I have to put out a ghost job req and interview every person applying within reason for every green card a direct report is applying for. I have to show there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job
The main problem is: even if the interviewee knocks it out of the park, is an amazing engineer, I still am not interested in firing my OPT/h1b team member who can still legally work for 2-3 years. So while I will deny their green card application and not submit it, I also won’t hire the interviewee
I'm glad our government has introduced the H1B program to help out employers like you who are dealing with a shortage of tech workers (who will work for 2/3 market and will do anything you say because if they get fired they'll be deported).
In 2023 there were 755,020 H1-B admittances. Why was it much easier to get a job in 2021? Because there were only 148,603 [1]. Notice that even though Republicans talked about immigration, neither party is talking about reducing H1-B filled roles. The kicker is if you’ve had a gap doing your own thing or because you were laid off and you apply for a job at a discount salary, you’re still not competitive against an H1-B worker because employers know you’d be able to trade up once you’ve been working for a few months.
These numbers probably don't mean what you think they mean. Certainly, the number of H-1B holders in 2021 and 2023 is about the same.
An "admittance" is someone with a H-1B visa appearing a port of entry like an airport to enter the US. If a single H-1B holder goes on (say) 3 international trips in 1 year, that will count as 3 "admittances" in that year.
The reason why the number is so low in 2021 is that the US government had a COVID non-immigrant travel ban. People with H-1B visas couldn't re-enter the US from many countries e.g. most countries in Europe. Many people in H-1B status (like myself) simply didn't take international trips that year.
(Although, even these statistics are not as simple as they seem! E.g., when an H-1B status holder changes employer this counts as a new receipt even though the number of H-1B workers hasn't changed. In periods of time when there is lots of churn in the labor market, like in 2022, you would see higher receipt numbers just from the churn. It's complicated!)
By law, the number of H1B visas issued per year is capped at 80k, and that's how many have been issued every year for the last twenty years.
"Admittance rates" measure how many H1B people travel internationally and then return to the USA. Unsurprisingly, in 2023, more people traveled internationally than in 2021, when almost all countries closed their borders.
Right, and while the fraudulent H1-B hires (taking jobs where there are qualified unemployed Americans who would like them) are taking jobs from Americans, the illegal immigrants, about to be deported, are not (even if we taxpayers are paying $500/night to put them up in NYC hotels etc).
I don't think Trump give a crap about helping American workers, anymore than his buddy Elon does - the anti-immigrant thing was just that.
India is exporting its poverty to the entire world. We have kids getting out of school that don't have a chance because of the H1B program. Need to get rid of the whole H1B program and repatriate all those here.
Any offspring also doesn't qualify for citizenship.
H1b should be a bid salery to play not first to apply. That is we will allow x of them, when you sponser someone you commit to paying them some salary for the full term - no layoffs (you get fire for cause but that is a legal thing they can take you to court for , and the courts can force you to give back pay if it wasn't a good cause) , you should know your budget can afford them. , someone who really is the best , offer them a million dollars to be sure they get in , just a warm body , if they don't get in who cares.
There are ways to abuse the above, but note they can always quit.
Add "automatic green card at the end of three years if sponsored again by the same employer".
Otherwise, the job would just be extremely cushy. Work the absolute bare minimum not to give cause for dismissal, and you're untouchable for the duration.
Companies should vet their emplopees better than that before hiring. Though there is potential to fire for cause if someone who should be able to do the work in 40 hour weeks isn't getting it done.
note that I added a 40 hour work week qualifier above.
...If your goal was to force companies to hire native citizens wherever possible, and only H1B workers when absolutely necessary, that might be the point.
one possible option to prevent ghost job posting for visa is to force employers to share the hiring month, salary, qualification and annonymized resume of the H1B/GC employer with all those they interviewed or applied. This will give closure to those applicants that didn't get the job.
This means small companies may not get good talent that value things besides salary (wfh, perks, fun project) and will have to compete with corporations for people who only cares about money. This may (or may not) impact startups
I value a good manager, a fun team, an actual PTO policy I can use, and cool projects to work with at about $40,000 a year. Salary is valuable but it is not the only valuable thing.
Salary is the most valuable thing, however. Because I would happily take a salary of 1 billion dollars with an awful manager and a no-fun team. And, conversely, I would never take a job with the best people on planet earth for a salary of one dollar.
If you were offered a job with an awful manager and a no-fun team for $250,000, and a job with the best people on the planet for $249,999, which one would you choose?
Right, naturally the extent matters, but it's still the most important statistic when doing cost analysis.
Also, other statistics are just wage in disguise. Work-life balance refers to working less, which means a higher wage. PTO is also just working less, which is a higher wage. WFH means less driving + lower cost of living, which is an effective higher wage.
Well, of course, you can make up hypotheticals. I used to say that you couldn't pay me enough to work in NYC. But of course I didn't literally mean that I wouldn't take FU money for a couple years to work there (not doing anything criminal etc.). But that wasn't going to realistically happen.
If you can't live off of $40,000 a year, you are not taking that job. I'm not saying there aren't people already independently wealthy and "working" for fun but those are an infinitesimal exception.
I think they mean that they will take a job with those benefits for 40k less than a job without. I assume generally they are looking at positions that pay substantially more than that.
I get your point, but if that were completely true, no one would work in the videogame or embedded software sectors. They pay dramatically less, especially early in career.
I'd argue that most workers value several things over salary. Very few people are trying to maximize their income at the expense of everything else. They tend to limit their job searches to places near their families. They apply to jobs they'd enjoy doing or at least wouldn't mind vs jobs they'd hate but which pay better. They don't apply to jobs that pay well but are also highly dangerous. etc.
Money > everything just isn't how most people see the world.
Changing the work hours doesn't technically affect "salary" but it's a change in wages. I think your example mostly reinforces the point, but we should be using the word "wages" to be clearer.
Fidessa is pretty famous on Wall Street for paying lower salaries but being much more fun to work for. They have tons of at-work and after-work events (with and without alcohol). There are lots of people who stay at Fidessa for much less money than they could make at another firm.
Maybe software-adjacent people applying to startups, but in general, this obviously can't be true. Relatively low-paying but high-status jobs, like FBI agent, military officer, elected official, judge wouldn't exist, nor low-paying passion work like social worker, wildlife conservation, most non-profits, low-paying jobs that are simply fun like most musicians, pro athletes in unpopular sports. Plenty of capable, talented people who could be making more money choose not to.
Of course people value things besides salary, but if there was no salary or the salary would not be enough to live off, none of those things matter in any way. So first and foremost (unless you're a billionaire's son) is salary, for everyone.
I worked at a globally remote company. Most of the European devs worked for a one man consulting company, that my employer then "contracted" out to. I'm not sure if that nullifies all the protections, but I'm sure it did a lot.
Wealthier European countries seem to be moving towards clamping down on this kind of consulting. See IR35 in the UK as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IR35
This is still possible in many European countries, especially less wealthy ones.
I mean, IR35 happened because you could avoid a lot of tax as a contractor. In Ireland however, being a contractor is fine, but you end up basically paying the same tax as an employed person, so the tax authorities don't mind.
I live in Austria and you can fire people for pretty much any reason. You have to give them 6 weeks notice, and there are some extra protections for people who are old or who have disabilities and who have been working for your company for a long time, but even then you can fire them.
You can even fire people for getting sick a lot.
And that's assuming you directly hire them as employees in the first place. Many people work via agencies or as contractors, and they have practically zero protections.
Wow, I am genuinely shocked by this post. I had no idea. Honestly, I assumed that most central European countries have reasonably strong labour laws that make it difficult to fire employees. Let us assume that your post is (mostly) true. How does Austria have such a large, robust, stable middle class without strong labour protections, or a wide/deep social safety net? Or does Austria have the equivalent of "Flexcurity" from Denmark (easy to fire, but wide/deep social safety net for a moderate period of time)?
Labour protections doesn't mean you are protected from being fired.
You have to pay people the minimum salary depending on their trade, you have to give them 5 weeks of vacation, pay overtime, pay for health insurance and so on.
Employers can't exploit their employees, but employees still have to do their job.
But there is also a big area of the economy where employers ignore the law and treat employees like shit. For example, service workers are not generally treated well in Austria, and many are afraid of losing their job so they don't complain to the authorities.
Maybe the statement isn't true for EU as a whole, but some member countries have far higher bar than what you describe. For instance in Spain the company must provide justification to the government before firing someone.
I don't know about the situation in Spain, but what a lot of people in Austria mix up is that there are different types of terminating contracts.
In Austria, the employer can terminate a contract immediately if the employee behaves in a manner that would harm the employer.
If the employee does nothing wrong, the contract can still be terminated, but you have to give notice 6 weeks ahead (or longer if the employee has worked at your company for a long time).
People get these things confused and think employees generally can't be fired without a reason, but that's not true. They just can't be fired on the spot without a reason.
Just speaking from my experience -- if the company is a big corp, usually the wages follow average market rates (I was paid market average wage in a top advertising corp in the world and I got my green card there in 6-7 years). Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out average market rates for each job category and the H1B sponsor has to match or pay above that to get the H1B application approved. I was also checking out my market rates (i.e., applying for other companies that allows H1B transfer) constantly during my H1B time because I can move to another job if my current company was paying me lower than average wages.
On the other hand, for some shady companies that are set up as contract shops, then I'd not be surprised if the wages are lower than average market rate, but I have never worked at one, so I might be misleading by even mentioning this here.
Your question is why is it wrong to depress wages? Yeah, really tough question.
Now consider OPT visa workers which are being paid even less, plus companies get an extra 8-10% discount because they don't have to pay Social Security and Medicare.
There is no shortage of skilled workers here. Only corporate greed.
You seem to be genuinely curious, which is commendable.
>Will that apply to every law in society or just to H1B laws?
The H1B laws are harder to enforce than most laws -- or so it would seem to me -- because the question of whether there are Americans that are able to do a particular job at a particular workplace depends on many fiddly details that only the managers of the particular workplace (the prospective defendant in any enforcement action) would know.
When lawyers working on Capitol Hill are serious about stamping out a behavior, they write laws that are easy to enforce (unambiguous, not relying much on human judgment). Something as vague as, "as long as there are no Americans qualified to do the job," suggests that whoever wrote that just wants to reassure critics of the H1B program without caring much whether H1B workers actually displace American workers.
This is the lump of labor fallacy. People are both consumers and laborers; by bringing someone new into a labor market you marginally decrease demand for their skill set but you also marginally increase demand for all other labor. If H1-B visa holders all worked in the same industry, it could conceivably lower wages in that industry but they don't. They work in everything from healthcare, to IT, to education.
You know what’s actually obnoxious? spreading nonsense for internet points. This is all public data btw so you can easily go on DOL website and pull those apps with real salaries.
If we are trading anecdotes here I personally dont know any h1bs who are making less than 300k total comp. Hows that for obnoxious?
Wait, this isn't clear to me. Are the interviewees citizens? So you're interviewing citizens to prove that there aren't any who can fill your jobs but even when they clearly could fill the job you don't hire them? Seems like the requirement of proving "there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job" is going to be near impossible for the government to enforce
Yes, h1b hiring practices have been shady at best for atleast a decade. For everyone that just doesn’t want to fire a coworker there is someone taking advantage of cheap labor that is easier to control under the threat of deportation.
The h1b program is supposed to be for people at the top of their field so they can skip the normal visa line, but it is commonly used to save money through exploitation.
A long time ago I read an hn comment that suggested h1b visas should go to the highest paying jobs, with the logic being that if they are such a rare talent they should probably be getting paid more.
I've been programming since the early 90's, and back then pretty much all my coworkers were other US citizens. I started to notice a shift toward the mid 90's and then, by the late 90's, they were practically all Indians on H1B visas. Nobody from Russia, China, El Salvador, Brazil, Japan, Botswana, Ethiopia or even Bangladesh or Pakistan - virtually every programmer I met was an Indian citizen in the US on an H1B visa. I saw this across ten employers in two different states. Every tech conference I went to, regardless of city, was full of Indian citizens with heavy accents, and me.
There's a prevailing belief that US employers prefer H1B visa holders because they'll work cheaper and not complain about poor working conditions but if that's true... why computer programmers, specifically? Why are there _any_ Americans in the organization? Surely the product owners, project managers, scrum masters, HR staff, janitors, facilities maintenance, receptionists, directors, VPs and CEOs could be filled cheaper and less complainier by an H1B visa holder too?
I have yet to find a plausible explanation why specifically computer programming (and no other career) is dominated specifically by Indian citizens (and no other nationality).
Computer programming is easily verifiable, the code works or it doesnt. so you dont need good english, and your education doesnt really matter since either you write working code or you dont. its also a massive cost on businesses. theres like a thousand reasons
1. India has ~130 million English speakers, second only to United States.
2. IIT.
3. Culture matters, both on the recruitment side and demand side. Indian outsourcing built a pipeline decades ago so it's now a well understood career path in India.
4. Non-technical positions tend to require greater social competencies in the hiring/customer culture. US programmers already complain about the cultural tendencies of their Indian colleagues. The social and political aspects of other careers are less amenable to dropping in a rando with limited understanding of the culture.
> The h1b program is supposed to be for people at the top of their field so they can skip the normal visa line, but it is commonly used to save money through exploitation.
Incorrect - such people already qualify for green cards under the "alien of extraordinary ability" criterion. At least in theory, anyway.
There is no "normal visa line" btw, unless you mean the green card diversity lottery, which people from eg. India and China don't even qualify for.
> A long time ago I read an hn comment that suggested h1b visas should go to the highest paying jobs, with the logic being that if they are such a rare talent they should probably be getting paid more.
This is in principle a good idea although I suspect that if actually implemented employers would figure out how to game the system just as they do now.
> Though it is supposed to be for skilled jobs that a capable american is not available to do.
No it's not. The H-1B program has no requirement for a labor market test (i.e. showing that there is no citizen that can do the job). The Immigration and Nationality Act, which is the source of the H-1B program, does not have such a requirement. The only big requirements are that the job require a degree (except for fashion models) and that it pays the prevailing wage.
It is 100% required for employment-based green card from a H1B. Anyone that has gone through this process knows this as their own job had to be posted to several job posting sites and each and ever candidate had to be reviewed and discounted in some ways (my company added crap to the posting such that it was simply impossible for someone to be as qualified for the job as me unless they sat next to me and did what I did for 5+ years…)
Nope, it's not 100% required, there are exceptions for certain job categories like nursing and there's also the extraordinary ability exception.
(Not trying to be pedantic but US immigration law is full of random loopholes and people who qualify for them, or might be able to qualify with a bit of work, often aren't aware.)
huh I thought the “good faith steps to recruit U.S. workers” part was for every company, but apparently it’s only for certain companies receiving money or who have already got in trouble.
I would have been more against it if I realized that.
Yeah. To be clear I think it's fair to be critical of the current shape of the H-1B program (personally, I think the way it's used by outsourcing companies is pretty bad).
But there's a logical fallacy in these discussions in which people criticize the current H-1B program for not being compliant with some made-up version of what the H-1B program is. If you don't like the current program, the solution is not "we need to do what the law says" because in fact the current program is 100% compliant with the law. The solution is to change the law.
> The h1b program is supposed to be for people at the top of their field so they can skip the normal visa line, but it is commonly used to save money through exploitation.
This is false. O-1 is the visa for the "people at the top of their field". H-1B is for regular employees.
At the last startup I worked at, our CTO was on a visa.
To satisfy the "no one in the US can fill the CTO role", they took out an advertisement in a San Francisco newspaper classifieds so they had evidence that they attempted to find a US citizen / permanent resident CTO.
This used to be fairly common for H1B roles of any level - I don't find it surprising almost no one wants to fire a colleague ultimately, so doing whatever you could to reduce the number of applicants while still paying lip service to the rules is the logical outcome, rightly or wrongly.
For what its worth, towards end of 2010s USCIS were starting to clamp down on this and were being a lot stricter about the job being advertised appropriately for the role (you submit evidence of the advertisement during the PERM process).
A tell for fake firms in my local newspaper is they ask for a snail mail resume. These appear to me to be more like shell companies submitting multiple H1Bs as far as I can tell though, not legit firms saying they cannot hire any US.
CTO actually makes sense for an h1b though, it’s a high paying job that can depend greatly on the technical and creative skills of the individual and how they mesh with the company.
The problem is when it’s someone pumping out code, or doing tech support for half the cost of the local competition.
CTO is not such an exceptional role that you can convince me that a company couldn't find a single person in America who would be qualified to take it
It's also a highly sought after role, so people would generally be willing to relocate for a role like that
H1Bs are designed to fill labour shortages, where your local labour market is saturated and you are struggling to find local talent or attract talent from further away, so you can import workers
Using a visa designed to fill labour shortages for an executive position like CTO is frankly an abuse of the system
But arguably any labor shortage can be fixed by just having way higher wages.
Like if Google is struggling to hire L3 entry level engineers, can't they just offer $1 million/year salary? Then of course they will get the people they want.
To me, the point of H-1B and similar programs isn't "we can't get the individual staff we need". It's rather that at a society-wide level, having more software engineers at an overall lower salary can be more beneficial to the country than fewer engineers at a higher salary. And I feel that the success of Silicon Valley kind of shows this: if we didn't have any immigrants to the US, maybe the salaries would have been higher, but there is simply no chance SV would have reached the scale it has.
>But arguably any labor shortage can be fixed by just having way higher wages.
In the long term perhaps, but not in the short term. Bidding wars over an inadequate supply of suitably-skilled labour are good for those workers, but they aren't good for the economy or society as a whole.
> It's rather that at a society-wide level, having more software engineers at an overall lower salary can be more beneficial to the country than fewer engineers at a higher salary.
Beneficial to owners of capital in said country. Not so beneficial to non owners of capital (also usually labor sellers) in said country.
For non-workers the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, while for workers the disadvantages outweigh the benefits.
If your income is from owning capital or from real estate value increase or from government benefits, then anything that can reduce the price of things you want to buy is a benefit. This is a large part of the population.
If your income is from working and producing goods and services, then getting paid less is a negative that is far worse than the positive from cheaper things.
Many people have their foot in both camps. Their main source of income is from their real estate appreciating in value, while working is just a means to pay off the old mortgage so that they soon can get a new cash out by mortgaging at a higher value.
It's very much also economic warfare waged by the elderly against the young. The elderly own almost all capital and are interested in increasing it. Keeping the young as poor as possible is excellent for them, so as to keep them from being a threat to their wealth and power.
I'll be the first to admit that the disadvantages outweigh the benefits for specific workers. NAFTA sucked for autoworkers. H1B visas suck for IT and software workers.
I think other types of workers benefit more than the portrait you paint, and not just the capital owners.
Unless you are a utilitarian (I'm not), I agree there is a valid debate on how much policy should disadvantage a small group for "the greater good".
H1b only sucks for short sighted people. Places like India would in any case have more software engineers available, than the US. Moving and hiring best of Indian engineers in the US kept teams operating in the US from being offshored wholesale.
Software isn't a car, doesn't require physical transportation.
An understaffed team in the US would be worth less than an offshore team with offshoring overhead.
Sure, I benefit that a washing machine costs $600 instead of $6000. That benefit is small in comparison with if my yearly income would be double. In almost all possible scenarios, higher wages are better than cheaper goods. You cannot improve your economic situation by purchasing cheap consumer goods, but you can do it with higher income.
btw the actual couch used by Marie Antionette is now on display at the San Francisco Legion of Honor.. a very expensive couch! at least a dozen people must have benefited economically from that couch.
That’s true, but in reality, the US chains the engineers and doctors with the specter of losing their visa and arduous paperwork over their head so that they are coerced into selling their labor at an even lower price.
I'm the first to admit it isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean there is no net benefit. hundreds of thousands of people are paid market wages on H1B visas and many get green cards. On balance, this is good for consumers and citizens.
I feel like people have a gut reaction to injustice and harm where they want to trash the whole system, not realizing that would be an even greater injustice and harm.
It is a counterproductive distraction to real change and improvement. It just scratches the emotional itch of moral outrage and superiority.
I do not want to "trash the whole system", but when I see laws crafted specifically and solely to depress labor prices, it is reasonable to get emotional and feel morally superior. Why else would we give work authorization to a person, but then restrict them to a single employer such as with H1-B?
See also lower minimum wages and separate labor standards for poorer Mexican immigrants in agriculture, not to mention the complete lack of requirement for employers to ensure legal work authorization, and complete lack of consequences for employers that employ people without work authorization.
> Why else would we give work authorization to a person, but then restrict them to a single employer such as with H1-B?
H1B visas are not restricted to a single employer. The catch is that the new employer is required to demonstrate the new role is valid for H1B work.
This is a control to make sure that H1-B visa holders are not underpaid or doing abusing the system.
It is a genuinely tough problem. You could decouple the H1B visa from the employer position, but then you have people entering for one type of work at market rate, and doing any type of work and undercutting salaries.
The whole employer requirement is an attempt to protect native workers. Letting H1B workers enter decoupled from a job and salary requirement would be much better for employers. They could pay them minimum wage and hire them into any role they want.
Im curious to hear ideas for how it could be structured that is better. Im sure there are options. Maybe the workers themselves could submit the info for change of employment, but I dont know how they would prove the work is at prevailing wage.
It is. Best case scenario H1Bs allow companies to avoid training citizens. Worst case (and most common) H1Bs are more exploitable labor compared to citizens.
H1Bs etc just suppress citizens wages and increase profits of capital holders. There’s a very very tiny % that actually aren’t replaceable domestically.
This is an excellent point and a real litmus test.
If there really were a labor shortage companies would be providing training programs to build that labor force.
Instead they post job descriptions so niche only a liar could technically qualify.
After reading it a few times my understanding is this:
An H1B job holder applies for a green card. OP then must interview to prove the role can't be filled by a citizen. An interviewee knocks it out of the park, failing the check and so the green card application is denied. However the person holding the job is still legally allowed to work for 2-3 years in their H1B. So they're kept on for that long even though the check failed for the green card.
> Seems like the requirement of proving "there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job" is going to be near impossible for the government to enforce
the person applying for the green card already works for the interviewing company. the job opening is THAT green card applicant's job requirements.
the lawyer/law firm handling the green card application process has to prove that there are no US citizens who are qualified to do the job.
if there were qualified applicants for the job, then the green card applicant won't be given a green card, I assume. But that green card applicant is already working in the country via some other visa, so there is no job opening to fill typically.
the current person in the job is performing well, otherwise, why would you be trying to get a green card for them?
i've never heard of any green card applicant getting denied a green card due to a qualified US citizen applicant.
If the labor market test yields a candidate, the petition isn't filed. So there is formally no rejection from the USCIS. But application processes fail at this step all the time.
You explained it perfectly. I’d never lie, if I interviewed someone comparable the process ends immediately internally. But the employee (who is still an amazing employee, exceeds, promotions,
Etc) is not fired
The requirement you mention is for filing a green card application.
If I find a good citizen, I don’t file the application, that’s the law. But the employee does have h1b or OPT and is still allowed to work in the US, nothing wrong with that. If the government wants to stop giving those out workplaces will adapt
> Seems like the requirement of proving "there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job" is going to be near impossible for the government to enforce
It's extremely easy to enforce with taxes that ensure the company is paying at least 1X0% of the highest market rate for the position. If they don't find an alternative to paying it is a necessary hire.
The requirement to pay market rate already exists and it's very easily gamed, eg. by under-leveling people or hiring them in under a related (but lower paid) role that doesn't reflect their actual responsibilities.
There's no premium financing proper adversarial regulatory agency there. If the IRS is not taking its special ~30% of 300+ workers salaries there's a best effort by a regulatory body that's viewed as a waste of tax payer money if it just checks a few technicalities.
This has been going on for decades. My first job out of university was at a dotcom consultancy with over 90% of software engineers there on H1B visas. The company was not at all shy about the fact that they only hired citizens/permanent residents if they had no other choice. I was hired because I had experience with a particular obscure RTOS that they couldn't find anyone on a visa who could do the work on a project they already told a client we were experts in.
Our VP of Software Engineering (here on a visa himself) stood right next to my desk telling one of our programmers not to worry about his visa expiring because they'd post his job for 24 hours on the company website, accept resumes for one week, and then declare the job unfillable by local talent so he could get his visa renewed. This was in 2000 and this type of thing has been practiced openly and with no fear of there ever being any consequences for violating both the letter and spirit of the law regarding using labor visas.
These threads end up fire hosed with people claiming hiring visa holders over citizens and permanent residents doesn't happen nor does it push down wages. They know these are lies and have been lies for decades. But since there are no consequences, legally or socially, it continues to be the default behavior. This in turn warps local talent development as more and more kids see that there's little reason to go into a career field where the government and business openly collude to disadvantage locals in favor of visa labor.
> These threads end up fire hosed with people claiming hiring visa holders over citizens and permanent residents
They apparently also get fire-hosed with comments on the horrors of H1B hiring in a thread that is on green card application rules, i.e., all youb commenters on H1B did not even read the GP post. Those rules require advertising for a filled position, but don't require firing the current holder when you find a good candidate.
I agree. I did hire someone on an H1B in the early 2010's and he was, to put it mildly, the perfect candidate for the job and I don't think I could have found anyone anywhere to do it. Someone else at the company was hired, into sales, and they were pretty good for the job (a Japanese person to service the Japanese market), but you could argue that citizen speakers of Japanese do exist and should have been given priority.
My one hope for the next administration is that they crack down hard on this sort of thing and pursue comprehensive immigration reform. A company that relies on labor from people who don't even have permanent residency rights probably shouldn't exist, and yes, I'm including agriculture in that statement. We should have a points based system like Canada with some carve outs for lower skilled ag workers.
lol you think immigration is a real concern? remember the convoy, or the W Bush era?
half of US farms, meat packing, restaurants, construction, etc. rely on undocumented labor. the GOP owned the house and Senate for years, and could have crushed it well before now.
they don't because a lot of big business want these illegals, and the same folks backing the new administration -- aka tech bros like Musk and Thiel -- are totally down with H1Bs
The law says I can’t submit the I-140 application, which I follow the law and I don’t submit it.
As a people manager it’s a heartbreaking conversation to have - to tell a report their dream of staying beyond their visa is gone
The law says every line manager needs to do their own industry pulse check every time an i-140 is submitted. And this is the only legal way to pulse check (advertise a ghost job). It would be much easier if the federal government did the pulse check one time for everyone and decided if engineers are or aren’t missing in the industry
So… the interviewee doesn’t get the job even though they knocked it out of the park, and the H1B doesn’t get their visa because the other interviewee did well. Basically nobody wins, and the H1B person is out of a job in 2-3 years?
