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.

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.

A week or two later I received rejection letters for both. It occurred to me that I might have been a stooge to make the VP's project look good on paper somehow.

That was more enlightening than I asked for. Those hundreds of other candidates A) never stood a chance against HR picking a candidate recommended by someone with more political power, B) will never realize that that was the reason they were passed upon, until maybe they reach their moment of realization first-hand like me, and C) were passed upon in favor of a candidate with a resume almost a year out of date. It illustrated to me the sheer futility of cold applying to random open positions and hoping for the best.

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

Our current best solution is to track when jobs get published/unpublished so that we can tell what's a repost (more likely to be a ghost job) vs a fresh job with high-intention to get the role filled.

I was talking to my co-founder this morning about collecting enough data so that we can analyze if it's even worth it for us to apply customers to re-posted jobs (there are legit reasons companies might do that) or if the hit rate is too low to bother (our kpi is interview-requests).

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?

First create a ghost application bot that creates fake resumes which fit the job descriptions. Then once you have calls or contact back wanting to proceed in the process mark off the job as real. Compile a database of all jobs that are verified as actually conducting a hiring process and thus are probably not ghost jobs. Sell subscription access to said database of validated jobs.

www.unlistedjobs.com

I'm sure that's not helping.

> 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.

Uh... just because it was cited previously (ie social proof) doesn't make it credible. And the "statistical power" study is orthogonal to this point at best. I understand that using LLMs is trendy right now, but they aren't magic, and I don't think there is any realistic way to get signal on "ghost" jobs without actual employment data.

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?)

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.

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.

Why is it easier to identify actual ghost jobs now? Not like it’s anything new to post a job without an immediate need. People been posting for unicorns, or in high turn over jobs some places have job posts every few months.

It was more an exploratory thing, not some huge job opp, so it became more of a nuisance than it was worth. But it still left me curious how in the world said systems even work.

Ditto if a museum is hosting an exhibition of art from some tiny country, and wants a few docents who can read the inscriptions?

Ditto if ...

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.

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.

It's an interesting way to spell "corruption".

If the world were both good and just then perhaps I could hop on board. But it most certainly isn’t. Frankly, saying so sounds like sour grapes.

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?

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'''

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.

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

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.

Companies should pay what it costs to get people to give up a significant portion of their lives working towards their business mission, or else get out of the business.

You're comparing the vast swathes of mediocre talent to the best from the rest of the world. Of course the top talent from elsewhere is going to beat the average talent from the US.

This doesn't sound right; meat spoils. If you've just killed something, it would be a lot of effort and danger to kill something else, all for almost zero benefit.

half of US farms, meat packing, restaurants, construction, etc. rely on undocumented labor. the GOP owned the house and Senate for years, and could have crushed it well before now.

they don't because a lot of big business want these illegals, and the same folks backing the new administration -- aka tech bros like Musk and Thiel -- are totally down with H1Bs

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.

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.

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

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 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

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.

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.

Instead they post job descriptions so niche only a liar could technically qualify.

Second - H1b are exploitable, because the system allows it.

H1b has demonstrably not suppressed software engineering wages at all.

Non-competes, have - on the other hand.

Best for who? Companies should train their workforce. Or get kicked out of the market, meaning that they should get kicked out of the nation.

He is just going the the motions that he's been prescribed. Either that or an idiot.

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.

"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.

I don't think Trump give a crap about helping American workers, anymore than his buddy Elon does - the anti-immigrant thing was just that.

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.

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).

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

LOL I'm gonna need a source for this gem

This is an absurd claim.

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.

There's a prevailing belief that US employers prefer H1B visa holders because they'll work cheaper and not complain about poor working conditions but if that's true... why computer programmers, specifically? Why are there _any_ Americans in the organization? Surely the product owners, project managers, scrum masters, HR staff, janitors, facilities maintenance, receptionists, directors, VPs and CEOs could be filled cheaper and less complainier by an H1B visa holder too?

I have yet to find a plausible explanation why specifically computer programming (and no other career) is dominated specifically by Indian citizens (and no other nationality).

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

H1B is the normal visa line.

