But since people have been increasingly saying that this is a problem, let's do something about it. My current thought is to add a new instruction at the top asking companies to please only post in the thread if they're committed to responding to every applicant. Other suggestions for addressing this issue are welcome!
Edit: since the next Who Is Hiring day is tomorrow, let's get precise. I'm including this text at the top of the thread:
NEW RULE: Please only post a job in this thread if you are committed to responding to everyone who applies.
Thoughts?
Edit per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42011360: "Please only post a job if you intend to fill a position and are committed to responding to everyone who applies."
* done for optics, to look like growth or doing well, or just to have their name out there.
* to fill the pipeline for future needs
* to assess the hiring market, for planning
* (for reasons mentioned in article) to light fire under current employees, or see how replaceable they are
* only for a serendipitous unicorn hire, not commodity developer
* for training in their hiring process
I know all these are things that happen in general with startup job posts, though not necessarily on HN.
None of those reasons preclude "responding", but responding doesn't solve the real problem, it's only a PR sugar coating on it.
An example of disclosure on the unicorn hire one would be to simply state the truth about it. That's fine, so long as you're not pretending to grow. It could even be good optics, about hiring standards.
Disclosure of some of the other intent would preclude it (e.g., probably nobody is going to state the goal of threatening or replacing current employees). Maybe those posts shouldn't be done at all, or maybe they can at least say that this is a speculative post, not for a currently open position.
I'd say job posts have to be truthful, and it's by default implied that they actually good faith intend to fill the position as described, in a timely manner, and that interviews will only be conducted in good faith. If the default isn't true, they should disclose that.
Very few people would disagree with that premise.
The thing is that bad faith actors doing bad faith things are not going to abide by the rules on their own accord, on account of being bad faith actors. So you need enforcement, and I don't really see how HN can enforce any of the things you posted. They're not really in a position to vet anything more than you or I can.
Maybe the initial "who is hiring" post should be more explicit about the lack of moderation and vetting instead.
There's a lot of questionable things that decent people do, in good faith, because they consider it normal and OK. If you tell people "actually, the convention here on that is something different", then I think most will respect that.
One way this doesn't work is if there's a lack of trust. For example, if an employer claims it values X, but actually behaves like Y, employees are less likely to do X, and also less likely to trust or respect the company on anything else.
Another way the HN example doesn't work as well is if the person has strong motivation otherwise. For example, if their boss told them to post a fake job on HN, and they really don't want to come back and say they can't because they just saw a new rule. But a lot of other times, the person doing the posting has more autonomy, or a more decent work environment.
A lot of guessing here, but I think stating a convention would help significantly.
All due respect: if an employer posts here offering for people to apply, that the employer in question is bad in some way, I don't see why that's considered "off topic." If a company sucks, we owe it to our fellow engineers to get the word out until they improve. A perfect example being the sorts that don't have any intention of filling the jobs they post.
In my mind the only sort of company that would avoid posting here due to the potential of being criticized by the HN userbase are exactly the sorts you don't want posting, so that seems like a win/win.
Just my 0.02.
Are there any other reasons you mentioned? I only found this one.
Thinking about it, people replying to the post stake their reputation too in whatever they post. If we see a throwaway or newish account causing shenanigans, people interested in the job post can form their own opinion of the nature of the comment? (isn't that what downvoting is for too?).
Since threads have this nice toggle feature you can always click [-] to ignore whatever people is saying about a job posting.
As an aside, been browsing HN for years and always wanted to say that you're doing the Lord's work.
But presumably they have to deal with that problem already anyway.
But I agree that's fair to expect from companies. Yes, they have potentially hundreds of applicants, but writing "We're sorry to inform that you have not been selected to interview" probably takes less than a minute, so spending less than an hour rejecting every applicant seems in line with the time I'd expect each candidate to spend preparing and submitting their application. Plus you can always automate a list of emails to send rejection messages to...
It's also a nice way to differentiate the Who's hiring? from all other job boards out there
Maybe make the "flag" feature work for users to "report" non-responsive employers. On repeat offenses, reach out to them saying they've been repeatedly reported? Just brainstorming
Perhaps the monthly postings should be handled via ycombinator.com/jobs and the thread here is just a dump of this month's new openings with links to applications there but not direct posts by companies?
Thats a lot of maybes, but my impression of the flag|vouch feature is as a first step community moderation and guessing it works well? The job thread being jobs targeting the community, I would think it would as well, or at a minimum help.
At the end of the day the challenges likely stem from "Who's hiring?" being just a thread with comments on a very spartan message board. I would have said you can solve these issues with an app or website, but you already have one, so it would be easier to just leverage that and then the sky is the limit–add any features you want!
I don’t care if a company ghosts me b/c they hired someone else—I care that/if I spent the time applying to a role for which there was no intent to hire.
How can we mandate that only roles that are actually open get posted? Does hn/jobs require confirmation that a hire was made within a certain timeframe? (say, 3-6 months?). It may be non-solvable as you obviously can’t mandate that a company hires, but if we can mandate that a company not advertise unless they’re going to hire it is certainly non-solved.
And then if a company posts the exact same ad for an excessive number of months and their headcount hasn't changed, they're clearly breaking the rule.
NEW RULE: Please only post a job if you intend to fill a position and are committed to responding to everyone who applies.
