Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs (opens in new tab)

I'm glad our government has introduced the H1B program to help out employers like you who are dealing with a shortage of tech workers (who will work for 2/3 market and will do anything you say because if they get fired they'll be deported).

Wait, this isn't clear to me. Are the interviewees citizens? So you're interviewing citizens to prove that there aren't any who can fill your jobs but even when they clearly could fill the job you don't hire them? Seems like the requirement of proving "there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job" is going to be near impossible for the government to enforce

For those who come across this type of fraud, reporting is straightforward. You can report anonymously.

https://www.uscis.gov/scams-fraud-and-misconduct/report-frau...

https://www.uscis.gov/report-fraud/uscis-tip-form

I would also report as securities fraud to the SEC, but that is a higher hill to climb.

https://www.sec.gov/submit-tip-or-complaint/tips-complaints-...

(not calling OP out specifically, general guidance when you come across illegal labor practices)

I think you've managed to explain why H1Bs shouldn't exist pretty convincingly.

So basically you're wasting the interviewees time and breaking the law by admitting that you won't hire a citizen who would do the job just as well.

Just wanted to say thanks for sharing this, dude -- a lot of other replies are complaining (because this does suck for US citizens), but I imagine it also sucks for you, since (IIUC) you just want to keep your good developer and also not lie to the government. It's not fun to hear about but it's better it's said out loud, right. Sorry you're in this situation

So, you are effectively committing fraud!

So when interviewing, perhaps I should skip more places that say citizenship required on the req, to avoid wasting my time?

So you are simultaneously screwing over the ones applying to the job, the government, the guy already working for you and yourself? Geez, it must be amazing in your department, a lose-lose-lose-lose

Are you claiming the government requires you to lie to applicants to the "ghost" job?

Do you have evidence for that claim?

How did you hire the H1-B in The first place if you have direct direct personal evidence that citizen labor is available?

> So while I will deny their green card application and not submit it,

I might be missing this in the thread. What is the reason that you deny their green card application and not submit?

Maybe if someone is “amazing” you should get them a green card.

That sounds ethical.

Good to hear that H1B programme isn't being abused.

If there are qualified citizens, why are hiring h1b?

I was always wondered who audits this. Why should you even deny the green card?

What makes it worth the extra trouble?

I guess the "green cards" really work cheap?

An understandable situation. But by admitting this, your company is admitting liability for citizenship discrimination (8 U.S.C. § 1324b).

Even though you are not submitting a PERM and running into potential issues with fraud there, the underlying act of rejecting US citizen/LPR applicants is the same, so I don't see how this would be any different than, for example, the Apple case last year (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-secures-25...) with a $25M settlement.

In the Apple case, the company did actually obtain PERMs for some of the positions, but they were only charged with discrimination against the un-hired applications, not anything to do with the the hiring/sponsoring of the foreign workers. Furthermore, the case did not even allege actual tossing out of US citizen resumes, but merely making the applications deliberately inconvenient to avoid actually receiving any unwanted "real" applications.

The H1B system is so rife with corruption at every level and needs to be stopped.

Rage baiting?

This will than probably change with the new American government and its anti-immigration stance. Less h1b, less ghost jobs.

Willingly admitting to fraud is a strong move.

You should probably stop breaking federal law.

This is just plain fraud

This isn't ethical. It shouldn't be legal. But it is. Welcome to America.

I can’t tell if this is satire or actual comic book villain behavior. I guess not really villain behavior, but certainly gaming a clearly broken system

So you have zero integrity. Thanks for sharing.

Sending this to Elon...

And quoting to capture the illegal activity:

'''shmatt 47 minutes ago | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost J...

I have to put out a ghost job req and interview every person applying within reason for every green card a direct report is applying for. I have to show there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job The main problem is: even if the interviewee knocks it out of the park, is an amazing engineer, I still am not interested in firing my OPT/h1b team member who can still legally work for 2-3 years. So while I will deny their green card application and not submit it, I also won’t hire the interviewee'''

This is why many job seekers are perpetually passive/work through recruiters. An in-house recruiter may be there to perpetually screen for purple unicorn candidates that bend the CEO's hiring freeze - a contract recruiter won't work with a firm that can't actually hire.