Yes, this is precisely what the comment thread is saying. Shmatt’s original post should shock you with its conclusion because everyone loses including shmatt.
I’m not necessarily shocked but more appalled. I’ve always wondered this - in tech there’s very little reason to believe that you need to import talent. Learning is mostly democratized these days, and I find it hard pressed to believe that there isn’t a US Citizen for literally any tech company. But they cost more hence they try to do the whole H1B process… which then comes to bite them back.
Exactly, and I don’t understand the fraud comments because this is exactly how US lawmakers intended the system the work. Easy to come for 3-6 years, hard to stay forever
It would be better if the “replaceable” part was determined on the federal level and not on the team level. That would get rid of all the ghost jobs
I dislike this system as much as you do. Clearly the PERM cert is flawed. I suppose the system is working as intended, and I'm not sure what the drama is, although of course, from a human empathy point of view, I feel like the story is making you look like the worst actor in this scenario.
That is unfair, but forgive me: you hold all the cards and occupy the most powerful position in the story, and you are framing it in absolutes, trying to make yourself a victim, talking about it as though you are powerless.
I’ve only had very limited experience with colleagues on OPT and my role as a hiring manager with an OPT visa holder.
There’s a big difference between a tech enabled agency, sometimes called a “body shop” - where you are B2B, you are someone’s lower cost option, you are a middleman - and a startup, where whatever you are developing - seemingly B2B, social media apps, hardware, biotech - in some form or another, your core business is capturing 90%+ margins on the LTVs of end users. With experience only in the startup style business, you ought to structure the economics of the deals to your employees such that they can buy what they want if everything works out, and all the incentives align.
So to me, it’s not super material, green card this, PERM certification that: if you make a ton of money, you can surmount any bureaucratic obstacle in this country. Is that the purpose of the system? A complex administrative problem like UCSIS policy and related politics cannot defeat the power of the almighty dollar. So for people who have agency, like startup CEOs, it’s possible to sincerely offer a path to citizenship in the US, in light of things like O1, E1, marriage, etc, that doesn’t break any laws, but only costs money.
> The law says I can’t submit the I-140 application, which I follow the law and I don’t submit it.
Sorry, I'm still unclear. What rule says you can't submit your employee's green card application even though you've determined that you won't hire a citizen to do that job?
This is not a constant fact, though. In 2021 there were not enough qualified US work eligible candidates to go around. Right now is going to be a very different story for many roles.
Just wanted to say thanks for sharing this, dude -- a lot of other replies are complaining (because this does suck for US citizens), but I imagine it also sucks for you, since (IIUC) you just want to keep your good developer and also not lie to the government. It's not fun to hear about but it's better it's said out loud, right. Sorry you're in this situation
No. Many (especially smaller) companies don't want to hire people who need visa sponsorship because it requires a decent amount of overhead. The company needs to have an immigration lawyer to prepare and submit paperwork, which many smaller companies don't want to bother with.
FWIW it's illegal to require "US citizenship" in a job description. You can, however, say "eligible to work in the US". (The former would be discriminatory against non-citizen permanent residents). Although I'm also not a lawyer.
There are actually situations where U.S. citizenship can be a requirement, e.g., cleared jobs but there needs to be a really good reason like not being able to obtain clearances.
SpaceX has been through the wringer on this one, so just copy & paste from their listing:
To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.
The SpaceX case was centered around ITAR regulations. ITAR jobs do not necessarily require security clearance. As the person you responded to mentioned, you have to be a citizen to get security clearance and related jobs. Asylum seekers and refugees can't get clearance.
Those companies are breaking the law. SpaceX was prosecuted for doing that.
Now SpaceX says:
To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.
If the position requires a security clearance, they are not breaking the law. Language like this is standard on defense contractor postings that require clearances (this from Lockeed):
> Security Clearance Statement: This position requires a government security clearance, you must be a US Citizen for consideration.
> SpaceX was prosecuted for doing that.
SpaceX was prosecuted for excluding refugees and asylees from export-controlled positions, not cleared positions.
Non-US citizens can't get a security clearance. Permanent residents can at most get a limited access authorization. The SpaceX case involved ITAR, not clearance.
No, because most places don't want to go through the hassle of sponsoring a visa.
Though once a place does want to go through the hassle, it seems to be the only kind of work they hire because they get a huge discount on labor. Of everyone I know IRL on work visas, almost all of them work in companies/teams that are 99% work visa.
I guess this is a case of "don't hate the player, hate the game." although the question remains why they filled the role with an H1B candidate in the first place if they could find locals that could do the job. That piece is clearly unethical and done only for wage suppression.
More like a case of “perhaps dont make judgements if your knowledge on the subject is aprox zero”. Again, same question as upthread - show me how prevailing wage is suppressing the market. The h1b could also been issued years ago like in 2021 for example
usually, they find this local person later. But is it right to replace then? Wage suppression but usually H-1Bs and other work immigration visas are not lower paid at big tech co
In this example the amazing engineer is a citizen or permanent resident already
If my superiors would give me extra unexpected budget I’d be happy to. But if I find a citizen that is just as good as my opt employee, my only path forward is to either fire the opt or let them continue on the team but not submit their GC application (because I have to swear I couldn’t find a citizen that is just as good)
…because if you grant them the green card they will up and get a new job? The incentives here are so screwed up for everyone, it effectively codifies a caste system of immigrant workers.
I took the implication to be that GP already had a good employee who was hired legitimately under the terms of the H1B, but that, to convert to a green card, you have to see whether a US person could do the job. So you have to put out for interviews to see, but you don’t have to act on that information.
If the interview process yields a US person equally qualified, GP can’t (and doesn’t) certify the guest worker’s green card application. But that doesn’t mean they have to fire them and send them home early: they can let the guest worker work out their contract if they want to (which they probably do, it probably pays well compared to other options). And an experienced, already-trained, good employee is probably more valuable to the business than an immediate, unplanned new hire anyway.
So yes, certainly screwed up incentives—but I don’t see how it would be better to require guest workers to put their jobs in immediate jeopardy just to apply for permanent residency.
exactly that. you actually want/need a few years of warning if your greencard is going to be accepted or not. having to put out a ghost job in order to find out if the greencard is going to be accepted is really the problem (for the ghost candidate)
It'd be fabulous if this was an option, but green card applications have all sorts of caps and aren't even just "wait in a line for N years." They are random every year and every year you fail to get approved you get no closer to being approved.
The effect is that you can have excellent engineers who've been in the US for a decade+ who are still in this liminal space where they don't have legal permanent residency.
You're comparing the vast swathes of mediocre talent to the best from the rest of the world. Of course the top talent from elsewhere is going to beat the average talent from the US.
You have to prove you tried interviewing and couldn’t find anyone to replace them. My company isn’t a super popular employer so we don’t get the best candidates. This might be a bigger problem at Google, Meta, etc
So you are simultaneously screwing over the ones applying to the job, the government, the guy already working for you and yourself? Geez, it must be amazing in your department, a lose-lose-lose-lose
An understandable situation. But by admitting this, your company is admitting liability for citizenship discrimination (8 U.S.C. § 1324b).
Even though you are not submitting a PERM and running into potential issues with fraud there, the underlying act of rejecting US citizen/LPR applicants is the same, so I don't see how this would be any different than, for example, the Apple case last year (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-secures-25...) with a $25M settlement.
In the Apple case, the company did actually obtain PERMs for some of the positions, but they were only charged with discrimination against the un-hired applications, not anything to do with the the hiring/sponsoring of the foreign workers. Furthermore, the case did not even allege actual tossing out of US citizen resumes, but merely making the applications deliberately inconvenient to avoid actually receiving any unwanted "real" applications.
I don't think you interpret the Apple case correctly. They got fined for advertising PERM job postings differently from regular job openings, distorting the test in the view of the agency. That has nothing to do with the post you are responding to.
It would go to the Immigrant and Employee Rights Section, Civil Rights Division, USDOJ. I think they only take formal complaints from those who applied though (it is different from the regular EEOC process though--the government itself acts as the complainant). You could try just sending them an email.
From the discussion in the rest of the thread, this test isn't required for hiring someone in a H1B in the first place, but it is required to upgrade it to a green card.
I can’t tell if this is satire or actual comic book villain behavior. I guess not really villain behavior, but certainly gaming a clearly broken system
OP already hired H-1B in the past and that person is working for them now. OP is now in the process of doing a green card application for said employee. They can't move forward with the GC application because there are other qualified citizens/residents, but they don't have to fire the existing H1B employee.
That's how I understand OP, if that's legally true or not, I don't know.
You're correct that they are under no obligation to fire the employee on the H-1B. (In theory, they are applying for a "new" job, and them not getting it for whatever the reason isn't an issue for their current job and status.)
However, what OP is missing is that rejecting the US citizen application based on their citizenship is still likely a prohibited discrimination case regardless of what they do with the existing employee.
OP isn't rejecting the US citizen application because they are a US citizen - they are rejecting all candidates applying for the position regardless of ability to do the job or not since the position is already filled. There was no intent to fill the position to begin with - just a test to see if they can sponsor the current h1b employee for their greencard or not. There is no discrimination if no applicant had a chance of being hired to begin with.
They might be running afoul of discrimination laws if they only interview US citizens to cut down on their workload for fake interviews, but I'd guess someone this careful (e.g. not actually submitting the greencard sponsorship where many employers would with a wink and a nod) is likely careful enough to not filter candidates on such obvious things either.
It's a problem with the h1b (and green card) program itself, not OPs behavior. If anything, OP is probably in the top few percentile of ethical businesses/managers if they are actually denying the sponsorships because they made a good faith attempt to test to see if the local market had appropriate candidates.
Interesting.
So practically, they would have to hire the new applicant and then let go of the h1b worker because presumably they don’t have the budget for it?!
'''shmatt 47 minutes ago | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost J...
I have to put out a ghost job req and interview every person applying within reason for every green card a direct report is applying for. I have to show there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job
The main problem is: even if the interviewee knocks it out of the park, is an amazing engineer, I still am not interested in firing my OPT/h1b team member who can still legally work for 2-3 years. So while I will deny their green card application and not submit it, I also won’t hire the interviewee'''
Yes, the depression the administration’s tariffs (and other policies) will produce will eliminate the jobs done by H1B workers, among others, and eliminate the incentives for economic immigration.
I actually couldn't begin to guess. The only thing I have to go on is, I think the administration is angling to do a sort of bust-out rather than enrich anybody, even those 'on their side'. If that's so, then much like with the FDA, there'll be some funny choices that lead to alarming outcomes.
I just don't know whether that would mean more h1b and ghost jobs, or less.
Trumps has talked multiple times about “stapling green cards to diplomas”. His rhetoric on illegal immigration is going to result in illegals who have committed a felony being deported and that’s it (just like every other neocon).
Making America better for Americans won’t happen until both sides realize neither party is looking out for the interests of American people and uses social issues etc to keep us divided.
As someone who went though the legal means when he was in the office last time, he will primarily hurt the legal immigration... because that is the easiest thing for them to do - grind USCIS to a halt.
Unlikely. "Staple a Green Card to their diploma" is what Trump had to say about students from other countries that graduate from US universities. Since out of country students pay the highest tuition rates, universities love them and give them preferential admissions. Though not as bad as elementary and high schools, universities suffer from grade inflation and are reluctant to kick out paying customers, especially those paying the highest tuition. As a consequence, academic standards are being reduced at a rapid rate.
If you want to come to the US to get a professional job, attending a US university instead of a domestic one is going to be worth the extra cost when it guarantees you a Green Card.
There might be a reduction in the flow of low skilled labor, especially for those looking to hire workers without legal status, but up the middle class portion of the labor market, expect the system to continue to favor cheap imported labor over domestic labor.
Generally not for Masters' programs though, which is the most popular and easiest way to get a temporary study visa. Then they pay out of state tuition rates.
>The trend could be due to the low marginal cost of posting additional job ads and to maintain a pipeline of talents. After adjusting for yearly trends, I find that ghost jobs can explain the recent disconnect in the Beveridge Curve in the past fifteen years. The results show that policy-makers should be aware of such a practice as it causes significant job fatigue and distorts market signals.
Very interesting.
I certainly have "gotten" what I thought was a ghost job. I went through the whole process ... they "wanted" to hire me. But didn't actually have a start date / couldn't actually hire me. For everyone involved though they seemed to be able to justify posting the job, interviews, because IMO, it made THEM look busy / effective.
The whole hiring people industrial complex seems oriented to be focused on the process of hiring (high fives for ever more complex hiring processes / delays) ... and not at all on the outcome (did we hire someone, were they good?).
It's the ultimate system where simply doing anything is "success" / and more processes rewarded, and there's almost no good measureless about outcomes for the company.
This is why many job seekers are perpetually passive/work through recruiters. An in-house recruiter may be there to perpetually screen for purple unicorn candidates that bend the CEO's hiring freeze - a contract recruiter won't work with a firm that can't actually hire.
I wish I could say I have a better experience with recruiters but I haven't. I've heard there are good recruiters, I don't doubt it, but it doesn't seem easy to find anymore than the next job is.
There really isn't a "good" recruiter from a candidate perspective. Their incentives are to support the firms they recruit for, and screen candidates. They do not work for your benefit.
My experience early in my career was that I needed to work with many of these recruiters until I found a gig. My experience at the time was weak, and my resume reflected that. I had to take the gigs which had lower competition e.g. systems administration.
Sort of. 3rd-party recruiters get paid on commission: they make money when their candidate gets hired in favor of the other recruiters' candidates. In that sense, the incentives are actually aligned in your favor when you're applying for a job that you really want: the recruiter is motivated to work to get you hired, and is only constrained by the need to not annoy the hiring manager. The incentives turn against you when the recruiter doesn't have any jobs that you really want, but is trying the numbers approach and putting you forward for things that you aren't really qualified for, "just in case" it's a good fit. You need to be aware that both of these scenarios can occur, so you can steer yourself away from the latter and towards the former.
The recruiter is still not really working for you, and the incentives are not aligned enough in your favor.
What we need is more of an "agent" like actors have: Maybe I don't have a full picture of what a Hollywood agent does, but I imagine they're constantly working in the background, looking for gigs for their busy actor, doing all the toil and paperwork and research on their behalf. Their end product is: "Studio X wants you to work on film A this year, and then Studio Y wants you to work on film B next year."
I could see a software engineer agent who gets paid by the engineer to do all of the application-filling-out, all the LinkedIn clicking, all of the company research, all of the pavement-pounding networking and paperwork toil, and all the interviewing, and then out comes: "Companies X, Y, and Z have these offers for you, which one do you want?" I'd probably pay a fortune, or maybe even a percentage of my comp, for a service like that.
The good recruiters are the ones who won't put you forward for a job that you're not qualified for, and will advocate for you during the hiring process in a job that you are qualified for. I have worked with recruiters like this before. But you need to screen the recruiter a bit, at least make sure that the jobs they are proposing for you actually make sense for you. If you are asking for SRE jobs in New York and they send you a DB Admin job req in New Haven, don't waste your time with that recruiter or that job.
> because IMO, it made THEM look busy / effective.
A KPI in hiring is offers made / accepted. I don't think the HR team gets credit for reviewing applicants and running interviews that don't result in one/both of these.
Not uncommon for in-house recruiters to keep sourcing new candidates and making them jump through all interviewing hoops even if they know the reqs aren’t open or till the morning they all get fired in a layoff that they know is coming. Agencies probably less so because they get paid commission.
If they don’t have real jobs available, what’s the point of building this “pipeline”?
Are they genuinely going to plan to use this pipeline for future roles? Because simply posting a real job in the future will still get 1000s of applications which builds _real_ pipeline
I don’t see recruiters going back through a bunch of old resumes to find “the one”. That’s not how that works and isn’t an efficient use of time
I was working for Meta in Bellevue, WA in 2022. Got laid off. Applied to several positions at MS (I was living in Redmond at the time), couldn't get a callback. Months and months go by, get a job, move across the country, get an email 9-12 months after applying that they'd like to interview me. I didn't even bother responding.
That's where the ghosting comes in. If you're always ghosting, then you always have recent people to get back to, not months old.
The pipeline isn't a lossless FIFO queue, in other words. People go in one end and are dropped out the other. In between are the recents you can call if a spot actually opens up.
Searching for people from scratch in reaction to a sudden demand will have much more latency than having someone you can pull from a recent roster of validated candidates.
It's exactly the same like how an integrated circuit can pull a sudden power demand from a capacitor placed next to it (often required by the datasheet), rather than from the power supply upstream, so there is no voltage sag affecting it and nearby components.
Or, in computing, prefetch and speculative execution, and such.
It can take months to hire a specialist from both but if you're constantly spinning plates, you have some lukewarm contacts as well as a list of obvious no's.
This "pipeline" thing is just an excuse. Companies are ALWAYS in the look for a special talent. This is not a real problem. If they find a very competent person they will offer the job. Otherwise, which is 99% of the time, they'll just say they're building a pipeline. It is the same mindset of a predator, they can justify being always looking for new pray, even though they know they'll only get it very rarely.
It makes everyone look busy. It helps calibrate interviewers so that the company remembers how to hire people. It maintains the illusion of growth.
The last point is important, historically startups/teams faced the risk of exodus once hiring stopped. As an employee, hiring is one of the few signals you have on the health of an opaque business.
I don't understand it either. I never had the company I had this experience with call me back, the whole experience was pretty off-putting.
But I suspect the "pipeline of talent" might be the internal excuse and in fact .... again there's no mensurables so no way to know if it is true or not. But someone can say they added folks to their "pipeline" like they add contacts on linkedin.
Having openings posted looks good to venture capitalists, which is, more and more, the way to succeed in our economy.
This has secondary effects of teaching people that having open positions is good just for the sake of it. They don't stop to analyze why they think that.
While the workers might be busy there are managers or HR people who want to appear busy, and job postings is a thing they can do. It also feels good to see a bunch of applicants and feel like you're in a position of power while sorting through them--and of some actual work comes along you can just ignore the applicants.
In short, there's no reason not to post a ghost job.
This isn't anything new. This exact same thing happened during the 2000-era dot-com bubble burst. There was a huge hiring freeze across all tech companies, yet somehow they were still posting job ads, but nobody was hiring. I even moved cities to work at a job where 10 of my friends worked (including the CEO as a good friend), and when I went in for the "interview" (the job was supposedly guaranteed) the CEO said he couldn't hire me because of a hiring freeze. I ended up freelancing for the company on-and-off for a couple of years, but it was barely enough to keep me fed. There was no other work anywhere. It was a rough 4 years, and we're going through the same thing now and have been for a while. I'm glad that this time I have a bit of job security, but I feel sorry for those that don't. I tried to warn everyone I could a few years ago that if they had a job, even if they didn't like it, they should consider staying because it's going to get rough. People laughed at me for suggesting this, but now nobody is laughing.
Hang on a minute. There is absolutely nothing in this research that measures the accuracy of this approach. A user saying "I was ghosted" is not, to my mind, proof of anything.
Job seekers almost never actually know if the job was real or not, so it's hard to see how Glassdoor reviews can ever provide the insight this work is looking for.
I do believe that "ghost" jobs exist, often for H1B purposes, but I don't think this work proves it.
Right! Everyone in this thread is discussing it as if it’s a proven fact when the approach is extremely sketchy. Based on this I would say 20% is a generous upper bound at most.
If I'm understanding this right, the author gave ChatGPT-4o 2000 reviews and asks it "Are you 90% sure that this is a ghost job". Then, the author used those as labeled examples, trained a BERT model to predict the ChatGPT decision, and then applied the BERT model to the rest of the dataset. I guess this is cool, but if the goal is to pinpoint some percentage of ghost jobs overall I'm very skeptical
(it's a bit disappointing that 200 comments into this thread there was only a single mention of either "BERT" or "ChatGPT" per ctrl-f)
There's also no historical baseline of comparison. I know for a fact that ghost jobs have existed for a long time. I don't see any evidence they are more prevalent now than 10 or 20 years ago.
While I'm disappointed at the scientific merits of the paper, I'm glad it was posted here which invited discussion on this topic. Someone feeling frustrated with their job app right now might find a speculative answer here.
(Currently waiting for "final decision" on 2 interviews which went well, but after 3 weeks, I'm starting to feel they're ghosting me)
The confirmation bias is certainly strong in many of the comments here, be cautious of accepting an explanation that makes you feel better over the alternatives
From the other side, they may be evaluating more candidates, hoping for a better fit. From the same side, I accepted an offer with another company after waiting for weeks for Google to respond, only to have them finally get back a couple days later. Someone dropped the ball on their end. Another interesting aspect is that I was laid off 4 weeks into my new job, only to then be hired by the team I was embedded with 2 weeks later, which goes to show you that large corps can be disorganized, so while one team is trying to hire to meet demand, the larger org is planning cuts to the workforce without giving them the heads up, while another part of the org is expanding with permission
A question I've had on my mind for a while now, watching this progression of fake or poisoned jobs, and miles of automatic systems to navigate:
At what point do people consider the well poisoned? Where they just check out and stop applying, to specific companies or in general, because its very very obvious that there isnt actually a valid hiring market at all.
I ask this question, because I've already passed this threshold, and have instead devoted the maximum of my time to personal ventures.
I'm already there with the monthly HN hiring threads. Not one of those companies over several years ever responded to me, even the ones where the listing felt tailor made for me, even the ones that literally said they respond to all applicants. They're a total waste of time lol
Seems like it would be beneficial to the community for someone to add some kind of a rating system for people posting in the HN hiring threads. I would expect at minimum to get a response.
Internet has gone to shit. It used to be much easier to find genuine people on the internet. Now, it is all marketing non-sense and filled with get-rich types.
My thoughts exactly. I haven't really tried many of the HN monthly postings myself very often, but once in a while I see something irresistible. But they never respond. Or they have an auto responder which doesn't count in my book.
When one company never responded, I added a comment to their ad the next month saying as much. The poor guy had to make up something about a spam filter.
Well, downvoting in the case discussing ghosting, right? But just like any voting system one datum doesn't really tell the story. Since creating throwaway accounts is pretty normal around here, I'd guess the solution is to reply to the posting calling out the "can't even be bothered to say fuck off" to warn others not to bother. Bonus points for doing that every month when they inevitably repost their fake listing next time
I think in a lot of cases HN job postings are from "companies" in such an early stage that they're not even sure if they've got funding. They post something thinking they're going to get funding to hire, but then it falls through. I put "companies" in quotes here because it's more like an idea for a company than an actual company.
In the last few months I've submitted dozens of job applications for positions where, as articulated by another commenter upthread, the person writing the JD could have been writing it based on my resume.
15+ YOE, interesting work, promotions with progression of responsibility and impact, deep experience working with executives on the business side, side projects, volunteering experience, I speak multiple natural languages (I even tried applying for some "international" roles), etc.
0 responses apart from "we're going with other candidates". Not even so much as a phone screen.
Inbound recruiting stream has dried up as well. In 2017-2018 I was getting a dozen or more emails from recruiters weekly. Now I get maybe one a month, typically for C2H or a full-time role w/ at least a 20% pay cut.
I've shifted my focus to entrepreneurial work and sharpening skills outside of tech.
Primarily working on growing a pressure washing business so I can be utterly done with (full-time, employee) tech work.
The other thing is an app / community for teaching meditation (a longtime passion of mine). I don't know if it will do well but if it nets me a half-dozen to a dozen students that I am instructing 1-1 via zoom for 20-30 minutes on a weekly basis when I FIRE here in the next five years I'll be happy.
I got laid off then brought back on last minute (whiplash), and though i was burned out while applying during the transition period, end of the day i needed a job.
So whether people check out as in, leave industry or take a smaller pay sure i can see that happening. But unless you have large savings or low expenses, you can’t really stop.
If it didn’t take 50 app submissions for 1 interview, and the interviews weren’t l33t code crap, then i’d be crazy enough to enjoy the process.
It really depends on the position of the prospective employee.
An unemployed person who needs a job should theoretically spend their workday hours on recruitment efforts. The prevalence of fake jobs might affect which roles they apply for but not the total number of applications.
However for employed individuals seeking a promotion it can have a big impact. Is it worth spending many hours of your leisure time applying/interviewing for a job that pays 10% more, if the job has even a small likelihood of being fake? Probably not.
The 'well could be poisoned' for unemployed people as well. Applying to job adverts isn't the only type of recruitment efforts; there is also further education and tending to professional social networks - the unemployed individual could easily consider these more valuable than applying to probably fake job adverts. Ultimately, this still hurts both worker and employer, because it just delays gainful employment and hides information from the market.
I gave up applying for jobs many years ago. Mostly because I am bad at the interview process. I maintain a good personal network and have a good reputation, so I can always find work.
Yep. I just decided to stop playing the game. I looked for about the first 6 months (a requirement for unemployment) but after that I decided to just retire. I was planning to work a few years more, but it's just not worth it. It's not only the ghost jobs, it's the whole interview process where you could spend days on interviews and take home tests and you still don't get the job. And then there's the ageism. No thanks. I'm out. Fortunately I can afford to be (frugally) retired.
IME, it’s been a crap system for decades. 7 of my last 7 jobs (over ~25 years) have been obtained through “my network” - ie former coworkers who enjoyed (tolerated?) working with me and were happy to make referrals, reach out, or in other ways help when I was looking for a new job. And often when I wasn’t looking.
There are many analogous questions! One of the most interesting challenges in life is trying to observe when the presentation of reality is fundamentally dishonest for some reason. The well poisoned, as it were.
I didn't know the hiring market was one of these situations, but I could see that being the case. Seems like a lot of hype and noise, but is anything really going on or is it just hollow?
Ghost jobs are certainly problematic, but I’ve been getting actual interviews where the technical bar feels too high. There’s extraordinarily little trust in previous job experience and interviews assess for test taking anxiety rather than actual skill[0].
- there are some positions that exist only to receive new personal data information. There are companies that scrape user data when you apply for a job
- some job positions are kept to make employees more productive
- some job positions are kept open to show investors "we are still hiring", "we have no problems, etc.
- some HR just want to have more and more data, some times it is just useful to have new CVs at hand
- my wife decided recently to apply to companies directly, not through work sites, to get directly to managers, etc.
- in the end my wife found job by word of mouth, someone knew someone, etc. etc.
Talking to a couple of people who found jobs recently, I realized that none of them actually found the job by applying online. All of them are through human relationships. It doesn't have to be someone who knew someone, but even an outsourced recruiting agency staffed by humans in a call center is more useful than applying online. The better recruiting agencies usually have an account manager who has a direct line to the company that's hiring.
I got hired by directly applying via a company's website; it was my 11th application and my first that wasn't a moonshot (nvda/valve/etc). It was in late 2023 (very bad market), and I didn't have any connections to the company at all. I also have no online presence. Online applications are not fully dead.