Why not: Please only post jobs if you are committed to interviewing and filling the position in the next 3 months. Accounts posting the same job opening for 6 months may be banned.
In this market if it takes 6+ months to find someone there is a fundamental problem with the opening.
At the very least it should be: "Please only post a job in this thread if you are committed to responding to all qualified applicants."
Every applicant is going to classify themselves as "qualified"; and every applicant that a company doesn't respond to, they will classify as "unqualified"; so if we modify the rule in this way, we may as well have no rule at all.
(Edit: I just noticed johnnyanmac already made this point in an earlier reply)
>At the very least it should be: "Please only post a job in this thread if you are committed to responding to all qualified applicants."
Too easy a loophole. I think we should just stick to the spirit of the rule and see if they make an honest gesture not make it literally 100% of applicants (ofc of they want a principal and a student in school applies they shouldn't expect a response).
That makes it easy, within HN, to see if a company is just doing copy/paste spam, or if they're posting new/updated info each month. It also has the advantage of being easily verifiable (and enforceable? not sure what the enforcement actions would be...) here on HN versus random anecdotes of "I applied but never heard back", which I doubt would have enough weight for anyone to do anything about.
Users here could help police/moderate by simply replying with a link to last month's posting if there is one and the posting omitted it. That would somewhat-gently "call out" the company for not reading/following the rules, without users leaving negative comments on the thread.
(Just thoughts from a user skimming by, I'm not in the market for a new job at the moment so I have little skin in the game)
Someone else suggested a good idea - make companies link to their previous request. Or even better - don't allow companies to post the exact same listing for months in a row. The actual behavior you're trying to root out is a company listing a position that isn't real - so just don't allow them to list the same not-real position over and over.
I don't know if that can be enforced, though it should be easy to script up something that checks this. But you're not going to enforce anything anyway, and I think this gets closer to actually what we want to achieve.
(1) I applied for a job from $Company and never got a response.
(2) I don't believe $Company is really hiring.
I'm hearing both of these concerns from users. They overlap but aren't the same. Linking a job ad to the previous job ad addresses #2 but not #1.
1. It's not anything new, unlike this "ghost jobs" thing which is a supposed new phenomenon. This makes it less likely that the status quo can be improved.
2. I believe the reason the status quo is as it is is because most companies are inundated with job applicants, many of them not even passing a basic qualifying test (e.g. people with no FE experiecnce applying to FE positions with min. required experience of 5 years).
I don't know if this is true for the HN thread, having never posted to it. It's possible it's much higher signal here so this issue becomes less relevant.
Anyway, just my 2 cents, mostly as an outsider to these threads.
What is this confusing sentence suppose to communicate? That you adore the idea? Or like it? Or hate it? Or are neutral? Or are indifferent? Or any other thousands of options? Nobody knows.
Why being so incredibly vague and off-putting?
The way I parse a sentence like "I don't love this idea", and the way I meant it, is that I think the idea has some merit, it's not terrible, but I'm not fully on board, it has more work to do. It's not all the way to "I don't like it" but it's not great yet.
In any case I elaborated in the rest of the post a bit more on this so I think you can see from the context what I meant.
* was going to make a Mr. Creosote reference but thought better of it
It is nice to expect something a bit more involved if it's a final round thing, but still. No-one likes the ghost.
I wouldn’t always blame the poster, and appreciate them letting us know.
I'm not saying there aren't abuses taking place but in my experience people are far too quick to jump to such conclusions on the internet, and the jumping-to-conclusions is actually the much bigger problem. Just speaking generally here–not about the Who Is Hiring threads.
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).
Thinking out loud:
* What if there were a bit more restrictions to posting on Who's hiring? Perhaps a counter of how many times a profile has posted, with a max of N posts allowed per M months, or something.
* Would also be nice to have some feedback from HN profiles on outcome of the job posting. Add a link to the job posting to your about page:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=##### NOREPLY|HIRED|OK
Anyway, maybe something like that would be out of scope for HN, but just thinking out loud here :-).
Perhaps extend it to something like everyone who applies, or responds to your comment”
Practically speaking, enforcement will be difficult/impossible for actions off HN - if someone claims a company isn’t responding, or using a templated email, how would you verify that?
By enforcing the same rule for a job thread, there’s a very clear location where the behavior of the company can be observed.
Those who comment and are to be taken seriously will have a certain amount of karma and or history on HN.
Honestly it's practically a joke to look at and it starting to make YC itself look bad. Seriously there is no value prop to these postings unless you are jobless, desperate and living in your car.
perhaps upvotes and downvotes can be subtly weighed by karma? This would give proven contributors more trust. In the case of job posts, it would enlist them in zapping the spam they recognise month after month?
And beyond that, beyond applicability to job posts, perhaps voting can be a collaborative filtering bubble instead of absolutes? This makes spammers and voting rings end up in an echo chamber? And perhaps for normal posts instead of there being an early top level comment that gets to the top and stays there and monopolises the conversation, you get more variety and people more easily find the conversation they come for?
So perhaps recruit some small group of math minded HNers and see what insights and ideas they wring from access to the fully voting history?
We have decided not to progress your application further.
While making our decision we've noted your extensive experience at [previous company] and feel that your skillsets are highly valuable in the industry and hope you find success in your job search soon."
I actually received that from a major tech company, unfilled mail merge aliases included.