This isn't anything new. This exact same thing happened during the 2000-era dot-com bubble burst. There was a huge hiring freeze across all tech companies, yet somehow they were still posting job ads, but nobody was hiring. I even moved cities to work at a job where 10 of my friends worked (including the CEO as a good friend), and when I went in for the "interview" (the job was supposedly guaranteed) the CEO said he couldn't hire me because of a hiring freeze. I ended up freelancing for the company on-and-off for a couple of years, but it was barely enough to keep me fed. There was no other work anywhere. It was a rough 4 years, and we're going through the same thing now and have been for a while. I'm glad that this time I have a bit of job security, but I feel sorry for those that don't. I tried to warn everyone I could a few years ago that if they had a job, even if they didn't like it, they should consider staying because it's going to get rough. People laughed at me for suggesting this, but now nobody is laughing.

> because IMO, it made THEM look busy / effective.

A KPI in hiring is offers made / accepted. I don't think the HR team gets credit for reviewing applicants and running interviews that don't result in one/both of these.

Not uncommon for in-house recruiters to keep sourcing new candidates and making them jump through all interviewing hoops even if they know the reqs aren’t open or till the morning they all get fired in a layoff that they know is coming. Agencies probably less so because they get paid commission.

> to maintain a pipeline of talents

See, this is the part I don’t understand.

If they don’t have real jobs available, what’s the point of building this “pipeline”?

Are they genuinely going to plan to use this pipeline for future roles? Because simply posting a real job in the future will still get 1000s of applications which builds _real_ pipeline

I don’t see recruiters going back through a bunch of old resumes to find “the one”. That’s not how that works and isn’t an efficient use of time

Seems like a bunch of busy work for nothing

Right! Everyone in this thread is discussing it as if it’s a proven fact when the approach is extremely sketchy. Based on this I would say 20% is a generous upper bound at most.

There's also no historical baseline of comparison. I know for a fact that ghost jobs have existed for a long time. I don't see any evidence they are more prevalent now than 10 or 20 years ago.

If I'm understanding this right, the author gave ChatGPT-4o 2000 reviews and asks it "Are you 90% sure that this is a ghost job". Then, the author used those as labeled examples, trained a BERT model to predict the ChatGPT decision, and then applied the BERT model to the rest of the dataset. I guess this is cool, but if the goal is to pinpoint some percentage of ghost jobs overall I'm very skeptical

(it's a bit disappointing that 200 comments into this thread there was only a single mention of either "BERT" or "ChatGPT" per ctrl-f)

Hail to you, person who also reads studies.

The methodology is pretty weak.

While I'm disappointed at the scientific merits of the paper, I'm glad it was posted here which invited discussion on this topic. Someone feeling frustrated with their job app right now might find a speculative answer here.

(Currently waiting for "final decision" on 2 interviews which went well, but after 3 weeks, I'm starting to feel they're ghosting me)

Yeah, but it looks official and confirmed my preexisting bias. So it's correct.

I am in this position.

In the last few months I've submitted dozens of job applications for positions where, as articulated by another commenter upthread, the person writing the JD could have been writing it based on my resume.

15+ YOE, interesting work, promotions with progression of responsibility and impact, deep experience working with executives on the business side, side projects, volunteering experience, I speak multiple natural languages (I even tried applying for some "international" roles), etc.

0 responses apart from "we're going with other candidates". Not even so much as a phone screen.

Inbound recruiting stream has dried up as well. In 2017-2018 I was getting a dozen or more emails from recruiters weekly. Now I get maybe one a month, typically for C2H or a full-time role w/ at least a 20% pay cut.

I've shifted my focus to entrepreneurial work and sharpening skills outside of tech.

