Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

In tech, ghost job listings maybe as high as 50%. Another reason for ghost job listing is to meet the requirements for visa processing.

> 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.

What’s the difference between a ghost job and opportunistic hiring? I’ve never seen any team I work for put out a job posting with no intention of hiring and I’ve certainly never participated in interviewing a candidate where there is no intention to hire. However, I have seen my team put out a job posting where we only intend to hire if we get an applicant that is unexpectedly good.

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.

I think the main problem with looking and identifying ghost jobs is that we categorize them wrong when measuring the economy and "the number of jobs out there" we need a mechanism where a place reports to the government what they actually need for headcount. Maybe they need to do some sort of weighted average of number of job openings vs EDITBA or something.

Worth checking other discussions of the issues:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Ghost%20Jobs&sort=byDate&type=...

Is everyone ignoring the fact that companies do this to make themselves look bigger than they are compared to the competition and/or to pretend economic success?

>The trend could be due to the low marginal cost of posting additional job ads and to maintain a pipeline of talents. After adjusting for yearly trends, I find that ghost jobs can explain the recent disconnect in the Beveridge Curve in the past fifteen years. The results show that policy-makers should be aware of such a practice as it causes significant job fatigue and distorts market signals.

Very interesting.

I certainly have "gotten" what I thought was a ghost job. I went through the whole process ... they "wanted" to hire me. But didn't actually have a start date / couldn't actually hire me. For everyone involved though they seemed to be able to justify posting the job, interviews, because IMO, it made THEM look busy / effective.

The whole hiring people industrial complex seems oriented to be focused on the process of hiring (high fives for ever more complex hiring processes / delays) ... and not at all on the outcome (did we hire someone, were they good?).

It's the ultimate system where simply doing anything is "success" / and more processes rewarded, and there's almost no good measureless about outcomes for the company.

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

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

Some IT service corporations that are known for a very high employee churn rates often post the same position a dozen times, for each of their office locations.

Sometimes it's a 100% remote job, and they still post it multiple times with different locations.

They probably litter job portals this way so that they can compensate for the frequent personell changes. They are impossible to miss.

And growth.

It’s a pretty bad signal if your series B startup isn’t hiring actively all the time.

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

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.

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

A question I've had on my mind for a while now, watching this progression of fake or poisoned jobs, and miles of automatic systems to navigate:

At what point do people consider the well poisoned? Where they just check out and stop applying, to specific companies or in general, because its very very obvious that there isnt actually a valid hiring market at all.

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

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

On the hiring side of this, we receive a _ton_ of resumes that have no experience in the technologies we're hiring for. Each day there are 5-10 automated resume submissions to our job portal for a single position, and we're a fairly small company. Perhaps hiring managers are both being (more) selective and becoming overloaded with the amount of AI/recruiter-sanitized resumes coming in as well.

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.

> 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.

My bet is that companies are hiring H1Bs but must post jobs. I literally dont see americans getting hired at well known tech companies

> 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

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.

So, you are effectively committing fraud!

I don't understand it either. I never had the company I had this experience with call me back, the whole experience was pretty off-putting.

But I suspect the "pipeline of talent" might be the internal excuse and in fact .... again there's no mensurables so no way to know if it is true or not. But someone can say they added folks to their "pipeline" like they add contacts on linkedin.

Everybody has to do something to justify their paycheck. If you’re in hiring and there’s no jobs, you have to do something.

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

Not respecting candidates and applicants is really painful for them. Dishonestly makes everything completely unpredictable and confusing.

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

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

Also, you can't really use the pipeline a year after the fact.

It is super embarrassing when a company heavily delayed gets back on an application.

I have always assumed that these are posted to obfuscate nepotism (aka successful networking). You make a show of searching for the just-right candidate, and in the meanwhile you already know exactly who you're going to hire.

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).

In this example the amazing engineer is a citizen or permanent resident already

If my superiors would give me extra unexpected budget I’d be happy to. But if I find a citizen that is just as good as my opt employee, my only path forward is to either fire the opt or let them continue on the team but not submit their GC application (because I have to swear I couldn’t find a citizen that is just as good)

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 results show that policy-makers should be aware of such a practice as it causes significant job fatigue and distorts market signals.

> distorts market signals

This is a feature, not a bug. Wall Street analysts have been using job posts as a signal for years to measure company current and future performance.

* positive signal: more job posts compared to previous quarter, so company must be healthy! Buy, Buy, Buy!

* negative signal: uh oh, less open job posts compared to previous quarter, must indicate bad quarter, hiring freeze, pending layoffs. Sell, Sell, Sell!

* neutral signal: less job posts for past 2 quarters, no increase in staff spend. Company probably cooking the books and pumping the next quarterly numbers.

I blame wall street.

I wonder when the job market is going to implode via AI applicants applying for fake jobs in an ouroboros of slop

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

You have to prove you tried interviewing and couldn’t find anyone to replace them. My company isn’t a super popular employer so we don’t get the best candidates. This might be a bigger problem at Google, Meta, etc

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

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

I see a lot of ghost job interviews in tech. There are smaller startups, that post the job ad. I had interviewed for the company over and over again, always getting denied for one reason or another.

It is very common for the listing to be for some other position, “Senior Software, Fraud Prevention” or something, then during the interview it will be for their “Platform” team. If you ask about the team it doesn’t exist yet and they are always “slowly building it out”.

Hence why there are so many h1bs.

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.

Blame wall street speculators.

> 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.

> 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.

One reason could be to have faster replacement if someone leaves.

The other is to make it look like they are busy and growing even when not.

This is willful labor theft and at this scale, a single fake job posting could cause thousands or tens of thousands of hours of wasted labor on the part of job seekers. Multiply the prevailing hourly wage equivalent for that job by the number of applicants and how much time it would have taken them to apply (Workday users, you're doomed!). That's how much money was stolen from the public by the company. Prosecute it like any other theft of that amount. It'll only take a couple of cases like this for every legal department across the country to tell HR and recruiting to stop the practice immediately.

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

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

That's where the ghosting comes in. If you're always ghosting, then you always have recent people to get back to, not months old.

The pipeline isn't a lossless FIFO queue, in other words. People go in one end and are dropped out the other. In between are the recents you can call if a spot actually opens up.

…because if you grant them the green card they will up and get a new job? The incentives here are so screwed up for everyone, it effectively codifies a caste system of immigrant workers.

