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Comment by letharion | Hacker News Reader

I was looking at a big tech company recently. They list well over a 100 open positions. I reach out to a friend who works there. He says some very nice things about me to his manager, who asks for my CV. Been six weeks and I haven't heard a word. I might apply again through the regular formal channels, but I would have thought that a strong recommendation was worth more.

I'm not really complaining, I'm in a fairly good spot myself, but for others out there in this situation, you're not alone.

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Same. Family friend is in high up position. Passed my CV on to the data team. They said positive encouraging things, and he said that he'd soon be in contact for the next steps.

It's been over a month. I can believe that family friend would be forced to say something positive about my CV, but not that he'd give me false hope.

My interpretation: companies aren't hiring, they're covertly laying off staff whilst projecting growth to the market. Or, they are hiring, but the current teams are worried about the security of their own jobs as AI is now making everyone worried.

I'm not saying your family friend has done this, but I've seen people "refer" others to their company, then deliberately tank the candidacy because they didn't believe in the candidate's skills.

I would buy this, and even take it as a valid criticism, if he left with a lie like "... but there aren't any open spots right now" or "...it's out of my hands".

But he left with the promise of a reply. It just seems heartless, especially since I will see him again soon at another family function.

Have you spoken to him since he promised to refer you? If not, you could probably clear all this up with a 10 minute phone conversation.

I recently ran a hiring pipeline for a senior/staff SWE. There were around a thousand applicants. What you have to understand is that there is a strong timing component to these pipelines: Hiring managers and recruiters screen hundreds of resumes to find people they want to talk to, resulting in maybe dozens of phones screens, followed by additional interview rounds for a handful of people who did really well.

So what happens if you send in your resume when we're already evaluating a bunch of people? Well, we may not have the bandwidth to interview you while we see if our current batch of candidates pan out. But also if your resume is good we probably won't reject you, either, while we wait to see if we can actually close a candidate.

It's entirely possible that we DO reach out to you after 2 months if we fail to make a hire on the current batch of candidates, or if our offers are rejected. Believe it or not, your resume is still right there in the tracker, and if there's no response yet, it could just be because it takes a really long time to go through this hiring process for everyone involved and there's no reason to reject you outright.

This is completely understandable, but I wonder why companies don't just say this - it would be a lot better than ghosting.

Right, just like ordering an Uber at a busy airport "this is taking longer than expected but we're still working on it..."

Most places are on a hiring freeze but there are exceptions at the SVP level. Often this is what is being looked for is that excellent candidate.

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