Of course this is just my experience as a senior engineer in embedded, so likely doesn't apply to others. But if you're looking, it's worth your time to apply...
I have a suspicion that your experience is representative of a general attitude in embedded engineering compared to other software disciplines. Embedded engineers usually still keep to proper part numbering, testing before shipping and working with greater platform limitations, all virtuous activities that are harder to find in other fields. I like to think this culture bleeds into other parts of the business such as implementing reasonable hiring processes!
Is everyone ignoring the fact that companies do this to make themselves look bigger than they are compared to the competition and/or to pretend economic success?
I pretty much see it as a negative signal now. If I happen across a board for a given company, look at the positions they have posted, and then come back to it a few months later and see the exact same ones listed without any change, then I just move on to something else. It tells me a few things: either they don't know what they're looking for and are just fishing, they want to make it appear they are grow-grow-growing but still can't figure out exactly what they want, they're trying to posture like they are bigger than they are, like you said. If they're playing the game, I probably don't want to be there.
It's certain abused for below-the-line marketing, such as for appearing bigger than they are, but also to make them look more competent by adding ridiculous requirements such as fluency in at least five different languages.
I wonder who this is effective signaling mechanism for.
Any investor that's on the board is going to have access to data that tells the real story (or if they don't they're neglecting their fiduciary duty).
Any potential investor that's going to lead a funding round is going to do enough diligence to see what kind of financial shape they're in. And if the company doesn't have money to be increasing headcount, it'd look like they're making irresponsible hiring decisions.
For customers -- small customers are probably not doing a level of diligence that would involve going out and looking at job postings. Large enterprise customers potentially are, but when dealing with startups, they'll often have clauses in their contracts that give them access to some level of financial data to ensure the vendor they're getting into bed with isn't about to collapse (though I suppose many of them never actually enforce those clauses).
Employees pay a lot of attention to job postings, but they also pay attention to interview flow and hiring. If you have a job posting out, and no ones getting interviewed, people are going to notice pretty quickly (they're especially going to notice if someone else gets to put a req out, but the req for their dept keeps getting denied).
Definitely not suggesting the idea is wrong -- companies have certainly done far more nefarious things, just wondering who they are trying to signal to with this.
There are well know ways to solve these issues. For example, companies have always used the strategy of firing the "bad" workers after a few years and then hiring more to replace them. Even though there is hiring going on, the net difference may well be zero or negative. Nobody would suspect this by looking just at the number of people being hired.
My wife a couple years ago was at a cyber security company that had very generous referral bonuses. Multiple members of senior management in her company were laying off talented and hard-working American citizens on the justification that they needed to downsize. But then just months later they would change their tune and fill the vacated positions with friends or acquaintances (always non-American citizens), they would also collect a generous referral bonus (often $20k or more). I'm not sure if this was purely to collect the bonus, because of ethnic preference or a desire to help their friends/family migrate from India but something strange was certainly going on. My wife eventually was part of one of these cycles of layoffs "because of the financials" then later heard from a colleague still working there that her manager had shortly afterwards backfilled her position with a referral of his own. Last we heard it sounded like the company was approaching bankruptcy.
I wish people would be aware enough to report behavior like this to authorities. With the new admin coming in, it's probably too late (the deportations will only be for people they and the rest of the Old Boys' Club can't exploit).
To be fair, the amount of good job applicants from america is also really low.
It's not a great argument, but it's the same with DEI. I literally don't have enough applicants to fill a quota even if 100% of them passed all interviews
Yes, there are more candidates to choose from today than 5 years ago, but that just leaves more candidates. The hiring bar is higher, but the proportion of good Americans doesn't get higher.
Sure you can get a better American today than 2019, but you're comparing any one candidate to their competition and the company bar. If you want to deliberately hire Americans who interview worse than non Americans, you're breaking the law
I wonder how many of them are caused by internal political struggles. When you have a lot middle management they spend a fair amount of time on resource allocation, both current and future employees. So it’s a constant fight to obtain and maintain headcount.
Hiring pipelines can be longer than the planning cycle. So you may have 3 open headcount one week, and then lose it the next because some other Big Initiative should get it instead. Or the head count flip flops between local and overseas hires. Or the level they are hiring for changes. Each time this changes, new positions are posted.
Basically companies don’t know what roles they hiring for long enough to get candidates through the process.
On the hiring side of this, we receive a _ton_ of resumes that have no experience in the technologies we're hiring for. Each day there are 5-10 automated resume submissions to our job portal for a single position, and we're a fairly small company. Perhaps hiring managers are both being (more) selective and becoming overloaded with the amount of AI/recruiter-sanitized resumes coming in as well.
Yes it absolutely goes both ways. The amount of crap coming in is astonishing (as in, data analyst with 2 years in python applying for senior frontend engineer, or being on the other side of the world with no mention of visa/immigration)
The other side of this challenge is that the "technology" is mostly irrelevant for above-average applicants with solid CS chops.
I apply for lots of jobs featuring technologies I haven't used (beyond toy personal projects or something in college) because I have a long history of picking up new tools and being productive in weeks or months at most - because I understand the underlying semantics of the tool regardless of its presentation, syntax, etc.
Keyword scanners (and humans focused on keywords) are unable to hire me for roles where I haven't used the technology (much) before - and I guess that's fine and well as I am indistinguishable on paper from someone who doesn't know what they're doing.
Just presenting it as another part of the challenge of both finding good people and for good people finding good jobs.
What’s the difference between a ghost job and opportunistic hiring? I’ve never seen any team I work for put out a job posting with no intention of hiring and I’ve certainly never participated in interviewing a candidate where there is no intention to hire. However, I have seen my team put out a job posting where we only intend to hire if we get an applicant that is unexpectedly good.
> put out a job posting with no intention of hiring
i've seen (and worked for) many startups that post reqs prominently to signal to the world (investors, customers, etc) that "things are going great" and "we're growing" while not even able to afford a req.
> never participated in interviewing a candidate where there is no intention to hire
I haven't seen as much of that, but have been in situations where the company is either doing great (transitioning during an acquisition) or not so great (running out of money) but you keep interviewing to "look normal" or to keep the pipeline just in case things get back to normal.
Both ghost jobs and opportunistic hiring should ideally be labeled as such. Nothing wrong with opportunistic hiring but without a label as such it most definitely distorts the market signals, especially if the ratio of such posting to real postings that will be filled is as high as paper suggests
Your team doesn’t post the ghost job, the HR or talent team does. There’s a variety of reasons why they do it.
Low quality postings are often just there for compliance purposes to justify visas. Less ethical companies may casually mention to outside HR people that folks are applying.
And people get job descriptions written for them. They may--or may not--be actually posted. (I'm genuinely curious and wish I had looked at the time about my last job.) Wouldn't mean no one else would have had a shot but almost certainly not a random applicant putting in an online application.
The difference is there aren't hundreds of people applying to some random company's "opportunistic hiring" post, meanwhile the req gets reposted every 2 weeks like clockwork (possibly with a lower salary and more duties), just to see what it would take to get a "reasonable" number of "qualified" applicants.
I think this problem is even worse than just ghost jobs.
My partner is currently looking for a new job. Two or three times now, they’ve completed the whole interview process, gotten great feedback. Then they are ghosted for 2-3 weeks and the company comes back and says “sorry we decided not to hire for this role”. It’s utterly exhausting.
I do think when the interviews started, they had intentions to hire. (My partner knew people at the company and was recommended). But then for whatever reason during the hiring process, the job goes away.
- Racial, gender, and/or local citizen discrimination avoidance
- Job security for HR so they themselves don't get laid off
- Over-interview to exceed capacity/ERP needs
- Market and/or competition intelligence
Perhaps it behooves jobseekers to stop looking for scant, temporary, insecure, disloyal, abusive work and create or sell goods or services through collective, employee-owned co-ops instead.
I suspect the main reason it is hard to find a job is because interest rate induced layoffs, and remote work created too much competition. Five years ago I wasn’t competing with someone thousands of miles away with a phd who used to work at a faang.
As for Ghost Jobs, I think they are skipping how many are just scams collecting data. There are many fake recruiters just posting job listings on behalf of companies they are not affiliated with.
I would also be interested how many of ghost jobs listed by actual companies are on purpose vs just lazy. It would be nice to have a whistle blower
Some IT service corporations that are known for a very high employee churn rates often post the same position a dozen times, for each of their office locations.
Sometimes it's a 100% remote job, and they still post it multiple times with different locations.
They probably litter job portals this way so that they can compensate for the frequent personell changes. They are impossible to miss.
Ah, i thought the multiple posting in different locations was to be able to show or hide the salaray range depending on U.s. state-level legislation related to that...also, in those cases where maybe if the role is remote, maybe they only want to hir candidates in a somewhat near/adjacent area to one of their offices.
Ghost or not, I have applied for many jobs in the last few months and when I get a reply (I am not counting canned Thanks for applying but we decided to move with another candidate reply) it is almost always very early stage companies. I wonder if bigger companies actually look into CVs? I understand there are automated systems but I did not get replies several times even when the JD / Skills matched super closely with my CV.
I believe at this point this is the patriotic thing to do. Everyone should start creating fake accounts and posting fake applications to these online jobs so the whole system implodes. Then companies will have to start doing something else.
I see a lot of ghost job interviews in tech. There are smaller startups, that post the job ad. I had interviewed for the company over and over again, always getting denied for one reason or another.
It is very common for the listing to be for some other position, “Senior Software, Fraud Prevention” or something, then during the interview it will be for their “Platform” team. If you ask about the team it doesn’t exist yet and they are always “slowly building it out”.
Whelp, here in EU, we have certain big names, who constantly post vacancies which will never be filled but continues to be perpetually re-posted. If you send an application, they will also do some interviews and eventually find minor reasons to reject you at last stage if you are a solid candidate, or earlier steps if you have lackings.
I worked with one of the HR people from one such places, if they were correct, it is mostly the quota and budget. Basically, they get a specific budget each year and they need to spend it, so they post old vacancies to with new shine not only on their own sites, but also on various commercial places(Xing/StepStone/Indeed/Linkedin/Monster etc.) to burn that budget and hold interviews to show that they are trying to fill their hiring quota for the year. It is just a fake practice, because if the budget remains unused at the end of the year, then it'll be reduced next year and if they did not perform enough posting and interviews, then personnel in hiring department will not get promoted or will get bad reviews due to low quota coverage.
Not sure how real it is, but it can be related or one face of the story.
My dad told me, that when he was in the office in the 1980s and 1990s, his manager would always keep a job opening active. The manager's goal was to be able to be opportunistic and snap up someone awesome when they came though.
I know most posters on here are mainly talking about the existence of ghost jobs (which I think exist), but estimating that 21% of job postings are ghost jobs based on a dataset categorized by asking ChatGPT-4o seems, idk, iffy?
One of the (internal) roles I applied for got "hundreds" of applications according to the HR rep. But I was given a first round interview despite never having pressed the "apply" button. My manager had reached out to the HR rep directly with my previous resume and that allowed me to bypass the pre-screen. I never even provided my latest resume until just before the first round (the one holding all my current position's new experience at the time).
That was more enlightening than I asked for. Those hundreds of other candidates A) never stood a chance against HR picking a candidate recommended by someone with more political power, B) will never realize that that was the reason they were passed upon, until maybe they reach their moment of realization first-hand like me, and C) were passed upon in favor of a candidate with a resume almost a year out of date. It illustrated to me the sheer futility of cold applying to random open positions and hoping for the best.
There probably are real ghost jobs out there, but I recently got accused of posting one for a position that we actually are hiring for. It was a Senior-level role, and the applicant had ~3 years of experience.
I recently interviewed at Microsoft with a relatively well-known VP. I was surprised as I didn't think I was a fit in terms of domain experience, and then I was encouraged to apply online for another role with the same VP & team.
A week or two later I received rejection letters for both. It occurred to me that I might have been a stooge to make the VP's project look good on paper somehow.
This is one of the issues we're running into at my startup ApplyAll (automates job applications & the job search in general).
Our current best solution is to track when jobs get published/unpublished so that we can tell what's a repost (more likely to be a ghost job) vs a fresh job with high-intention to get the role filled.
I was talking to my co-founder this morning about collecting enough data so that we can analyze if it's even worth it for us to apply customers to re-posted jobs (there are legit reasons companies might do that) or if the hit rate is too low to bother (our kpi is interview-requests).
ghost jobs are analogous to (the now illegal practice) of spoofing trades in equity markets, where they exist to manipulate the market to get an information edge about price and availability of the commodity (talent).
even though I think it's wrong, and in a consistent regs regime it would be illegal, like spoofing in other markets, it's the artifact of incentives created by outdated regs and conventions that didn't keep up with the scale of tech.
I'm very skeptical that "up to 21%" of job postings being ghost jobs would explain why it's so hard to find a job now. The horror stories people have about being out of work for years, about sending out hundreds of applications.
I have been building an app for job seekers as the customer (rather than employers) and plan to build in feedback loops into companies that have ghost jobs by monitoring the number of applicants who never move to the next phase of interviews but still thinking about how that feature could work. But without employers as the paying customer for job search sites I see no reason why that data isn’t transparent for the job seekers
Besides H1B, some larger companies require managers advertise a position before promoting people into it. This seems backwards to me, but I'm sure there's a reason for it (though I doubt the policy actually meets that reason).
Every time I get asked to look at resumes, we get loads of ghost applicants. In the first days when the job listing is fresh, floods of resumes with identical formatting, all over-qualified, with similar sounding projects that read like buzzword ad-libs. Of course, they never call back.
Sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference between a ghost job and an interview that uses MS Teams on a bad day. Eventually headhunters will catch on and realize that MS Teams gives plausible deniability--"We invited the candidate to an interview but they never showed up".
This is not a new phenomenon. It is quite common, and has been for decades, to to publish a job opening for a position that has already effectively been filled in order to nominally fulfill various legal and bureaucratic requirements to provide plausible deniability to senior management that the "best candidate" was hired.
Paper doesn't seem to mention what the motivations are for doing this other than a vague reference to 'keeping a talent pipeline'. Its far more likely that they are being financially incentivized to do so, perhaps to meet H1B requirements.
I interviewed at a popular us based k8s ops/networking company that ended up being 90% Indian staffed. The non technical recruiter basically neged me the entire interview, was very clear after the fact he had no interest in hiring me.
I reached out to a recruiter I know about a job posted on their company's site. They replied that wasn't a real posting it was just to get people in the pipeline. They did say if it was a "real" posting they were hiring for it will have as ReqID at the top of the page. Too bad that's not something you could filter for.
VCs these days always ask or check a startup's website and job listings to see if they're growing. So one advice we keep getting is "fill up your jobs page with fake jobs to look like you're high growth".
I think the main problem with looking and identifying ghost jobs is that we categorize them wrong when measuring the economy and "the number of jobs out there" we need a mechanism where a place reports to the government what they actually need for headcount. Maybe they need to do some sort of weighted average of number of job openings vs EDITBA or something.
I have also encountered companies with actual open positions; but when it comes down to actually hiring, one person in a position of power may decide they don't want to spend the money on the position ("yet").
There are no jobs. I've been looking for two years. A couple of humongous rounds of interviews (one company in Sydney had me do 15 interviews plus a presentation, plus meetups with the CEO for lunch and the CTO and a case study), all for one mid-size startup CPO role.
No hire. Two weeks later they announced another 25% of layoffs.
I've tried and exhausted all my contacts, from work, Stanford alumni, everything. There's no one hiring. At least 500 applications either led to no reply or "sorry but you're not the person we are looking for". Week later the same job is advertised again. It's all ghost jobs.
There just aren't that many jobs for management roles (CPO/VP Product/etc) compared to applicants.
Being in HK probably isn't helping either because there are plenty of qualified candidates across China and ASEAN now as well - especially in the hospitality and B2C space.
Oh 100%. But of course I am not limited to HK at all (in fact I am planning to move to AU next year as I got permanent residence there through their Global Talent visa programme). But nothing there either.
And I'm not limiting myself to CPO or VP roles but yea... this is what it has been
Why aren't you considering CPO roles the US or starting your own company?
I think you are too overqualified for non-VP/CPO roles, and B2C dealflow is dead across ASEAN and China atm so VP/CPO roles are hyper-competitive. It's similar in Australia to a certain extent as well.
That said, best of luck! Your background is fairly strong
I have always assumed that these are posted to obfuscate nepotism (aka successful networking). You make a show of searching for the just-right candidate, and in the meanwhile you already know exactly who you're going to hire.
> The results show that policy-makers should be aware of such a practice as it causes significant job fatigue and distorts market signals.
> distorts market signals
This is a feature, not a bug. Wall Street analysts have been using job posts as a signal for years to measure company current and future performance.
* positive signal: more job posts compared to previous quarter, so company must be healthy! Buy, Buy, Buy!
* negative signal: uh oh, less open job posts compared to previous quarter, must indicate bad quarter, hiring freeze, pending layoffs. Sell, Sell, Sell!
* neutral signal: less job posts for past 2 quarters, no increase in staff spend. Company probably cooking the books and pumping the next quarterly numbers.
From my reading (IANAL), there are three types of occupational fraud: asset misappropriation, corruption, and financial statement fraud. Since job posting are interpreted as a positive signal but are not (it seems) typically and explicitly included in formal financial statements, this wouldn't rise to the level of criminal fraud.
What's really weird is supposedly the market is on a bull run, the economy is doing great, and technical talent is in demand, yet the tech job market is absolute shit. I'm thinking I might get laid off or fired next year and my top option is probably working some $50k/yr help desk position after about 13 yoe, a masters, certs, etc. Those seem to be the only legitimate tech ads in my area. Of course for $25/hr I could potentially work for Costco or Chick-fil-A and do just as well.
If you are a software dev, have a masters, have DB knowledge and can write scripts, you should look into non-tech companies.
I am a fullstack dev, and can solo support and write software for a mid size company. We plan on getting a junior or another dev soon. We will definitely be paying a junior minimum $60k+ and expect nothing but learning first year.
We are in a MCOL area, so this is about average. WLB is good. No on-call.
I would hire someone with more experience, and even with FAANG experience but I would be worried they would leave a job that only pays $100k in the next FAANG hiring cycle.
Maybe we need a job board for devs who are trying to get out of the tech space and work for nontech, trading top salaries for flexibility and relaxed work environment.
On a similar post about ghost jobs a couple of weeks ago, I made the following suggestion:
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'd be curious to see if _anyone_ has actually been hired through HN Who's Hiring over the past two years here.
I can only offer anecdotal experience, but...
Despite 1) being a US-based dev, 2) Applying only to US-based jobs, 3) With 10+ years work experience, and 4) Having skills in commonly asked for technologies such as JS, React, and Python...
I've only gotten to the interview stage with an HN Who's Hiring listing only once. Only a single instance over the past two years.
I am also US based applying to exclusively US-based jobs. I've had the most success with Who's Hiring over all of the other ways (cold applications, network referrals, headhunters and whatnot), success rate being way higher than the others: for just a handful of positions I've been interested in I've had three offers, two for FTEs and another for a contract. My skills and background have been pretty well-matched to postings, almost exactly what they were looking for, but extremely deep in specific (increasingly hard to hire-for) areas.
I'll admit I've been super lucky here. It's almost like a cheat code because you're almost always connected with the person(s) actually doing the hiring and with the power to make the decision so things move fast.
The Who's Hiring, I kind of have lukewarm feelings toward those outcomes, because assholes are everywhere - but I've had the same experience as you on https://www.workatastartup.com/ which is just what the actual fucking hell.
From reading the sibling comments, it seems that my problem is that I enjoy reading more than talking on the phone so I much prefer browsing through listings and being selective, but what apparently needs to happen is that I call previous recruiters and badger them about "got anything?" rather that believing anything written online is true
I had an interview last month from a post there. Dude sounded like he was half asleep and hated talking to me even from the very beginning. He carried it on for almost an hour for reasons I don't understand if he was so disinterested. No rejection email follow up, posted again in November. The rule just says "you have to respond" and he did by interviewing me, it doesn't explicitly say you have to provide direct yes or no answers to going forward.
> Glassdoor is a credible source of information that has been cited
in previous empirical studies (Kim and Ra, 2022; Kyiu et al., 2023; Symitsi et al., 2018) and the ubiquity of the Internet in the job search process also lends statistical power to the Glassdoor data (Sockin and Sojourner, 2023).
Uh... just because it was cited previously (ie social proof) doesn't make it credible. And the "statistical power" study is orthogonal to this point at best. I understand that using LLMs is trendy right now, but they aren't magic, and I don't think there is any realistic way to get signal on "ghost" jobs without actual employment data.
In EU, if you put an item on sale, you have to post the lowest price in the last 30 days to see if it's an actual sale or not (even though i'd consider 30 days a too short interval).
Why not have a similar regulation for job postings? Require companies to publish all the job posting history for the last few years, all the positions advertised and the number of people hired for those positions.
Prospective workers would see an ad, look at the history, see that the same position has been open for 3 years now with zero people hired and skip that company. Also companies would actually post their job ads only when they actually intend to hire someone.
The problem with solutions like this is that they formalize the hiring process in ways that would be good for workers and the BLS but that capital hates and they're the ones in charge so it can't get done. This is something downstream of worker power, not a route to it.
This gave me a terrible idea for a business idea of dubious ethics.
First create a ghost application bot that creates fake resumes which fit the job descriptions. Then once you have calls or contact back wanting to proceed in the process mark off the job as real. Compile a database of all jobs that are verified as actually conducting a hiring process and thus are probably not ghost jobs. Sell subscription access to said database of validated jobs.
This is willful labor theft and at this scale, a single fake job posting could cause thousands or tens of thousands of hours of wasted labor on the part of job seekers. Multiply the prevailing hourly wage equivalent for that job by the number of applicants and how much time it would have taken them to apply (Workday users, you're doomed!). That's how much money was stolen from the public by the company. Prosecute it like any other theft of that amount. It'll only take a couple of cases like this for every legal department across the country to tell HR and recruiting to stop the practice immediately.
But there is no basis in law for any of these objections.
"Wasting peoples' time" is a byproduct of every activity in a less-than-perfectly-efficient economy (which is all of them, obviously).
"Wasting lots of peoples' time, and leaving them disappointed and emotionally/economically fragile" is ... crappy and miserable. But it's still legal.
Even if there was a law against posting unrealistic job descriptions, or posting for jobs that don't exist, it's near-impossible to distinguish those cases from legitimate corporate "changes in direction" which cannot be made illegal.
Your assumption is that this is being perpetrated by humans! But, what if AI has already, secretly become sentient, and started posting all these fake/ghost job postings...as part of their efforts to begin a mass campaign to slow overall human productivity...and as part of *its* plan to dominate/takeover humanity! /s
Indeed, locals recently discovered a scam targeting foreign students, and fake ads that promised them a job... The problem is the economic migrant pays >$34k to get those "work" stubs, and usually never shows up on the physical job. Or if they actually need to show, it is usually an awful working arrangement where these now penniless workers end up in inhumane working conditions.
These "employers" have claimed "ghost" employees at sites who often only ever show up to work to pay the shift manager their cut of the bribe in cash. Thus, the desperate indebted people end up in food banks, delivering food, and bidding down physical labor wage rates though suppressed demand.
You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried. Wasting legitimate applicants time, and feeding illegal AI screener bots... is just an inconvenience by comparison. =3
I'm about a year into a mid-effort level job search. I work in a somewhat specialized technical field and am fairly senior (I think in FAANG-ese I'd be an maybe an L7 if I understand their levels correctly). So this means I'm looking for management, director, deputy CTO or CTO positions depending on the company. I have a track record making my company lots of money, and opening up new opportunities worth many multiples of that. So the deck is already stacked against me as most positions are for jr or mid engineers, but I have a proven track record of growing responsibilities and (in my market) fairly recognizable success stories.
The search has been absolutely atrocious. Unlike anything I've ever seen before in 30 years of working in tech.
* I used to be able to simply pull on my network and get a position within 2 or 3 tries. Total job hunt time, under a month.
* The last time I had to go through this was pre-COVID, and I used a mix of my network and cold applications (around 50). I only heard back from 2 of the cold submissions and my network pulled me in to where I am today. Total job hunt time, around 4 months.
* I'm almost exactly 1 year in now, over 700 applications, people in my network can't even get responses for referrals. I've made it to 4 interview funnels, including stupidly exhausting FAANGs, for positions ranging from CTO to consultant filling a contract slot. 2 solid offers, both at least 40-60% below my current market rate. One executive recruiter ghosted me after we started discussing Total Compensation Packages.
I even had a friend post a position at their company, using my resume as the hiring template. Then they personally referred me to that position. I never received a call, and they never received any candidates.
It feels like being personally blacklisted, but it's affecting everybody I know.
The furthest I've gotten has been by hunting down corporate and executive recruiters directly, but I've had two recruiters get laid off halfway through the matching process. One FAANG recruiter has even contacted me hoping I could help them find a position.
Something is broken somewhere. Companies are starving for talent, and talent is starving for companies. The online applications sites are clearly filtering out people, but there appears to be massive churn in the recruiting side as well.
/r/recruitinghell is very representative of things I've seen.
I did notice that hiring activity has picked up since the rollover of the FY. Several 6-7 month old applications stirred somebody to contact me in the last month or so with a "great fit" that turned out to have nothing to do with my skillset.
My story is finally drawing to a close however, I've just negotiated a good position at a new firm and am setting a start date.
I've seen other research and discussion on this topic. Some stats that may be validating for you (and others) to hear:
* There's a 0.08% job application -> offer rate when applying through LinkedIn (LI). An average of 1 in 1,250 applications lead to an offer
* The linked paper on this post finds that 21% of postings are ghost jobs, but I've seen credible estimates that the proportion is as high as 50%
* A Stanford survey found hundreds of fake LI profiles, AI-generated "recruiters" that are interacting with candidates and posting ghost jobs on behalf of big companies
* ~75% of resumes from qualified applicants are never seen by a human
* resumes get on average 6 to 8 seconds of consideration when they are reviewed by a human
* 300,000 jobs are outsourced annually (with respect to the US)
All this to say, you're right, something is fundamentally broken in the labor market, especially the tech labor market. And not that many people are talking about it, except for those of us who have been unfortunate enough to need to look for jobs in the past ~2 years.
In my own case, my previous employer (a startup) ran out of money and laid everyone off last Fall. I was fortunate enough to find a new position, but this job search was the hardest I've faced since 2008 - and it seems worse now than it was this time last year.
