Absolutely. And a lot of spam. A few months ago there was a little flame war between a few people. Company posted an ad and someone replied "this is spam, and you don't respond, just keep posting the same ad", and the company replied "no, I own the company and hand write this job ad every month to fit our future needs" which was patently a lie (exact same headcount, exact same three positions, every month for the last eight months, and usually a byte-accurate copy of each posting), and several similar.
Not to mention it's "discouraged" to call employers out on poor behavior. I know of at least three companies who post pretty steadily who ghosted at final rounds or in one case, "We intend to present a written offer" (though in "fairness", they did eventually inform me that they'd decided to freeze hiring, well, nearly three months later).
It's against the rules to call out hiring companies in the thread, primarily because we don't want off-topic arguments and because it would be too easy to exploit it for shenanigans.
But since people have been increasingly saying that this is a problem, let's do something about it. My current thought is to add a new instruction at the top asking companies to please only post in the thread if they're committed to responding to every applicant. Other suggestions for addressing this issue are welcome!
Edit: since the next Who Is Hiring day is tomorrow, let's get precise. I'm including this text at the top of the thread:
NEW RULE: Please only post a job in this thread if you are committed to responding to everyone who applies.
Great idea. Do you also want to address some more root problems of job postings:
* done for optics, to look like growth or doing well, or just to have their name out there.
* to fill the pipeline for future needs
* to assess the hiring market, for planning
* (for reasons mentioned in article) to light fire under current employees, or see how replaceable they are
* only for a serendipitous unicorn hire, not commodity developer
* for training in their hiring process
I know all these are things that happen in general with startup job posts, though not necessarily on HN.
None of those reasons preclude "responding", but responding doesn't solve the real problem, it's only a PR sugar coating on it.
An example of disclosure on the unicorn hire one would be to simply state the truth about it. That's fine, so long as you're not pretending to grow. It could even be good optics, about hiring standards.
Disclosure of some of the other intent would preclude it (e.g., probably nobody is going to state the goal of threatening or replacing current employees). Maybe those posts shouldn't be done at all, or maybe they can at least say that this is a speculative post, not for a currently open position.
I'd say job posts have to be truthful, and it's by default implied that they actually good faith intend to fill the position as described, in a timely manner, and that interviews will only be conducted in good faith. If the default isn't true, they should disclose that.
> I'd say job posts have to be truthful, and it's by default implied that they actually good faith intend to fill the position as described, in a timely manner, and that interviews will only be conducted in good faith. If the default isn't true, they should disclose that.
Very few people would disagree with that premise.
The thing is that bad faith actors doing bad faith things are not going to abide by the rules on their own accord, on account of being bad faith actors. So you need enforcement, and I don't really see how HN can enforce any of the things you posted. They're not really in a position to vet anything more than you or I can.
Maybe the initial "who is hiring" post should be more explicit about the lack of moderation and vetting instead.
There's definitely a chunk of bad-faith people, who'll lie, cheat, and steal, but I think it's the minority.
There's a lot of questionable things that decent people do, in good faith, because they consider it normal and OK. If you tell people "actually, the convention here on that is something different", then I think most will respect that.
One way this doesn't work is if there's a lack of trust. For example, if an employer claims it values X, but actually behaves like Y, employees are less likely to do X, and also less likely to trust or respect the company on anything else.
Another way the HN example doesn't work as well is if the person has strong motivation otherwise. For example, if their boss told them to post a fake job on HN, and they really don't want to come back and say they can't because they just saw a new rule. But a lot of other times, the person doing the posting has more autonomy, or a more decent work environment.
A lot of guessing here, but I think stating a convention would help significantly.
Maybe; I don't want too be too cynical about it, but I suspect many people don't really read it in the first place, and if you're the sort of person posting fake jobs then I don't expect you're really deterred by this.
Good point about not many people reading it, but there was a nice all-caps "NEW RULE" at the top today, so we'll see.
Definitely some people who will disregard rules they know are rules, but I think there's also a lot of people who just thought fake job posts were the convention, and now they'll change behavior.