I'm already there with the monthly HN hiring threads. Not one of those companies over several years ever responded to me, even the ones where the listing felt tailor made for me, even the ones that literally said they respond to all applicants. They're a total waste of time lol

I got laid off then brought back on last minute (whiplash), and though i was burned out while applying during the transition period, end of the day i needed a job.

So whether people check out as in, leave industry or take a smaller pay sure i can see that happening. But unless you have large savings or low expenses, you can’t really stop.

If it didn’t take 50 app submissions for 1 interview, and the interviews weren’t l33t code crap, then i’d be crazy enough to enjoy the process.

> I've already passed this threshold, and have instead devoted the maximum of my time to personal ventures.

Same here. After a certain point you are doing yourself a disservice by enduring rejection notices if you actually have the skills you claim to.

The hardest part is having faith in yourself and the possibility of acquiring a customer.

It really depends on the position of the prospective employee.

An unemployed person who needs a job should theoretically spend their workday hours on recruitment efforts. The prevalence of fake jobs might affect which roles they apply for but not the total number of applications.

However for employed individuals seeking a promotion it can have a big impact. Is it worth spending many hours of your leisure time applying/interviewing for a job that pays 10% more, if the job has even a small likelihood of being fake? Probably not.

I gave up applying for jobs many years ago. Mostly because I am bad at the interview process. I maintain a good personal network and have a good reputation, so I can always find work.

If I had to wager a guess, and this is being conservative and fortunate, after about a year and exhausting unemployment you start staring into the wall and saying 'WTF' to yourself out loud. It's a bummer and discouragement is the last sort of thing that person needs at that point.

Yep. I just decided to stop playing the game. I looked for about the first 6 months (a requirement for unemployment) but after that I decided to just retire. I was planning to work a few years more, but it's just not worth it. It's not only the ghost jobs, it's the whole interview process where you could spend days on interviews and take home tests and you still don't get the job. And then there's the ageism. No thanks. I'm out. Fortunately I can afford to be (frugally) retired.

IME, it’s been a crap system for decades. 7 of my last 7 jobs (over ~25 years) have been obtained through “my network” - ie former coworkers who enjoyed (tolerated?) working with me and were happy to make referrals, reach out, or in other ways help when I was looking for a new job. And often when I wasn’t looking.

There are many analogous questions! One of the most interesting challenges in life is trying to observe when the presentation of reality is fundamentally dishonest for some reason. The well poisoned, as it were.

I didn't know the hiring market was one of these situations, but I could see that being the case. Seems like a lot of hype and noise, but is anything really going on or is it just hollow?

Talking to a couple of people who found jobs recently, I realized that none of them actually found the job by applying online. All of them are through human relationships. It doesn't have to be someone who knew someone, but even an outsourced recruiting agency staffed by humans in a call center is more useful than applying online. The better recruiting agencies usually have an account manager who has a direct line to the company that's hiring.

Online job seeking is dead.

Thank you for sharing this article. The study illustrates something I have tried to explain to people but haven’t found the right words for. As someone with (diagnosed) severe social anxiety, I would rather get a tooth drilled than do a technical interview. That hasn’t been great for my career, as you can imagine. I desperately wish I could just take a written test or something.

I pretty much see it as a negative signal now. If I happen across a board for a given company, look at the positions they have posted, and then come back to it a few months later and see the exact same ones listed without any change, then I just move on to something else. It tells me a few things: either they don't know what they're looking for and are just fishing, they want to make it appear they are grow-grow-growing but still can't figure out exactly what they want, they're trying to posture like they are bigger than they are, like you said. If they're playing the game, I probably don't want to be there.

It's certain abused for below-the-line marketing, such as for appearing bigger than they are, but also to make them look more competent by adding ridiculous requirements such as fluency in at least five different languages.

Sure, also HR needs to do this to look busy. They will sell management on doing this instead of being downsized themselves.

I wonder who this is effective signaling mechanism for.

Any investor that's on the board is going to have access to data that tells the real story (or if they don't they're neglecting their fiduciary duty).

