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Comment by hunglee2 | Hacker News Reader

The outrage from job seekers is justified but Gizmodo doesn't help matters by categorising fraud (fake jobs) with failure (never filled). Hiring is hard, as anyone who has ever done it will attest, and very many vacancies opened in good faith are not filled for a variety of reasons - budget pulled, hiring manager won't make a decision, internal candidate appears at late stage etc.

We also need to draw a distinction between employers posting jobs directly vs 3rd party agencies posting jobs for the company's they represent, or purport to represent. There is a disincentive for the former to post 'fake jobs' - who wants to deal with the applicant flow, but an incentive for the latter to do so - harvest resume's, build a database.

Anyways. My point is, there _is_ a problem but mainstream magazine treatment like this from Gizmodo serves to add smoke when there's already a fire

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Disagree.

If you post a job then reneg on it that still leaves folks out in the cold who are, in earnest, looking for work. Mistakes happen, and I don't blame hiring managers for the shifting financial landscapes they often have to face. But that job wasn't solid enough to count as a real position.

Lump them together.

A posting which was never intended to be filled is still different than one that was intended to be filled, but never actually happened.

Good luck telling them apart however.

If you make it so every posting has to be filled or it’s ‘fraud’, it will be an even bigger mess.

Maybe, but it's too hard to distinguish between the jobs that were posted with intention to not be filled and jobs that were posted with intention to be filled but through other circumstances weren't. So the distinction is moot.

It's a lot like this website. It used to be pretty obvious which comments were trolls and which are real people but more and more the people have gotten dumber and the trolls gotten smarter so it's almost impossible to tell the difference between maliciousness and stupidity and for the rest of us it doesn't really matter one way or the other. A person wasting our time is a person wasting our time, the intentions aren't important.

> So the distinction is moot.

From the perspective of an applicant's emotional response, sure, but it's absolutely relevant in order to have a conversation about how to solve it since the different causes may need different approaches, or may occur in sufficiently differing rates to influence which should be addressed first.

The distinction is also moot from perspective of an individuals's time being cavalierly wasted by a large corporation.

Just wait until you start thinking about dating.

But if we’re claiming fraud, either way the intent is actually the deciding factor. You can’t commit fraud without a guilty mind (mens rea)- at least in any jurisdiction I’m aware of.

Modern dating sucks, but at least half the time there's a real human on the other side that isn't a corporation trying to sell me something.

And yes, that's what audits are for. To deduce intent by investigating from within, something we could never do.

nah, fake profiles are a huge problem. depending on the site, it could easily be 1 to 5 real:fake or more.

I did say 1 in 2 weren't bots. I wouldn't say that's great in any measure when your goal is some form of companionship.

different is a matter of use case. The difference doesn't matter to the applicant. It probably does if you propose the death penalty for posting fake listings.

A fine large enough to make bad job postings (genuine or not) unprofitable is fine. We don't need reducto ad absurdum here.

Just make businesses put thought into their postings and not let someone who has no idea of the qualifications right them up themselves.

There is nothing wrong with reductor ad absurdum to make a point about dependency and categories. It is the primary use case.

I think there are a million practical challenges to implementing a fine. I wonder if there is enough incentives to draw employers to a verified list service.

Sure there is, it's in the name. We don't need an absurd argument for a punishment that is straightforward to explain. You usually use absurdum to simplify complex topics.

Or I suppose to win a presidential debate, these days.

I brought it up because people seemed genuinely confused on the idea that job listing background could matter for one person and not for another.

Of course it is subjective until you introduce a context.

It's even harder to tell them apart in a bear market where the job market is stacked in favor of employers (for the moment).

With the current glut of laid off engineering talent in the hiring pool, if an employer cannot find a candidate, they are not really serious about hiring. Yes, there's more filtering involved now, but you can't say that the candidates don't exist.

Every posting needs to have an honest attempt to fill it. I don't know the exact numbers, but if there 1000 applicants per posting and you end up reposting your job 4 times, there's clearly something amiss.this overlap of 1-4000 applications and not one of them are worth a call? Even if we accept 90% is spam, that's still hundreds of candidates in a "recruiters market" being passed over.

The challenge of course is that ‘I just didn’t like them’ is a valid form of discrimination.

So while it may be obviously bullshit (what, you can’t find anyone you actually like out of thousands?), it takes a non trivial amount of paperwork right now to prove it’s bullshit to the degree you could actually punish anyone for it. Especially with the recent administration change.

Yeah, the usual product of excessive greed. It's on the exploited to prove stuff with info they don't have access to. At least Lina Khan gave voided non-competes before capitalism took the reigns again.