It makes everyone look busy. It helps calibrate interviewers so that the company remembers how to hire people. It maintains the illusion of growth.

The last point is important, historically startups/teams faced the risk of exodus once hiring stopped. As an employee, hiring is one of the few signals you have on the health of an opaque business.

I once applied for a job that precisely matched my qualifications. It was crazy - the job description could have been written by someone looking at my CV.

I didn't even get an interview. Likely no one did.

It wasn't a ghost job, though. It was a position created for a someone they wanted to hire. Being a public institution, they were required to advertise positions. That didn't mean that they actually wanted any of the candidates who applied.

I wonder how many of them are caused by internal political struggles. When you have a lot middle management they spend a fair amount of time on resource allocation, both current and future employees. So it’s a constant fight to obtain and maintain headcount.

Hiring pipelines can be longer than the planning cycle. So you may have 3 open headcount one week, and then lose it the next because some other Big Initiative should get it instead. Or the head count flip flops between local and overseas hires. Or the level they are hiring for changes. Each time this changes, new positions are posted.

Basically companies don’t know what roles they hiring for long enough to get candidates through the process.

I suspect the main reason it is hard to find a job is because interest rate induced layoffs, and remote work created too much competition. Five years ago I wasn’t competing with someone thousands of miles away with a phd who used to work at a faang.

As for Ghost Jobs, I think they are skipping how many are just scams collecting data. There are many fake recruiters just posting job listings on behalf of companies they are not affiliated with.

I would also be interested how many of ghost jobs listed by actual companies are on purpose vs just lazy. It would be nice to have a whistle blower

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.

Rage baiting?

Having openings posted looks good to venture capitalists, which is, more and more, the way to succeed in our economy.

This has secondary effects of teaching people that having open positions is good just for the sake of it. They don't stop to analyze why they think that.

While the workers might be busy there are managers or HR people who want to appear busy, and job postings is a thing they can do. It also feels good to see a bunch of applicants and feel like you're in a position of power while sorting through them--and of some actual work comes along you can just ignore the applicants.

In short, there's no reason not to post a ghost job.

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

At the last startup I worked at, our CTO was on a visa.

To satisfy the "no one in the US can fill the CTO role", they took out an advertisement in a San Francisco newspaper classifieds so they had evidence that they attempted to find a US citizen / permanent resident CTO.

Obviously there were no applicants.

Is this a new phenomenon?

My dad told me, that when he was in the office in the 1980s and 1990s, his manager would always keep a job opening active. The manager's goal was to be able to be opportunistic and snap up someone awesome when they came though.

> It shouldn't be legal. But it is.

How is that legal? If you think the local applicant can do the job, you legally can’t hire the H-1B over them, right?

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.

Are you suggesting that companies are committing FRAUD ?

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

I run interviewing at a well known company, this isnt true

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.

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

It is. Best case scenario H1Bs allow companies to avoid training citizens. Worst case (and most common) H1Bs are more exploitable labor compared to citizens.

H1Bs etc just suppress citizens wages and increase profits of capital holders. There’s a very very tiny % that actually aren’t replaceable domestically.

Not likely. The new government is not interested in harming the interests of the big employers.

> 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

Correct. It's pure theatre.

Just like how the last Trump government fixed it?

There are no jobs. I've been looking for two years. A couple of humongous rounds of interviews (one company in Sydney had me do 15 interviews plus a presentation, plus meetups with the CEO for lunch and the CTO and a case study), all for one mid-size startup CPO role.

No hire. Two weeks later they announced another 25% of layoffs.

I've tried and exhausted all my contacts, from work, Stanford alumni, everything. There's no one hiring. At least 500 applications either led to no reply or "sorry but you're not the person we are looking for". Week later the same job is advertised again. It's all ghost jobs.

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.

No, you're missing the point.

To extend the visa they have to swear they couldn't find a citizen to do this job, and aren't willing to lie.

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.

Yes, h1b hiring practices have been shady at best for atleast a decade. For everyone that just doesn’t want to fire a coworker there is someone taking advantage of cheap labor that is easier to control under the threat of deportation.

The h1b program is supposed to be for people at the top of their field so they can skip the normal visa line, but it is commonly used to save money through exploitation.

A long time ago I read an hn comment that suggested h1b visas should go to the highest paying jobs, with the logic being that if they are such a rare talent they should probably be getting paid more.

No. Many (especially smaller) companies don't want to hire people who need visa sponsorship because it requires a decent amount of overhead. The company needs to have an immigration lawyer to prepare and submit paperwork, which many smaller companies don't want to bother with.

FWIW it's illegal to require "US citizenship" in a job description. You can, however, say "eligible to work in the US". (The former would be discriminatory against non-citizen permanent residents). Although I'm also not a lawyer.

Most companies aren't well known, what makes you think your experience is the "true" one?

You mean to say you get a large amount of high quality American candidates?

OP already hired H-1B in the past and that person is working for them now. OP is now in the process of doing a green card application for said employee. They can't move forward with the GC application because there are other qualified citizens/residents, but they don't have to fire the existing H1B employee.

That's how I understand OP, if that's legally true or not, I don't know.

Caste systems are extremely convenient.

it's a loophole, and loopholes are legal

This has been going on for decades. My first job out of university was at a dotcom consultancy with over 90% of software engineers there on H1B visas. The company was not at all shy about the fact that they only hired citizens/permanent residents if they had no other choice. I was hired because I had experience with a particular obscure RTOS that they couldn't find anyone on a visa who could do the work on a project they already told a client we were experts in.

Our VP of Software Engineering (here on a visa himself) stood right next to my desk telling one of our programmers not to worry about his visa expiring because they'd post his job for 24 hours on the company website, accept resumes for one week, and then declare the job unfillable by local talent so he could get his visa renewed. This was in 2000 and this type of thing has been practiced openly and with no fear of there ever being any consequences for violating both the letter and spirit of the law regarding using labor visas.

These threads end up fire hosed with people claiming hiring visa holders over citizens and permanent residents doesn't happen nor does it push down wages. They know these are lies and have been lies for decades. But since there are no consequences, legally or socially, it continues to be the default behavior. This in turn warps local talent development as more and more kids see that there's little reason to go into a career field where the government and business openly collude to disadvantage locals in favor of visa labor.

This is simple to solve: just don't make too many offers, and complain that you "couldn't find talent".

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

This should also be illegal, but alas

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.

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.

It’s neither ethical or legal, it’s fraud.

One can hope for a silver lining.