Any potential investor that's going to lead a funding round is going to do enough diligence to see what kind of financial shape they're in. And if the company doesn't have money to be increasing headcount, it'd look like they're making irresponsible hiring decisions.

For customers -- small customers are probably not doing a level of diligence that would involve going out and looking at job postings. Large enterprise customers potentially are, but when dealing with startups, they'll often have clauses in their contracts that give them access to some level of financial data to ensure the vendor they're getting into bed with isn't about to collapse (though I suppose many of them never actually enforce those clauses).

Employees pay a lot of attention to job postings, but they also pay attention to interview flow and hiring. If you have a job posting out, and no ones getting interviewed, people are going to notice pretty quickly (they're especially going to notice if someone else gets to put a req out, but the req for their dept keeps getting denied).

Definitely not suggesting the idea is wrong -- companies have certainly done far more nefarious things, just wondering who they are trying to signal to with this.

That's a really good point. It's public data, so it's also a way for investors to gage success.

Blame wall street speculators.

My wife a couple years ago was at a cyber security company that had very generous referral bonuses. Multiple members of senior management in her company were laying off talented and hard-working American citizens on the justification that they needed to downsize. But then just months later they would change their tune and fill the vacated positions with friends or acquaintances (always non-American citizens), they would also collect a generous referral bonus (often $20k or more). I'm not sure if this was purely to collect the bonus, because of ethnic preference or a desire to help their friends/family migrate from India but something strange was certainly going on. My wife eventually was part of one of these cycles of layoffs "because of the financials" then later heard from a colleague still working there that her manager had shortly afterwards backfilled her position with a referral of his own. Last we heard it sounded like the company was approaching bankruptcy.

To be fair, the amount of good job applicants from america is also really low.

It's not a great argument, but it's the same with DEI. I literally don't have enough applicants to fill a quota even if 100% of them passed all interviews

> put out a job posting with no intention of hiring

i've seen (and worked for) many startups that post reqs prominently to signal to the world (investors, customers, etc) that "things are going great" and "we're growing" while not even able to afford a req.

> never participated in interviewing a candidate where there is no intention to hire

I haven't seen as much of that, but have been in situations where the company is either doing great (transitioning during an acquisition) or not so great (running out of money) but you keep interviewing to "look normal" or to keep the pipeline just in case things get back to normal.

Both ghost jobs and opportunistic hiring should ideally be labeled as such. Nothing wrong with opportunistic hiring but without a label as such it most definitely distorts the market signals, especially if the ratio of such posting to real postings that will be filled is as high as paper suggests

Your team doesn’t post the ghost job, the HR or talent team does. There’s a variety of reasons why they do it.

Low quality postings are often just there for compliance purposes to justify visas. Less ethical companies may casually mention to outside HR people that folks are applying.

It happens all of the time.

The difference is there aren't hundreds of people applying to some random company's "opportunistic hiring" post, meanwhile the req gets reposted every 2 weeks like clockwork (possibly with a lower salary and more duties), just to see what it would take to get a "reasonable" number of "qualified" applicants.

And people get job descriptions written for them. They may--or may not--be actually posted. (I'm genuinely curious and wish I had looked at the time about my last job.) Wouldn't mean no one else would have had a shot but almost certainly not a random applicant putting in an online application.

Right. It is all about the team's level of selectiveness at that moment, which does ebb and flow over time.

Yes it absolutely goes both ways. The amount of crap coming in is astonishing (as in, data analyst with 2 years in python applying for senior frontend engineer, or being on the other side of the world with no mention of visa/immigration)

The other side of this challenge is that the "technology" is mostly irrelevant for above-average applicants with solid CS chops.

I apply for lots of jobs featuring technologies I haven't used (beyond toy personal projects or something in college) because I have a long history of picking up new tools and being productive in weeks or months at most - because I understand the underlying semantics of the tool regardless of its presentation, syntax, etc.

Keyword scanners (and humans focused on keywords) are unable to hire me for roles where I haven't used the technology (much) before - and I guess that's fine and well as I am indistinguishable on paper from someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

Just presenting it as another part of the challenge of both finding good people and for good people finding good jobs.