First of all, congrats on getting a new gig! With a few minor differences, your experience is similar to my own. So, clearly, you are not alone! I will note that one other blockage that you likely encountered but maybe didn't note or focus on which has hit me (in addition to other factors you cited): agism. I have been in the workforce for a little over 28 years, and 24 of those years has been in some sort of IT or digital or technical-related team...and most recently i have felt the tinge of agism ridiculously high - moreso while trying to get a job, but also in some (but not all) areas of my current dayjob. Its funny, when applying for jobs, and when speaking with some potential hiring managrers, HR, etc....you get the feeling from their questions...But when working with a team of any age, and you bring value to the team, then agism is not as much of a thing. There are times when one's aged wisdom is highly regarded and valued...and then other times - most especially during hiring processes - where it is considered a potential problem. Again, i'm so glad you got your new gig, but it sure is hell out there! :-)
I feel age has something to do with it as well. I know a lot of people around 50 in tech that have been laid off recently. They generally make more money, so it can be easier to justify.
As anecdata, I’ve worked in recruitment, both as a recruiter and as CTO of a very well-established recruitech firm, and basically have never heard of this outside of people complaining they think it happens. Posting jobs you already know who you want to hire for it, sure, but the signalling success and luring in candidates for later thing wasn’t really something I saw. To me, it feels like when people used to claim that antivirus firms were the ones writing viruses.
I've encountered this before with absurdly high job requirements paired with a low-moderate commensurate salary. While on call with an HR rep for a listing I had loosely met, I deduced from their responses it was done so the company could claim their talent needs aren't being met domestically, and thus would file for more H-1B or H-2B work authorization permits. This is rife with its own issues of non-transparency and offshoring, where I likely encountered it in the later stages[0] and was being paid lip service to the process without the intent of hiring.
I suspect a lot of the frustration people describe comes from this combined with presently high demand for remote tech jobs. Back when I was job searching in late 2023, I noticed there would be _hundreds_ of applicants for even the worst postings (e.g., paying 50% market rate). Nobody is reading that many resumes, and in the unlikely case they are, that person probably lacks the expertise needed to evaluate candidates. Screeners are starting with resumes recommended to them and binning the rest.
It’s H1B abuse, everyone knows it. Indian nationals get hired on in a leadership position, and all of a sudden the entire tech branch is staffed by H1B workers, wonder how could that be? We all know it’s happening, but if you say it done head in the sand junior well call you racist.
I once applied for a job that precisely matched my qualifications. It was crazy - the job description could have been written by someone looking at my CV.
I didn't even get an interview. Likely no one did.
It wasn't a ghost job, though. It was a position created for a someone they wanted to hire. Being a public institution, they were required to advertise positions. That didn't mean that they actually wanted any of the candidates who applied.
I once applied to a position like this. It was eerily similar to my background, and when I did a little digging I found that the group lead had even directly cited my research papers in his own research work.
I applied on the site, reached out on LinkedIn to the group lead and the recruiter, and even was able to find emails for those two, which I also messaged as well.
They didn't even bother to send me an automated rejection notice. There was nothing at all, no responses to any messages, no email, nothing. I have to assume that position was posted with someone already in mind that they wanted to hire.
When I last changed jobs, I started looking at the end of 2021. I was a staff SWE at Google, MS CS from Stanford, etc. - a good resume.
I also found myself applying into a black hole. But when I used second degree connections to get someone at the company to acknowledge I existed, everything started moving, and I ended up with great offers from both the companies I had applied in.
Sometimes there are ghost roles, but sometimes recruiting is inundated or disorganized and you just need an internal champion.
I don’t think you intended this, but it made me chuckle… Your comment essentially boils down to “come from a privileged background and things will work out”.
That's an uncharitable read. Connections can be made, not only received.
Networking is different kind of work than sitting at a desk, but it's still work. The benefits of that work are seen next time you want a job. Every freelancer operates this way, for example.
This so much. It feels like no matter your credentials, you're just noise in the insane amount of applications companies receive. Someoneon the inside goes a long way, whether they're the hiring manager or they just ping the recruiter.
Because he did not get the job for what he knows, but who. Another candidate of equal knowledge, without the privilege of his connections, would not have succeeded.
I’m sorry I do not buy this as a form of “corruption”. Employers aren’t obligated to create perfectly leveled fields for candidates to apply on, especially when candidates are using AI to gin up fake resumes. Perhaps in some fields this is a legal obligation, but I don’t think that is what we’re discussing.
If the world were both good and just then perhaps I could hop on board. But it most certainly isn’t. Frankly, saying so sounds like sour grapes.
And "corruption" is an interesting way of saying that you don't think personal connections should pay into business decisions but I realize many folks in tech roles think that way.
I once applied for my own job req (a JD I wrote for a role on my own team), and the HR system automatically kicked my resume out for being unqualified.
Interesting. Every recruiter on linkedin will swear blind that technology doesn't work like that, and they have to manually sort through and review hundreds of applications, and ATS don't just blindly trash/delete applications. But I can't believe your situation did not happen, and that similar things aren't happening regularly.
To me this is like: Why work for a big company? I worked for a big company once and did not like it. Kids out of college are always drawn to the big names, and they can look good on your resume.
My feeling is, if you want to work for a big company, work for a small one and make it big. I can say from experience that turns out really well.
> work for a small one and make it big. I can say from experience that turns out really well.
Survivor bias.
I worked for a smallish company. I was employee number 77. I got laid off about a year and a half later after sales stalled. We're now almost two years after that layoff, and now the company has a skeleton crew just keeping the lights on until the money runs out.
Maybe, I don't really have data on that but there's a huge range for both. I would say, think about your career, its growth and longevity. Posters on HN have pointed out some large companies that have a habit of laying people off before they fully vest. And there is the whole challenge of getting meaningful responsibility in a large organization. Everyone thinks when they are starting out that they are going to march up the organizational ladder.
Everything I am saying is anecdote, not data, but I have seen people propel themselves up into large organizations by being entrepreneurs. I think of a friend who worked for a bit for a large company, had a start up with mixed results, and then went back to another large company as an SVP. I don't know if that person would have gotten their marching through the ranks.
i'm a hiring manager for engineers and have worked with tons of ATSes and have yet to work with a system that does this. i'm not saying it isn't real, but even as a director with fairly privileged access to the hiring pipeline and near-administrative access to the ATS at a public company with tons of applicants, i've never even seen an option for this sort of thing.
the ATS will tag candidates who meet certain key requirements or highlight them, but for the most part it's just a big messy list of people that someone has to filter through. humans are super bad at eliminating their biases and there's a sense that the top of the hiring funnel is mostly noise and unqualified folks, so i think the much more mundane reality is that until you make it past the first (very arbitrary) screen you don't get that much consideration as a candidate.
when i'm helping recruiting make a dent in inbound applications, i'd say charitably i spend 5 minutes per application on initial screen (to clear a backlog of sometimes hundreds.) i try my best to be aware of my biases, but that's almost no time for absorbing someone's entire career, trying to find correlations between their accomplishments and the role, sussing out red flags and then making a decision as to whether their application is worth investing potentially hours of time on in next steps.
a couple other things that play into this:
- i've never worked at a company that didn't believe they'd hired so well that they were truly one of the stand-out, high performing teams that could afford to be picky, and "as good as us" often isn't good enough when the mandate is to "constantly raise the bar." obviously this is delusional but it's pervasive in corporate culture.
- right now in particular, the terrible market combined with the intricacy of AI-generated applications for candidates that don't exist (this is the most bizarre trend I've experienced thus far - candidates with personal websites, githubs that are just forks of public repos, and extensive and impressive resumes at major companies who do not exist and when brought onto interview calls will not turn on their cameras and speak with a weird delay as if they're asking ChatGPT for answers) really means that the zone is utterly flooded with garbage. the mental fatigue on resume 50 of 400 is substantial, let alone on one deeper in the pile. you're reading document after document that's nearly identical, trying to figure out which ones are worth pushing forward.
ultimately i think the task is so herculean that most folks, whether they admit it or not, wind up responding most directly to folks whose backgrounds they personally relate to, or who manage to demonstrate the right amount of personality that makes you go "huh, i think we should talk to them a little more."
i present this all as a known problem, and i'm not trying to diminish the frustration of job hunters by saying "oh it's bad on the other side, too" because i absolutely know how much the experience of job hunting sucks and don't wish it on anyone. i just think that in the absence of people being willing to admit how haphazard and human-driven the whole process is, conspiracy theories about AI rejections and ChatGPT reviewing resumes en masse run amok.
> right now in particular, the terrible market combined with the intricacy of AI-generated applications for candidates that don't exist (this is the most bizarre trend I've experienced thus far
This is a major problem and isn't widely talked about because it's only seen by HR and hiring managers.
For nearly any engineering job post, companies are getting flooded with resumes from fake candidates in other countries.
At first they were easy to spot (their linkedin account would be < 6 months old, they would apply using a VPN, they would have a VOIP telephone number) but they're getting more sophisticated and harder to weed out real candidates from fake.
The worst part is that the fake candidates are always the ones with the best resumes (since they're fake, their resumes are often also faked and tailored exactly the the job description)
The use of AI during interviews is also a major issue - hiring teams are slowly realizing that the types of questions and interview challenges that worked before no longer work today due to the rise in AI-assisted interview tools that candidates use. It's common to ask a question, then see the candidate wait a few seconds before they start to answer (w
It's really hard when you have 500 applicants in the first day of posting a full stack role, and 80-90% of them aren't real people.
First, thanks so much for sharing your experience on the HR/hiring side!
I recall in the multiple post-pandemic layoffs (especially in tech industry) that hiring teams were some of the first to be gutted. Made sense on a practical level since, at least in theory, layoffs > fewer job openings > fewer applicants to go through > less people needed to go through them.
However, I'm sure that's also led to more people applying for the fewer job openings that are available.
Does that seem like an accurate read? Maybe a contributing factor to lack of communication, even if it's simply a templated decline?
so to be clear, i'm engineering leadership - my exposure is probably greater than most individual contributor engineers but don't take my word as the experience of a dedicated recruiter - they have a much better view of the lay of the land than i do. i just wind up having a certain percentage of hiring/recruiting responsibility as part of my job.
for sure i think that might be a part of it, but i can say from experience that the market is flooded with recruiters, so if capacity was the issue, i'd imagine salaries are depressed right now and tons of talent is available... they could just hire their teams back up.
i genuinely can't explain to you why people aren't getting "no's." i wish i could. it makes me sincerely angry. the way ATSes are usually set up is you have a button to remove them from consideration or put them in some "not at the moment" disposition and every tool i've ever used has an option to automatically send a relevant form email as the result of that action. sending the email would take the same effort as not sending the email.
the only thing i can imagine (and have heard some hr folks say) is that rejecting someone is an action that elicits an emotional response in the person rejected - they might be hurt, they might be offended - and can lead to requests for an explanation why, or also hurt the chance that that person might be interested in working for you in the future. thus, just going dark and acting like "it got lost in the mail" is a way for them to keep the option of hiring you open in the future, or keep you receptive to a response if they reach out 6 months later.
i personally don't know if that's real, and i also don't think it reflects how actual humans respond to being ghosted, but the lack of a rejection email for a role i think is honestly a completely indefensible practice and i do not understand what is going on in the minds of the people who operate that way.
What's worse is when you have to actually interview the candidate, even though you know the job is going to someone internal. I've had to do this at large companies and at public institutions.
It is normal in public sector. I was offered a position in a public sector job and the supervisor gave me the keys to the office and lab and told me that due to hiring requirement blah blah, they had to put a new tender and post the position online for several days before they can declare me as the selected candidate. The contract will be delivered to me via post after the day they take down the advert.
While I felt immensely special and cool, but once I received the contract by post, one of my random friends called me o say that he needed a job badly and found this perfect opening and applied there, but he got rejected, whether I was interested to also apply for that position, the requirements looked like I would be the best fit. When he sent me the PDF, dang, it was the same job that was being posted for me and I was super sad.
I eventually did not sign the contract because the practice really felt immoral to me and recommended my friend instead. While my supervisor was super sad, because they had to go through a long process for that fake job advert, nonetheless he understood my stance and went ahead and called my friend again.
I believe these public institute jobs must post internal hires publicly to comply with certain regulations or something, but the practice is weird.
Same here, I applied for a job where a friend already worked and he said he would be highly surprised if I didn't get the job. They didn't even call me to the interview. After the ad expired I just got an automated message that they had moved on, friend said no new person ever appeared.
I can understand ghost jobs, I mean large public corporations have even had useless jobs to inflate their share holder value, but this was for a Swedish government agency!
I became unemployed in August, I had to apply for at least 6 jobs every month to get benefits, and now I have two offers on the table but both of them came from recruiters that contacted me, not jobs that I applied for.
I don't think there's anything one can realistically do about this. They probably should get rid of the requirement to have an open application process altogether. If they have someone in mind they will hire, they will hire that person.
It also happens (and is very common) for H1-B positions. The company wants to hire someone specific, because they are cheaper, but legally has to advertise the job first to "prove" that they couldn't fill it with a US citizen/resident. So, the normal ploy is to precisely tailor the requirements to the person they want to hire, and then advertise the job someplace where as few as possible people will see it.
It's not always because the candidate is cheaper but sometimes the candidate will have already worked there for a while under a different visa and have proven themselves.
I had a similar situation/question. I knew an old coworker who was eagerly trying to get me on their team at another company. They said I had to apply and then they'd take it to their manager who was already on board with the idea.
So I did, at 10PM or so at night. And within a few minutes, got a rejection email.
To this day I wonder if someone clicked reject, or the system just autorejected me because of something it didn't like on my resume. Needless to say, I gave up on that idea.
Yep. They told me they(the team) don't know what happened, never saw it, and to apply again. I tried, but the system wouldn't allow it (it was one of those outsourced HR things, I forget the name).
It was more an exploratory thing, not some huge job opp, so it became more of a nuisance than it was worth. But it still left me curious how in the world said systems even work.
Sometimes they also need to post the job to meet company policies. The hiring manger knows who they want to hire, but HR has requirements to post for various reasons.
This is how my wife got her most recent job. The hire was all but signed off on but HR required the posting be made company wide. They didn't have a requirement for how long the posting had to be open. She coordinated with the hiring manager to open the posting, she submitted her resume, and the posting was closed. All in about two minutes. HR got to tick a box though.
I've had a similar experience for a local job. I honestly thought it was my previous employer unknowingly reaching out to me initially through a recruiting agency. The job description was verbatim my resume. Got the interview, and ghosted.
I now wonder if the same thing happened to me. Within the niche of that job I was pretty objectively the highest qualified candidate in the world at the time. Did really well in interviews. Did not get the job. A decade later, though, I'm actually thankful I didn't get it. Blessing in disguise.
That's a typical process that companies, who want to sponsor green card to their internal employee, are required to do. They have to find an equally-skilled US citizen by posting jobs publicly for X amount of time. Then after they have collected applications, they "review" and reject them; use that as an evidence in filing the green card for the internal employee.
It is a broken/absurd rule and only puts more work to everyone involved (not just the applicants, the HR; the internal employee and his/her manager, who usually has to get involved in that process). The process itself is also relatively expensive (cost ~$10K+ for attorney fees; documentation and USCIS application fees). I know because I had to go through that asinine process years ago when my ex-employer (big corporation) sponsored my green card.
We should put all those corporate interviewer experts to work by having a government immigration commission that holds H1B arbitration interviews, where a visa applicant competes with an unemployed citizen.
And the solution has been obvious all along, and was even proposed by Trump in his first term. Turn H1B into an auction so that only just creme de la creme makes it through, limit the numbers, and issue green cards sooner, with no additional bureaucatic bullshit. Maybe he'll finally get to do it this time.
H1B auctions are perfect, so long as you want to maximize the total dollars "saved" by American businesses, by hiring cheaper foreign workers.
But if you actually want a way to hire top-skill foreign workers in specialties where America is short on local talent? No, sorry. 99.5% of specialties don't and won't pay enough to win an auction where Big Tech has opened its checkbooks.
So the moment that someone wants to hire a bilingual child care worker who has a fairly obscure second language (vs. English/French, English/Spanish, English/German, etc.), you think it's perfectly reasonable to 10X the pay rate?
Ditto if a museum is hosting an exhibition of art from some tiny country, and wants a few docents who can read the inscriptions?
I have to put out a ghost job req and interview every person applying within reason for every green card a direct report is applying for. I have to show there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job
The main problem is: even if the interviewee knocks it out of the park, is an amazing engineer, I still am not interested in firing my OPT/h1b team member who can still legally work for 2-3 years. So while I will deny their green card application and not submit it, I also won’t hire the interviewee
I'm glad our government has introduced the H1B program to help out employers like you who are dealing with a shortage of tech workers (who will work for 2/3 market and will do anything you say because if they get fired they'll be deported).
In 2023 there were 755,020 H1-B admittances. Why was it much easier to get a job in 2021? Because there were only 148,603 [1]. Notice that even though Republicans talked about immigration, neither party is talking about reducing H1-B filled roles. The kicker is if you’ve had a gap doing your own thing or because you were laid off and you apply for a job at a discount salary, you’re still not competitive against an H1-B worker because employers know you’d be able to trade up once you’ve been working for a few months.
[1] https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/h1b-visa...
These numbers probably don't mean what you think they mean. Certainly, the number of H-1B holders in 2021 and 2023 is about the same.
An "admittance" is someone with a H-1B visa appearing a port of entry like an airport to enter the US. If a single H-1B holder goes on (say) 3 international trips in 1 year, that will count as 3 "admittances" in that year.
The reason why the number is so low in 2021 is that the US government had a COVID non-immigrant travel ban. People with H-1B visas couldn't re-enter the US from many countries e.g. most countries in Europe. Many people in H-1B status (like myself) simply didn't take international trips that year.
Great point. The H-1B receipts total[1] is probably what most are looking for
2020: 427,200 2021: 398,300 2022: 474,300 2023: 386,600
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/f...
Yes! Great find.
(Although, even these statistics are not as simple as they seem! E.g., when an H-1B status holder changes employer this counts as a new receipt even though the number of H-1B workers hasn't changed. In periods of time when there is lots of churn in the labor market, like in 2022, you would see higher receipt numbers just from the churn. It's complicated!)
Thank you all for clarifying. So 80k/year is the key number.
But if I bothered to look up what the words mean about complex administrative questions, I forfeit my right to be outraged!
By law, the number of H1B visas issued per year is capped at 80k, and that's how many have been issued every year for the last twenty years.
"Admittance rates" measure how many H1B people travel internationally and then return to the USA. Unsurprisingly, in 2023, more people traveled internationally than in 2021, when almost all countries closed their borders.
Right, and while the fraudulent H1-B hires (taking jobs where there are qualified unemployed Americans who would like them) are taking jobs from Americans, the illegal immigrants, about to be deported, are not (even if we taxpayers are paying $500/night to put them up in NYC hotels etc).
I don't think Trump give a crap about helping American workers, anymore than his buddy Elon does - the anti-immigrant thing was just that.
India is exporting its poverty to the entire world. We have kids getting out of school that don't have a chance because of the H1B program. Need to get rid of the whole H1B program and repatriate all those here.
Any offspring also doesn't qualify for citizenship.
>Any offspring also doesn't qualify for citizenship.
Literally anti-constitutional.
I hope you aren't suggesting it is hypocritical to not oppose legal immigration when opposing illegal immigration.
H1b should be a bid salery to play not first to apply. That is we will allow x of them, when you sponser someone you commit to paying them some salary for the full term - no layoffs (you get fire for cause but that is a legal thing they can take you to court for , and the courts can force you to give back pay if it wasn't a good cause) , you should know your budget can afford them. , someone who really is the best , offer them a million dollars to be sure they get in , just a warm body , if they don't get in who cares.
There are ways to abuse the above, but note they can always quit.
Add "automatic green card at the end of three years if sponsored again by the same employer".
Otherwise, the job would just be extremely cushy. Work the absolute bare minimum not to give cause for dismissal, and you're untouchable for the duration.
Companies should vet their emplopees better than that before hiring. Though there is potential to fire for cause if someone who should be able to do the work in 40 hour weeks isn't getting it done.
note that I added a 40 hour work week qualifier above.
...If your goal was to force companies to hire native citizens wherever possible, and only H1B workers when absolutely necessary, that might be the point.
one possible option to prevent ghost job posting for visa is to force employers to share the hiring month, salary, qualification and annonymized resume of the H1B/GC employer with all those they interviewed or applied. This will give closure to those applicants that didn't get the job.
You're halfway there. H1Bs should also require payment to the government of $250k/year. Style it as a fee or a tax or whatever.
This means small companies may not get good talent that value things besides salary (wfh, perks, fun project) and will have to compete with corporations for people who only cares about money. This may (or may not) impact startups
Same as ever though, this is tangential to H1B.
Stop it, no one "values things besides salary", and you know it.
I value a good manager, a fun team, an actual PTO policy I can use, and cool projects to work with at about $40,000 a year. Salary is valuable but it is not the only valuable thing.
Salary is the most valuable thing, however. Because I would happily take a salary of 1 billion dollars with an awful manager and a no-fun team. And, conversely, I would never take a job with the best people on planet earth for a salary of one dollar.
If you were offered a job with an awful manager and a no-fun team for $250,000, and a job with the best people on the planet for $249,999, which one would you choose?
Right, naturally the extent matters, but it's still the most important statistic when doing cost analysis.
Also, other statistics are just wage in disguise. Work-life balance refers to working less, which means a higher wage. PTO is also just working less, which is a higher wage. WFH means less driving + lower cost of living, which is an effective higher wage.
Well, of course, you can make up hypotheticals. I used to say that you couldn't pay me enough to work in NYC. But of course I didn't literally mean that I wouldn't take FU money for a couple years to work there (not doing anything criminal etc.). But that wasn't going to realistically happen.
If you can't live off of $40,000 a year, you are not taking that job. I'm not saying there aren't people already independently wealthy and "working" for fun but those are an infinitesimal exception.
I think they mean that they will take a job with those benefits for 40k less than a job without. I assume generally they are looking at positions that pay substantially more than that.
I get your point, but if that were completely true, no one would work in the videogame or embedded software sectors. They pay dramatically less, especially early in career.
I'd argue that most workers value several things over salary. Very few people are trying to maximize their income at the expense of everything else. They tend to limit their job searches to places near their families. They apply to jobs they'd enjoy doing or at least wouldn't mind vs jobs they'd hate but which pay better. They don't apply to jobs that pay well but are also highly dangerous. etc.
Money > everything just isn't how most people see the world.
I hired a developer who just wanted a cushy job and I offered him a cushy job.
I offered 4 day work week, no on-call, no overtime, but paid less than their previous employer (because I couldn't afford it).
I am sure lots of people value things besides salary.
Changing the work hours doesn't technically affect "salary" but it's a change in wages. I think your example mostly reinforces the point, but we should be using the word "wages" to be clearer.
Fidessa is pretty famous on Wall Street for paying lower salaries but being much more fun to work for. They have tons of at-work and after-work events (with and without alcohol). There are lots of people who stay at Fidessa for much less money than they could make at another firm.
That's only 99% true, but the 1% of exceptions will get an egregiously disproportionate amount of attention and concern.
Maybe software-adjacent people applying to startups, but in general, this obviously can't be true. Relatively low-paying but high-status jobs, like FBI agent, military officer, elected official, judge wouldn't exist, nor low-paying passion work like social worker, wildlife conservation, most non-profits, low-paying jobs that are simply fun like most musicians, pro athletes in unpopular sports. Plenty of capable, talented people who could be making more money choose not to.
I mean, that's not entirely true.
Mostly true, yes. A monthly pizza and beer party won't make up for lack of salary, but extra PTO that I can use can.
Like...if I had the choice of a job that offered $200K/year but only 2 weeks PTO, and another offered only $185K but 5 weeks PTO, I'd take the latter.
Honestly I'd love a company that gave 4 weeks PTO with the option to take up to another 4 weeks unpaid.
If you people only valued salary you'd all be in sales :)
Are you serious? I know quite clearly that people do value things besides salary!
Of course people value things besides salary, but if there was no salary or the salary would not be enough to live off, none of those things matter in any way. So first and foremost (unless you're a billionaire's son) is salary, for everyone.
How do we have ghost jobs and simultanously not have enough tech workers that we need to import them?
I am seeing lots of qualified commentors (according to them) say they won't even get a call back...
What makes you so sure the job wouldn't just exist somewhere cheaper like Europe if they couldn't hire for 2/3 in the US?
Because it’s hard to fire someone in the EU. Eastern Europe is cheaper and so is India.
I worked at a globally remote company. Most of the European devs worked for a one man consulting company, that my employer then "contracted" out to. I'm not sure if that nullifies all the protections, but I'm sure it did a lot.
Wealthier European countries seem to be moving towards clamping down on this kind of consulting. See IR35 in the UK as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IR35
This is still possible in many European countries, especially less wealthy ones.
I mean, IR35 happened because you could avoid a lot of tax as a contractor. In Ireland however, being a contractor is fine, but you end up basically paying the same tax as an employed person, so the tax authorities don't mind.
Using agencies largely solves the "hard to fire someone" problem.
That's a myth. How is it hard to fire someone?
I live in Austria and you can fire people for pretty much any reason. You have to give them 6 weeks notice, and there are some extra protections for people who are old or who have disabilities and who have been working for your company for a long time, but even then you can fire them.
You can even fire people for getting sick a lot.
And that's assuming you directly hire them as employees in the first place. Many people work via agencies or as contractors, and they have practically zero protections.
Wow, I am genuinely shocked by this post. I had no idea. Honestly, I assumed that most central European countries have reasonably strong labour laws that make it difficult to fire employees. Let us assume that your post is (mostly) true. How does Austria have such a large, robust, stable middle class without strong labour protections, or a wide/deep social safety net? Or does Austria have the equivalent of "Flexcurity" from Denmark (easy to fire, but wide/deep social safety net for a moderate period of time)?
Labour protections doesn't mean you are protected from being fired.
You have to pay people the minimum salary depending on their trade, you have to give them 5 weeks of vacation, pay overtime, pay for health insurance and so on.
Employers can't exploit their employees, but employees still have to do their job.
But there is also a big area of the economy where employers ignore the law and treat employees like shit. For example, service workers are not generally treated well in Austria, and many are afraid of losing their job so they don't complain to the authorities.
>That's a myth. How is it hard to fire someone?
Maybe the statement isn't true for EU as a whole, but some member countries have far higher bar than what you describe. For instance in Spain the company must provide justification to the government before firing someone.
https://www.rippling.com/blog/termination-in-spain
I don't know about the situation in Spain, but what a lot of people in Austria mix up is that there are different types of terminating contracts.