I always get surprised when people DO find a job through a job board, careers website, or gasp Linkedin Jobs.

Weirdly that's how someone I met got a job at OpenAI.

(I applied and didn't even hear back haha. Does that mean it's a ghost job, but I'm the ghost?)

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

(this clarified the situation for me, thank you)

I wish I could say I have a better experience with recruiters but I haven't. I've heard there are good recruiters, I don't doubt it, but it doesn't seem easy to find anymore than the next job is.

Ghost or not, I have applied for many jobs in the last few months and when I get a reply (I am not counting canned Thanks for applying but we decided to move with another candidate reply) it is almost always very early stage companies. I wonder if bigger companies actually look into CVs? I understand there are automated systems but I did not get replies several times even when the JD / Skills matched super closely with my CV.

This "pipeline" thing is just an excuse. Companies are ALWAYS in the look for a special talent. This is not a real problem. If they find a very competent person they will offer the job. Otherwise, which is 99% of the time, they'll just say they're building a pipeline. It is the same mindset of a predator, they can justify being always looking for new pray, even though they know they'll only get it very rarely.

Something is only as illegal as the enforcement put into it.

Recently I have found several things:

- there are some positions that exist only to receive new personal data information. There are companies that scrape user data when you apply for a job

- some job positions are kept to make employees more productive

- some job positions are kept open to show investors "we are still hiring", "we have no problems, etc.

- some HR just want to have more and more data, some times it is just useful to have new CVs at hand

- my wife decided recently to apply to companies directly, not through work sites, to get directly to managers, etc.

- in the end my wife found job by word of mouth, someone knew someone, etc. etc.

Well this one’s easy; there’s less money going around than in say, 2021, and hiring people is harder.

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 only made it through 1/4 of the paper before running out of time.

Very interesting though.

Maybe the article mentions it, but is a sustainable countermeasure for job seekers only applying on websites where employer has to pay to post?

I took the implication to be that GP already had a good employee who was hired legitimately under the terms of the H1B, but that, to convert to a green card, you have to see whether a US person could do the job. So you have to put out for interviews to see, but you don’t have to act on that information.

If the interview process yields a US person equally qualified, GP can’t (and doesn’t) certify the guest worker’s green card application. But that doesn’t mean they have to fire them and send them home early: they can let the guest worker work out their contract if they want to (which they probably do, it probably pays well compared to other options). And an experienced, already-trained, good employee is probably more valuable to the business than an immediate, unplanned new hire anyway.

So yes, certainly screwed up incentives—but I don’t see how it would be better to require guest workers to put their jobs in immediate jeopardy just to apply for permanent residency.

So you’re just using your own definition of legal/illegal?

There are actually situations where U.S. citizenship can be a requirement, e.g., cleared jobs but there needs to be a really good reason like not being able to obtain clearances.

Besides H1B, some larger companies require managers advertise a position before promoting people into it. This seems backwards to me, but I'm sure there's a reason for it (though I doubt the policy actually meets that reason).

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.

You should probably stop breaking federal law.

Trumps has talked multiple times about “stapling green cards to diplomas”. His rhetoric on illegal immigration is going to result in illegals who have committed a felony being deported and that’s it (just like every other neocon).

Making America better for Americans won’t happen until both sides realize neither party is looking out for the interests of American people and uses social issues etc to keep us divided.

I actually couldn't begin to guess. The only thing I have to go on is, I think the administration is angling to do a sort of bust-out rather than enrich anybody, even those 'on their side'. If that's so, then much like with the FDA, there'll be some funny choices that lead to alarming outcomes.

I just don't know whether that would mean more h1b and ghost jobs, or less.

CTO actually makes sense for an h1b though, it’s a high paying job that can depend greatly on the technical and creative skills of the individual and how they mesh with the company.

The problem is when it’s someone pumping out code, or doing tech support for half the cost of the local competition.

No, because most places don't want to go through the hassle of sponsoring a visa.

Though once a place does want to go through the hassle, it seems to be the only kind of work they hire because they get a huge discount on labor. Of everyone I know IRL on work visas, almost all of them work in companies/teams that are 99% work visa.

> FWIW it's illegal to require "US citizenship" in a job description.

nonsense

tons of jobs advertisements required "US citizenship", because there is a security clearance attached

As anecdata, I’ve worked in recruitment, both as a recruiter and as CTO of a very well-established recruitech firm, and basically have never heard of this outside of people complaining they think it happens. Posting jobs you already know who you want to hire for it, sure, but the signalling success and luring in candidates for later thing wasn’t really something I saw. To me, it feels like when people used to claim that antivirus firms were the ones writing viruses.

Is this a serious comment? Use your intelligence.

You're largely correct, as I understand it.

You cant discriminate in favor of citizens vs permanent residents unless the job legally requires citizenship.

Theres like a million well qualified applicants, they arent getting hired. go read any jobs forum, people are struggling

Unlikely. "Staple a Green Card to their diploma" is what Trump had to say about students from other countries that graduate from US universities. Since out of country students pay the highest tuition rates, universities love them and give them preferential admissions. Though not as bad as elementary and high schools, universities suffer from grade inflation and are reluctant to kick out paying customers, especially those paying the highest tuition. As a consequence, academic standards are being reduced at a rapid rate.

If you want to come to the US to get a professional job, attending a US university instead of a domestic one is going to be worth the extra cost when it guarantees you a Green Card.

There might be a reduction in the flow of low skilled labor, especially for those looking to hire workers without legal status, but up the middle class portion of the labor market, expect the system to continue to favor cheap imported labor over domestic labor.

Hang on a minute. There is absolutely nothing in this research that measures the accuracy of this approach. A user saying "I was ghosted" is not, to my mind, proof of anything.

Job seekers almost never actually know if the job was real or not, so it's hard to see how Glassdoor reviews can ever provide the insight this work is looking for.

I do believe that "ghost" jobs exist, often for H1B purposes, but I don't think this work proves it.

That's how it works in sane environments; unfortunately those can be quite rare.

I wouldn't count on it. But there will certainly be tons of new part time jobs with no benefits and no health insurance.

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?

SpaceX has been through the wringer on this one, so just copy & paste from their listing:

To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.

Yes, this was serious. If someone says:

> This isn't ethical. It shouldn't be legal. But it is.

It actually means „ok, it actually is illegal, but it’s not properly enforced“?