> It's against the rules to call out hiring companies in the thread, primarily because we don't want off-topic arguments
All due respect: if an employer posts here offering for people to apply, that the employer in question is bad in some way, I don't see why that's considered "off topic." If a company sucks, we owe it to our fellow engineers to get the word out until they improve. A perfect example being the sorts that don't have any intention of filling the jobs they post.
In my mind the only sort of company that would avoid posting here due to the potential of being criticized by the HN userbase are exactly the sorts you don't want posting, so that seems like a win/win.
> we don't want off-topic arguments and because it would be too easy to exploit it for shenanigans.
Are there any other reasons you mentioned? I only found this one.
Thinking about it, people replying to the post stake their reputation too in whatever they post. If we see a throwaway or newish account causing shenanigans, people interested in the job post can form their own opinion of the nature of the comment? (isn't that what downvoting is for too?).
Since threads have this nice toggle feature you can always click [-] to ignore whatever people is saying about a job posting.
That's two reasons! (1) It's offtopic, which is especially bad given that the threads are so comment-heavy; and (2) it's too easy to exploit.
I suppose exploit is not the right word, because a lot of it is people posting their grudges or bad feelings that they probably have perfectly legit reasons for, and yet are not the full story. We're not going to get the full story, or even a fair assessment, from a distracting back-and-forth in the middle of a job ads thread; and that's ignoring the point that most people posting to Who Is Hiring aren't in a position to respond to such complaints in the first place.
It seems to me easy to see that if we allowed it, there would be no limit to it, and the end result would be a bad scene indeed.
Two questions:
1) How would the feedback loop work from users who do not receive a response?
2) Are you concerned about a possible "chilling effect" for startups that don't want to post for fear of being spammed?
As an aside, been browsing HN for years and always wanted to say that you're doing the Lord's work.
Presumably you guys don’t want to create a report button for just this situation. I never know what to think when I see downvotes in the Who’s Hiring thread. There’s no way for me to tell if someone hates the CEO (eg, if Twitter posted job openings), or they’ve noticed the same position filed three months in a row. I’ve seen a few of those before you got around to detaching them.
I think it's going to be hard to enforce that, unless you go through ycombinator.com/jobs
But I agree that's fair to expect from companies. Yes, they have potentially hundreds of applicants, but writing "We're sorry to inform that you have not been selected to interview" probably takes less than a minute, so spending less than an hour rejecting every applicant seems in line with the time I'd expect each candidate to spend preparing and submitting their application. Plus you can always automate a list of emails to send rejection messages to...
It's also a nice way to differentiate the Who's hiring? from all other job boards out there
Maybe make the "flag" feature work for users to "report" non-responsive employers. On repeat offenses, reach out to them saying they've been repeatedly reported? Just brainstorming
Perhaps the monthly postings should be handled via ycombinator.com/jobs and the thread here is just a dump of this month's new openings with links to applications there but not direct posts by companies?
There's little enforcement happening in those threads anyway—they're too free-form, and manual intervention is too expensive. But adding a rule should hopefully still make a difference.
Maybe add the flag|vouch to the comments for those threads? Not entirely sure how it works (or if its possible), but it seems to work pretty well. I am guessing there is a filter for bad actors, even if not, the few that would be affected would maybe end up with positive comments from long aged accounts.
Thats a lot of maybes, but my impression of the flag|vouch feature is as a first step community moderation and guessing it works well? The job thread being jobs targeting the community, I would think it would as well, or at a minimum help.
I had a little side project I was working on a while ago that would ingest "Who's Hiring" posts every month through the HN API and analyze month to month when each one came and went, in order to call out the companies posting the (according to some heuristic) same ad for months and months, never actually hiring anyone. I was going to snarkily call the tool "Who's Not Hiring?"
Obviously a company -actually- hiring the same kind of person month after month would be a false positive, but I thought it might help to catch some of these companies abusing "Who's Hiring"
Good luck! I still wonder if you can't you sidestep the free-form and manual intervention stuff by giving those threads some shape via a monthly posting feature on ycombinator.com/jobs?
At the end of the day the challenges likely stem from "Who's hiring?" being just a thread with comments on a very spartan message board. I would have said you can solve these issues with an app or website, but you already have one, so it would be easier to just leverage that and then the sky is the limit–add any features you want!
ycombinator/jobs would presumably not be the right venue for an open job board but yes we could build software to better support Who Is Hiring threads. I've always resisted doing so but maybe we eventually will. I'm not sure how that would help with the ghosting problem though...
