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Posted by rubatrejo 23 hours ago

28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days(unlisted.careers)
287 points | 339 commentspage 2
wrxd 22 hours ago|
I sent a few CVs recently trying to get a fully remote job and the experience has been miserable.

From what I can tell the job posting have been opened for a while, companies are inundated with CVs thanks to them offering remote and form the screening feedback I had (when I was lucky to get any feedback) it was basically that they can be as picky as they want and hire people who matches every single one of their requirements.

On the flip side at my work (FAANG, not remote) we barely get any CVs from people who can pass the technical screening. Most the candidate fail so badly it’s not even funny

whstl 21 hours ago|
> On the flip side at my work (FAANG, not remote) we barely get any CVs from people who can pass the technical screening. Most the candidate fail so badly it’s not even funny

Same experience in multiple YC startups whose payment isn't even that competitive. Half of the resumes don't match the qualification, and on top of that the freelancing recruiter doesn't even seem to care. Lately I resorted to hiring from my own network.

LoganDark 21 hours ago||
How do you build a network? I have a few previous employers, but they don't have any help for me directly, and I haven't had any luck by applying or reaching out to recruiters or agencies.
whstl 21 hours ago||
If you're an individual contributor: keep in touch with colleagues, especially senior level and technical managers, or people going to other companies.

Managers: keep in touch with the best people and just hire them on your next job for more than they were getting paid. Win-win.

It's not easy for everyone, if you don't interact with colleagues outside the job it's probably impossible.

hn_submit 22 hours ago||
This is common everywhere. Employers are leaving open job listings and just wait and see who comes along.

Career sites would do well to automatically close job listings after 90 days or so.

gullywhumper 20 hours ago||
I work with US healthcare postings and our numbers are pretty similar: >400k open/active postings, 30% over 90 days, median 44 days. These are direct-hire only postings from the employers (no job boards / aggregators / staffing agencies).

I don't have a hypothesis for why jobs stay posted for so long, other than that employers are always look for a workers, the roles are generally well-defined, and turnover can be high. I don't think there's anything nefarious within healthcare causing so many postings to stay up for so long. Most healthcare employers are generally desperate for workers. So much so that they pay crazy rates for temporary workers (staffing agencies / travelers). The company I work for helps health systems try to minimize those costs.

shantnutiwari 7 hours ago||
Warning: the page has been deleted and Im getting a 404. I wonder why? Its on the HN front page and people are still discussing it, but there is no article
BobbyTables2 13 hours ago||
What about companies in which managers hold on to requisitions to defer layoffs?

Or companies that are in a perpetual hiring freeze?

destitude 22 hours ago||
I've about given up looking for a remote job even as a software engineer with over 20+ years of experience especially with macOS since I never seem to get a reply or "no longer accepting applicants".
whatever1 22 hours ago||
It is clear signal but its causes are multiple and I am not sure what percent attribution each one has:

1) Roles with high turnover. Likely the posting stays always on. 2) The pay is bad and nobody takes the job. 3) The role is too niche and the candidates in the market with visibility to the role are very few. 4) Aggressive hiring. Candidates have many options and until they actually show up at work, you keep interviewing other candidates. 5) Forgotten posts / ghost posts (my gut feeling says that this is the lowest contributor to the spike we observe, as likely it should be flat over time)

MarleTangible 22 hours ago||
Reposts from recruiting agencies or other unrelated companies to resell the candidates or simply farm user details for fraud etc.
dgellow 22 hours ago||
So, you’re saying it’s not really a clear signal?
AngryData 20 hours ago||
This has been a problem/norm for many jobs for many years now. If you haven't had to deal with it before now, consider yourself lucky.
jrochkind1 22 hours ago||
I've been hearing people looking for jobs with (to me) weird theories about fake/ghost job postings, that the employer never plans to fill... they have various theories of why (hypothetical) employers would do this that I don't quite follow.

Has anyone else heard of/seen this, or can explain where it's coming from or if it means anything?

fwlr 22 hours ago||
It is absolutely and undeniably a real phenomenon. Take your pick of explanations, nobody actually knows for sure, but you have to tell yourself something or you’d toss your phone out the window when you get the 40th notification that you might be interested in the exact same job that auto-rejected you the previous 39 times. Speaking from personal experience over the last year.
jrochkind1 21 hours ago||
It's very weird. You would think the people posting the jobs might know for sure, although different posters may have different motivations. It seems something that should be amenable to some journalistic investigation, but while it's getting a lot of talk between job seekers, including in these comments, nobody seems to have tried to do such investigation to get some clues as to what's going on.
whstl 18 hours ago||
The simple explanation is incompetence: the ratio of false negatives is too high, so everyone has a story of being rejected from jobs they could perfectly fulfil. The ratio of false positives is also high, so jobs remain open for longer they should.

I recently met the CTO of a unicorn in a social function, and they urged me to apply, he would fast track. I interviewed there before, got an offer but decided to go somewhere else. Even with a face-to-face invitation from the CTO and obviously having passed an interview in the past, they rejected me.

There is no end to incompetence in modern business.

JDups 10 hours ago||
Earlier this summer I applied for a job at a local startup that I had all the qualifications for and quite a bit of relevant experience. I got a rejection email within 48 hours. Eventually I happened to meet with one of the founders through a connection and had a chat, he said how amazing it was that someone local had worked on similar problems in the past. In the end he said that unfortunately they don't have the capacity to expand the team right now.

Their job postings are currently still up on their site and linkedin.

dvt 22 hours ago|
As someone that's currently looking (with plenty of experience, corporate, startup, and contract), can confirm it's pretty rough out there. I think the application process is just becoming enshittified: because HR uses AI to filter, applicants are starting to use AI to apply, so we have volumes and volumes of nonsense flowing back and forth.

Been working professionally for ~15 years or so, and it's never been this bad. Other than "knowing someone" (i.e. a referral, and even that falls through routinely), not sure what the best way to snag a position is these days.

nabbed 22 hours ago||
I just read this on CNBC:

  “US business continues to boom,” S&P Global Market Intelligence chief business
  economist Chris Williamson said in a statement. “To put the growth surge in
  context, barring the spike in demand following the opening up of the economy
  after the COVID-19 lockdowns, the latest improvement in business activity
  is the greatest recorded since early 2015. Business is clearly booming now in
  both manufacturing and services.”
From https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/23/treasury-yields-oil-inflatio...

Is it booming for everyone except software developers? I keep hearing about developers who have been looking for a job for 6 months or longer and don't get responses to applications.

Or is it some process failure (which you hint at) that is making it difficult to capitalize on that boom?

ndiddy 21 hours ago|||
Most job growth for the past several years has been in the healthcare, leisure and hospitality, and construction sectors. Removing these sectors makes job growth negative for 2024 and 2025, and wipes out the majority of job growth in 2026. See https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/economy/spotl...
pixl97 22 hours ago||||
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery

Business doing good doesn't automatically mean populations of humans are doing good themselves.

xboxnolifes 20 hours ago||||
The article is talking about "The Economy" (read: stocks and bonds), not employment numbers. The market can both be awful for job seekers and great for capital owners.
bonesss 21 hours ago|||
Speculation, but: if tech over hired during COVID our section of the market could be experiencing a corrective slowdown while others are booming in aggregate.
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