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'm about a year into a mid-effort level job search. I work in a somewhat specialized technical field and am fairly senior (I think in FAANG-ese I'd be an maybe an L7 if I understand their levels correctly). So this means I'm looking for management, director, deputy CTO or CTO positions depending on the company. I have a track record making my company lots of money, and opening up new opportunities worth many multiples of that. So the deck is already stacked against me as most positions are for jr or mid engineers, but I have a proven track record of growing responsibilities and (in my market) fairly recognizable success stories.

The search has been absolutely atrocious. Unlike anything I've ever seen before in 30 years of working in tech.

* I used to be able to simply pull on my network and get a position within 2 or 3 tries. Total job hunt time, under a month.

* The last time I had to go through this was pre-COVID, and I used a mix of my network and cold applications (around 50). I only heard back from 2 of the cold submissions and my network pulled me in to where I am today. Total job hunt time, around 4 months.

* I'm almost exactly 1 year in now, over 700 applications, people in my network can't even get responses for referrals. I've made it to 4 interview funnels, including stupidly exhausting FAANGs, for positions ranging from CTO to consultant filling a contract slot. 2 solid offers, both at least 40-60% below my current market rate. One executive recruiter ghosted me after we started discussing Total Compensation Packages.

I even had a friend post a position at their company, using my resume as the hiring template. Then they personally referred me to that position. I never received a call, and they never received any candidates.

It feels like being personally blacklisted, but it's affecting everybody I know.

The furthest I've gotten has been by hunting down corporate and executive recruiters directly, but I've had two recruiters get laid off halfway through the matching process. One FAANG recruiter has even contacted me hoping I could help them find a position.

Something is broken somewhere. Companies are starving for talent, and talent is starving for companies. The online applications sites are clearly filtering out people, but there appears to be massive churn in the recruiting side as well.

/r/recruitinghell is very representative of things I've seen.

I did notice that hiring activity has picked up since the rollover of the FY. Several 6-7 month old applications stirred somebody to contact me in the last month or so with a "great fit" that turned out to have nothing to do with my skillset.

My story is finally drawing to a close however, I've just negotiated a good position at a new firm and am setting a start date.

ghost jobs are analogous to (the now illegal practice) of spoofing trades in equity markets, where they exist to manipulate the market to get an information edge about price and availability of the commodity (talent).

even though I think it's wrong, and in a consistent regs regime it would be illegal, like spoofing in other markets, it's the artifact of incentives created by outdated regs and conventions that didn't keep up with the scale of tech.

Dawg, not every sentence someone says is 100% literal all the time.

> The h1b program is supposed to be for people at the top of their field so they can skip the normal visa line, but it is commonly used to save money through exploitation.

Incorrect - such people already qualify for green cards under the "alien of extraordinary ability" criterion. At least in theory, anyway.

There is no "normal visa line" btw, unless you mean the green card diversity lottery, which people from eg. India and China don't even qualify for.

> A long time ago I read an hn comment that suggested h1b visas should go to the highest paying jobs, with the logic being that if they are such a rare talent they should probably be getting paid more.

This is in principle a good idea although I suspect that if actually implemented employers would figure out how to game the system just as they do now.

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.

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.

There are well know ways to solve these issues. For example, companies have always used the strategy of firing the "bad" workers after a few years and then hiring more to replace them. Even though there is hiring going on, the net difference may well be zero or negative. Nobody would suspect this by looking just at the number of people being hired.

You're correct that they are under no obligation to fire the employee on the H-1B. (In theory, they are applying for a "new" job, and them not getting it for whatever the reason isn't an issue for their current job and status.)

However, what OP is missing is that rejecting the US citizen application based on their citizenship is still likely a prohibited discrimination case regardless of what they do with the existing employee.

Fwiw they're probably just making a point to protest the phenomenon.

Oh 100%. But of course I am not limited to HK at all (in fact I am planning to move to AU next year as I got permanent residence there through their Global Talent visa programme). But nothing there either. And I'm not limiting myself to CPO or VP roles but yea... this is what it has been

STEM grad student tuition is paid by government grants

I work for <megacorp> and the way they get around this is by only hiring contractors. Because then the liability for that is on the vendor.

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.

They are all fake until they figure out the real wage bottom. They're getting closer.

Can you guys stop shitposting?

Companies can't just do this.

It'd be fabulous if this was an option, but green card applications have all sorts of caps and aren't even just "wait in a line for N years." They are random every year and every year you fail to get approved you get no closer to being approved.

The effect is that you can have excellent engineers who've been in the US for a decade+ who are still in this liminal space where they don't have legal permanent residency.

I suspect a lot of the frustration people describe comes from this combined with presently high demand for remote tech jobs. Back when I was job searching in late 2023, I noticed there would be _hundreds_ of applicants for even the worst postings (e.g., paying 50% market rate). Nobody is reading that many resumes, and in the unlikely case they are, that person probably lacks the expertise needed to evaluate candidates. Screeners are starting with resumes recommended to them and binning the rest.

it's okay to break stupid laws as long as you don't get caught

Why aren't you considering CPO roles the US or starting your own company?

I think you are too overqualified for non-VP/CPO roles, and B2C dealflow is dead across ASEAN and China atm so VP/CPO roles are hyper-competitive. It's similar in Australia to a certain extent as well.

That said, best of luck! Your background is fairly strong

> 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

It's extremely easy to enforce with taxes that ensure the company is paying at least 1X0% of the highest market rate for the position. If they don't find an alternative to paying it is a necessary hire.

should vs. could. vs. ought. vs. can

Strikes again

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'''

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.

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.

You’re right, I was a bit hyperbolic there. Though it is supposed to be for skilled jobs that a capable american is not available to do.

I've had one job saved in LinkedIn for about 6 months. It keeps closing and reopening, but never seems to actually get filled.

I know most posters on here are mainly talking about the existence of ghost jobs (which I think exist), but estimating that 21% of job postings are ghost jobs based on a dataset categorized by asking ChatGPT-4o seems, idk, iffy?

grabs pearls oh no!

I mean we literally elected a president who was convicted of falsifying business records (a form of fraud).

No, this is backwards

CTO is not such an exceptional role that you can convince me that a company couldn't find a single person in America who would be qualified to take it

It's also a highly sought after role, so people would generally be willing to relocate for a role like that

H1Bs are designed to fill labour shortages, where your local labour market is saturated and you are struggling to find local talent or attract talent from further away, so you can import workers

Using a visa designed to fill labour shortages for an executive position like CTO is frankly an abuse of the system

I think this problem is even worse than just ghost jobs.