>we receive a _ton_ of resumes that have no experience in the technologies we're hiring for.

No one wants to train employees anymore.

There just aren't that many jobs for management roles (CPO/VP Product/etc) compared to applicants.

Being in HK probably isn't helping either because there are plenty of qualified candidates across China and ASEAN now as well - especially in the hospitality and B2C space.

Reasons include:

- Racial, gender, and/or local citizen discrimination avoidance

- Job security for HR so they themselves don't get laid off

- Over-interview to exceed capacity/ERP needs

- Market and/or competition intelligence

Perhaps it behooves jobseekers to stop looking for scant, temporary, insecure, disloyal, abusive work and create or sell goods or services through collective, employee-owned co-ops instead.

> There are many fake recruiters just posting job listings on behalf of companies they are not affiliated with.

I wonder what's the best way to fight this back. Possibly inundate them with junk applications that their data becomes worthless?

It's crazy because the JDs will be so extremely specific to a niche skillset and I still won't get a reply.

Ah, i thought the multiple posting in different locations was to be able to show or hide the salaray range depending on U.s. state-level legislation related to that...also, in those cases where maybe if the role is remote, maybe they only want to hir candidates in a somewhat near/adjacent area to one of their offices.

I believe at this point this is the patriotic thing to do. Everyone should start creating fake accounts and posting fake applications to these online jobs so the whole system implodes. Then companies will have to start doing something else.

Some companies have a future opening listing for this purpose. so now it becomes unclear

On a similar post about ghost jobs a couple of weeks ago, I made the following suggestion:

Another potential way to at least surface dodgy behaviour perhaps: Automatically append to a poster's comment links to all their previous comments in Who's Hiring threads in the past twelve months.

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).

Why can't you complain? I see reply links under all the listings and you certainly have enough karma to do anything here (AFAIK)

I'd be curious to see if _anyone_ has actually been hired through HN Who's Hiring over the past two years here.

I can only offer anecdotal experience, but...

Despite 1) being a US-based dev, 2) Applying only to US-based jobs, 3) With 10+ years work experience, and 4) Having skills in commonly asked for technologies such as JS, React, and Python...

I've only gotten to the interview stage with an HN Who's Hiring listing only once. Only a single instance over the past two years.

The problem with solutions like this is that they formalize the hiring process in ways that would be good for workers and the BLS but that capital hates and they're the ones in charge so it can't get done. This is something downstream of worker power, not a route to it.

I've noticed the snowflakes have been demanding senior title after working 3 years.

Seems like a natural reaction to ghost jobs. Post ghost applications in order to "sample the market" to find out which jobs might be real.

Isn't that just fraud/spam? That's a different thing that what is being discussed.

For "fairness"

But there is no basis in law for any of these objections.

"Wasting peoples' time" is a byproduct of every activity in a less-than-perfectly-efficient economy (which is all of them, obviously).

"Wasting lots of peoples' time, and leaving them disappointed and emotionally/economically fragile" is ... crappy and miserable. But it's still legal.

Even if there was a law against posting unrealistic job descriptions, or posting for jobs that don't exist, it's near-impossible to distinguish those cases from legitimate corporate "changes in direction" which cannot be made illegal.

Your assumption is that this is being perpetrated by humans! But, what if AI has already, secretly become sentient, and started posting all these fake/ghost job postings...as part of their efforts to begin a mass campaign to slow overall human productivity...and as part of *its* plan to dominate/takeover humanity! /s

Better idea: Charge both recruiters and applicants to contact each other. Recruiters should be charged more because they are generally the spammers. The nuances can be worked out. But people can earn a small amount in the process.

Do you have an API?

I've encountered this before with absurdly high job requirements paired with a low-moderate commensurate salary. While on call with an HR rep for a listing I had loosely met, I deduced from their responses it was done so the company could claim their talent needs aren't being met domestically, and thus would file for more H-1B or H-2B work authorization permits. This is rife with its own issues of non-transparency and offshoring, where I likely encountered it in the later stages[0] and was being paid lip service to the process without the intent of hiring.