If we are trading anecdotes here I personally dont know any h1bs who are making less than 300k total comp. Hows that for obnoxious?

Turns out none of that actually mattered if the whole point is to generate busy-work and turn HR into another function like sales/marketing afraid to lose their budget for the year, or even worse to evaluate market conditions poorly. This entire thing should be illegal with the study at hand as evidence to make it so.

In Austria, the employer can terminate a contract immediately if the employee behaves in a manner that would harm the employer.

If the employee does nothing wrong, the contract can still be terminated, but you have to give notice 6 weeks ahead (or longer if the employee has worked at your company for a long time).

People get these things confused and think employees generally can't be fired without a reason, but that's not true. They just can't be fired on the spot without a reason.

You have to pay people the minimum salary depending on their trade, you have to give them 5 weeks of vacation, pay overtime, pay for health insurance and so on.

Employers can't exploit their employees, but employees still have to do their job.

But there is also a big area of the economy where employers ignore the law and treat employees like shit. For example, service workers are not generally treated well in Austria, and many are afraid of losing their job so they don't complain to the authorities.

You should not plan to do projects that require you to hire a special resource tomorrow.

And also: Having an open pipeline really does not hedge for that, and you open pipeline might not align with your sudden need.

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

On the other hand, for some shady companies that are set up as contract shops, then I'd not be surprised if the wages are lower than average market rate, but I have never worked at one, so I might be misleading by even mentioning this here.

Minimum for a Software Developer in SF: $113,444 https://h1bgrader.com/

As for actually submitting the application--as I understand they actually audit the job ad responses and your decisions--so if you didn't even pretend to have a reason for not hiring them, you would automatically be in a lot of trouble. The game is to come up with flaws in the citizen candidates by requiring highly specific experience--e.g. "JDK v17.0.9 Programming" vs "experience with Java" to justify your target being the only one qualified. That would ultimately be for the court to decide.

Only interviewing citizens to the exclusion of PR/EAD card holders as in your example as written would be a violation.

What I think you meant though, which is not interviewing those who don't have permission to work (without your future attempt to get it for them) is normally completely fine; however, this situation is a little different since you would be willing to provide that for the "target" employee but not the other applications. However, I still don't think it would run afoul of this particular law.

Most laws are like this. Do you know criminality laws require intent and yet we do fine without mind reading devices.

Most H1Bs are in software and wages in software have been rising along with number of people in software engineering over the long term.

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.

Sorry, I'm still unclear. What rule says you can't submit your employee's green card application even though you've determined that you won't hire a citizen to do that job?

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

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

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

Not even remotely true, outside of unskilled labour work

> Like if Google is struggling to hire L3 entry level engineers, can't they just offer $1 million/year salary?

They can, but that won't suddenly make more people who are qualified for L3 entry level engineering positions to sprout into existence

It may cause people to re-skill to try and chase those positions.

It probably will have engineers from their competitors come to work for them

But then their competitors are in the same position facing a labour shortage. The shortage hasn't gone away!

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.

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

nonsense

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

> 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“?

Sorry, if you "learned online" and haven't spent a few years building software - you aren't immediately as qualified as a graduate from IIT.

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

And as far as I can tell, Pittsburgh is in the same country as SF.

I think I would be harder to make such a cynical zing about the net benefit of allowing 10,000 doctors to immigrate.

I'll be the first to admit that the disadvantages outweigh the benefits for specific workers. NAFTA sucked for autoworkers. H1B visas suck for IT and software workers.

I think other types of workers benefit more than the portrait you paint, and not just the capital owners.

Unless you are a utilitarian (I'm not), I agree there is a valid debate on how much policy should disadvantage a small group for "the greater good".

See also lower minimum wages and separate labor standards for poorer Mexican immigrants in agriculture, not to mention the complete lack of requirement for employers to ensure legal work authorization, and complete lack of consequences for employers that employ people without work authorization.

Private companies play their part in implementing this remedy of Injustice and Good Policy, yet private companies exist to profit first and foremost. Management practices of labor have a sordid history, going way back.. A worker in a private company with a lottery work permit must play out the life under management in that company, whatever that may be.. And that management will also change, not always for the better.

Now its 2024.....