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Ask HN: Recruiters, why do you repost jobs with 1000 applications a month later?

by charliebwrites on 11/18/24, 10:56 PM with 29 comments

• by gregjor on 11/18/24, 11:20 PM

  Companies and the recruiters who work for them post ghost jobs for various reasons. You can find plenty of writing and discussion about it on HN, Reddit, YouTube, even mainstream media. Look at the Wikipedia entry for "ghost job."

  Not really a new practice, but having job postings and job searching online makes it more obvious. Running ads for jobs the employer may not fill has few downsides and doesn't cost much.

  Digging through job postings and applying to them has turned into a numbers game, and an arms race of automation and now AI tools. I suggest a more effective job hunting strategy, because worrying about ghost job postings just wastes your time if you intend to find a job.

• by phendrenad2 on 11/19/24, 2:48 AM

  I think these are ghost jobs based on institutional optimism. The toxic positivity culture in modern corporations ensures that companies always want to be hiring, but the purse-string-holders and bean-counters block the hire when it comes to actually signing on the dotted line.

  This is why I don't look for jobs on LinkedIn, it's the garbage heap of false optimism.

• by bojo on 11/18/24, 11:57 PM

  I asked that same question here a while back.

  One of the answers was (paraphrased), "because we're constantly recruiting for that title, but maybe not the same team." I'm not sure if that was a good or bad sign. Growth? Or constant turnover? Really makes you wonder.

  I manage a highly stable tier 2 software team embedded in enterprise, and only recruit maybe once every ~2 years, if that. Hard to relate to what is going on these days.

• by leros on 11/20/24, 7:17 PM

  Many recruiters don't use jobs the way you expect. They're posting jobs as lead generation to fill up their ATS with candidates. They don't even necessarily care what job you applied to. However, they also primarily want active candidates, so they prefer to look at candidates that recently applies as it shows active intent. They repost jobs to get a new batch of active candidates to sort through.

  Is this messed up and totally broken? Yes. Is it how many recruiters operate? Unfortunately, yes.

• by bob_theslob646 on 11/19/24, 3:55 PM

  Not a recruiter but it may have to do with state laws.

  > "It is possible that state laws have posting requirements for employers awarded state government contracts. "

  https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/tools/hr-answers/regulatio...

• by angmarsbane on 11/18/24, 11:05 PM

  To see if you repost it with a lower salary if you get the same amount or fewer applicants and if there is a difference in applicant quality. It provides some insight into labor market.

• by lifestyleguru on 11/19/24, 9:50 AM

  The odds in job search market and in line with Tinder right now or even worse. There is no hiring. Don't waste time and energy, use your emergency supplies.

• by ipaddr on 11/20/24, 4:17 AM

  What is worse is the fake job interviews. If they don't call you back at least you didn't have an assignment no one will look at.

• by Malidir on 11/21/24, 4:41 PM

  Aside: ATS systems will reject, say, 75% of the 1000 for not having the requried skills listed.

• by cryptozeus on 11/21/24, 7:03 PM

  Lately this is the way companies are marketing and collecting resumes with no job to offer

• by b20000 on 11/24/24, 10:58 PM

  posting jobs without the intention of hiring or having the headcount available should be illegal under CA law with a 1MM$ fine per occurence

• by scinadier on 11/19/24, 6:31 AM

  Perhaps they need more data to fine-tune resume readers.

• by muzani on 11/20/24, 9:42 AM

  1 out of 200 people on the job market can't pass FizzBuzz back then. Today the odds are much better because they teach FizzBuzz on week 1 of bootcamp, but 1 out of 200 still won't meet some absurdly low bar you set for them.

  Note that this is out of the people on the job market applying for these jobs. Most of those people will never be hired for a coding job and so they'll be applying to every job they see on LinkedIn for a year or so.

  This is worse for low barrier job portals. 1 out of 2 may be able to pass FizzBuzz out of applicants from HN. There are a lot of people on HN who hate tech and are burnt out. A lot of these guys hate Next.js but will learn it for money. Half your applicants on LinkedIn don't know the difference between Node.js and Next.js and will go into the interviews without checking.

• by hcrean on 11/18/24, 11:14 PM

  Posting a nonsense job to accrue CVs and a call-list of details is a common tactic used by the people tasked with building the internal candidate database.