There are job postings out there that are solid, but where the company is unwilling to pay the recruiter markup, and hiring organically just doesn't result in solid candidates. Not every company hiring is a Fortune 500 or Big Tech company looking to get over on the world. Many are smaller companies looking to fill roles but may be lacking in the bandwidth or resources to lower expectations and either pay well over market or hire downmarket and train extensively. To say these companies are hiring fraudulently is unfair.

>hiring organically just doesn't result in solid candidates.

If you get one bad hire, it's probably on them

If you get 20 bad hires, it's probably on the company. At some point, no matter the size, people really need to look at themselves and say if they are really trying to enhance their shop and let talent succeed, or if they are a churn shop and don't deserve solid candidates to begin with.

I'm not talking about hires, but candidates. Not all markets are awash in talent in every stack.

It's the same concept. Even with niche tech. If you can't hire a good candidate in a buyers market, and repeatedly get bad hires, what's your interview pipeline doing? Paying too low, getting reqs wrong in a game of telephone? Hiring through nepotism instead of merit?

I'm just a bit tired of the "but we need to avoid bad hires" narrative. Especially since a certain blundermouth more or less said the quiet part out loud for the intentions many have with that. It made sense in 2022, but is that really an issue in 2025? If you can't "find solid candidates" now, how did you Faire in non-bust markets?

A small relatively unknown company outside of more popular job markets will not get huge numbers of applicants to posts on a random job board. That doesn't make those posts malicious on the company's part. It's just a relatively illiquid market.

They may need other help to find a candidate, e.g. recruiters. But that's a different topic than the OP, which is about "online job postings"

You really haven't seen how much of a buyers market this is, have you? Even small unknown companies can throw a post on and get hundreds of responses in hours. Yes, a lot is slop, but we're still talking some dozens of genuine candidates that needs any job.

> But that's a different topic than the OP, which is about "online job postings"

This whole topic is about online job postings. Smaller groups that don't just grab their friends need to find talent too.

I know -- in popular markets, for more general roles, you will get lots of valid candidates.

If you need specific skills in a specific geographic area, you probably still get a lot of responses, but the vast majority (if not all) aren't going to be suitable. Really, these jobs don't have much luck being filled on job boards, because it isn't the best medium to hire those people, but many companies will put them out there anyway to broaden their reach.

Sure, it comes down to your filters at the end. But I think legitimately needing a unicorn or domain expert is different from the above statement of

> hiring organically just doesn't result in solid candidates.

the tech hiring has been a bit annoying for a decade now, but this simply sounds like a narrative for someone simply wanting an H1B rather than one who is simply bad at finding talent.

The way I read it, Gizmodo cannot tell whether those jobs are fake or just never filled. How could anyone tell from outside ? The visible fact is that no-one is hired for those jobs.

If you get hundreds of apps and you can't get a single qualified candidate, you either have a horribly inefficient recruiting system or your job needs are so specific that general job boards won't help you anyway. If you have years of inefficiencies happening without being addressed, at what point to we just call it fraud instead?

Or possibly you highly overestimate your job needs vs. The requirements posted. Which is endemic of the above reasons anyway.

Sure, hiring is hard but the factors you mention are rare, and teams are extremely motivated to fill vacancies.

Teams are also strongly motivated to not hire a bad team member that drags down morale and wastes resources. I want to say this is more true in government hiring, where it's difficult to fire people, but I've seen private companies hold out for a long time until they find someone with the right combination of cultural fit and technical skills.

It’s extraordinary how frequently companies discuss the cost of a bad hire and never consider the opportunity cost of a no-hire.

Companies that keep waiting for Mr. Right are really saying that the opportunity cost of not completing their project is very low. In other words it’s not really that important at all.

On the contrary. "Not completing the project" is not an option—if they don't hire someone to fill a vacancy on the team, the rest of the team will just be expected to work extra hours to keep up.

Oh, not with overtime—you're salaried, remember? (Alternate version: Oh, no, you can't actually log the extra hours; we don't have the budget for overtime, and I, the manager, can't be seen asking for more money, or it would affect my bonus!)

And you'd better step up and work those hours. You want to be seen as a team player, right?

>Not completing the project" is not an option—if they don't hire someone to fill a vacancy on the team, the rest of the team will just be expected to work extra hours to keep up.

And that's the opportunity cost we don't talk about. The cost isn't "we slow down on a project from a bad hire". It's "demoralize/burned out engineers quit to a point where the deadline is impossible to reach". You can't force overtime to engineers that leave and take their institutional knowledge with them

There's also a lot of fake job postings as a sort of carrot to overworked engineers that "promise more help is coming". Which is just as ingenuous to existing employees as it is to applicants.

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