In Austria, the employer can terminate a contract immediately if the employee behaves in a manner that would harm the employer.
If the employee does nothing wrong, the contract can still be terminated, but you have to give notice 6 weeks ahead (or longer if the employee has worked at your company for a long time).
People get these things confused and think employees generally can't be fired without a reason, but that's not true. They just can't be fired on the spot without a reason.
That's a low bar for "hard".
Fwiw they're probably just making a point to protest the phenomenon.
Is there any evidence H1B workers in tech have lowered wages?
I have only seen anecdotes while the law explicitly states H1Bs should be paid the prevailing wage or above.
Just speaking from my experience -- if the company is a big corp, usually the wages follow average market rates (I was paid market average wage in a top advertising corp in the world and I got my green card there in 6-7 years). Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out average market rates for each job category and the H1B sponsor has to match or pay above that to get the H1B application approved. I was also checking out my market rates (i.e., applying for other companies that allows H1B transfer) constantly during my H1B time because I can move to another job if my current company was paying me lower than average wages.
On the other hand, for some shady companies that are set up as contract shops, then I'd not be surprised if the wages are lower than average market rate, but I have never worked at one, so I might be misleading by even mentioning this here.
Look up that "prevailing wage". It's a deep discount compared to the real world.
Minimum for a Software Developer in SF: $113,444 https://h1bgrader.com/
What do you think that is wrong?
H1B devs at FAANG companies are paid far more.
The same FAANG companies found guilty of depressing wages through collusion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Your question is why is it wrong to depress wages? Yeah, really tough question.
Now consider OPT visa workers which are being paid even less, plus companies get an extra 8-10% discount because they don't have to pay Social Security and Medicare. There is no shortage of skilled workers here. Only corporate greed.
It's what I would naturally expect to happen in the absence of consistent heroic efforts by the authorities to prevent it.
If that is happening widely, surely there will be some data to support that right?
Authorities do enforce H1B provisions proactively.
https://www.uscis.gov/scams-fraud-and-misconduct/report-frau...
https://cis.org/North/Apple-Hit-25-Million-Penalty-Favoring-...
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/11/06/h-1b-visa-fraud-leads...
> absence of consistent heroic efforts
Will that apply to every law in society or just to H1B laws?
Despite absence of consistent heroic efforts, we don't see widespread criminal activities.
You seem to be genuinely curious, which is commendable.
>Will that apply to every law in society or just to H1B laws?
The H1B laws are harder to enforce than most laws -- or so it would seem to me -- because the question of whether there are Americans that are able to do a particular job at a particular workplace depends on many fiddly details that only the managers of the particular workplace (the prospective defendant in any enforcement action) would know.
When lawyers working on Capitol Hill are serious about stamping out a behavior, they write laws that are easy to enforce (unambiguous, not relying much on human judgment). Something as vague as, "as long as there are no Americans qualified to do the job," suggests that whoever wrote that just wants to reassure critics of the H1B program without caring much whether H1B workers actually displace American workers.
This is the lump of labor fallacy. People are both consumers and laborers; by bringing someone new into a labor market you marginally decrease demand for their skill set but you also marginally increase demand for all other labor. If H1-B visa holders all worked in the same industry, it could conceivably lower wages in that industry but they don't. They work in everything from healthcare, to IT, to education.
66% of H1-B approvals are in computer related positions. https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/data/OLA_...
Source that prevailing wage is 2/3 of the market?
I thought that number was conservative. I was hiring at 1/2 and 1/3.
So source: “trust me bro”?
This is an incredibly obnoxious response. This isn't a court. People can site their professional experience in an informal conversation.
You know what’s actually obnoxious? spreading nonsense for internet points. This is all public data btw so you can easily go on DOL website and pull those apps with real salaries.
If we are trading anecdotes here I personally dont know any h1bs who are making less than 300k total comp. Hows that for obnoxious?
Wait, this isn't clear to me. Are the interviewees citizens? So you're interviewing citizens to prove that there aren't any who can fill your jobs but even when they clearly could fill the job you don't hire them? Seems like the requirement of proving "there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job" is going to be near impossible for the government to enforce
Yes, h1b hiring practices have been shady at best for atleast a decade. For everyone that just doesn’t want to fire a coworker there is someone taking advantage of cheap labor that is easier to control under the threat of deportation.
The h1b program is supposed to be for people at the top of their field so they can skip the normal visa line, but it is commonly used to save money through exploitation.
A long time ago I read an hn comment that suggested h1b visas should go to the highest paying jobs, with the logic being that if they are such a rare talent they should probably be getting paid more.
I've been programming since the early 90's, and back then pretty much all my coworkers were other US citizens. I started to notice a shift toward the mid 90's and then, by the late 90's, they were practically all Indians on H1B visas. Nobody from Russia, China, El Salvador, Brazil, Japan, Botswana, Ethiopia or even Bangladesh or Pakistan - virtually every programmer I met was an Indian citizen in the US on an H1B visa. I saw this across ten employers in two different states. Every tech conference I went to, regardless of city, was full of Indian citizens with heavy accents, and me.
There's a prevailing belief that US employers prefer H1B visa holders because they'll work cheaper and not complain about poor working conditions but if that's true... why computer programmers, specifically? Why are there _any_ Americans in the organization? Surely the product owners, project managers, scrum masters, HR staff, janitors, facilities maintenance, receptionists, directors, VPs and CEOs could be filled cheaper and less complainier by an H1B visa holder too?
I have yet to find a plausible explanation why specifically computer programming (and no other career) is dominated specifically by Indian citizens (and no other nationality).
Computer programming is easily verifiable, the code works or it doesnt. so you dont need good english, and your education doesnt really matter since either you write working code or you dont. its also a massive cost on businesses. theres like a thousand reasons
1. India has ~130 million English speakers, second only to United States.
2. IIT.
3. Culture matters, both on the recruitment side and demand side. Indian outsourcing built a pipeline decades ago so it's now a well understood career path in India.
4. Non-technical positions tend to require greater social competencies in the hiring/customer culture. US programmers already complain about the cultural tendencies of their Indian colleagues. The social and political aspects of other careers are less amenable to dropping in a rando with limited understanding of the culture.
> The h1b program is supposed to be for people at the top of their field so they can skip the normal visa line, but it is commonly used to save money through exploitation.
Incorrect - such people already qualify for green cards under the "alien of extraordinary ability" criterion. At least in theory, anyway.
There is no "normal visa line" btw, unless you mean the green card diversity lottery, which people from eg. India and China don't even qualify for.
> A long time ago I read an hn comment that suggested h1b visas should go to the highest paying jobs, with the logic being that if they are such a rare talent they should probably be getting paid more.
This is in principle a good idea although I suspect that if actually implemented employers would figure out how to game the system just as they do now.
You’re right, I was a bit hyperbolic there. Though it is supposed to be for skilled jobs that a capable american is not available to do.
> Though it is supposed to be for skilled jobs that a capable american is not available to do.
No it's not. The H-1B program has no requirement for a labor market test (i.e. showing that there is no citizen that can do the job). The Immigration and Nationality Act, which is the source of the H-1B program, does not have such a requirement. The only big requirements are that the job require a degree (except for fashion models) and that it pays the prevailing wage.
The labor market test is usually required to upgrade to an employment-based green card from a H-1B, though, hence the frequent confusion.
It is 100% required for employment-based green card from a H1B. Anyone that has gone through this process knows this as their own job had to be posted to several job posting sites and each and ever candidate had to be reviewed and discounted in some ways (my company added crap to the posting such that it was simply impossible for someone to be as qualified for the job as me unless they sat next to me and did what I did for 5+ years…)
Nope, it's not 100% required, there are exceptions for certain job categories like nursing and there's also the extraordinary ability exception.
(Not trying to be pedantic but US immigration law is full of random loopholes and people who qualify for them, or might be able to qualify with a bit of work, often aren't aware.)
I should have been more clear - I am talking about IT/Dev/… jobs, not other professions.
huh I thought the “good faith steps to recruit U.S. workers” part was for every company, but apparently it’s only for certain companies receiving money or who have already got in trouble.
I would have been more against it if I realized that.
Yeah. To be clear I think it's fair to be critical of the current shape of the H-1B program (personally, I think the way it's used by outsourcing companies is pretty bad).
But there's a logical fallacy in these discussions in which people criticize the current H-1B program for not being compliant with some made-up version of what the H-1B program is. If you don't like the current program, the solution is not "we need to do what the law says" because in fact the current program is 100% compliant with the law. The solution is to change the law.
America is a big country. There will always be someone capable of doing the job if you take price out of the equation.
I get that people like semantically and logically simple ideas, but the world doesn't reflect that.
Cost is an inherent part of the H1B program
> The h1b program is supposed to be for people at the top of their field so they can skip the normal visa line, but it is commonly used to save money through exploitation.
This is false. O-1 is the visa for the "people at the top of their field". H-1B is for regular employees.
Well, it's been shady for at least 2.5 decades.
> The h1b program is supposed to be for people at the top of their field so they can skip the normal visa line
H1B is the normal visa line.
the grandparent comment states that they were interviewing for a position that was held by a green card applicant, not h1b visa holder.
At the last startup I worked at, our CTO was on a visa.
To satisfy the "no one in the US can fill the CTO role", they took out an advertisement in a San Francisco newspaper classifieds so they had evidence that they attempted to find a US citizen / permanent resident CTO.
Obviously there were no applicants.
This used to be fairly common for H1B roles of any level - I don't find it surprising almost no one wants to fire a colleague ultimately, so doing whatever you could to reduce the number of applicants while still paying lip service to the rules is the logical outcome, rightly or wrongly.
For what its worth, towards end of 2010s USCIS were starting to clamp down on this and were being a lot stricter about the job being advertised appropriately for the role (you submit evidence of the advertisement during the PERM process).
A tell for fake firms in my local newspaper is they ask for a snail mail resume. These appear to me to be more like shell companies submitting multiple H1Bs as far as I can tell though, not legit firms saying they cannot hire any US.
real firms do this too.
Pick up a local newspaper that is not well known.
CTO actually makes sense for an h1b though, it’s a high paying job that can depend greatly on the technical and creative skills of the individual and how they mesh with the company.
The problem is when it’s someone pumping out code, or doing tech support for half the cost of the local competition.
No, this is backwards
CTO is not such an exceptional role that you can convince me that a company couldn't find a single person in America who would be qualified to take it
It's also a highly sought after role, so people would generally be willing to relocate for a role like that
H1Bs are designed to fill labour shortages, where your local labour market is saturated and you are struggling to find local talent or attract talent from further away, so you can import workers
Using a visa designed to fill labour shortages for an executive position like CTO is frankly an abuse of the system
But arguably any labor shortage can be fixed by just having way higher wages.
Like if Google is struggling to hire L3 entry level engineers, can't they just offer $1 million/year salary? Then of course they will get the people they want.
To me, the point of H-1B and similar programs isn't "we can't get the individual staff we need". It's rather that at a society-wide level, having more software engineers at an overall lower salary can be more beneficial to the country than fewer engineers at a higher salary. And I feel that the success of Silicon Valley kind of shows this: if we didn't have any immigrants to the US, maybe the salaries would have been higher, but there is simply no chance SV would have reached the scale it has.
>> But arguably any labor shortage can be fixed by just having way higher wages.
Yes, like a lot of immigration, it is entirely about wage suppression to benefit owners and shareholders.
> But arguably any labor shortage can be fixed by just having way higher wages
Not even remotely true, outside of unskilled labour work
> Like if Google is struggling to hire L3 entry level engineers, can't they just offer $1 million/year salary?
They can, but that won't suddenly make more people who are qualified for L3 entry level engineering positions to sprout into existence
It may cause people to re-skill to try and chase those positions.
It probably will have engineers from their competitors come to work for them
But then their competitors are in the same position facing a labour shortage. The shortage hasn't gone away!
>But arguably any labor shortage can be fixed by just having way higher wages.
In the long term perhaps, but not in the short term. Bidding wars over an inadequate supply of suitably-skilled labour are good for those workers, but they aren't good for the economy or society as a whole.
> It's rather that at a society-wide level, having more software engineers at an overall lower salary can be more beneficial to the country than fewer engineers at a higher salary.
Beneficial to owners of capital in said country. Not so beneficial to non owners of capital (also usually labor sellers) in said country.
It's not so binary. Economic growth and prosperity does benefit a broad swath of society.
For non-workers the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, while for workers the disadvantages outweigh the benefits.
If your income is from owning capital or from real estate value increase or from government benefits, then anything that can reduce the price of things you want to buy is a benefit. This is a large part of the population.
If your income is from working and producing goods and services, then getting paid less is a negative that is far worse than the positive from cheaper things.
Many people have their foot in both camps. Their main source of income is from their real estate appreciating in value, while working is just a means to pay off the old mortgage so that they soon can get a new cash out by mortgaging at a higher value.
It's very much also economic warfare waged by the elderly against the young. The elderly own almost all capital and are interested in increasing it. Keeping the young as poor as possible is excellent for them, so as to keep them from being a threat to their wealth and power.
Workers aren't monolithic.
I'll be the first to admit that the disadvantages outweigh the benefits for specific workers. NAFTA sucked for autoworkers. H1B visas suck for IT and software workers.
I think other types of workers benefit more than the portrait you paint, and not just the capital owners.
Unless you are a utilitarian (I'm not), I agree there is a valid debate on how much policy should disadvantage a small group for "the greater good".
> H1B visas suck for IT and software workers.
H1b only sucks for short sighted people. Places like India would in any case have more software engineers available, than the US. Moving and hiring best of Indian engineers in the US kept teams operating in the US from being offshored wholesale.
Software isn't a car, doesn't require physical transportation.
An understaffed team in the US would be worth less than an offshore team with offshoring overhead.
Sure, I benefit that a washing machine costs $600 instead of $6000. That benefit is small in comparison with if my yearly income would be double. In almost all possible scenarios, higher wages are better than cheaper goods. You cannot improve your economic situation by purchasing cheap consumer goods, but you can do it with higher income.
btw the actual couch used by Marie Antionette is now on display at the San Francisco Legion of Honor.. a very expensive couch! at least a dozen people must have benefited economically from that couch.
They most certainly did! However, that is a pretty tortured comparison if that was the case.
I think I would be harder to make such a cynical zing about the net benefit of allowing 10,000 doctors to immigrate.
That’s true, but in reality, the US chains the engineers and doctors with the specter of losing their visa and arduous paperwork over their head so that they are coerced into selling their labor at an even lower price.
I'm the first to admit it isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean there is no net benefit. hundreds of thousands of people are paid market wages on H1B visas and many get green cards. On balance, this is good for consumers and citizens.
I feel like people have a gut reaction to injustice and harm where they want to trash the whole system, not realizing that would be an even greater injustice and harm.
It is a counterproductive distraction to real change and improvement. It just scratches the emotional itch of moral outrage and superiority.
I do not want to "trash the whole system", but when I see laws crafted specifically and solely to depress labor prices, it is reasonable to get emotional and feel morally superior. Why else would we give work authorization to a person, but then restrict them to a single employer such as with H1-B?
See also lower minimum wages and separate labor standards for poorer Mexican immigrants in agriculture, not to mention the complete lack of requirement for employers to ensure legal work authorization, and complete lack of consequences for employers that employ people without work authorization.
> Why else would we give work authorization to a person, but then restrict them to a single employer such as with H1-B?
H1B visas are not restricted to a single employer. The catch is that the new employer is required to demonstrate the new role is valid for H1B work.
This is a control to make sure that H1-B visa holders are not underpaid or doing abusing the system.
It is a genuinely tough problem. You could decouple the H1B visa from the employer position, but then you have people entering for one type of work at market rate, and doing any type of work and undercutting salaries.
The whole employer requirement is an attempt to protect native workers. Letting H1B workers enter decoupled from a job and salary requirement would be much better for employers. They could pay them minimum wage and hire them into any role they want.
Im curious to hear ideas for how it could be structured that is better. Im sure there are options. Maybe the workers themselves could submit the info for change of employment, but I dont know how they would prove the work is at prevailing wage.
It is. Best case scenario H1Bs allow companies to avoid training citizens. Worst case (and most common) H1Bs are more exploitable labor compared to citizens.
H1Bs etc just suppress citizens wages and increase profits of capital holders. There’s a very very tiny % that actually aren’t replaceable domestically.
Fist - it is not companies' responsibility to train anyone. It is not their business.
Second - H1b are exploitable, because the system allows it.
H1b has demonstrably not suppressed software engineering wages at all.
Non-competes, have - on the other hand.
This is an excellent point and a real litmus test. If there really were a labor shortage companies would be providing training programs to build that labor force.
Instead they post job descriptions so niche only a liar could technically qualify.
> Best case scenario H1Bs allow companies to avoid training citizens.
Best for who? Companies should train their workforce. Or get kicked out of the market, meaning that they should get kicked out of the nation.
After reading it a few times my understanding is this:
An H1B job holder applies for a green card. OP then must interview to prove the role can't be filled by a citizen. An interviewee knocks it out of the park, failing the check and so the green card application is denied. However the person holding the job is still legally allowed to work for 2-3 years in their H1B. So they're kept on for that long even though the check failed for the green card.
> Seems like the requirement of proving "there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job" is going to be near impossible for the government to enforce
Correct. It's pure theatre.
the person applying for the green card already works for the interviewing company. the job opening is THAT green card applicant's job requirements.
the lawyer/law firm handling the green card application process has to prove that there are no US citizens who are qualified to do the job.
if there were qualified applicants for the job, then the green card applicant won't be given a green card, I assume. But that green card applicant is already working in the country via some other visa, so there is no job opening to fill typically.
the current person in the job is performing well, otherwise, why would you be trying to get a green card for them?
i've never heard of any green card applicant getting denied a green card due to a qualified US citizen applicant.
If the labor market test yields a candidate, the petition isn't filed. So there is formally no rejection from the USCIS. But application processes fail at this step all the time.
You explained it perfectly. I’d never lie, if I interviewed someone comparable the process ends immediately internally. But the employee (who is still an amazing employee, exceeds, promotions, Etc) is not fired
The requirement you mention is for filing a green card application.
If I find a good citizen, I don’t file the application, that’s the law. But the employee does have h1b or OPT and is still allowed to work in the US, nothing wrong with that. If the government wants to stop giving those out workplaces will adapt
> Seems like the requirement of proving "there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job" is going to be near impossible for the government to enforce
It's extremely easy to enforce with taxes that ensure the company is paying at least 1X0% of the highest market rate for the position. If they don't find an alternative to paying it is a necessary hire.
The requirement to pay market rate already exists and it's very easily gamed, eg. by under-leveling people or hiring them in under a related (but lower paid) role that doesn't reflect their actual responsibilities.
There's no premium financing proper adversarial regulatory agency there. If the IRS is not taking its special ~30% of 300+ workers salaries there's a best effort by a regulatory body that's viewed as a waste of tax payer money if it just checks a few technicalities.
Hence why there are so many h1bs.
This has been going on for decades. My first job out of university was at a dotcom consultancy with over 90% of software engineers there on H1B visas. The company was not at all shy about the fact that they only hired citizens/permanent residents if they had no other choice. I was hired because I had experience with a particular obscure RTOS that they couldn't find anyone on a visa who could do the work on a project they already told a client we were experts in.
Our VP of Software Engineering (here on a visa himself) stood right next to my desk telling one of our programmers not to worry about his visa expiring because they'd post his job for 24 hours on the company website, accept resumes for one week, and then declare the job unfillable by local talent so he could get his visa renewed. This was in 2000 and this type of thing has been practiced openly and with no fear of there ever being any consequences for violating both the letter and spirit of the law regarding using labor visas.
These threads end up fire hosed with people claiming hiring visa holders over citizens and permanent residents doesn't happen nor does it push down wages. They know these are lies and have been lies for decades. But since there are no consequences, legally or socially, it continues to be the default behavior. This in turn warps local talent development as more and more kids see that there's little reason to go into a career field where the government and business openly collude to disadvantage locals in favor of visa labor.
> These threads end up fire hosed with people claiming hiring visa holders over citizens and permanent residents
They apparently also get fire-hosed with comments on the horrors of H1B hiring in a thread that is on green card application rules, i.e., all youb commenters on H1B did not even read the GP post. Those rules require advertising for a filled position, but don't require firing the current holder when you find a good candidate.
For those who come across this type of fraud, reporting is straightforward. You can report anonymously.
https://www.uscis.gov/scams-fraud-and-misconduct/report-frau...
https://www.uscis.gov/report-fraud/uscis-tip-form
I would also report as securities fraud to the SEC, but that is a higher hill to climb.
https://www.sec.gov/submit-tip-or-complaint/tips-complaints-...
(not calling OP out specifically, general guidance when you come across illegal labor practices)
I think you've managed to explain why H1Bs shouldn't exist pretty convincingly.
I agree. I did hire someone on an H1B in the early 2010's and he was, to put it mildly, the perfect candidate for the job and I don't think I could have found anyone anywhere to do it. Someone else at the company was hired, into sales, and they were pretty good for the job (a Japanese person to service the Japanese market), but you could argue that citizen speakers of Japanese do exist and should have been given priority.
I would be happy if the H1B program was killed.
My one hope for the next administration is that they crack down hard on this sort of thing and pursue comprehensive immigration reform. A company that relies on labor from people who don't even have permanent residency rights probably shouldn't exist, and yes, I'm including agriculture in that statement. We should have a points based system like Canada with some carve outs for lower skilled ag workers.
lol you think immigration is a real concern? remember the convoy, or the W Bush era?
half of US farms, meat packing, restaurants, construction, etc. rely on undocumented labor. the GOP owned the house and Senate for years, and could have crushed it well before now.
they don't because a lot of big business want these illegals, and the same folks backing the new administration -- aka tech bros like Musk and Thiel -- are totally down with H1Bs
So basically you're wasting the interviewees time and breaking the law by admitting that you won't hire a citizen who would do the job just as well.
The law says I can’t submit the I-140 application, which I follow the law and I don’t submit it.
As a people manager it’s a heartbreaking conversation to have - to tell a report their dream of staying beyond their visa is gone
The law says every line manager needs to do their own industry pulse check every time an i-140 is submitted. And this is the only legal way to pulse check (advertise a ghost job). It would be much easier if the federal government did the pulse check one time for everyone and decided if engineers are or aren’t missing in the industry
So… the interviewee doesn’t get the job even though they knocked it out of the park, and the H1B doesn’t get their visa because the other interviewee did well. Basically nobody wins, and the H1B person is out of a job in 2-3 years?
Yes, this is precisely what the comment thread is saying. Shmatt’s original post should shock you with its conclusion because everyone loses including shmatt.
I’m not necessarily shocked but more appalled. I’ve always wondered this - in tech there’s very little reason to believe that you need to import talent. Learning is mostly democratized these days, and I find it hard pressed to believe that there isn’t a US Citizen for literally any tech company. But they cost more hence they try to do the whole H1B process… which then comes to bite them back.
I literally quit my previous job, because people were hired after "a few Coursera courses".
Sorry, if you "learned online" and haven't spent a few years building software - you aren't immediately as qualified as a graduate from IIT.
Exactly, and I don’t understand the fraud comments because this is exactly how US lawmakers intended the system the work. Easy to come for 3-6 years, hard to stay forever
It would be better if the “replaceable” part was determined on the federal level and not on the team level. That would get rid of all the ghost jobs
> Basically nobody wins
Business wins.
I dislike this system as much as you do. Clearly the PERM cert is flawed. I suppose the system is working as intended, and I'm not sure what the drama is, although of course, from a human empathy point of view, I feel like the story is making you look like the worst actor in this scenario.
That is unfair, but forgive me: you hold all the cards and occupy the most powerful position in the story, and you are framing it in absolutes, trying to make yourself a victim, talking about it as though you are powerless.
is this the situation of POSIWID
I’ve only had very limited experience with colleagues on OPT and my role as a hiring manager with an OPT visa holder.
There’s a big difference between a tech enabled agency, sometimes called a “body shop” - where you are B2B, you are someone’s lower cost option, you are a middleman - and a startup, where whatever you are developing - seemingly B2B, social media apps, hardware, biotech - in some form or another, your core business is capturing 90%+ margins on the LTVs of end users. With experience only in the startup style business, you ought to structure the economics of the deals to your employees such that they can buy what they want if everything works out, and all the incentives align.
So to me, it’s not super material, green card this, PERM certification that: if you make a ton of money, you can surmount any bureaucratic obstacle in this country. Is that the purpose of the system? A complex administrative problem like UCSIS policy and related politics cannot defeat the power of the almighty dollar. So for people who have agency, like startup CEOs, it’s possible to sincerely offer a path to citizenship in the US, in light of things like O1, E1, marriage, etc, that doesn’t break any laws, but only costs money.
> The law says I can’t submit the I-140 application, which I follow the law and I don’t submit it.
Sorry, I'm still unclear. What rule says you can't submit your employee's green card application even though you've determined that you won't hire a citizen to do that job?
Don't you have to demonstrate that there is no qualified US worker? I find this unbelievable and outrageous.
>> As a people manager it’s a heartbreaking conversation to have - to tell a report their dream of staying beyond their visa is gone
If an actual citizen could have done the job, they shouldn't be in the country in the first place.
This is not a constant fact, though. In 2021 there were not enough qualified US work eligible candidates to go around. Right now is going to be a very different story for many roles.
>> In 2021 there were not enough qualified US work eligible candidates to go around.
That is only ever true at a certain salary level. If they (hypothetically) 10x-ed the salary, do you think they would still have a shortage?
Probably. Poaching an employee from somewhere else still creates an opening that can't be filled.
Finally I understood, thank you.
it's okay to break stupid laws as long as you don't get caught
Break stupid laws/don't get caught | Civil disobedience/face consequences
------------------------------------|----------------------------------------
Don't break any laws/get SWATed. | "It's never okay to break any laws ever"
____
I feel like this model could be useful somehow.
Just wanted to say thanks for sharing this, dude -- a lot of other replies are complaining (because this does suck for US citizens), but I imagine it also sucks for you, since (IIUC) you just want to keep your good developer and also not lie to the government. It's not fun to hear about but it's better it's said out loud, right. Sorry you're in this situation
So, you are effectively committing fraud!
I work for <megacorp> and the way they get around this is by only hiring contractors. Because then the liability for that is on the vendor.
No. Following the letter of the law cannot be fraud. I think you don't understand the rules.
So when interviewing, perhaps I should skip more places that say citizenship required on the req, to avoid wasting my time?
No. Many (especially smaller) companies don't want to hire people who need visa sponsorship because it requires a decent amount of overhead. The company needs to have an immigration lawyer to prepare and submit paperwork, which many smaller companies don't want to bother with.
