept as a bottle deposit.
Depending on the cost, this may or may not unequally impact small businesses - though one could make the cost proportional to the companys employees.
I hear people talking about this all the time on here, so let me pose a couple scenarios for consideration:
A company has a dev team of 10 people. Hiring typically takes 3-4 months. Retention is ~2 years per employee. Assume the team size is stable. Is it morally acceptable to have an open role listed before anyone has quit?
A company has a team of 500 people. Hiring typically takes 1-2 months. Retention is ~ 2 years per employee. Assume the team size is stable. How many roles is it morally acceptable to have open before people have quit?
Zero and zero. Since you know what your turnover rate is and the lead time to hire, you need to size your team appropriately to provide adequate slack in case of turnover. Then you can hire people in a professional and respectful manner.
At a team size of 500 the number of roles is flexible. Do I hire one senior or two mids? It can depend on the quality applicants. And if an applicant is really exceptional, money can sometimes be found horse-trading with other parts of the org.
As an IC I thought most engineers were decently competent and deserved to be treated well. As a hiring manager I discovered that I had only interacted with engineers who had been good enough to land a job and my sample was biased. It turns out that most applicants are completely incompetent and should have never applied in the first place. The _typical_ experience for me is ~3000 applicants, ~300 phone screens, and ~30 interviews for _one_ hire.
I feel bad for the genuinely capable engineers who don’t get a response. That’s tough. Rest assured it sucks for everyone. If I knew a better way I’d be game. Head-hunting myself is even more time intensive.
And to actually answer the question: 2 and 50.
You’re replacing half the staff each year. Any given month you expect to lose .5 and 25 employees respectively. With a lead time of 3-4 months in the former, that means during any given hiring cycle you expect to lose 1-2 employees. Anyone interviewing during slot is eligible, even if a role is not open _right that second_. For the latter, 25-50.
One thing applicants don’t realize is that by keeping the pipeline full I can fill a position “immediately” upon vacancy. If it had to start up a hiring pipeline it’d take 3 months. This means that in aggregate the hiring process is _more efficient_ than it otherwise would be. This means that _you get hired_ more quickly than you otherwise would. A cold-start wouldn’t necessarily improve your odds, it’d just make the whole process longer and more expensive for everyone.
You are wrong.
It improves the efficiency for the company at the expense of all of the people who spent time applying for something other than what was stated.
For example, you could not tell them that you would or would not hire them after a certain point in time -- which is something they will ask about and you will be unable to disclose, and so you'll wrap your lie in some vague language.
If these kinds of pipeline hirings were disclosed as such then your math would be correct. But, as stated, the purposeful information asymmetry (lying by another name) means that you are externalizing the uncertainty to the job-seeker.
You're making a trade-off, not getting a free lunch -- that trade-off is just at the expense of someone you are not legally obligated to expose this to.
It isn't nice.
(disclaimer: I've never done it, but I have talked to people who have; additionally I've never applied to a ghost/pipeline rec)
Agree to disagree.
My experience is that it’s quite a bit more nuanced and complex than that.
The uncertainty works both ways. I don’t know at the moment I open a position when or if someone qualified will apply or be hired. I don’t even know with precision exactly when positions open up. How long is the grace period for taking down open job positions after one is filled? 3 days? 1? An hour? Just the mechanics of filling out HR paperwork means there’s lag between reality and the job posting. If I’m constantly opening/closing positions (as one would be at a team size of 500) there’s just as much chance of a position actually being open and not having a listing as the other way around if I’m attempting to always update the posting.
I do know that a chunk of applicants will be baristas, uber drivers, and construction works, another chunk will have keyword-optimized resumes that are incomprehensible, and many more will simply be too junior for a role because everyone is aiming high hoping to make to their next move. Employers are absolutely flooded with garbage.
Similarly, when trying to hire I spend most of my time on it between resume reviews, phone screenings, and actual interviews. It’s incredibly labor intensive to hire good engineers and/or technical managers. I’m working just as hard as the applicants.
I don’t use vague language. If it’s the case that I don’t have a position open at the moment of a phone screen, I tell an applicant when and how many positions I expect to have open.
And it’s not just the time spent on the process. It takes weeks to months to restart the process after it’s shut down. You have to update job descriptions, train your talent team on what to look for in resumes, train engineers on how to do technical interviews, and may sure they are “calibrated”. If they are out of practice they fumble the interviews and the company looks bad to applicants, and they tend over-estimate an interviewee’s performance because they don’t have a recent point of comparison to work with. This means I have to do 5-10 throw-away interviews to grease the wheels. If I fully stopped a pipeline and treated each position as a special snowflake, and everyone else in the world did the same, it’d just create even _more_ overhead for all parties involved.
I’m not saying it’s a good system. But humans are human and on balance any system is going to be gamed. There’s no way around that. For every one applicant who’s only applying to jobs they are interested in and qualified for there's 10 more just spamming every posting they come across. As a hiring manager I have to deal with that reality. The only way I know to reduce that overhead is to not add more by grinding the hiring pipeline to a halt whenever a position is filled.
As a hiring manager you are being paid to do that work, while the job-seeker is doing it on speculation. These are not equal positions, even though your falsely equate them.
Think about this: If you are not externalizing the costs, why not disclose in the job listing that this job posting does not correspond to a job opening ? What do the company gain ? What does the job-seeker lose ?
As someone who has done hundreds of interviews and built a team from the ground up for my current startup as well as others, the rest of your post just strikes me as hyperbole and excuses.
I can’t speak to your experience. If you haven’t been completely inundated with junk applications you’ve discovered a process I never have, and I would love to hear about it. How do you go about hiring at scale?
100s of interviews a month is typical for my org. If you believe that’s hyperbole, I don’t know what to say. Believe as you wish.
"Hey John, thanks for sending in an application. Unfortunately the role is not currently available. We haven't had the resourcing to keep our ATS as up to date as we would like."
Send an email to the applicant. Automate it so it's near zero-cost. It's called human decency.
Hiring managers are incapable of doing this. It's not that the industry can't do this, it's that they're lazy, incompetent, and immoral.
That pretending someone with honest and constructive intent doesn't exist has become a default response mechanism is gross in most circumstances.
What's your point? These questions seem to be statements masquerading as questions. If you're interested in making a survey, I apologize and would recommend using a survey tool instead.
"People waste energy and time applying for them, following up with hiring managers who aren’t actually hiring, and preparing for interviews that aren’t going to happen. That’s exhausting and demoralizing."
Most importantly, it's fraud and theft. It's time people took a much harder stand against entities who deliberately steal their time. Call them out and make it as unpleasant as possible for these scumbags (not that this amounts to much).
Since society is making it acceptable to treat employees like dirt, I don't see why employees will not exploit employers in a variety of ways.
[dead]
Some of the reasons reported for having ghost jobs listed seem morally acceptable for example:
> They’re “always open to new people”: The organization is always on the lookout for potential candidates for future roles, whether or not they’re actively hiring at the moment. This was true of 50% of respondents in one survey from Clarify Capital.
Perhaps a note on the posting could help.
I'm noticing nothing in this article about justification about hiring on visa, which seems like a scummy behavior that would have been relevant.