My partner is currently looking for a new job. Two or three times now, they’ve completed the whole interview process, gotten great feedback. Then they are ghosted for 2-3 weeks and the company comes back and says “sorry we decided not to hire for this role”. It’s utterly exhausting.

I do think when the interviews started, they had intentions to hire. (My partner knew people at the company and was recommended). But then for whatever reason during the hiring process, the job goes away.

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

What's really weird is supposedly the market is on a bull run, the economy is doing great, and technical talent is in demand, yet the tech job market is absolute shit. I'm thinking I might get laid off or fired next year and my top option is probably working some $50k/yr help desk position after about 13 yoe, a masters, certs, etc. Those seem to be the only legitimate tech ads in my area. Of course for $25/hr I could potentially work for Costco or Chick-fil-A and do just as well.

The requirement you mention is for filing a green card application.

If I find a good citizen, I don’t file the application, that’s the law. But the employee does have h1b or OPT and is still allowed to work in the US, nothing wrong with that. If the government wants to stop giving those out workplaces will adapt

The requirement to pay market rate already exists and it's very easily gamed, eg. by under-leveling people or hiring them in under a related (but lower paid) role that doesn't reflect their actual responsibilities.

H1b should be a bid salery to play not first to apply. That is we will allow x of them, when you sponser someone you commit to paying them some salary for the full term - no layoffs (you get fire for cause but that is a legal thing they can take you to court for , and the courts can force you to give back pay if it wasn't a good cause) , you should know your budget can afford them. , someone who really is the best , offer them a million dollars to be sure they get in , just a warm body , if they don't get in who cares.

There are ways to abuse the above, but note they can always quit.

Well, it's been shady for at least 2.5 decades.

The law says I can’t submit the I-140 application, which I follow the law and I don’t submit it.

As a people manager it’s a heartbreaking conversation to have - to tell a report their dream of staying beyond their visa is gone

The law says every line manager needs to do their own industry pulse check every time an i-140 is submitted. And this is the only legal way to pulse check (advertise a ghost job). It would be much easier if the federal government did the pulse check one time for everyone and decided if engineers are or aren’t missing in the industry

Yes, there are more candidates to choose from today than 5 years ago, but that just leaves more candidates. The hiring bar is higher, but the proportion of good Americans doesn't get higher.

Sure you can get a better American today than 2019, but you're comparing any one candidate to their competition and the company bar. If you want to deliberately hire Americans who interview worse than non Americans, you're breaking the law

Seems like it would be beneficial to the community for someone to add some kind of a rating system for people posting in the HN hiring threads. I would expect at minimum to get a response.

Internet has gone to shit. It used to be much easier to find genuine people on the internet. Now, it is all marketing non-sense and filled with get-rich types.

Yes, the depression the administration’s tariffs (and other policies) will produce will eliminate the jobs done by H1B workers, among others, and eliminate the incentives for economic immigration.

I can't imagine why they're not a super popular employer.

In EU, if you put an item on sale, you have to post the lowest price in the last 30 days to see if it's an actual sale or not (even though i'd consider 30 days a too short interval).

Why not have a similar regulation for job postings? Require companies to publish all the job posting history for the last few years, all the positions advertised and the number of people hired for those positions.

Prospective workers would see an ad, look at the history, see that the same position has been open for 3 years now with zero people hired and skip that company. Also companies would actually post their job ads only when they actually intend to hire someone.

> The h1b program is supposed to be for people at the top of their field so they can skip the normal visa line

H1B is the normal visa line.

In 2023 there were 755,020 H1-B admittances. Why was it much easier to get a job in 2021? Because there were only 148,603 [1]. Notice that even though Republicans talked about immigration, neither party is talking about reducing H1-B filled roles. The kicker is if you’ve had a gap doing your own thing or because you were laid off and you apply for a job at a discount salary, you’re still not competitive against an H1-B worker because employers know you’d be able to trade up once you’ve been working for a few months.

[1] https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/h1b-visa...

> These threads end up fire hosed with people claiming hiring visa holders over citizens and permanent residents

They apparently also get fire-hosed with comments on the horrors of H1B hiring in a thread that is on green card application rules, i.e., all youb commenters on H1B did not even read the GP post. Those rules require advertising for a filled position, but don't require firing the current holder when you find a good candidate.

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.

Those companies are breaking the law. SpaceX was prosecuted for doing that.

Now SpaceX says:

To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.

This means small companies may not get good talent that value things besides salary (wfh, perks, fun project) and will have to compete with corporations for people who only cares about money. This may (or may not) impact startups

What makes it worth the extra trouble?

I guess the "green cards" really work cheap?

Break stupid laws/don't get caught | Civil disobedience/face consequences

------------------------------------|----------------------------------------

Don't break any laws/get SWATed. | "It's never okay to break any laws ever"

____

I feel like this model could be useful somehow.

I have 20+ years of experience and am getting nowhere. I'm ready to give up on life.

Doesn’t appear so, the OP seems genuine

This is a leftover of the Paycheck Protection Program fraud and is definitely a corrupt practice.

The problem is that it’s hard to prove they did that. Until the law is changed the show will go on.

Hail to you, person who also reads studies.

The methodology is pretty weak.

Is there someone who we could report this comment to? Get an investigation opened.

These numbers probably don't mean what you think they mean. Certainly, the number of H-1B holders in 2021 and 2023 is about the same.

An "admittance" is someone with a H-1B visa appearing a port of entry like an airport to enter the US. If a single H-1B holder goes on (say) 3 international trips in 1 year, that will count as 3 "admittances" in that year.

The reason why the number is so low in 2021 is that the US government had a COVID non-immigrant travel ban. People with H-1B visas couldn't re-enter the US from many countries e.g. most countries in Europe. Many people in H-1B status (like myself) simply didn't take international trips that year.

Willingly admitting to fraud is a strong move.

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.

Interesting. So practically, they would have to hire the new applicant and then let go of the h1b worker because presumably they don’t have the budget for it?!

Ghost jobs are certainly problematic, but I’ve been getting actual interviews where the technical bar feels too high. There’s extraordinarily little trust in previous job experience and interviews assess for test taking anxiety rather than actual skill[0].

[0]: https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/

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.

This would seem to send the wrong signal to investors about the health of the company. Maybe this should be illegal for publicly traded companies?