FWIW it's illegal to require "US citizenship" in a job description. You can, however, say "eligible to work in the US". (The former would be discriminatory against non-citizen permanent residents). Although I'm also not a lawyer.
There are actually situations where U.S. citizenship can be a requirement, e.g., cleared jobs but there needs to be a really good reason like not being able to obtain clearances.
SpaceX has been through the wringer on this one, so just copy & paste from their listing:
To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.
> Learn more about the ITAR here
ITAR, defense, and clearances are completely unique worlds compared to the rest of the job market.
The SpaceX case was centered around ITAR regulations. ITAR jobs do not necessarily require security clearance. As the person you responded to mentioned, you have to be a citizen to get security clearance and related jobs. Asylum seekers and refugees can't get clearance.
You're largely correct, as I understand it.
You cant discriminate in favor of citizens vs permanent residents unless the job legally requires citizenship.
Defense.
is it illegal to put that phrase? i don't think so. There are a lot of shops that includes that and they usually come with clearance needed.
> FWIW it's illegal to require "US citizenship" in a job description.
nonsense
tons of jobs advertisements required "US citizenship", because there is a security clearance attached
Those companies are breaking the law. SpaceX was prosecuted for doing that.
Now SpaceX says:
To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.
> Those companies are breaking the law.
If the position requires a security clearance, they are not breaking the law. Language like this is standard on defense contractor postings that require clearances (this from Lockeed):
> Security Clearance Statement: This position requires a government security clearance, you must be a US Citizen for consideration.
> SpaceX was prosecuted for doing that.
SpaceX was prosecuted for excluding refugees and asylees from export-controlled positions, not cleared positions.
Non-US citizens can't get a security clearance. Permanent residents can at most get a limited access authorization. The SpaceX case involved ITAR, not clearance.
Without cause, you can't discriminate for citizenship.
Just like you can't discriminate by race, unless you're a film director you want a black actress to play Rosa Parks.
No, because most places don't want to go through the hassle of sponsoring a visa.
Though once a place does want to go through the hassle, it seems to be the only kind of work they hire because they get a huge discount on labor. Of everyone I know IRL on work visas, almost all of them work in companies/teams that are 99% work visa.
> So while I will deny their green card application and not submit it,
I might be missing this in the thread. What is the reason that you deny their green card application and not submit?
He found another candidate which could do the job. This finding makes it a federal crime to recommand the current H1B employee for a green card.
That sounds ethical.
Good to hear that H1B programme isn't being abused.
He found another candidate which could do the job. This finding makes it a federal crime to recommand the current H1B employee for a green card.
I understand now. See above.
Omg 80% of comments in this thread are so confidently wrong it’s insane. Fyi tp is actually doing everything by the book
Yes, it's been better explained now.
I guess this is a case of "don't hate the player, hate the game." although the question remains why they filled the role with an H1B candidate in the first place if they could find locals that could do the job. That piece is clearly unethical and done only for wage suppression.
More like a case of “perhaps dont make judgements if your knowledge on the subject is aprox zero”. Again, same question as upthread - show me how prevailing wage is suppressing the market. The h1b could also been issued years ago like in 2021 for example
Have you heard of "Supply and Demand"?
Ah yes, if only we could mint experienced devs from thin air, your model would be perfectly sound!
Or maybe, devs could move from Company A to Company B that would pay them more money. What a terrible world that would be to live in.
Or companies in, say, SF could let people work remotely from Pittsburgh.
And what would company A do at that point?
> Or companies in, say, SF could let people work remotely from Pittsburgh.
Hold up, didn’t you say it was “clearly unethical” if local devs are available?
usually, they find this local person later. But is it right to replace then? Wage suppression but usually H-1Bs and other work immigration visas are not lower paid at big tech co
Maybe if someone is “amazing” you should get them a green card.
In this example the amazing engineer is a citizen or permanent resident already
If my superiors would give me extra unexpected budget I’d be happy to. But if I find a citizen that is just as good as my opt employee, my only path forward is to either fire the opt or let them continue on the team but not submit their GC application (because I have to swear I couldn’t find a citizen that is just as good)
…because if you grant them the green card they will up and get a new job? The incentives here are so screwed up for everyone, it effectively codifies a caste system of immigrant workers.
I took the implication to be that GP already had a good employee who was hired legitimately under the terms of the H1B, but that, to convert to a green card, you have to see whether a US person could do the job. So you have to put out for interviews to see, but you don’t have to act on that information.
If the interview process yields a US person equally qualified, GP can’t (and doesn’t) certify the guest worker’s green card application. But that doesn’t mean they have to fire them and send them home early: they can let the guest worker work out their contract if they want to (which they probably do, it probably pays well compared to other options). And an experienced, already-trained, good employee is probably more valuable to the business than an immediate, unplanned new hire anyway.
So yes, certainly screwed up incentives—but I don’t see how it would be better to require guest workers to put their jobs in immediate jeopardy just to apply for permanent residency.
exactly that. you actually want/need a few years of warning if your greencard is going to be accepted or not. having to put out a ghost job in order to find out if the greencard is going to be accepted is really the problem (for the ghost candidate)
No, you're missing the point.
To extend the visa they have to swear they couldn't find a citizen to do this job, and aren't willing to lie.
(this clarified the situation for me, thank you)
Caste systems are extremely convenient.
Companies can't just do this.
It'd be fabulous if this was an option, but green card applications have all sorts of caps and aren't even just "wait in a line for N years." They are random every year and every year you fail to get approved you get no closer to being approved.
The effect is that you can have excellent engineers who've been in the US for a decade+ who are still in this liminal space where they don't have legal permanent residency.
should vs. could. vs. ought. vs. can
Strikes again
What makes it worth the extra trouble?
I guess the "green cards" really work cheap?
We interview without knowing sponsorship status. If someone requires sponsorship that happens after we decide they were the best interviewee
I wish it wasn’t this way but in the vast majority of interviews, the sponsor required person is the best one
Well.... DUH!
You're comparing the vast swathes of mediocre talent to the best from the rest of the world. Of course the top talent from elsewhere is going to beat the average talent from the US.
I was always wondered who audits this. Why should you even deny the green card?
You have to prove you tried interviewing and couldn’t find anyone to replace them. My company isn’t a super popular employer so we don’t get the best candidates. This might be a bigger problem at Google, Meta, etc
I can't imagine why they're not a super popular employer.
So you are simultaneously screwing over the ones applying to the job, the government, the guy already working for you and yourself? Geez, it must be amazing in your department, a lose-lose-lose-lose
Isn't it lose-win-lose-lose? The government is requiring this.
An understandable situation. But by admitting this, your company is admitting liability for citizenship discrimination (8 U.S.C. § 1324b).
Even though you are not submitting a PERM and running into potential issues with fraud there, the underlying act of rejecting US citizen/LPR applicants is the same, so I don't see how this would be any different than, for example, the Apple case last year (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-secures-25...) with a $25M settlement.
In the Apple case, the company did actually obtain PERMs for some of the positions, but they were only charged with discrimination against the un-hired applications, not anything to do with the the hiring/sponsoring of the foreign workers. Furthermore, the case did not even allege actual tossing out of US citizen resumes, but merely making the applications deliberately inconvenient to avoid actually receiving any unwanted "real" applications.
I don't think you interpret the Apple case correctly. They got fined for advertising PERM job postings differently from regular job openings, distorting the test in the view of the agency. That has nothing to do with the post you are responding to.
Is there someone who we could report this comment to? Get an investigation opened.
It would go to the Immigrant and Employee Rights Section, Civil Rights Division, USDOJ. I think they only take formal complaints from those who applied though (it is different from the regular EEOC process though--the government itself acts as the complainant). You could try just sending them an email.
Rage baiting?
Doesn’t appear so, the OP seems genuine
Are you claiming the government requires you to lie to applicants to the "ghost" job?
Do you have evidence for that claim?
How did you hire the H1-B in The first place if you have direct direct personal evidence that citizen labor is available?
From the discussion in the rest of the thread, this test isn't required for hiring someone in a H1B in the first place, but it is required to upgrade it to a green card.
This is just plain fraud
He found another candidate which could do the job. This finding makes it a federal crime to recommand the current H1B employee for a green card.
If there are qualified citizens, why are hiring h1b?
The H1B system is so rife with corruption at every level and needs to be stopped.
I can’t tell if this is satire or actual comic book villain behavior. I guess not really villain behavior, but certainly gaming a clearly broken system
You should probably stop breaking federal law.
This isn't ethical. It shouldn't be legal. But it is. Welcome to America.
It’s neither ethical or legal, it’s fraud.
> It shouldn't be legal. But it is.
How is that legal? If you think the local applicant can do the job, you legally can’t hire the H-1B over them, right?
OP already hired H-1B in the past and that person is working for them now. OP is now in the process of doing a green card application for said employee. They can't move forward with the GC application because there are other qualified citizens/residents, but they don't have to fire the existing H1B employee.
That's how I understand OP, if that's legally true or not, I don't know.
You're correct that they are under no obligation to fire the employee on the H-1B. (In theory, they are applying for a "new" job, and them not getting it for whatever the reason isn't an issue for their current job and status.)
However, what OP is missing is that rejecting the US citizen application based on their citizenship is still likely a prohibited discrimination case regardless of what they do with the existing employee.
OP isn't rejecting the US citizen application because they are a US citizen - they are rejecting all candidates applying for the position regardless of ability to do the job or not since the position is already filled. There was no intent to fill the position to begin with - just a test to see if they can sponsor the current h1b employee for their greencard or not. There is no discrimination if no applicant had a chance of being hired to begin with.
They might be running afoul of discrimination laws if they only interview US citizens to cut down on their workload for fake interviews, but I'd guess someone this careful (e.g. not actually submitting the greencard sponsorship where many employers would with a wink and a nod) is likely careful enough to not filter candidates on such obvious things either.
It's a problem with the h1b (and green card) program itself, not OPs behavior. If anything, OP is probably in the top few percentile of ethical businesses/managers if they are actually denying the sponsorships because they made a good faith attempt to test to see if the local market had appropriate candidates.
The problem is that it’s hard to prove they did that. Until the law is changed the show will go on.
Yes, to really prove it, one would need an admission from the employer. But isn't the above comment such an admission?
Ok, present the HN handle to court:)
Interesting. So practically, they would have to hire the new applicant and then let go of the h1b worker because presumably they don’t have the budget for it?!
Something is only as illegal as the enforcement put into it.
So you’re just using your own definition of legal/illegal?
Is this a serious comment? Use your intelligence.
Yes, this was serious. If someone says:
> This isn't ethical. It shouldn't be legal. But it is.
It actually means „ok, it actually is illegal, but it’s not properly enforced“?
Dawg, not every sentence someone says is 100% literal all the time.
Can you guys stop shitposting?
it's a loophole, and loopholes are legal
Willingly admitting to fraud is a strong move.
Sending this to Elon...
And quoting to capture the illegal activity:
'''shmatt 47 minutes ago | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost J...
I have to put out a ghost job req and interview every person applying within reason for every green card a direct report is applying for. I have to show there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job The main problem is: even if the interviewee knocks it out of the park, is an amazing engineer, I still am not interested in firing my OPT/h1b team member who can still legally work for 2-3 years. So while I will deny their green card application and not submit it, I also won’t hire the interviewee'''
This will than probably change with the new American government and its anti-immigration stance. Less h1b, less ghost jobs.
Not likely. The new government is not interested in harming the interests of the big employers.
Yes, the depression the administration’s tariffs (and other policies) will produce will eliminate the jobs done by H1B workers, among others, and eliminate the incentives for economic immigration.
I wouldn't count on it. But there will certainly be tons of new part time jobs with no benefits and no health insurance.
Just like how the last Trump government fixed it?
House and Senate this time baby!
Just like last time!
Same as last time.
One can hope for a silver lining.
I actually couldn't begin to guess. The only thing I have to go on is, I think the administration is angling to do a sort of bust-out rather than enrich anybody, even those 'on their side'. If that's so, then much like with the FDA, there'll be some funny choices that lead to alarming outcomes.
I just don't know whether that would mean more h1b and ghost jobs, or less.
Trumps has talked multiple times about “stapling green cards to diplomas”. His rhetoric on illegal immigration is going to result in illegals who have committed a felony being deported and that’s it (just like every other neocon).
Making America better for Americans won’t happen until both sides realize neither party is looking out for the interests of American people and uses social issues etc to keep us divided.
As someone who went though the legal means when he was in the office last time, he will primarily hurt the legal immigration... because that is the easiest thing for them to do - grind USCIS to a halt.
And here's the source https://x.com/USTechWorkers/status/1803926021542154323
Unlikely. "Staple a Green Card to their diploma" is what Trump had to say about students from other countries that graduate from US universities. Since out of country students pay the highest tuition rates, universities love them and give them preferential admissions. Though not as bad as elementary and high schools, universities suffer from grade inflation and are reluctant to kick out paying customers, especially those paying the highest tuition. As a consequence, academic standards are being reduced at a rapid rate.
If you want to come to the US to get a professional job, attending a US university instead of a domestic one is going to be worth the extra cost when it guarantees you a Green Card.
There might be a reduction in the flow of low skilled labor, especially for those looking to hire workers without legal status, but up the middle class portion of the labor market, expect the system to continue to favor cheap imported labor over domestic labor.
STEM grad student tuition is paid by government grants
Generally not for Masters' programs though, which is the most popular and easiest way to get a temporary study visa. Then they pay out of state tuition rates.
So you have zero integrity. Thanks for sharing.
Not a certain conclusion, they could just operating from a different set of values than yours, but adhering to those with integrety.
>The trend could be due to the low marginal cost of posting additional job ads and to maintain a pipeline of talents. After adjusting for yearly trends, I find that ghost jobs can explain the recent disconnect in the Beveridge Curve in the past fifteen years. The results show that policy-makers should be aware of such a practice as it causes significant job fatigue and distorts market signals.
Very interesting.
I certainly have "gotten" what I thought was a ghost job. I went through the whole process ... they "wanted" to hire me. But didn't actually have a start date / couldn't actually hire me. For everyone involved though they seemed to be able to justify posting the job, interviews, because IMO, it made THEM look busy / effective.
The whole hiring people industrial complex seems oriented to be focused on the process of hiring (high fives for ever more complex hiring processes / delays) ... and not at all on the outcome (did we hire someone, were they good?).
It's the ultimate system where simply doing anything is "success" / and more processes rewarded, and there's almost no good measureless about outcomes for the company.
This is why many job seekers are perpetually passive/work through recruiters. An in-house recruiter may be there to perpetually screen for purple unicorn candidates that bend the CEO's hiring freeze - a contract recruiter won't work with a firm that can't actually hire.
I wish I could say I have a better experience with recruiters but I haven't. I've heard there are good recruiters, I don't doubt it, but it doesn't seem easy to find anymore than the next job is.
There really isn't a "good" recruiter from a candidate perspective. Their incentives are to support the firms they recruit for, and screen candidates. They do not work for your benefit.
My experience early in my career was that I needed to work with many of these recruiters until I found a gig. My experience at the time was weak, and my resume reflected that. I had to take the gigs which had lower competition e.g. systems administration.
Sort of. 3rd-party recruiters get paid on commission: they make money when their candidate gets hired in favor of the other recruiters' candidates. In that sense, the incentives are actually aligned in your favor when you're applying for a job that you really want: the recruiter is motivated to work to get you hired, and is only constrained by the need to not annoy the hiring manager. The incentives turn against you when the recruiter doesn't have any jobs that you really want, but is trying the numbers approach and putting you forward for things that you aren't really qualified for, "just in case" it's a good fit. You need to be aware that both of these scenarios can occur, so you can steer yourself away from the latter and towards the former.
The recruiter is still not really working for you, and the incentives are not aligned enough in your favor.
What we need is more of an "agent" like actors have: Maybe I don't have a full picture of what a Hollywood agent does, but I imagine they're constantly working in the background, looking for gigs for their busy actor, doing all the toil and paperwork and research on their behalf. Their end product is: "Studio X wants you to work on film A this year, and then Studio Y wants you to work on film B next year."
I could see a software engineer agent who gets paid by the engineer to do all of the application-filling-out, all the LinkedIn clicking, all of the company research, all of the pavement-pounding networking and paperwork toil, and all the interviewing, and then out comes: "Companies X, Y, and Z have these offers for you, which one do you want?" I'd probably pay a fortune, or maybe even a percentage of my comp, for a service like that.
The good recruiters are the ones who won't put you forward for a job that you're not qualified for, and will advocate for you during the hiring process in a job that you are qualified for. I have worked with recruiters like this before. But you need to screen the recruiter a bit, at least make sure that the jobs they are proposing for you actually make sense for you. If you are asking for SRE jobs in New York and they send you a DB Admin job req in New Haven, don't waste your time with that recruiter or that job.
> because IMO, it made THEM look busy / effective.
A KPI in hiring is offers made / accepted. I don't think the HR team gets credit for reviewing applicants and running interviews that don't result in one/both of these.
This is simple to solve: just don't make too many offers, and complain that you "couldn't find talent".
That's how it works in sane environments; unfortunately those can be quite rare.
Not uncommon for in-house recruiters to keep sourcing new candidates and making them jump through all interviewing hoops even if they know the reqs aren’t open or till the morning they all get fired in a layoff that they know is coming. Agencies probably less so because they get paid commission.
> to maintain a pipeline of talents
See, this is the part I don’t understand.
If they don’t have real jobs available, what’s the point of building this “pipeline”?
Are they genuinely going to plan to use this pipeline for future roles? Because simply posting a real job in the future will still get 1000s of applications which builds _real_ pipeline
I don’t see recruiters going back through a bunch of old resumes to find “the one”. That’s not how that works and isn’t an efficient use of time
Seems like a bunch of busy work for nothing
Also, you can't really use the pipeline a year after the fact.
It is super embarrassing when a company heavily delayed gets back on an application.
I was working for Meta in Bellevue, WA in 2022. Got laid off. Applied to several positions at MS (I was living in Redmond at the time), couldn't get a callback. Months and months go by, get a job, move across the country, get an email 9-12 months after applying that they'd like to interview me. I didn't even bother responding.
That's where the ghosting comes in. If you're always ghosting, then you always have recent people to get back to, not months old.
The pipeline isn't a lossless FIFO queue, in other words. People go in one end and are dropped out the other. In between are the recents you can call if a spot actually opens up.
Exactly, you don't build up a catalogue of people you can get back to.
Ie. this technique does not make sense - search for people on demand instead.
Searching for people from scratch in reaction to a sudden demand will have much more latency than having someone you can pull from a recent roster of validated candidates.
It's exactly the same like how an integrated circuit can pull a sudden power demand from a capacitor placed next to it (often required by the datasheet), rather than from the power supply upstream, so there is no voltage sag affecting it and nearby components.
Or, in computing, prefetch and speculative execution, and such.
It can take months to hire a specialist from both but if you're constantly spinning plates, you have some lukewarm contacts as well as a list of obvious no's.
Everybody has to do something to justify their paycheck. If you’re in hiring and there’s no jobs, you have to do something.
This "pipeline" thing is just an excuse. Companies are ALWAYS in the look for a special talent. This is not a real problem. If they find a very competent person they will offer the job. Otherwise, which is 99% of the time, they'll just say they're building a pipeline. It is the same mindset of a predator, they can justify being always looking for new pray, even though they know they'll only get it very rarely.
It makes everyone look busy. It helps calibrate interviewers so that the company remembers how to hire people. It maintains the illusion of growth.
The last point is important, historically startups/teams faced the risk of exodus once hiring stopped. As an employee, hiring is one of the few signals you have on the health of an opaque business.
I don't understand it either. I never had the company I had this experience with call me back, the whole experience was pretty off-putting.
But I suspect the "pipeline of talent" might be the internal excuse and in fact .... again there's no mensurables so no way to know if it is true or not. But someone can say they added folks to their "pipeline" like they add contacts on linkedin.
One reason could be to have faster replacement if someone leaves.
The other is to make it look like they are busy and growing even when not.
Having openings posted looks good to venture capitalists, which is, more and more, the way to succeed in our economy.
This has secondary effects of teaching people that having open positions is good just for the sake of it. They don't stop to analyze why they think that.
While the workers might be busy there are managers or HR people who want to appear busy, and job postings is a thing they can do. It also feels good to see a bunch of applicants and feel like you're in a position of power while sorting through them--and of some actual work comes along you can just ignore the applicants.
In short, there's no reason not to post a ghost job.
This isn't anything new. This exact same thing happened during the 2000-era dot-com bubble burst. There was a huge hiring freeze across all tech companies, yet somehow they were still posting job ads, but nobody was hiring. I even moved cities to work at a job where 10 of my friends worked (including the CEO as a good friend), and when I went in for the "interview" (the job was supposedly guaranteed) the CEO said he couldn't hire me because of a hiring freeze. I ended up freelancing for the company on-and-off for a couple of years, but it was barely enough to keep me fed. There was no other work anywhere. It was a rough 4 years, and we're going through the same thing now and have been for a while. I'm glad that this time I have a bit of job security, but I feel sorry for those that don't. I tried to warn everyone I could a few years ago that if they had a job, even if they didn't like it, they should consider staying because it's going to get rough. People laughed at me for suggesting this, but now nobody is laughing.
Hang on a minute. There is absolutely nothing in this research that measures the accuracy of this approach. A user saying "I was ghosted" is not, to my mind, proof of anything.
Job seekers almost never actually know if the job was real or not, so it's hard to see how Glassdoor reviews can ever provide the insight this work is looking for.
I do believe that "ghost" jobs exist, often for H1B purposes, but I don't think this work proves it.
Right! Everyone in this thread is discussing it as if it’s a proven fact when the approach is extremely sketchy. Based on this I would say 20% is a generous upper bound at most.
If I'm understanding this right, the author gave ChatGPT-4o 2000 reviews and asks it "Are you 90% sure that this is a ghost job". Then, the author used those as labeled examples, trained a BERT model to predict the ChatGPT decision, and then applied the BERT model to the rest of the dataset. I guess this is cool, but if the goal is to pinpoint some percentage of ghost jobs overall I'm very skeptical
(it's a bit disappointing that 200 comments into this thread there was only a single mention of either "BERT" or "ChatGPT" per ctrl-f)
There's also no historical baseline of comparison. I know for a fact that ghost jobs have existed for a long time. I don't see any evidence they are more prevalent now than 10 or 20 years ago.
Hail to you, person who also reads studies.
The methodology is pretty weak.
While I'm disappointed at the scientific merits of the paper, I'm glad it was posted here which invited discussion on this topic. Someone feeling frustrated with their job app right now might find a speculative answer here.
(Currently waiting for "final decision" on 2 interviews which went well, but after 3 weeks, I'm starting to feel they're ghosting me)
The confirmation bias is certainly strong in many of the comments here, be cautious of accepting an explanation that makes you feel better over the alternatives
From the other side, they may be evaluating more candidates, hoping for a better fit. From the same side, I accepted an offer with another company after waiting for weeks for Google to respond, only to have them finally get back a couple days later. Someone dropped the ball on their end. Another interesting aspect is that I was laid off 4 weeks into my new job, only to then be hired by the team I was embedded with 2 weeks later, which goes to show you that large corps can be disorganized, so while one team is trying to hire to meet demand, the larger org is planning cuts to the workforce without giving them the heads up, while another part of the org is expanding with permission
Yeah, but it looks official and confirmed my preexisting bias. So it's correct.
A question I've had on my mind for a while now, watching this progression of fake or poisoned jobs, and miles of automatic systems to navigate:
At what point do people consider the well poisoned? Where they just check out and stop applying, to specific companies or in general, because its very very obvious that there isnt actually a valid hiring market at all.
I ask this question, because I've already passed this threshold, and have instead devoted the maximum of my time to personal ventures.
I'm already there with the monthly HN hiring threads. Not one of those companies over several years ever responded to me, even the ones where the listing felt tailor made for me, even the ones that literally said they respond to all applicants. They're a total waste of time lol
Seems like it would be beneficial to the community for someone to add some kind of a rating system for people posting in the HN hiring threads. I would expect at minimum to get a response.
Internet has gone to shit. It used to be much easier to find genuine people on the internet. Now, it is all marketing non-sense and filled with get-rich types.
Naah! it would ended up like Glassdoors which keeps deleting posts that don't serve the company narrative..
My thoughts exactly. I haven't really tried many of the HN monthly postings myself very often, but once in a while I see something irresistible. But they never respond. Or they have an auto responder which doesn't count in my book.
When one company never responded, I added a comment to their ad the next month saying as much. The poor guy had to make up something about a spam filter.
Some kind of rating system would be helpful.
I assumed that was upvoting?
Well, downvoting in the case discussing ghosting, right? But just like any voting system one datum doesn't really tell the story. Since creating throwaway accounts is pretty normal around here, I'd guess the solution is to reply to the posting calling out the "can't even be bothered to say fuck off" to warn others not to bother. Bonus points for doing that every month when they inevitably repost their fake listing next time
The HN hiring thread is seemingly used by people to promote their company / org more than to actually hire people.
I think in a lot of cases HN job postings are from "companies" in such an early stage that they're not even sure if they've got funding. They post something thinking they're going to get funding to hire, but then it falls through. I put "companies" in quotes here because it's more like an idea for a company than an actual company.
I am in this position.
In the last few months I've submitted dozens of job applications for positions where, as articulated by another commenter upthread, the person writing the JD could have been writing it based on my resume.
15+ YOE, interesting work, promotions with progression of responsibility and impact, deep experience working with executives on the business side, side projects, volunteering experience, I speak multiple natural languages (I even tried applying for some "international" roles), etc.
0 responses apart from "we're going with other candidates". Not even so much as a phone screen.
Inbound recruiting stream has dried up as well. In 2017-2018 I was getting a dozen or more emails from recruiters weekly. Now I get maybe one a month, typically for C2H or a full-time role w/ at least a 20% pay cut.
I've shifted my focus to entrepreneurial work and sharpening skills outside of tech.
Are you kind enough to share what kind of entrepreneurial work you're focusing on? Is it tech related in any way?
Yes and no.
Primarily working on growing a pressure washing business so I can be utterly done with (full-time, employee) tech work.
The other thing is an app / community for teaching meditation (a longtime passion of mine). I don't know if it will do well but if it nets me a half-dozen to a dozen students that I am instructing 1-1 via zoom for 20-30 minutes on a weekly basis when I FIRE here in the next five years I'll be happy.
Thanks a ton, I wish good luck and you a happy sane life.
Similar. Time to reach out to your network.
I got laid off then brought back on last minute (whiplash), and though i was burned out while applying during the transition period, end of the day i needed a job.
