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

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.

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.

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

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.

i'm a hiring manager for engineers and have worked with tons of ATSes and have yet to work with a system that does this. i'm not saying it isn't real, but even as a director with fairly privileged access to the hiring pipeline and near-administrative access to the ATS at a public company with tons of applicants, i've never even seen an option for this sort of thing.

the ATS will tag candidates who meet certain key requirements or highlight them, but for the most part it's just a big messy list of people that someone has to filter through. humans are super bad at eliminating their biases and there's a sense that the top of the hiring funnel is mostly noise and unqualified folks, so i think the much more mundane reality is that until you make it past the first (very arbitrary) screen you don't get that much consideration as a candidate.

when i'm helping recruiting make a dent in inbound applications, i'd say charitably i spend 5 minutes per application on initial screen (to clear a backlog of sometimes hundreds.) i try my best to be aware of my biases, but that's almost no time for absorbing someone's entire career, trying to find correlations between their accomplishments and the role, sussing out red flags and then making a decision as to whether their application is worth investing potentially hours of time on in next steps.

a couple other things that play into this:

- i've never worked at a company that didn't believe they'd hired so well that they were truly one of the stand-out, high performing teams that could afford to be picky, and "as good as us" often isn't good enough when the mandate is to "constantly raise the bar." obviously this is delusional but it's pervasive in corporate culture.

- right now in particular, the terrible market combined with the intricacy of AI-generated applications for candidates that don't exist (this is the most bizarre trend I've experienced thus far - candidates with personal websites, githubs that are just forks of public repos, and extensive and impressive resumes at major companies who do not exist and when brought onto interview calls will not turn on their cameras and speak with a weird delay as if they're asking ChatGPT for answers) really means that the zone is utterly flooded with garbage. the mental fatigue on resume 50 of 400 is substantial, let alone on one deeper in the pile. you're reading document after document that's nearly identical, trying to figure out which ones are worth pushing forward.

ultimately i think the task is so herculean that most folks, whether they admit it or not, wind up responding most directly to folks whose backgrounds they personally relate to, or who manage to demonstrate the right amount of personality that makes you go "huh, i think we should talk to them a little more."

i present this all as a known problem, and i'm not trying to diminish the frustration of job hunters by saying "oh it's bad on the other side, too" because i absolutely know how much the experience of job hunting sucks and don't wish it on anyone. i just think that in the absence of people being willing to admit how haphazard and human-driven the whole process is, conspiracy theories about AI rejections and ChatGPT reviewing resumes en masse run amok.

> work for a small one and make it big. I can say from experience that turns out really well.

Survivor bias.

I worked for a smallish company. I was employee number 77. I got laid off about a year and a half later after sales stalled. We're now almost two years after that layoff, and now the company has a skeleton crew just keeping the lights on until the money runs out.

    > Why work for a big company?

Most large corps have higher total comp compared to smaller corps.

Hopefully you are enjoying yourself at the big company you are at now. Sorry for what happened and I wish you well.

> right now in particular, the terrible market combined with the intricacy of AI-generated applications for candidates that don't exist (this is the most bizarre trend I've experienced thus far

This is a major problem and isn't widely talked about because it's only seen by HR and hiring managers.

For nearly any engineering job post, companies are getting flooded with resumes from fake candidates in other countries.

At first they were easy to spot (their linkedin account would be < 6 months old, they would apply using a VPN, they would have a VOIP telephone number) but they're getting more sophisticated and harder to weed out real candidates from fake.

The worst part is that the fake candidates are always the ones with the best resumes (since they're fake, their resumes are often also faked and tailored exactly the the job description)

The use of AI during interviews is also a major issue - hiring teams are slowly realizing that the types of questions and interview challenges that worked before no longer work today due to the rise in AI-assisted interview tools that candidates use. It's common to ask a question, then see the candidate wait a few seconds before they start to answer (w

It's really hard when you have 500 applicants in the first day of posting a full stack role, and 80-90% of them aren't real people.

Maybe, I don't really have data on that but there's a huge range for both. I would say, think about your career, its growth and longevity. Posters on HN have pointed out some large companies that have a habit of laying people off before they fully vest. And there is the whole challenge of getting meaningful responsibility in a large organization. Everyone thinks when they are starting out that they are going to march up the organizational ladder.

Everything I am saying is anecdote, not data, but I have seen people propel themselves up into large organizations by being entrepreneurs. I think of a friend who worked for a bit for a large company, had a start up with mixed results, and then went back to another large company as an SVP. I don't know if that person would have gotten their marching through the ranks.

First, thanks so much for sharing your experience on the HR/hiring side!

I recall in the multiple post-pandemic layoffs (especially in tech industry) that hiring teams were some of the first to be gutted. Made sense on a practical level since, at least in theory, layoffs > fewer job openings > fewer applicants to go through > less people needed to go through them.

However, I'm sure that's also led to more people applying for the fewer job openings that are available.

Does that seem like an accurate read? Maybe a contributing factor to lack of communication, even if it's simply a templated decline?

Not big, but certainly bigger. Based on the number of people in the #general channel on Slack, we're ~450 people.

so to be clear, i'm engineering leadership - my exposure is probably greater than most individual contributor engineers but don't take my word as the experience of a dedicated recruiter - they have a much better view of the lay of the land than i do. i just wind up having a certain percentage of hiring/recruiting responsibility as part of my job.

for sure i think that might be a part of it, but i can say from experience that the market is flooded with recruiters, so if capacity was the issue, i'd imagine salaries are depressed right now and tons of talent is available... they could just hire their teams back up.

i genuinely can't explain to you why people aren't getting "no's." i wish i could. it makes me sincerely angry. the way ATSes are usually set up is you have a button to remove them from consideration or put them in some "not at the moment" disposition and every tool i've ever used has an option to automatically send a relevant form email as the result of that action. sending the email would take the same effort as not sending the email.

the only thing i can imagine (and have heard some hr folks say) is that rejecting someone is an action that elicits an emotional response in the person rejected - they might be hurt, they might be offended - and can lead to requests for an explanation why, or also hurt the chance that that person might be interested in working for you in the future. thus, just going dark and acting like "it got lost in the mail" is a way for them to keep the option of hiring you open in the future, or keep you receptive to a response if they reach out 6 months later.

i personally don't know if that's real, and i also don't think it reflects how actual humans respond to being ghosted, but the lack of a rejection email for a role i think is honestly a completely indefensible practice and i do not understand what is going on in the minds of the people who operate that way.