This used to be fairly common for H1B roles of any level - I don't find it surprising almost no one wants to fire a colleague ultimately, so doing whatever you could to reduce the number of applicants while still paying lip service to the rules is the logical outcome, rightly or wrongly.

For what its worth, towards end of 2010s USCIS were starting to clamp down on this and were being a lot stricter about the job being advertised appropriately for the role (you submit evidence of the advertisement during the PERM process).

By law, the number of H1B visas issued per year is capped at 80k, and that's how many have been issued every year for the last twenty years.

"Admittance rates" measure how many H1B people travel internationally and then return to the USA. Unsurprisingly, in 2023, more people traveled internationally than in 2021, when almost all countries closed their borders.

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.

> The h1b program is supposed to be for people at the top of their field so they can skip the normal visa line, but it is commonly used to save money through exploitation.

This is false. O-1 is the visa for the "people at the top of their field". H-1B is for regular employees.

Naah! it would ended up like Glassdoors which keeps deleting posts that don't serve the company narrative..

Rejection notices? I get ghosted. I would welcome a rejection notice.

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.

What makes you so sure the job wouldn't just exist somewhere cheaper like Europe if they couldn't hire for 2/3 in the US?

if only AI could solve this problem....

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 assumed that was upvoting?

Wage bottom floor is getting lower every day with AI

Paper doesn't seem to mention what the motivations are for doing this other than a vague reference to 'keeping a talent pipeline'. Its far more likely that they are being financially incentivized to do so, perhaps to meet H1B requirements.

I interviewed at a popular us based k8s ops/networking company that ended up being 90% Indian staffed. The non technical recruiter basically neged me the entire interview, was very clear after the fact he had no interest in hiring me.

This should be illegal

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.

A tell for fake firms in my local newspaper is they ask for a snail mail resume. These appear to me to be more like shell companies submitting multiple H1Bs as far as I can tell though, not legit firms saying they cannot hire any US.

But arguably any labor shortage can be fixed by just having way higher wages.

Like if Google is struggling to hire L3 entry level engineers, can't they just offer $1 million/year salary? Then of course they will get the people they want.

To me, the point of H-1B and similar programs isn't "we can't get the individual staff we need". It's rather that at a society-wide level, having more software engineers at an overall lower salary can be more beneficial to the country than fewer engineers at a higher salary. And I feel that the success of Silicon Valley kind of shows this: if we didn't have any immigrants to the US, maybe the salaries would have been higher, but there is simply no chance SV would have reached the scale it has.

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)

Same as ever though, this is tangential to H1B.

Because it’s hard to fire someone in the EU. Eastern Europe is cheaper and so is India.

So… the interviewee doesn’t get the job even though they knocked it out of the park, and the H1B doesn’t get their visa because the other interviewee did well. Basically nobody wins, and the H1B person is out of a job in 2-3 years?

It would go to the Immigrant and Employee Rights Section, Civil Rights Division, USDOJ. I think they only take formal complaints from those who applied though (it is different from the regular EEOC process though--the government itself acts as the complainant). You could try just sending them an email.

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.

This is just plain fraud

We interview without knowing sponsorship status. If someone requires sponsorship that happens after we decide they were the best interviewee

I wish it wasn’t this way but in the vast majority of interviews, the sponsor required person is the best one

I wish people would be aware enough to report behavior like this to authorities. With the new admin coming in, it's probably too late (the deportations will only be for people they and the rest of the Old Boys' Club can't exploit).

> It's rather that at a society-wide level, having more software engineers at an overall lower salary can be more beneficial to the country than fewer engineers at a higher salary.

Beneficial to owners of capital in said country. Not so beneficial to non owners of capital (also usually labor sellers) in said country.

But if I bothered to look up what the words mean about complex administrative questions, I forfeit my right to be outraged!

Generally not for Masters' programs though, which is the most popular and easiest way to get a temporary study visa. Then they pay out of state tuition rates.

Interesting. Every recruiter on linkedin will swear blind that technology doesn't work like that, and they have to manually sort through and review hundreds of applications, and ATS don't just blindly trash/delete applications. But I can't believe your situation did not happen, and that similar things aren't happening regularly.

This is the reason I no longer bother with HN's "Who's Hiring" posts.

They're all Ghost Jobs and we can't even complain there about it.

Add "automatic green card at the end of three years if sponsored again by the same employer".

Otherwise, the job would just be extremely cushy. Work the absolute bare minimum not to give cause for dismissal, and you're untouchable for the duration.

I have also encountered companies with actual open positions; but when it comes down to actually hiring, one person in a position of power may decide they don't want to spend the money on the position ("yet").

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

No one wants to train employees anymore.

I don't think there's anything one can realistically do about this. They probably should get rid of the requirement to have an open application process altogether. If they have someone in mind they will hire, they will hire that person.

Sorry I should have clarified.

The ATS doesn't kick out your resume automatically, it just fails to include you in the 25 top candidates that get forwarded on to the hiring manager.

It was very sad to see that my resume didn't make it for a job description that I wrote based on my resume.

I'm down, as long as I can't be charged with fraud or something for it.

When I last changed jobs, I started looking at the end of 2021. I was a staff SWE at Google, MS CS from Stanford, etc. - a good resume.

I also found myself applying into a black hole. But when I used second degree connections to get someone at the company to acknowledge I existed, everything started moving, and I ended up with great offers from both the companies I had applied in.

Sometimes there are ghost roles, but sometimes recruiting is inundated or disorganized and you just need an internal champion.

From my reading (IANAL), there are three types of occupational fraud: asset misappropriation, corruption, and financial statement fraud. Since job posting are interpreted as a positive signal but are not (it seems) typically and explicitly included in formal financial statements, this wouldn't rise to the level of criminal fraud.

After reading it a few times my understanding is this:

An H1B job holder applies for a green card. OP then must interview to prove the role can't be filled by a citizen. An interviewee knocks it out of the park, failing the check and so the green card application is denied. However the person holding the job is still legally allowed to work for 2-3 years in their H1B. So they're kept on for that long even though the check failed for the green card.

Are you kind enough to share what kind of entrepreneurial work you're focusing on? Is it tech related in any way?

My thoughts exactly. I haven't really tried many of the HN monthly postings myself very often, but once in a while I see something irresistible. But they never respond. Or they have an auto responder which doesn't count in my book.

When one company never responded, I added a comment to their ad the next month saying as much. The poor guy had to make up something about a spam filter.

Some kind of rating system would be helpful.