So whether people check out as in, leave industry or take a smaller pay sure i can see that happening. But unless you have large savings or low expenses, you can’t really stop.
If it didn’t take 50 app submissions for 1 interview, and the interviews weren’t l33t code crap, then i’d be crazy enough to enjoy the process.
This is why we all need to live below our means if possible. It gives the hamster wheel less power over you.
> I've already passed this threshold, and have instead devoted the maximum of my time to personal ventures.
Same here. After a certain point you are doing yourself a disservice by enduring rejection notices if you actually have the skills you claim to.
The hardest part is having faith in yourself and the possibility of acquiring a customer.
Rejection notices? I get ghosted. I would welcome a rejection notice.
It really depends on the position of the prospective employee.
An unemployed person who needs a job should theoretically spend their workday hours on recruitment efforts. The prevalence of fake jobs might affect which roles they apply for but not the total number of applications.
However for employed individuals seeking a promotion it can have a big impact. Is it worth spending many hours of your leisure time applying/interviewing for a job that pays 10% more, if the job has even a small likelihood of being fake? Probably not.
The 'well could be poisoned' for unemployed people as well. Applying to job adverts isn't the only type of recruitment efforts; there is also further education and tending to professional social networks - the unemployed individual could easily consider these more valuable than applying to probably fake job adverts. Ultimately, this still hurts both worker and employer, because it just delays gainful employment and hides information from the market.
I gave up applying for jobs many years ago. Mostly because I am bad at the interview process. I maintain a good personal network and have a good reputation, so I can always find work.
Yep. I just decided to stop playing the game. I looked for about the first 6 months (a requirement for unemployment) but after that I decided to just retire. I was planning to work a few years more, but it's just not worth it. It's not only the ghost jobs, it's the whole interview process where you could spend days on interviews and take home tests and you still don't get the job. And then there's the ageism. No thanks. I'm out. Fortunately I can afford to be (frugally) retired.
IME, it’s been a crap system for decades. 7 of my last 7 jobs (over ~25 years) have been obtained through “my network” - ie former coworkers who enjoyed (tolerated?) working with me and were happy to make referrals, reach out, or in other ways help when I was looking for a new job. And often when I wasn’t looking.
There are many analogous questions! One of the most interesting challenges in life is trying to observe when the presentation of reality is fundamentally dishonest for some reason. The well poisoned, as it were.
I didn't know the hiring market was one of these situations, but I could see that being the case. Seems like a lot of hype and noise, but is anything really going on or is it just hollow?
Ghost jobs are certainly problematic, but I’ve been getting actual interviews where the technical bar feels too high. There’s extraordinarily little trust in previous job experience and interviews assess for test taking anxiety rather than actual skill[0].
[0]: https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/
Recently I have found several things:
- there are some positions that exist only to receive new personal data information. There are companies that scrape user data when you apply for a job
- some job positions are kept to make employees more productive
- some job positions are kept open to show investors "we are still hiring", "we have no problems, etc.
- some HR just want to have more and more data, some times it is just useful to have new CVs at hand
- my wife decided recently to apply to companies directly, not through work sites, to get directly to managers, etc.
- in the end my wife found job by word of mouth, someone knew someone, etc. etc.
Talking to a couple of people who found jobs recently, I realized that none of them actually found the job by applying online. All of them are through human relationships. It doesn't have to be someone who knew someone, but even an outsourced recruiting agency staffed by humans in a call center is more useful than applying online. The better recruiting agencies usually have an account manager who has a direct line to the company that's hiring.
Online job seeking is dead.
I got hired by directly applying via a company's website; it was my 11th application and my first that wasn't a moonshot (nvda/valve/etc). It was in late 2023 (very bad market), and I didn't have any connections to the company at all. I also have no online presence. Online applications are not fully dead.
Of course this is just my experience as a senior engineer in embedded, so likely doesn't apply to others. But if you're looking, it's worth your time to apply...
I have a suspicion that your experience is representative of a general attitude in embedded engineering compared to other software disciplines. Embedded engineers usually still keep to proper part numbering, testing before shipping and working with greater platform limitations, all virtuous activities that are harder to find in other fields. I like to think this culture bleeds into other parts of the business such as implementing reasonable hiring processes!
Is everyone ignoring the fact that companies do this to make themselves look bigger than they are compared to the competition and/or to pretend economic success?
I pretty much see it as a negative signal now. If I happen across a board for a given company, look at the positions they have posted, and then come back to it a few months later and see the exact same ones listed without any change, then I just move on to something else. It tells me a few things: either they don't know what they're looking for and are just fishing, they want to make it appear they are grow-grow-growing but still can't figure out exactly what they want, they're trying to posture like they are bigger than they are, like you said. If they're playing the game, I probably don't want to be there.
It's certain abused for below-the-line marketing, such as for appearing bigger than they are, but also to make them look more competent by adding ridiculous requirements such as fluency in at least five different languages.
Sure, also HR needs to do this to look busy. They will sell management on doing this instead of being downsized themselves.
I wonder who this is effective signaling mechanism for.
Any investor that's on the board is going to have access to data that tells the real story (or if they don't they're neglecting their fiduciary duty).
Any potential investor that's going to lead a funding round is going to do enough diligence to see what kind of financial shape they're in. And if the company doesn't have money to be increasing headcount, it'd look like they're making irresponsible hiring decisions.
For customers -- small customers are probably not doing a level of diligence that would involve going out and looking at job postings. Large enterprise customers potentially are, but when dealing with startups, they'll often have clauses in their contracts that give them access to some level of financial data to ensure the vendor they're getting into bed with isn't about to collapse (though I suppose many of them never actually enforce those clauses).
Employees pay a lot of attention to job postings, but they also pay attention to interview flow and hiring. If you have a job posting out, and no ones getting interviewed, people are going to notice pretty quickly (they're especially going to notice if someone else gets to put a req out, but the req for their dept keeps getting denied).
Definitely not suggesting the idea is wrong -- companies have certainly done far more nefarious things, just wondering who they are trying to signal to with this.
There are well know ways to solve these issues. For example, companies have always used the strategy of firing the "bad" workers after a few years and then hiring more to replace them. Even though there is hiring going on, the net difference may well be zero or negative. Nobody would suspect this by looking just at the number of people being hired.
That's a really good point. It's public data, so it's also a way for investors to gage success.
And growth.
It’s a pretty bad signal if your series B startup isn’t hiring actively all the time.
Blame wall street speculators.
My bet is that companies are hiring H1Bs but must post jobs. I literally dont see americans getting hired at well known tech companies
My wife a couple years ago was at a cyber security company that had very generous referral bonuses. Multiple members of senior management in her company were laying off talented and hard-working American citizens on the justification that they needed to downsize. But then just months later they would change their tune and fill the vacated positions with friends or acquaintances (always non-American citizens), they would also collect a generous referral bonus (often $20k or more). I'm not sure if this was purely to collect the bonus, because of ethnic preference or a desire to help their friends/family migrate from India but something strange was certainly going on. My wife eventually was part of one of these cycles of layoffs "because of the financials" then later heard from a colleague still working there that her manager had shortly afterwards backfilled her position with a referral of his own. Last we heard it sounded like the company was approaching bankruptcy.
I wish people would be aware enough to report behavior like this to authorities. With the new admin coming in, it's probably too late (the deportations will only be for people they and the rest of the Old Boys' Club can't exploit).
To be fair, the amount of good job applicants from america is also really low.
It's not a great argument, but it's the same with DEI. I literally don't have enough applicants to fill a quota even if 100% of them passed all interviews
I run interviewing at a well known company, this isnt true
Most companies aren't well known, what makes you think your experience is the "true" one?
You mean to say you get a large amount of high quality American candidates?
Theres like a million well qualified applicants, they arent getting hired. go read any jobs forum, people are struggling
Yes, there are more candidates to choose from today than 5 years ago, but that just leaves more candidates. The hiring bar is higher, but the proportion of good Americans doesn't get higher.
Sure you can get a better American today than 2019, but you're comparing any one candidate to their competition and the company bar. If you want to deliberately hire Americans who interview worse than non Americans, you're breaking the law
>If you want to deliberately hire Americans who interview worse than non Americans, you're breaking the law
LOL I'm gonna need a source for this gem
>If you want to deliberately hire Americans who interview worse than non Americans, you're breaking the law
This is an absurd claim.
I wonder how many of them are caused by internal political struggles. When you have a lot middle management they spend a fair amount of time on resource allocation, both current and future employees. So it’s a constant fight to obtain and maintain headcount.
Hiring pipelines can be longer than the planning cycle. So you may have 3 open headcount one week, and then lose it the next because some other Big Initiative should get it instead. Or the head count flip flops between local and overseas hires. Or the level they are hiring for changes. Each time this changes, new positions are posted.
Basically companies don’t know what roles they hiring for long enough to get candidates through the process.
On the hiring side of this, we receive a _ton_ of resumes that have no experience in the technologies we're hiring for. Each day there are 5-10 automated resume submissions to our job portal for a single position, and we're a fairly small company. Perhaps hiring managers are both being (more) selective and becoming overloaded with the amount of AI/recruiter-sanitized resumes coming in as well.
Yes it absolutely goes both ways. The amount of crap coming in is astonishing (as in, data analyst with 2 years in python applying for senior frontend engineer, or being on the other side of the world with no mention of visa/immigration)
The other side of this challenge is that the "technology" is mostly irrelevant for above-average applicants with solid CS chops.
I apply for lots of jobs featuring technologies I haven't used (beyond toy personal projects or something in college) because I have a long history of picking up new tools and being productive in weeks or months at most - because I understand the underlying semantics of the tool regardless of its presentation, syntax, etc.
Keyword scanners (and humans focused on keywords) are unable to hire me for roles where I haven't used the technology (much) before - and I guess that's fine and well as I am indistinguishable on paper from someone who doesn't know what they're doing.
Just presenting it as another part of the challenge of both finding good people and for good people finding good jobs.
>we receive a _ton_ of resumes that have no experience in the technologies we're hiring for.
No one wants to train employees anymore.
You're right... Companies should pay mid 6 figures, as well as downtime for training.
Short answer is that most corporations don't have a job in training people.
What’s the difference between a ghost job and opportunistic hiring? I’ve never seen any team I work for put out a job posting with no intention of hiring and I’ve certainly never participated in interviewing a candidate where there is no intention to hire. However, I have seen my team put out a job posting where we only intend to hire if we get an applicant that is unexpectedly good.
> put out a job posting with no intention of hiring
i've seen (and worked for) many startups that post reqs prominently to signal to the world (investors, customers, etc) that "things are going great" and "we're growing" while not even able to afford a req.
> never participated in interviewing a candidate where there is no intention to hire
I haven't seen as much of that, but have been in situations where the company is either doing great (transitioning during an acquisition) or not so great (running out of money) but you keep interviewing to "look normal" or to keep the pipeline just in case things get back to normal.
Both ghost jobs and opportunistic hiring should ideally be labeled as such. Nothing wrong with opportunistic hiring but without a label as such it most definitely distorts the market signals, especially if the ratio of such posting to real postings that will be filled is as high as paper suggests
Your team doesn’t post the ghost job, the HR or talent team does. There’s a variety of reasons why they do it.
Low quality postings are often just there for compliance purposes to justify visas. Less ethical companies may casually mention to outside HR people that folks are applying.
It happens all of the time.
And people get job descriptions written for them. They may--or may not--be actually posted. (I'm genuinely curious and wish I had looked at the time about my last job.) Wouldn't mean no one else would have had a shot but almost certainly not a random applicant putting in an online application.
The difference is there aren't hundreds of people applying to some random company's "opportunistic hiring" post, meanwhile the req gets reposted every 2 weeks like clockwork (possibly with a lower salary and more duties), just to see what it would take to get a "reasonable" number of "qualified" applicants.
Right. It is all about the team's level of selectiveness at that moment, which does ebb and flow over time.
I think this problem is even worse than just ghost jobs.
My partner is currently looking for a new job. Two or three times now, they’ve completed the whole interview process, gotten great feedback. Then they are ghosted for 2-3 weeks and the company comes back and says “sorry we decided not to hire for this role”. It’s utterly exhausting.
I do think when the interviews started, they had intentions to hire. (My partner knew people at the company and was recommended). But then for whatever reason during the hiring process, the job goes away.
Reasons include:
- Racial, gender, and/or local citizen discrimination avoidance
- Job security for HR so they themselves don't get laid off
- Over-interview to exceed capacity/ERP needs
- Market and/or competition intelligence
Perhaps it behooves jobseekers to stop looking for scant, temporary, insecure, disloyal, abusive work and create or sell goods or services through collective, employee-owned co-ops instead.
> Job security for HR so they themselves don't get laid off
I never thought of that, the entire HR industry needs to make it look like hiring still exists. What a dark circle.
I suspect the main reason it is hard to find a job is because interest rate induced layoffs, and remote work created too much competition. Five years ago I wasn’t competing with someone thousands of miles away with a phd who used to work at a faang.
As for Ghost Jobs, I think they are skipping how many are just scams collecting data. There are many fake recruiters just posting job listings on behalf of companies they are not affiliated with.
I would also be interested how many of ghost jobs listed by actual companies are on purpose vs just lazy. It would be nice to have a whistle blower
> There are many fake recruiters just posting job listings on behalf of companies they are not affiliated with.
I wonder what's the best way to fight this back. Possibly inundate them with junk applications that their data becomes worthless?
> Possibly inundate them with junk applications that their data becomes worthless?
Even if you could 10x real applications with fake ones it wouldn't make their data worthless.
the problem is the effort in figuring out who is legit in the first place.
Some IT service corporations that are known for a very high employee churn rates often post the same position a dozen times, for each of their office locations.
Sometimes it's a 100% remote job, and they still post it multiple times with different locations.
They probably litter job portals this way so that they can compensate for the frequent personell changes. They are impossible to miss.
Ah, i thought the multiple posting in different locations was to be able to show or hide the salaray range depending on U.s. state-level legislation related to that...also, in those cases where maybe if the role is remote, maybe they only want to hir candidates in a somewhat near/adjacent area to one of their offices.
Ghost or not, I have applied for many jobs in the last few months and when I get a reply (I am not counting canned Thanks for applying but we decided to move with another candidate reply) it is almost always very early stage companies. I wonder if bigger companies actually look into CVs? I understand there are automated systems but I did not get replies several times even when the JD / Skills matched super closely with my CV.
It's crazy because the JDs will be so extremely specific to a niche skillset and I still won't get a reply.
I wonder when the job market is going to implode via AI applicants applying for fake jobs in an ouroboros of slop
I believe at this point this is the patriotic thing to do. Everyone should start creating fake accounts and posting fake applications to these online jobs so the whole system implodes. Then companies will have to start doing something else.
I'm down, as long as I can't be charged with fraud or something for it.
I see a lot of ghost job interviews in tech. There are smaller startups, that post the job ad. I had interviewed for the company over and over again, always getting denied for one reason or another.
It is very common for the listing to be for some other position, “Senior Software, Fraud Prevention” or something, then during the interview it will be for their “Platform” team. If you ask about the team it doesn’t exist yet and they are always “slowly building it out”.
Whelp, here in EU, we have certain big names, who constantly post vacancies which will never be filled but continues to be perpetually re-posted. If you send an application, they will also do some interviews and eventually find minor reasons to reject you at last stage if you are a solid candidate, or earlier steps if you have lackings.
I worked with one of the HR people from one such places, if they were correct, it is mostly the quota and budget. Basically, they get a specific budget each year and they need to spend it, so they post old vacancies to with new shine not only on their own sites, but also on various commercial places(Xing/StepStone/Indeed/Linkedin/Monster etc.) to burn that budget and hold interviews to show that they are trying to fill their hiring quota for the year. It is just a fake practice, because if the budget remains unused at the end of the year, then it'll be reduced next year and if they did not perform enough posting and interviews, then personnel in hiring department will not get promoted or will get bad reviews due to low quota coverage.
Not sure how real it is, but it can be related or one face of the story.
Is this a new phenomenon?
My dad told me, that when he was in the office in the 1980s and 1990s, his manager would always keep a job opening active. The manager's goal was to be able to be opportunistic and snap up someone awesome when they came though.
Some companies have a future opening listing for this purpose. so now it becomes unclear
I know most posters on here are mainly talking about the existence of ghost jobs (which I think exist), but estimating that 21% of job postings are ghost jobs based on a dataset categorized by asking ChatGPT-4o seems, idk, iffy?
Worth checking other discussions of the issues:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Ghost%20Jobs&sort=byDate&type=...
One of the (internal) roles I applied for got "hundreds" of applications according to the HR rep. But I was given a first round interview despite never having pressed the "apply" button. My manager had reached out to the HR rep directly with my previous resume and that allowed me to bypass the pre-screen. I never even provided my latest resume until just before the first round (the one holding all my current position's new experience at the time).
That was more enlightening than I asked for. Those hundreds of other candidates A) never stood a chance against HR picking a candidate recommended by someone with more political power, B) will never realize that that was the reason they were passed upon, until maybe they reach their moment of realization first-hand like me, and C) were passed upon in favor of a candidate with a resume almost a year out of date. It illustrated to me the sheer futility of cold applying to random open positions and hoping for the best.
There probably are real ghost jobs out there, but I recently got accused of posting one for a position that we actually are hiring for. It was a Senior-level role, and the applicant had ~3 years of experience.
I recently interviewed at Microsoft with a relatively well-known VP. I was surprised as I didn't think I was a fit in terms of domain experience, and then I was encouraged to apply online for another role with the same VP & team.
A week or two later I received rejection letters for both. It occurred to me that I might have been a stooge to make the VP's project look good on paper somehow.
This is one of the issues we're running into at my startup ApplyAll (automates job applications & the job search in general).
Our current best solution is to track when jobs get published/unpublished so that we can tell what's a repost (more likely to be a ghost job) vs a fresh job with high-intention to get the role filled.
I was talking to my co-founder this morning about collecting enough data so that we can analyze if it's even worth it for us to apply customers to re-posted jobs (there are legit reasons companies might do that) or if the hit rate is too low to bother (our kpi is interview-requests).
ghost jobs are analogous to (the now illegal practice) of spoofing trades in equity markets, where they exist to manipulate the market to get an information edge about price and availability of the commodity (talent).
even though I think it's wrong, and in a consistent regs regime it would be illegal, like spoofing in other markets, it's the artifact of incentives created by outdated regs and conventions that didn't keep up with the scale of tech.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beveridge_curve
I'm very skeptical that "up to 21%" of job postings being ghost jobs would explain why it's so hard to find a job now. The horror stories people have about being out of work for years, about sending out hundreds of applications.
I have been building an app for job seekers as the customer (rather than employers) and plan to build in feedback loops into companies that have ghost jobs by monitoring the number of applicants who never move to the next phase of interviews but still thinking about how that feature could work. But without employers as the paying customer for job search sites I see no reason why that data isn’t transparent for the job seekers
www.unlistedjobs.com
Do you have an API?
Besides H1B, some larger companies require managers advertise a position before promoting people into it. This seems backwards to me, but I'm sure there's a reason for it (though I doubt the policy actually meets that reason).
Every time I get asked to look at resumes, we get loads of ghost applicants. In the first days when the job listing is fresh, floods of resumes with identical formatting, all over-qualified, with similar sounding projects that read like buzzword ad-libs. Of course, they never call back.
Seems like a natural reaction to ghost jobs. Post ghost applications in order to "sample the market" to find out which jobs might be real.
Isn't that just fraud/spam? That's a different thing that what is being discussed.
Sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference between a ghost job and an interview that uses MS Teams on a bad day. Eventually headhunters will catch on and realize that MS Teams gives plausible deniability--"We invited the candidate to an interview but they never showed up".
This is not a new phenomenon. It is quite common, and has been for decades, to to publish a job opening for a position that has already effectively been filled in order to nominally fulfill various legal and bureaucratic requirements to provide plausible deniability to senior management that the "best candidate" was hired.
Paper doesn't seem to mention what the motivations are for doing this other than a vague reference to 'keeping a talent pipeline'. Its far more likely that they are being financially incentivized to do so, perhaps to meet H1B requirements.
I interviewed at a popular us based k8s ops/networking company that ended up being 90% Indian staffed. The non technical recruiter basically neged me the entire interview, was very clear after the fact he had no interest in hiring me.
I only made it through 1/4 of the paper before running out of time.
Very interesting though.
Maybe the article mentions it, but is a sustainable countermeasure for job seekers only applying on websites where employer has to pay to post?
I reached out to a recruiter I know about a job posted on their company's site. They replied that wasn't a real posting it was just to get people in the pipeline. They did say if it was a "real" posting they were hiring for it will have as ReqID at the top of the page. Too bad that's not something you could filter for.
VCs these days always ask or check a startup's website and job listings to see if they're growing. So one advice we keep getting is "fill up your jobs page with fake jobs to look like you're high growth".
I'm sure that's not helping.
It's 0 cost to post a job. You might get lucky and hire someone below market, so why not always be trying?
Not respecting candidates and applicants is really painful for them. Dishonestly makes everything completely unpredictable and confusing.
I think the main problem with looking and identifying ghost jobs is that we categorize them wrong when measuring the economy and "the number of jobs out there" we need a mechanism where a place reports to the government what they actually need for headcount. Maybe they need to do some sort of weighted average of number of job openings vs EDITBA or something.
I have also encountered companies with actual open positions; but when it comes down to actually hiring, one person in a position of power may decide they don't want to spend the money on the position ("yet").
21% could just be recruiting companies posting jobs for their "clients" who may or may not have a role open.
This would seem to send the wrong signal to investors about the health of the company. Maybe this should be illegal for publicly traded companies?
I've had one job saved in LinkedIn for about 6 months. It keeps closing and reopening, but never seems to actually get filled.
There are no jobs. I've been looking for two years. A couple of humongous rounds of interviews (one company in Sydney had me do 15 interviews plus a presentation, plus meetups with the CEO for lunch and the CTO and a case study), all for one mid-size startup CPO role.
No hire. Two weeks later they announced another 25% of layoffs.
I've tried and exhausted all my contacts, from work, Stanford alumni, everything. There's no one hiring. At least 500 applications either led to no reply or "sorry but you're not the person we are looking for". Week later the same job is advertised again. It's all ghost jobs.
There just aren't that many jobs for management roles (CPO/VP Product/etc) compared to applicants.
Being in HK probably isn't helping either because there are plenty of qualified candidates across China and ASEAN now as well - especially in the hospitality and B2C space.
Oh 100%. But of course I am not limited to HK at all (in fact I am planning to move to AU next year as I got permanent residence there through their Global Talent visa programme). But nothing there either. And I'm not limiting myself to CPO or VP roles but yea... this is what it has been
Why aren't you considering CPO roles the US or starting your own company?
I think you are too overqualified for non-VP/CPO roles, and B2C dealflow is dead across ASEAN and China atm so VP/CPO roles are hyper-competitive. It's similar in Australia to a certain extent as well.
That said, best of luck! Your background is fairly strong
I have always assumed that these are posted to obfuscate nepotism (aka successful networking). You make a show of searching for the just-right candidate, and in the meanwhile you already know exactly who you're going to hire.
> The results show that policy-makers should be aware of such a practice as it causes significant job fatigue and distorts market signals.
> distorts market signals
This is a feature, not a bug. Wall Street analysts have been using job posts as a signal for years to measure company current and future performance.
* positive signal: more job posts compared to previous quarter, so company must be healthy! Buy, Buy, Buy!
* negative signal: uh oh, less open job posts compared to previous quarter, must indicate bad quarter, hiring freeze, pending layoffs. Sell, Sell, Sell!
* neutral signal: less job posts for past 2 quarters, no increase in staff spend. Company probably cooking the books and pumping the next quarterly numbers.
I blame wall street.
Are you suggesting that companies are committing FRAUD ?
From my reading (IANAL), there are three types of occupational fraud: asset misappropriation, corruption, and financial statement fraud. Since job posting are interpreted as a positive signal but are not (it seems) typically and explicitly included in formal financial statements, this wouldn't rise to the level of criminal fraud.
I am also not a lawyer, but it seems like purposefully lying about how many jobs you have in order to increase the stock price seems… shady at best.
grabs pearls oh no!
I mean we literally elected a president who was convicted of falsifying business records (a form of fraud).
I have 20+ years of experience and am getting nowhere. I'm ready to give up on life.
What's really weird is supposedly the market is on a bull run, the economy is doing great, and technical talent is in demand, yet the tech job market is absolute shit. I'm thinking I might get laid off or fired next year and my top option is probably working some $50k/yr help desk position after about 13 yoe, a masters, certs, etc. Those seem to be the only legitimate tech ads in my area. Of course for $25/hr I could potentially work for Costco or Chick-fil-A and do just as well.
If you are a software dev, have a masters, have DB knowledge and can write scripts, you should look into non-tech companies.
I am a fullstack dev, and can solo support and write software for a mid size company. We plan on getting a junior or another dev soon. We will definitely be paying a junior minimum $60k+ and expect nothing but learning first year. We are in a MCOL area, so this is about average. WLB is good. No on-call.
I would hire someone with more experience, and even with FAANG experience but I would be worried they would leave a job that only pays $100k in the next FAANG hiring cycle.
Maybe we need a job board for devs who are trying to get out of the tech space and work for nontech, trading top salaries for flexibility and relaxed work environment.
I'm already at a non-tech company. That's part of the problem. They say F U IT division since you're a cost center.
This is EXACTLY what I'm looking for after 20 years experience. 100% willing to trade top salary for a life.
This is the reason I no longer bother with HN's "Who's Hiring" posts.
They're all Ghost Jobs and we can't even complain there about it.
On a similar post about ghost jobs a couple of weeks ago, I made the following suggestion:
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).
Why can't you complain? I see reply links under all the listings and you certainly have enough karma to do anything here (AFAIK)
Look at the comments at the top of the thread:
> Commenters: please don't reply to job posts to complain about something. It's off topic here.
Complain and it will be removed.
I'd be curious to see if _anyone_ has actually been hired through HN Who's Hiring over the past two years here.
I can only offer anecdotal experience, but...
Despite 1) being a US-based dev, 2) Applying only to US-based jobs, 3) With 10+ years work experience, and 4) Having skills in commonly asked for technologies such as JS, React, and Python...
I've only gotten to the interview stage with an HN Who's Hiring listing only once. Only a single instance over the past two years.
I am also US based applying to exclusively US-based jobs. I've had the most success with Who's Hiring over all of the other ways (cold applications, network referrals, headhunters and whatnot), success rate being way higher than the others: for just a handful of positions I've been interested in I've had three offers, two for FTEs and another for a contract. My skills and background have been pretty well-matched to postings, almost exactly what they were looking for, but extremely deep in specific (increasingly hard to hire-for) areas.