Would you be open to having people email if they send an application and get ghosted so that you can potentially take action on future hiring threads? (or stuff like the mentioned copy-pasted job posting that got caught in an argument) Since I know that emailing you is already the best way to ask for moderation help.
I like your suggesting actual features/systems, and the idea that we can make hn/jobs the better job board, but I think this targets the wrong problem:
I don’t care if a company ghosts me b/c they hired someone else—I care that/if I spent the time applying to a role for which there was no intent to hire.
How can we mandate that only roles that are actually open get posted? Does hn/jobs require confirmation that a hire was made within a certain timeframe? (say, 3-6 months?). It may be non-solvable as you obviously can’t mandate that a company hires, but if we can mandate that a company not advertise unless they’re going to hire it is certainly non-solved.
Everyone? Applicants are using AI to mass apply for jobs. Not everyone deserves a response.
Why not: Please only post jobs if you are committed to interviewing and filling the position in the next 3 months. Accounts posting the same job opening for 6 months may be banned.
In this market if it takes 6+ months to find someone there is a fundamental problem with the opening.
At the very least it should be: "Please only post a job in this thread if you are committed to responding to all qualified applicants."
You are making good points but now I'm wondering if we should just drop the idea.
Every applicant is going to classify themselves as "qualified"; and every applicant that a company doesn't respond to, they will classify as "unqualified"; so if we modify the rule in this way, we may as well have no rule at all.
(Edit: I just noticed johnnyanmac already made this point in an earlier reply)
Since we're on HN, I think using LLMS instead of humans to talk is a bigger issue than whether an applicant is mass applying outside the site with LLMS. We should address that first and that will fix the issue anyway.
>At the very least it should be: "Please only post a job in this thread if you are committed to responding to all qualified applicants."
Too easy a loophole. I think we should just stick to the spirit of the rule and see if they make an honest gesture not make it literally 100% of applicants (ofc of they want a principal and a student in school applies they shouldn't expect a response).
What if the new rule required a company to link to their last "who's hiring" posting if it was within, say, the last 3 months?
That makes it easy, within HN, to see if a company is just doing copy/paste spam, or if they're posting new/updated info each month. It also has the advantage of being easily verifiable (and enforceable? not sure what the enforcement actions would be...) here on HN versus random anecdotes of "I applied but never heard back", which I doubt would have enough weight for anyone to do anything about.
Users here could help police/moderate by simply replying with a link to last month's posting if there is one and the posting omitted it. That would somewhat-gently "call out" the company for not reading/following the rules, without users leaving negative comments on the thread.
(Just thoughts from a user skimming by, I'm not in the market for a new job at the moment so I have little skin in the game)
I had a plan[1] to use the HN API to try to suss out companies spamming month after month without hiring, but it never went anywhere. This article is motivating me to pick up the 1/4-finished code and have another look at it.
I don't love this idea. I feel like it's just going to force even more busybody work into the process - now companies will need to "respond" to every applicant, no matter how irrelevant, so that response isn't going to be high-information anyway.
Someone else suggested a good idea - make companies link to their previous request. Or even better - don't allow companies to post the exact same listing for months in a row. The actual behavior you're trying to root out is a company listing a position that isn't real - so just don't allow them to list the same not-real position over and over.
I don't know if that can be enforced, though it should be easy to script up something that checks this. But you're not going to enforce anything anyway, and I think this gets closer to actually what we want to achieve.
Yes, if you consider #1 an issue, then you're right. But I'm not sure that's an issue that should actually be addressed, because:
1. It's not anything new, unlike this "ghost jobs" thing which is a supposed new phenomenon. This makes it less likely that the status quo can be improved.
2. I believe the reason the status quo is as it is is because most companies are inundated with job applicants, many of them not even passing a basic qualifying test (e.g. people with no FE experiecnce applying to FE positions with min. required experience of 5 years).
I don't know if this is true for the HN thread, having never posted to it. It's possible it's much higher signal here so this issue becomes less relevant.
Anyway, just my 2 cents, mostly as an outsider to these threads.