Yes, this is precisely what the comment thread is saying. Shmatt’s original post should shock you with its conclusion because everyone loses including shmatt.

Yep, they love a giant database filled with candidates they will never check out.

Similar. Time to reach out to your network.

I agree. I did hire someone on an H1B in the early 2010's and he was, to put it mildly, the perfect candidate for the job and I don't think I could have found anyone anywhere to do it. Someone else at the company was hired, into sales, and they were pretty good for the job (a Japanese person to service the Japanese market), but you could argue that citizen speakers of Japanese do exist and should have been given priority.

I would be happy if the H1B program was killed.

Exactly, you don't build up a catalogue of people you can get back to.

Ie. this technique does not make sense - search for people on demand instead.

Yes, to really prove it, one would need an admission from the employer. But isn't the above comment such an admission?

That sounds ethical.

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

> 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?

Using agencies largely solves the "hard to fire someone" problem.

> 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?

So you have zero integrity. Thanks for sharing.

> Though it is supposed to be for skilled jobs that a capable american is not available to do.

No it's not. The H-1B program has no requirement for a labor market test (i.e. showing that there is no citizen that can do the job). The Immigration and Nationality Act, which is the source of the H-1B program, does not have such a requirement. The only big requirements are that the job require a degree (except for fashion models) and that it pays the prevailing wage.

Finally I understood, thank you.

This is EXACTLY what I'm looking for after 20 years experience. 100% willing to trade top salary for a life.

There really isn't a "good" recruiter from a candidate perspective. Their incentives are to support the firms they recruit for, and screen candidates. They do not work for your benefit.

My experience early in my career was that I needed to work with many of these recruiters until I found a gig. My experience at the time was weak, and my resume reflected that. I had to take the gigs which had lower competition e.g. systems administration.

Not a certain conclusion, they could just operating from a different set of values than yours, but adhering to those with integrety.

I dislike this system as much as you do. Clearly the PERM cert is flawed. I suppose the system is working as intended, and I'm not sure what the drama is, although of course, from a human empathy point of view, I feel like the story is making you look like the worst actor in this scenario.

That is unfair, but forgive me: you hold all the cards and occupy the most powerful position in the story, and you are framing it in absolutes, trying to make yourself a victim, talking about it as though you are powerless.

the grandparent comment states that they were interviewing for a position that was held by a green card applicant, not h1b visa holder.

>But arguably any labor shortage can be fixed by just having way higher wages.

In the long term perhaps, but not in the short term. Bidding wars over an inadequate supply of suitably-skilled labour are good for those workers, but they aren't good for the economy or society as a whole.

Ok, present the HN handle to court:)

It can take months to hire a specialist from both but if you're constantly spinning plates, you have some lukewarm contacts as well as a list of obvious no's.

Isn't it lose-win-lose-lose? The government is requiring this.

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.

Great point. The H-1B receipts total[1] is probably what most are looking for

2020: 427,200 2021: 398,300 2022: 474,300 2023: 386,600

[1] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/f...

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.

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.

He found another candidate which could do the job. This finding makes it a federal crime to recommand the current H1B employee for a green card.

I got hired by directly applying via a company's website; it was my 11th application and my first that wasn't a moonshot (nvda/valve/etc). It was in late 2023 (very bad market), and I didn't have any connections to the company at all. I also have no online presence. Online applications are not fully dead.

Of course this is just my experience as a senior engineer in embedded, so likely doesn't apply to others. But if you're looking, it's worth your time to apply...

He found another candidate which could do the job. This finding makes it a federal crime to recommand the current H1B employee for a green card.

Source that prevailing wage is 2/3 of the market?

He found another candidate which could do the job. This finding makes it a federal crime to recommand the current H1B employee for a green card.

Don't you have to demonstrate that there is no qualified US worker? I find this unbelievable and outrageous.

Stop it, no one "values things besides salary", and you know it.

House and Senate this time baby!

the person applying for the green card already works for the interviewing company. the job opening is THAT green card applicant's job requirements.

the lawyer/law firm handling the green card application process has to prove that there are no US citizens who are qualified to do the job.

if there were qualified applicants for the job, then the green card applicant won't be given a green card, I assume. But that green card applicant is already working in the country via some other visa, so there is no job opening to fill typically.

the current person in the job is performing well, otherwise, why would you be trying to get a green card for them?

i've never heard of any green card applicant getting denied a green card due to a qualified US citizen applicant.

>> As a people manager it’s a heartbreaking conversation to have - to tell a report their dream of staying beyond their visa is gone

If an actual citizen could have done the job, they shouldn't be in the country in the first place.

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.

huh I thought the “good faith steps to recruit U.S. workers” part was for every company, but apparently it’s only for certain companies receiving money or who have already got in trouble.

I would have been more against it if I realized that.

I get your point, but if that were completely true, no one would work in the videogame or embedded software sectors. They pay dramatically less, especially early in career.

This so much. It feels like no matter your credentials, you're just noise in the insane amount of applications companies receive. Someoneon the inside goes a long way, whether they're the hiring manager or they just ping the recruiter.

I value a good manager, a fun team, an actual PTO policy I can use, and cool projects to work with at about $40,000 a year. Salary is valuable but it is not the only valuable thing.

My one hope for the next administration is that they crack down hard on this sort of thing and pursue comprehensive immigration reform. A company that relies on labor from people who don't even have permanent residency rights probably shouldn't exist, and yes, I'm including agriculture in that statement. We should have a points based system like Canada with some carve outs for lower skilled ag workers.

America is a big country. There will always be someone capable of doing the job if you take price out of the equation.

I get that people like semantically and logically simple ideas, but the world doesn't reflect that.

Cost is an inherent part of the H1B program

Omg 80% of comments in this thread are so confidently wrong it’s insane. Fyi tp is actually doing everything by the book

Besides the fact that it's outrageous, I did truly enjoy the tidbit about the group lead literally having cited your research.

It feels like genuine human interactions online will be reduced to chance more and more.

The labor market test is usually required to upgrade to an employment-based green card from a H-1B, though, hence the frequent confusion.

It's not so binary. Economic growth and prosperity does benefit a broad swath of society.

Is there any evidence H1B workers in tech have lowered wages?

I have only seen anecdotes while the law explicitly states H1Bs should be paid the prevailing wage or above.

the problem is the effort in figuring out who is legit in the first place.