[0] https://flag.dol.gov/programs/H-2B

> Another reason for ghost job listing is to meet the requirements for visa processing.

This plus the idea of just grabbing and holding resumes that the HR team will never actually look at.

MS literally hung up on me in 2020 during the interview in teams, no less than 3 minutes into the interview itself (interviewer was more than a dozen minutes late, and is a prominent MS guy who gives lecture style talks)

it's only gonna get worse

It's 0 cost to post a job. You might get lucky and hire someone below market, so why not always be trying?

Are you suggesting that companies are committing FRAUD ?

Wage bottom floor is getting lower every day with AI

Same here, 20 years but also reading about h1bs "at no less than 300k" and more realistically looking to burn it all down with Trump's help, then move into building houses.

If you are a software dev, have a masters, have DB knowledge and can write scripts, you should look into non-tech companies.

I am a fullstack dev, and can solo support and write software for a mid size company. We plan on getting a junior or another dev soon. We will definitely be paying a junior minimum $60k+ and expect nothing but learning first year. We are in a MCOL area, so this is about average. WLB is good. No on-call.

I would hire someone with more experience, and even with FAANG experience but I would be worried they would leave a job that only pays $100k in the next FAANG hiring cycle.

Maybe we need a job board for devs who are trying to get out of the tech space and work for nontech, trading top salaries for flexibility and relaxed work environment.

That's great that you found a new spot.

I've seen other research and discussion on this topic. Some stats that may be validating for you (and others) to hear:

* There's a 0.08% job application -> offer rate when applying through LinkedIn (LI). An average of 1 in 1,250 applications lead to an offer

* The linked paper on this post finds that 21% of postings are ghost jobs, but I've seen credible estimates that the proportion is as high as 50%

* A Stanford survey found hundreds of fake LI profiles, AI-generated "recruiters" that are interacting with candidates and posting ghost jobs on behalf of big companies

* ~75% of resumes from qualified applicants are never seen by a human

* resumes get on average 6 to 8 seconds of consideration when they are reviewed by a human

* 300,000 jobs are outsourced annually (with respect to the US)

All this to say, you're right, something is fundamentally broken in the labor market, especially the tech labor market. And not that many people are talking about it, except for those of us who have been unfortunate enough to need to look for jobs in the past ~2 years.

In my own case, my previous employer (a startup) ran out of money and laid everyone off last Fall. I was fortunate enough to find a new position, but this job search was the hardest I've faced since 2008 - and it seems worse now than it was this time last year.

First of all, congrats on getting a new gig! With a few minor differences, your experience is similar to my own. So, clearly, you are not alone! I will note that one other blockage that you likely encountered but maybe didn't note or focus on which has hit me (in addition to other factors you cited): agism. I have been in the workforce for a little over 28 years, and 24 of those years has been in some sort of IT or digital or technical-related team...and most recently i have felt the tinge of agism ridiculously high - moreso while trying to get a job, but also in some (but not all) areas of my current dayjob. Its funny, when applying for jobs, and when speaking with some potential hiring managrers, HR, etc....you get the feeling from their questions...But when working with a team of any age, and you bring value to the team, then agism is not as much of a thing. There are times when one's aged wisdom is highly regarded and valued...and then other times - most especially during hiring processes - where it is considered a potential problem. Again, i'm so glad you got your new gig, but it sure is hell out there! :-)

I feel age has something to do with it as well. I know a lot of people around 50 in tech that have been laid off recently. They generally make more money, so it can be easier to justify.

H1B auctions are perfect, so long as you want to maximize the total dollars "saved" by American businesses, by hiring cheaper foreign workers.

But if you actually want a way to hire top-skill foreign workers in specialties where America is short on local talent? No, sorry. 99.5% of specialties don't and won't pay enough to win an auction where Big Tech has opened its checkbooks.

