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

> 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.

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

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

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.

[delayed]

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.

>via a recruiter

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

Yeah, I’ve never understood this - earlier in my career this was the standard to have technically skilled hiring managers look for and contact people.

Now people act like they must have this ridiculous firehose of resumes to sort through, then have non-technical HR gals sort and filter out based on whatever random criteria they use, and then by the time it gets to the hiring managers - they still have no idea if this person is a complete idiot or has any skills at all. The qualified people you actually want to hire don’t want to be treated like idiots or liars either.

I just don’t feel it has to be this way - there is zero value in a firehose unless you were looking for desperate and cheap people.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

How do hire a recruiter as a candidate?

This absolutely sucks if you don't have networking skills, but this is exactly why it pays of to network. You're basically able to skips 50 - 90% of the recruitment "pipeline" is you know the right people and they want you specifically.

The person I responded to said that filling a role in 90 days would be "relatively quick" so you've already improved theoretical hiring efficiency by up to 50%.

But it still doesn't sound like a very effective process typed out like this.

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

Surely you should be looking for evidence of the opposite. Why would a company create a job listing if they aren’t hiring? You are supposing there’s a global conspiracy to create fake job listings.

Every company I’ve worked at, from startups to big tech have had job listings open when they want to hire someone. Sometimes a job post will stay open for months or even years, not because it is fake but because finding the right candidate is far more important than finding a candidate.

I empathize with the frustrating experience of seeing job listings that you’re qualified for and not being hired, and certainly a lot of companies half-ass their hiring and do not review every applicant, but fake job listings make very little sense. When they do occur, it’s for obscure reasons, not because that is standard operating procedure.

The whoishiring thread here on HN regularly sees candidates accuse regularly posting companies of not actually hiring, even though there’s ample evidence these companies are hiring.

Re: the original claim about job posts being created when the company already has an internal candidate, there are very few organizations where that is necessary. A private company rarely has an obligation to consider outside candidates, it is mostly seen in government recruitment and for visa reasons. Job sites charge lots of money to list, a company wouldn’t waste money advertising a job they don’t intend to hire for.

Why you don’t make harder questions that would probably require to use ai?

Real job you have ai, so no point to ask too many things that ai can answer anyway.

Ok, some big level stuff like node has an event loop.

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

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.

HR was much better at "employee retention" historically.