What is this confusing sentence suppose to communicate? That you adore the idea? Or like it? Or hate it? Or are neutral? Or are indifferent? Or any other thousands of options? Nobody knows.
I'm sorry, I certainly don't mean to be off-putting.
The way I parse a sentence like "I don't love this idea", and the way I meant it, is that I think the idea has some merit, it's not terrible, but I'm not fully on board, it has more work to do. It's not all the way to "I don't like it" but it's not great yet.
In any case I elaborated in the rest of the post a bit more on this so I think you can see from the context what I meant.
How about mentioning in the who's hiring post that people can email HN if they think someone posted in bad faith. The slight inconvenience should turn off people who complain just for the sake of it, and other readers won't be discouraged by seeing the complaints. The downside is extra admin for you, of course.
I don't think I can handle many more emails*. But beyond that—what would we do? We don't have the cycles to arbitrate these things; nor the skill; nor the interest.
* was going to make a Mr. Creosote reference but thought better of it
Hn/jobs may not have the interest, sure. Job posters in general may not have an interest. I think monetization here comes from candidates. As a job seeker I would be willing to pay for access to a job board where listings/posters are somehow vetted to protect me from filling out ghost applications.
I think that's a great start. I mean for me, I'm realistic - if it's a pre-first round or first round exit so to speak, I don't expect anything substantive, a canned response is acceptable. I get that it's a pain when you have hundreds of applicants, but it should also be trivial.
It is nice to expect something a bit more involved if it's a final round thing, but still. No-one likes the ghost.
What I would really like to see is for employers to give actual feedback to the rejected candidates at any stage of the interview process. I am sure that employers can find a way to share constructive feedback without the fear of any legal implications. And I am sure most candidates will really appreciate a meaningful feedback instead of an automated rejection email. This would also have the side effect of having only serious candidates and employers engage in the process and should go a long way of getting rid of these ghost jobs. I would love to see a job board which only post jobs where the employers promises to share a feedback with any candidate they interview. I am sure it will be a hit.
The problem isn't that the rules arent well specified enough. The problem is that too many agents with the most power in this exchange (ie employers) just violate people's trust. Dishonest agents need to be visibly held to account, and right now the only way that happens is by calling them out. But since that's forbidden, there's a conundrum.
I’m not defending companies here, but what I’ve seen happen sometimes is a well-meaning engineering manager will post openings on this or other forums, and then the resumes end up in black holes like Greenhouse where the HR/non-technical types filter out applications without even looking at or responding to many of them.
I wouldn’t always blame the poster, and appreciate them letting us know.
That seems too restrictive to me. Some positions don't fill up quickly and some companies are growing and hiring over long stretches. I am completely unqualified to make these calls.
I'm not saying there aren't abuses taking place but in my experience people are far too quick to jump to such conclusions on the internet, and the jumping-to-conclusions is actually the much bigger problem. Just speaking generally here–not about the Who Is Hiring threads.
Another potential way to at least surface dodgy behaviour perhaps: Automatically append to a poster's comment links to all their previous comments in Who's Hiring threads in the past twelve months.
I can foresee posters then creating throwaway accounts to avoid this, but the green username would be a give-away (or restrict new accounts from posting on these threads).
I would suggest that there be a way to report bad-faith job postings in some way or there are consequences. anyone can claim they applied with no response. Someone who reports actual evidence like "this account has posted this exact listing for the last 4 months and the company size hasn't changed a bit" may justify e.g. removing listings.
Wouldn't any company unscrupulous enough to advertise a job opening without a genuine intention to hire simply disregard such a rule?
Thinking out loud:
* What if there were a bit more restrictions to posting on Who's hiring? Perhaps a counter of how many times a profile has posted, with a max of N posts allowed per M months, or something.
* Would also be nice to have some feedback from HN profiles on outcome of the job posting. Add a link to the job posting to your about page:
... this way you can attempt to disregard the feedback if the profile posting it seems bogus. Posters wouldn't want to hurt their own reputation by lying about the quality of a job posting.
Anyway, maybe something like that would be out of scope for HN, but just thinking out loud here :-).
I like it! Frankly, it should be something that hiring companies do anyways.