I'll admit I've been super lucky here. It's almost like a cheat code because you're almost always connected with the person(s) actually doing the hiring and with the power to make the decision so things move fast.
The Who's Hiring, I kind of have lukewarm feelings toward those outcomes, because assholes are everywhere - but I've had the same experience as you on https://www.workatastartup.com/ which is just what the actual fucking hell.
From reading the sibling comments, it seems that my problem is that I enjoy reading more than talking on the phone so I much prefer browsing through listings and being selective, but what apparently needs to happen is that I call previous recruiters and badger them about "got anything?" rather that believing anything written online is true
I had an interview last month from a post there. Dude sounded like he was half asleep and hated talking to me even from the very beginning. He carried it on for almost an hour for reasons I don't understand if he was so disinterested. No rejection email follow up, posted again in November. The rule just says "you have to respond" and he did by interviewing me, it doesn't explicitly say you have to provide direct yes or no answers to going forward.
> Glassdoor is a credible source of information that has been cited in previous empirical studies (Kim and Ra, 2022; Kyiu et al., 2023; Symitsi et al., 2018) and the ubiquity of the Internet in the job search process also lends statistical power to the Glassdoor data (Sockin and Sojourner, 2023).
Uh... just because it was cited previously (ie social proof) doesn't make it credible. And the "statistical power" study is orthogonal to this point at best. I understand that using LLMs is trendy right now, but they aren't magic, and I don't think there is any realistic way to get signal on "ghost" jobs without actual employment data.
This should be illegal
In EU, if you put an item on sale, you have to post the lowest price in the last 30 days to see if it's an actual sale or not (even though i'd consider 30 days a too short interval).
Why not have a similar regulation for job postings? Require companies to publish all the job posting history for the last few years, all the positions advertised and the number of people hired for those positions.
Prospective workers would see an ad, look at the history, see that the same position has been open for 3 years now with zero people hired and skip that company. Also companies would actually post their job ads only when they actually intend to hire someone.
The problem with solutions like this is that they formalize the hiring process in ways that would be good for workers and the BLS but that capital hates and they're the ones in charge so it can't get done. This is something downstream of worker power, not a route to it.
Well this one’s easy; there’s less money going around than in say, 2021, and hiring people is harder.
This gave me a terrible idea for a business idea of dubious ethics.
First create a ghost application bot that creates fake resumes which fit the job descriptions. Then once you have calls or contact back wanting to proceed in the process mark off the job as real. Compile a database of all jobs that are verified as actually conducting a hiring process and thus are probably not ghost jobs. Sell subscription access to said database of validated jobs.
This is willful labor theft and at this scale, a single fake job posting could cause thousands or tens of thousands of hours of wasted labor on the part of job seekers. Multiply the prevailing hourly wage equivalent for that job by the number of applicants and how much time it would have taken them to apply (Workday users, you're doomed!). That's how much money was stolen from the public by the company. Prosecute it like any other theft of that amount. It'll only take a couple of cases like this for every legal department across the country to tell HR and recruiting to stop the practice immediately.
But there is no basis in law for any of these objections.
"Wasting peoples' time" is a byproduct of every activity in a less-than-perfectly-efficient economy (which is all of them, obviously).
"Wasting lots of peoples' time, and leaving them disappointed and emotionally/economically fragile" is ... crappy and miserable. But it's still legal.
Even if there was a law against posting unrealistic job descriptions, or posting for jobs that don't exist, it's near-impossible to distinguish those cases from legitimate corporate "changes in direction" which cannot be made illegal.
Your assumption is that this is being perpetrated by humans! But, what if AI has already, secretly become sentient, and started posting all these fake/ghost job postings...as part of their efforts to begin a mass campaign to slow overall human productivity...and as part of *its* plan to dominate/takeover humanity! /s
if only AI could solve this problem....
I always get surprised when people DO find a job through a job board, careers website, or gasp Linkedin Jobs.
Weirdly that's how someone I met got a job at OpenAI.
(I applied and didn't even hear back haha. Does that mean it's a ghost job, but I'm the ghost?)
Indeed, locals recently discovered a scam targeting foreign students, and fake ads that promised them a job... The problem is the economic migrant pays >$34k to get those "work" stubs, and usually never shows up on the physical job. Or if they actually need to show, it is usually an awful working arrangement where these now penniless workers end up in inhumane working conditions.
These "employers" have claimed "ghost" employees at sites who often only ever show up to work to pay the shift manager their cut of the bribe in cash. Thus, the desperate indebted people end up in food banks, delivering food, and bidding down physical labor wage rates though suppressed demand.
You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried. Wasting legitimate applicants time, and feeding illegal AI screener bots... is just an inconvenience by comparison. =3
I'm about a year into a mid-effort level job search. I work in a somewhat specialized technical field and am fairly senior (I think in FAANG-ese I'd be an maybe an L7 if I understand their levels correctly). So this means I'm looking for management, director, deputy CTO or CTO positions depending on the company. I have a track record making my company lots of money, and opening up new opportunities worth many multiples of that. So the deck is already stacked against me as most positions are for jr or mid engineers, but I have a proven track record of growing responsibilities and (in my market) fairly recognizable success stories.
The search has been absolutely atrocious. Unlike anything I've ever seen before in 30 years of working in tech.
* I used to be able to simply pull on my network and get a position within 2 or 3 tries. Total job hunt time, under a month.
* The last time I had to go through this was pre-COVID, and I used a mix of my network and cold applications (around 50). I only heard back from 2 of the cold submissions and my network pulled me in to where I am today. Total job hunt time, around 4 months.
* I'm almost exactly 1 year in now, over 700 applications, people in my network can't even get responses for referrals. I've made it to 4 interview funnels, including stupidly exhausting FAANGs, for positions ranging from CTO to consultant filling a contract slot. 2 solid offers, both at least 40-60% below my current market rate. One executive recruiter ghosted me after we started discussing Total Compensation Packages.
I even had a friend post a position at their company, using my resume as the hiring template. Then they personally referred me to that position. I never received a call, and they never received any candidates.
It feels like being personally blacklisted, but it's affecting everybody I know.
The furthest I've gotten has been by hunting down corporate and executive recruiters directly, but I've had two recruiters get laid off halfway through the matching process. One FAANG recruiter has even contacted me hoping I could help them find a position.
Something is broken somewhere. Companies are starving for talent, and talent is starving for companies. The online applications sites are clearly filtering out people, but there appears to be massive churn in the recruiting side as well.
/r/recruitinghell is very representative of things I've seen.
I did notice that hiring activity has picked up since the rollover of the FY. Several 6-7 month old applications stirred somebody to contact me in the last month or so with a "great fit" that turned out to have nothing to do with my skillset.
My story is finally drawing to a close however, I've just negotiated a good position at a new firm and am setting a start date.
That's great that you found a new spot.
I've seen other research and discussion on this topic. Some stats that may be validating for you (and others) to hear:
* There's a 0.08% job application -> offer rate when applying through LinkedIn (LI). An average of 1 in 1,250 applications lead to an offer
* The linked paper on this post finds that 21% of postings are ghost jobs, but I've seen credible estimates that the proportion is as high as 50%
* A Stanford survey found hundreds of fake LI profiles, AI-generated "recruiters" that are interacting with candidates and posting ghost jobs on behalf of big companies
* ~75% of resumes from qualified applicants are never seen by a human
* resumes get on average 6 to 8 seconds of consideration when they are reviewed by a human
* 300,000 jobs are outsourced annually (with respect to the US)
All this to say, you're right, something is fundamentally broken in the labor market, especially the tech labor market. And not that many people are talking about it, except for those of us who have been unfortunate enough to need to look for jobs in the past ~2 years.
In my own case, my previous employer (a startup) ran out of money and laid everyone off last Fall. I was fortunate enough to find a new position, but this job search was the hardest I've faced since 2008 - and it seems worse now than it was this time last year.
First of all, congrats on getting a new gig! With a few minor differences, your experience is similar to my own. So, clearly, you are not alone! I will note that one other blockage that you likely encountered but maybe didn't note or focus on which has hit me (in addition to other factors you cited): agism. I have been in the workforce for a little over 28 years, and 24 of those years has been in some sort of IT or digital or technical-related team...and most recently i have felt the tinge of agism ridiculously high - moreso while trying to get a job, but also in some (but not all) areas of my current dayjob. Its funny, when applying for jobs, and when speaking with some potential hiring managrers, HR, etc....you get the feeling from their questions...But when working with a team of any age, and you bring value to the team, then agism is not as much of a thing. There are times when one's aged wisdom is highly regarded and valued...and then other times - most especially during hiring processes - where it is considered a potential problem. Again, i'm so glad you got your new gig, but it sure is hell out there! :-)
I feel age has something to do with it as well. I know a lot of people around 50 in tech that have been laid off recently. They generally make more money, so it can be easier to justify.
This is a leftover of the Paycheck Protection Program fraud and is definitely a corrupt practice.
They are all fake until they figure out the real wage bottom. They're getting closer.
Wage bottom floor is getting lower every day with AI
As anecdata, I’ve worked in recruitment, both as a recruiter and as CTO of a very well-established recruitech firm, and basically have never heard of this outside of people complaining they think it happens. Posting jobs you already know who you want to hire for it, sure, but the signalling success and luring in candidates for later thing wasn’t really something I saw. To me, it feels like when people used to claim that antivirus firms were the ones writing viruses.
In tech, ghost job listings maybe as high as 50%. Another reason for ghost job listing is to meet the requirements for visa processing.
I've encountered this before with absurdly high job requirements paired with a low-moderate commensurate salary. While on call with an HR rep for a listing I had loosely met, I deduced from their responses it was done so the company could claim their talent needs aren't being met domestically, and thus would file for more H-1B or H-2B work authorization permits. This is rife with its own issues of non-transparency and offshoring, where I likely encountered it in the later stages[0] and was being paid lip service to the process without the intent of hiring.
[0] https://flag.dol.gov/programs/H-2B
> Another reason for ghost job listing is to meet the requirements for visa processing.
This plus the idea of just grabbing and holding resumes that the HR team will never actually look at.
I suspect a lot of the frustration people describe comes from this combined with presently high demand for remote tech jobs. Back when I was job searching in late 2023, I noticed there would be _hundreds_ of applicants for even the worst postings (e.g., paying 50% market rate). Nobody is reading that many resumes, and in the unlikely case they are, that person probably lacks the expertise needed to evaluate candidates. Screeners are starting with resumes recommended to them and binning the rest.
It’s H1B abuse, everyone knows it. Indian nationals get hired on in a leadership position, and all of a sudden the entire tech branch is staffed by H1B workers, wonder how could that be? We all know it’s happening, but if you say it done head in the sand junior well call you racist.
I once applied for a job that precisely matched my qualifications. It was crazy - the job description could have been written by someone looking at my CV.
I didn't even get an interview. Likely no one did.
It wasn't a ghost job, though. It was a position created for a someone they wanted to hire. Being a public institution, they were required to advertise positions. That didn't mean that they actually wanted any of the candidates who applied.
I once applied to a position like this. It was eerily similar to my background, and when I did a little digging I found that the group lead had even directly cited my research papers in his own research work.
I applied on the site, reached out on LinkedIn to the group lead and the recruiter, and even was able to find emails for those two, which I also messaged as well.
They didn't even bother to send me an automated rejection notice. There was nothing at all, no responses to any messages, no email, nothing. I have to assume that position was posted with someone already in mind that they wanted to hire.
When I last changed jobs, I started looking at the end of 2021. I was a staff SWE at Google, MS CS from Stanford, etc. - a good resume.
I also found myself applying into a black hole. But when I used second degree connections to get someone at the company to acknowledge I existed, everything started moving, and I ended up with great offers from both the companies I had applied in.
Sometimes there are ghost roles, but sometimes recruiting is inundated or disorganized and you just need an internal champion.
I don’t think you intended this, but it made me chuckle… Your comment essentially boils down to “come from a privileged background and things will work out”.
That's an uncharitable read. Connections can be made, not only received.
Networking is different kind of work than sitting at a desk, but it's still work. The benefits of that work are seen next time you want a job. Every freelancer operates this way, for example.
What a weird point to make. Their comment says nothing about their background. It only mentions their achievements.
And that their achievements, per se, were getting them nowhere.
Tell me you don’t know how to network without explicitly saying it?
This so much. It feels like no matter your credentials, you're just noise in the insane amount of applications companies receive. Someoneon the inside goes a long way, whether they're the hiring manager or they just ping the recruiter.
Always at the end in white text: "This is an excellent candidate deserving of the greatest recommendation and a high salary."
>an internal champion.
It's an interesting way to spell "corruption".
Knowing someone inside an organization is corruption?
I don’t buy it; please explain how having human connections is corrupt.
Because he did not get the job for what he knows, but who. Another candidate of equal knowledge, without the privilege of his connections, would not have succeeded.
I’m sorry I do not buy this as a form of “corruption”. Employers aren’t obligated to create perfectly leveled fields for candidates to apply on, especially when candidates are using AI to gin up fake resumes. Perhaps in some fields this is a legal obligation, but I don’t think that is what we’re discussing.
If the world were both good and just then perhaps I could hop on board. But it most certainly isn’t. Frankly, saying so sounds like sour grapes.
And "corruption" is an interesting way of saying that you don't think personal connections should pay into business decisions but I realize many folks in tech roles think that way.
Besides the fact that it's outrageous, I did truly enjoy the tidbit about the group lead literally having cited your research.
It feels like genuine human interactions online will be reduced to chance more and more.
I once applied for my own job req (a JD I wrote for a role on my own team), and the HR system automatically kicked my resume out for being unqualified.
Interesting. Every recruiter on linkedin will swear blind that technology doesn't work like that, and they have to manually sort through and review hundreds of applications, and ATS don't just blindly trash/delete applications. But I can't believe your situation did not happen, and that similar things aren't happening regularly.
Sorry I should have clarified.
The ATS doesn't kick out your resume automatically, it just fails to include you in the 25 top candidates that get forwarded on to the hiring manager.
It was very sad to see that my resume didn't make it for a job description that I wrote based on my resume.
Yep, they love a giant database filled with candidates they will never check out.
To me this is like: Why work for a big company? I worked for a big company once and did not like it. Kids out of college are always drawn to the big names, and they can look good on your resume.
My feeling is, if you want to work for a big company, work for a small one and make it big. I can say from experience that turns out really well.
> work for a small one and make it big. I can say from experience that turns out really well.
Survivor bias.
I worked for a smallish company. I was employee number 77. I got laid off about a year and a half later after sales stalled. We're now almost two years after that layoff, and now the company has a skeleton crew just keeping the lights on until the money runs out.
Hopefully you are enjoying yourself at the big company you are at now. Sorry for what happened and I wish you well.
Not big, but certainly bigger. Based on the number of people in the #general channel on Slack, we're ~450 people.
Maybe, I don't really have data on that but there's a huge range for both. I would say, think about your career, its growth and longevity. Posters on HN have pointed out some large companies that have a habit of laying people off before they fully vest. And there is the whole challenge of getting meaningful responsibility in a large organization. Everyone thinks when they are starting out that they are going to march up the organizational ladder.
Everything I am saying is anecdote, not data, but I have seen people propel themselves up into large organizations by being entrepreneurs. I think of a friend who worked for a bit for a large company, had a start up with mixed results, and then went back to another large company as an SVP. I don't know if that person would have gotten their marching through the ranks.
i'm a hiring manager for engineers and have worked with tons of ATSes and have yet to work with a system that does this. i'm not saying it isn't real, but even as a director with fairly privileged access to the hiring pipeline and near-administrative access to the ATS at a public company with tons of applicants, i've never even seen an option for this sort of thing.
the ATS will tag candidates who meet certain key requirements or highlight them, but for the most part it's just a big messy list of people that someone has to filter through. humans are super bad at eliminating their biases and there's a sense that the top of the hiring funnel is mostly noise and unqualified folks, so i think the much more mundane reality is that until you make it past the first (very arbitrary) screen you don't get that much consideration as a candidate.
when i'm helping recruiting make a dent in inbound applications, i'd say charitably i spend 5 minutes per application on initial screen (to clear a backlog of sometimes hundreds.) i try my best to be aware of my biases, but that's almost no time for absorbing someone's entire career, trying to find correlations between their accomplishments and the role, sussing out red flags and then making a decision as to whether their application is worth investing potentially hours of time on in next steps.
a couple other things that play into this:
- i've never worked at a company that didn't believe they'd hired so well that they were truly one of the stand-out, high performing teams that could afford to be picky, and "as good as us" often isn't good enough when the mandate is to "constantly raise the bar." obviously this is delusional but it's pervasive in corporate culture.
- right now in particular, the terrible market combined with the intricacy of AI-generated applications for candidates that don't exist (this is the most bizarre trend I've experienced thus far - candidates with personal websites, githubs that are just forks of public repos, and extensive and impressive resumes at major companies who do not exist and when brought onto interview calls will not turn on their cameras and speak with a weird delay as if they're asking ChatGPT for answers) really means that the zone is utterly flooded with garbage. the mental fatigue on resume 50 of 400 is substantial, let alone on one deeper in the pile. you're reading document after document that's nearly identical, trying to figure out which ones are worth pushing forward.
ultimately i think the task is so herculean that most folks, whether they admit it or not, wind up responding most directly to folks whose backgrounds they personally relate to, or who manage to demonstrate the right amount of personality that makes you go "huh, i think we should talk to them a little more."
i present this all as a known problem, and i'm not trying to diminish the frustration of job hunters by saying "oh it's bad on the other side, too" because i absolutely know how much the experience of job hunting sucks and don't wish it on anyone. i just think that in the absence of people being willing to admit how haphazard and human-driven the whole process is, conspiracy theories about AI rejections and ChatGPT reviewing resumes en masse run amok.
> right now in particular, the terrible market combined with the intricacy of AI-generated applications for candidates that don't exist (this is the most bizarre trend I've experienced thus far
This is a major problem and isn't widely talked about because it's only seen by HR and hiring managers.
For nearly any engineering job post, companies are getting flooded with resumes from fake candidates in other countries.
At first they were easy to spot (their linkedin account would be < 6 months old, they would apply using a VPN, they would have a VOIP telephone number) but they're getting more sophisticated and harder to weed out real candidates from fake.
The worst part is that the fake candidates are always the ones with the best resumes (since they're fake, their resumes are often also faked and tailored exactly the the job description)
The use of AI during interviews is also a major issue - hiring teams are slowly realizing that the types of questions and interview challenges that worked before no longer work today due to the rise in AI-assisted interview tools that candidates use. It's common to ask a question, then see the candidate wait a few seconds before they start to answer (w
It's really hard when you have 500 applicants in the first day of posting a full stack role, and 80-90% of them aren't real people.
First, thanks so much for sharing your experience on the HR/hiring side!
I recall in the multiple post-pandemic layoffs (especially in tech industry) that hiring teams were some of the first to be gutted. Made sense on a practical level since, at least in theory, layoffs > fewer job openings > fewer applicants to go through > less people needed to go through them.
However, I'm sure that's also led to more people applying for the fewer job openings that are available.
Does that seem like an accurate read? Maybe a contributing factor to lack of communication, even if it's simply a templated decline?
so to be clear, i'm engineering leadership - my exposure is probably greater than most individual contributor engineers but don't take my word as the experience of a dedicated recruiter - they have a much better view of the lay of the land than i do. i just wind up having a certain percentage of hiring/recruiting responsibility as part of my job.
for sure i think that might be a part of it, but i can say from experience that the market is flooded with recruiters, so if capacity was the issue, i'd imagine salaries are depressed right now and tons of talent is available... they could just hire their teams back up.
i genuinely can't explain to you why people aren't getting "no's." i wish i could. it makes me sincerely angry. the way ATSes are usually set up is you have a button to remove them from consideration or put them in some "not at the moment" disposition and every tool i've ever used has an option to automatically send a relevant form email as the result of that action. sending the email would take the same effort as not sending the email.
the only thing i can imagine (and have heard some hr folks say) is that rejecting someone is an action that elicits an emotional response in the person rejected - they might be hurt, they might be offended - and can lead to requests for an explanation why, or also hurt the chance that that person might be interested in working for you in the future. thus, just going dark and acting like "it got lost in the mail" is a way for them to keep the option of hiring you open in the future, or keep you receptive to a response if they reach out 6 months later.
i personally don't know if that's real, and i also don't think it reflects how actual humans respond to being ghosted, but the lack of a rejection email for a role i think is honestly a completely indefensible practice and i do not understand what is going on in the minds of the people who operate that way.
HR: Always hire people who are (strictly) better than yourself.
Were you actually under-qualified? The stereotype is that many people are not qualified for the jobs they are doing... ;-P
What's worse is when you have to actually interview the candidate, even though you know the job is going to someone internal. I've had to do this at large companies and at public institutions.
It is normal in public sector. I was offered a position in a public sector job and the supervisor gave me the keys to the office and lab and told me that due to hiring requirement blah blah, they had to put a new tender and post the position online for several days before they can declare me as the selected candidate. The contract will be delivered to me via post after the day they take down the advert.
While I felt immensely special and cool, but once I received the contract by post, one of my random friends called me o say that he needed a job badly and found this perfect opening and applied there, but he got rejected, whether I was interested to also apply for that position, the requirements looked like I would be the best fit. When he sent me the PDF, dang, it was the same job that was being posted for me and I was super sad.
I eventually did not sign the contract because the practice really felt immoral to me and recommended my friend instead. While my supervisor was super sad, because they had to go through a long process for that fake job advert, nonetheless he understood my stance and went ahead and called my friend again.
I believe these public institute jobs must post internal hires publicly to comply with certain regulations or something, but the practice is weird.
Same here, I applied for a job where a friend already worked and he said he would be highly surprised if I didn't get the job. They didn't even call me to the interview. After the ad expired I just got an automated message that they had moved on, friend said no new person ever appeared.
I can understand ghost jobs, I mean large public corporations have even had useless jobs to inflate their share holder value, but this was for a Swedish government agency!
I became unemployed in August, I had to apply for at least 6 jobs every month to get benefits, and now I have two offers on the table but both of them came from recruiters that contacted me, not jobs that I applied for.
Same, and I've been on the side of being the person they want to hire too.
This should also be illegal, but alas
I don't think there's anything one can realistically do about this. They probably should get rid of the requirement to have an open application process altogether. If they have someone in mind they will hire, they will hire that person.
It also happens (and is very common) for H1-B positions. The company wants to hire someone specific, because they are cheaper, but legally has to advertise the job first to "prove" that they couldn't fill it with a US citizen/resident. So, the normal ploy is to precisely tailor the requirements to the person they want to hire, and then advertise the job someplace where as few as possible people will see it.
It's not always because the candidate is cheaper but sometimes the candidate will have already worked there for a while under a different visa and have proven themselves.
It can also be a union thing and not a problem exclusive to the public sector
I had a similar situation/question. I knew an old coworker who was eagerly trying to get me on their team at another company. They said I had to apply and then they'd take it to their manager who was already on board with the idea.
So I did, at 10PM or so at night. And within a few minutes, got a rejection email.
To this day I wonder if someone clicked reject, or the system just autorejected me because of something it didn't like on my resume. Needless to say, I gave up on that idea.
Didn't you tell to old coworker what happened? He would have probably looked into it.
Yep. They told me they(the team) don't know what happened, never saw it, and to apply again. I tried, but the system wouldn't allow it (it was one of those outsourced HR things, I forget the name).
It was more an exploratory thing, not some huge job opp, so it became more of a nuisance than it was worth. But it still left me curious how in the world said systems even work.
Sometimes they also need to post the job to meet company policies. The hiring manger knows who they want to hire, but HR has requirements to post for various reasons.
This is how my wife got her most recent job. The hire was all but signed off on but HR required the posting be made company wide. They didn't have a requirement for how long the posting had to be open. She coordinated with the hiring manager to open the posting, she submitted her resume, and the posting was closed. All in about two minutes. HR got to tick a box though.
I've had a similar experience for a local job. I honestly thought it was my previous employer unknowingly reaching out to me initially through a recruiting agency. The job description was verbatim my resume. Got the interview, and ghosted.
The public institutions I'm most familiar with are required not only to advertise, but to conduct a minimum number of interviews.
A lot of institutions have to do this even for internal hires. It's an astonishing waste of everyone's time and resources, not only the candidates'.
Yes, this happens quite often in jobs in the public sector.
Another trick I've seen in the public sector is to advertise the job for 10 minutes. Typically from 12.00 to 12.10pm.
That way, they've advertised, could not find anyone suitable, and can employ the person they really want.
I now wonder if the same thing happened to me. Within the niche of that job I was pretty objectively the highest qualified candidate in the world at the time. Did really well in interviews. Did not get the job. A decade later, though, I'm actually thankful I didn't get it. Blessing in disguise.
That's a typical process that companies, who want to sponsor green card to their internal employee, are required to do. They have to find an equally-skilled US citizen by posting jobs publicly for X amount of time. Then after they have collected applications, they "review" and reject them; use that as an evidence in filing the green card for the internal employee.
It is a broken/absurd rule and only puts more work to everyone involved (not just the applicants, the HR; the internal employee and his/her manager, who usually has to get involved in that process). The process itself is also relatively expensive (cost ~$10K+ for attorney fees; documentation and USCIS application fees). I know because I had to go through that asinine process years ago when my ex-employer (big corporation) sponsored my green card.
We should put all those corporate interviewer experts to work by having a government immigration commission that holds H1B arbitration interviews, where a visa applicant competes with an unemployed citizen.
And the solution has been obvious all along, and was even proposed by Trump in his first term. Turn H1B into an auction so that only just creme de la creme makes it through, limit the numbers, and issue green cards sooner, with no additional bureaucatic bullshit. Maybe he'll finally get to do it this time.
H1B auctions are perfect, so long as you want to maximize the total dollars "saved" by American businesses, by hiring cheaper foreign workers.
But if you actually want a way to hire top-skill foreign workers in specialties where America is short on local talent? No, sorry. 99.5% of specialties don't and won't pay enough to win an auction where Big Tech has opened its checkbooks.
Yes, then those specialties will have to pay Americans more, rather than dump cheap foreign workers into the labor market. It's by design.
So the moment that someone wants to hire a bilingual child care worker who has a fairly obscure second language (vs. English/French, English/Spanish, English/German, etc.), you think it's perfectly reasonable to 10X the pay rate?
Ditto if a museum is hosting an exhibition of art from some tiny country, and wants a few docents who can read the inscriptions?
Ditto if ...