Well, downvoting in the case discussing ghosting, right? But just like any voting system one datum doesn't really tell the story. Since creating throwaway accounts is pretty normal around here, I'd guess the solution is to reply to the posting calling out the "can't even be bothered to say fuck off" to warn others not to bother. Bonus points for doing that every month when they inevitably repost their fake listing next time

It's what I would naturally expect to happen in the absence of consistent heroic efforts by the authorities to prevent it.

exactly that. you actually want/need a few years of warning if your greencard is going to be accepted or not. having to put out a ghost job in order to find out if the greencard is going to be accepted is really the problem (for the ghost candidate)

Indeed, locals recently discovered a scam targeting foreign students, and fake ads that promised them a job... The problem is the economic migrant pays >$34k to get those "work" stubs, and usually never shows up on the physical job. Or if they actually need to show, it is usually an awful working arrangement where these now penniless workers end up in inhumane working conditions.

These "employers" have claimed "ghost" employees at sites who often only ever show up to work to pay the shift manager their cut of the bribe in cash. Thus, the desperate indebted people end up in food banks, delivering food, and bidding down physical labor wage rates though suppressed demand.

You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried. Wasting legitimate applicants time, and feeding illegal AI screener bots... is just an inconvenience by comparison. =3

And the solution has been obvious all along, and was even proposed by Trump in his first term. Turn H1B into an auction so that only just creme de la creme makes it through, limit the numbers, and issue green cards sooner, with no additional bureaucatic bullshit. Maybe he'll finally get to do it this time.

OP isn't rejecting the US citizen application because they are a US citizen - they are rejecting all candidates applying for the position regardless of ability to do the job or not since the position is already filled. There was no intent to fill the position to begin with - just a test to see if they can sponsor the current h1b employee for their greencard or not. There is no discrimination if no applicant had a chance of being hired to begin with.

They might be running afoul of discrimination laws if they only interview US citizens to cut down on their workload for fake interviews, but I'd guess someone this careful (e.g. not actually submitting the greencard sponsorship where many employers would with a wink and a nod) is likely careful enough to not filter candidates on such obvious things either.

It's a problem with the h1b (and green card) program itself, not OPs behavior. If anything, OP is probably in the top few percentile of ethical businesses/managers if they are actually denying the sponsorships because they made a good faith attempt to test to see if the local market had appropriate candidates.

Yes, it's been better explained now.

I guess this is a case of "don't hate the player, hate the game." although the question remains why they filled the role with an H1B candidate in the first place if they could find locals that could do the job. That piece is clearly unethical and done only for wage suppression.

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.

Just like last time!

> Those companies are breaking the law.

If the position requires a security clearance, they are not breaking the law. Language like this is standard on defense contractor postings that require clearances (this from Lockeed):

> Security Clearance Statement: This position requires a government security clearance, you must be a US Citizen for consideration.

> SpaceX was prosecuted for doing that.

SpaceX was prosecuted for excluding refugees and asylees from export-controlled positions, not cleared positions.

>If you want to deliberately hire Americans who interview worse than non Americans, you're breaking the law

LOL I'm gonna need a source for this gem

I understand now. See above.

This is why we all need to live below our means if possible. It gives the hamster wheel less power over you.

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 reached out to a recruiter I know about a job posted on their company's site. They replied that wasn't a real posting it was just to get people in the pipeline. They did say if it was a "real" posting they were hiring for it will have as ReqID at the top of the page. Too bad that's not something you could filter for.

I was working for Meta in Bellevue, WA in 2022. Got laid off. Applied to several positions at MS (I was living in Redmond at the time), couldn't get a callback. Months and months go by, get a job, move across the country, get an email 9-12 months after applying that they'd like to interview me. I didn't even bother responding.

>> But arguably any labor shortage can be fixed by just having way higher wages.

Yes, like a lot of immigration, it is entirely about wage suppression to benefit owners and shareholders.

That's only 99% true, but the 1% of exceptions will get an egregiously disproportionate amount of attention and concern.

I thought that number was conservative. I was hiring at 1/2 and 1/3.

I worked at a globally remote company. Most of the European devs worked for a one man consulting company, that my employer then "contracted" out to. I'm not sure if that nullifies all the protections, but I'm sure it did a lot.

The Who's Hiring, I kind of have lukewarm feelings toward those outcomes, because assholes are everywhere - but I've had the same experience as you on https://www.workatastartup.com/ which is just what the actual fucking hell.

From reading the sibling comments, it seems that my problem is that I enjoy reading more than talking on the phone so I much prefer browsing through listings and being selective, but what apparently needs to happen is that I call previous recruiters and badger them about "got anything?" rather that believing anything written online is true

...If your goal was to force companies to hire native citizens wherever possible, and only H1B workers when absolutely necessary, that might be the point.

real firms do this too.

Pick up a local newspaper that is not well known.

To me this is like: Why work for a big company? I worked for a big company once and did not like it. Kids out of college are always drawn to the big names, and they can look good on your resume.

My feeling is, if you want to work for a big company, work for a small one and make it big. I can say from experience that turns out really well.

More like a case of “perhaps dont make judgements if your knowledge on the subject is aprox zero”. Again, same question as upthread - show me how prevailing wage is suppressing the market. The h1b could also been issued years ago like in 2021 for example

Without cause, you can't discriminate for citizenship.

Just like you can't discriminate by race, unless you're a film director you want a black actress to play Rosa Parks.

So source: “trust me bro”?

is this the situation of POSIWID

I’m not necessarily shocked but more appalled. I’ve always wondered this - in tech there’s very little reason to believe that you need to import talent. Learning is mostly democratized these days, and I find it hard pressed to believe that there isn’t a US Citizen for literally any tech company. But they cost more hence they try to do the whole H1B process… which then comes to bite them back.

Yes and no.

Primarily working on growing a pressure washing business so I can be utterly done with (full-time, employee) tech work.

The other thing is an app / community for teaching meditation (a longtime passion of mine). I don't know if it will do well but if it nets me a half-dozen to a dozen students that I am instructing 1-1 via zoom for 20-30 minutes on a weekly basis when I FIRE here in the next five years I'll be happy.

Non-US citizens can't get a security clearance. Permanent residents can at most get a limited access authorization. The SpaceX case involved ITAR, not clearance.

is it illegal to put that phrase? i don't think so. There are a lot of shops that includes that and they usually come with clearance needed.

usually, they find this local person later. But is it right to replace then? Wage suppression but usually H-1Bs and other work immigration visas are not lower paid at big tech co

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