Perhaps extend it to something like everyone who applies, or responds to your comment”
Practically speaking, enforcement will be difficult/impossible for actions off HN - if someone claims a company isn’t responding, or using a templated email, how would you verify that?
By enforcing the same rule for a job thread, there’s a very clear location where the behavior of the company can be observed.
If companies receive comments saying i never heard back (at least they need to generate an email saying application was received and later your not a good fit, if not) and they keep posting this same or similar job. Well then they should warned about losing their HN job listing priviligies. Put them on a list that a bot notifies you and or downvotes them a lot.
Those who comment and are to be taken seriously will have a certain amount of karma and or history on HN.
What about all of the YC companies posting comment-free ads for founding engineers offering 1/2 market wages and next-to-no equity in person in SF?
Honestly it's practically a joke to look at and it starting to make YC itself look bad. Seriously there is no value prop to these postings unless you are jobless, desperate and living in your car.
perhaps upvotes and downvotes can be subtly weighed by karma? This would give proven contributors more trust. In the case of job posts, it would enlist them in zapping the spam they recognise month after month?
And beyond that, beyond applicability to job posts, perhaps voting can be a collaborative filtering bubble instead of absolutes? This makes spammers and voting rings end up in an echo chamber? And perhaps for normal posts instead of there being an early top level comment that gets to the top and stays there and monopolises the conversation, you get more variety and people more easily find the conversation they come for?
We've experimented with vote weighting over the years but the results have been disappointing. It's not easy to come up with criteria for users whose votes are more reliable.
"Dear [applicant name], thank you for sending us your application.
We have decided not to progress your application further.
While making our decision we've noted your extensive experience at [previous company] and feel that your skillsets are highly valuable in the industry and hope you find success in your job search soon."
I actually received that from a major tech company, unfilled mail merge aliases included.
Tangentially-related: I see postings for jobs specifically in states that require pay transparency (posting the pay range in job announcements), but they do not include a pay range in their announcements. While this is primarily an issue for companies that are illegally posting announcements without the required pay range, it might be helpful to include a statement in the rules at the top of the page. This statement could remind posters that if they are in a state with a pay transparency law, they need to include the pay range in their job postings.
Could also make it a site rule that _all_ jobs postings should include a pay range. Shouldn't have to waste your time applying to a job that has a pay range you would never accept.
Could this be a case where companies have a "people-ops" person who needs to justify their position even though the company hasn't hired anyone in months? So they create some new OKRs like: "Get 20 qualified candidates vetted and ranked in case we do decide to hire someone.", "Create 40 job ads" or something?
It wasn't just them, but another dozen or so YC startups who've been around for many years and always keep a job ad in the queue. It's not their fault for doing that—it's my fault for neglecting the HN job ad system for too long. I get that the community doesn't like seeing the same ads over and over for the same few, long-established companies.
We recently changed the HN /jobs page to gradually reduce the frequency of those. Newer startups, who by definition haven't been around long enough to have had many posts, should be significantly better represented. The system has been designed to favor them for a long time, but it's favoring them more now.
>it's my fault for neglecting the HN job ad system for too long.
If it helps, the system works great on an honor system. Have a community of passionate hackers, a site encouraging those hackers (some of which may be part of the community) to start up their own business and realize their ides, and the ad system would have good actors on both sides the pipeline. Interesting jobs for a community of passionate people.
I feel like that "honor" comes and goes with the economy though. Anything for an applicant to survive, anything for a job poster to make the company look good for investors.
Also along with ghost jobs do we have ghost candidates? Every job posting on LinkedIn have hundred plus applicants within the first two hours. Maybe many of the applicants are not eligible but this phenomenon points to a massive increase in labor supply for tech jobs. Automation and opening up competition globally is gutting out most of the tech jobs it seems.
The candidates are real. But The qualifications often aren't. Even if you post a job being full time on-site, you'll get applicants who are not even in the same country looking for remote work.
I feel that was the natural conclusion of a system where "requirements" are as realistic as a unicorn. But we're all suffering from that
Last I applied to a job posted on Who's Hiring, they had me fill a self recorded video interview on some platform. And do some coding exercise with screen sharing. Then send it to them. I've never gotten any sort of reply back, positive or negative. Felt like a clown. Won't be using that again.