I once applied to a position like this. It was eerily similar to my background, and when I did a little digging I found that the group lead had even directly cited my research papers in his own research work.

I applied on the site, reached out on LinkedIn to the group lead and the recruiter, and even was able to find emails for those two, which I also messaged as well.

They didn't even bother to send me an automated rejection notice. There was nothing at all, no responses to any messages, no email, nothing. I have to assume that position was posted with someone already in mind that they wanted to hire.

I once applied for my own job req (a JD I wrote for a role on my own team), and the HR system automatically kicked my resume out for being unqualified.

Same, and I've been on the side of being the person they want to hire too.

This should also be illegal, but alas

What's worse is when you have to actually interview the candidate, even though you know the job is going to someone internal. I've had to do this at large companies and at public institutions.

I had a similar situation/question. I knew an old coworker who was eagerly trying to get me on their team at another company. They said I had to apply and then they'd take it to their manager who was already on board with the idea.

So I did, at 10PM or so at night. And within a few minutes, got a rejection email.

To this day I wonder if someone clicked reject, or the system just autorejected me because of something it didn't like on my resume. Needless to say, I gave up on that idea.

Same here, I applied for a job where a friend already worked and he said he would be highly surprised if I didn't get the job. They didn't even call me to the interview. After the ad expired I just got an automated message that they had moved on, friend said no new person ever appeared.

I can understand ghost jobs, I mean large public corporations have even had useless jobs to inflate their share holder value, but this was for a Swedish government agency!

I became unemployed in August, I had to apply for at least 6 jobs every month to get benefits, and now I have two offers on the table but both of them came from recruiters that contacted me, not jobs that I applied for.

It is normal in public sector. I was offered a position in a public sector job and the supervisor gave me the keys to the office and lab and told me that due to hiring requirement blah blah, they had to put a new tender and post the position online for several days before they can declare me as the selected candidate. The contract will be delivered to me via post after the day they take down the advert.

While I felt immensely special and cool, but once I received the contract by post, one of my random friends called me o say that he needed a job badly and found this perfect opening and applied there, but he got rejected, whether I was interested to also apply for that position, the requirements looked like I would be the best fit. When he sent me the PDF, dang, it was the same job that was being posted for me and I was super sad.

I eventually did not sign the contract because the practice really felt immoral to me and recommended my friend instead. While my supervisor was super sad, because they had to go through a long process for that fake job advert, nonetheless he understood my stance and went ahead and called my friend again.

I believe these public institute jobs must post internal hires publicly to comply with certain regulations or something, but the practice is weird.

I now wonder if the same thing happened to me. Within the niche of that job I was pretty objectively the highest qualified candidate in the world at the time. Did really well in interviews. Did not get the job. A decade later, though, I'm actually thankful I didn't get it. Blessing in disguise.

Sometimes they also need to post the job to meet company policies. The hiring manger knows who they want to hire, but HR has requirements to post for various reasons.

I've had a similar experience for a local job. I honestly thought it was my previous employer unknowingly reaching out to me initially through a recruiting agency. The job description was verbatim my resume. Got the interview, and ghosted.

A lot of institutions have to do this even for internal hires. It's an astonishing waste of everyone's time and resources, not only the candidates'.

The public institutions I'm most familiar with are required not only to advertise, but to conduct a minimum number of interviews.

Yes, this happens quite often in jobs in the public sector.

That's a typical process that companies, who want to sponsor green card to their internal employee, are required to do. They have to find an equally-skilled US citizen by posting jobs publicly for X amount of time. Then after they have collected applications, they "review" and reject them; use that as an evidence in filing the green card for the internal employee.

It is a broken/absurd rule and only puts more work to everyone involved (not just the applicants, the HR; the internal employee and his/her manager, who usually has to get involved in that process). The process itself is also relatively expensive (cost ~$10K+ for attorney fees; documentation and USCIS application fees). I know because I had to go through that asinine process years ago when my ex-employer (big corporation) sponsored my green card.