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Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.

If the listing is generic like "senior software engineer" and all of the requirements are generic like being able to program or do teamwork, it's probably a generic listing.

Applying anyway is a safe bet, but I wouldn't invest as much energy into tailoring your resume if it's a 6 month old posting from a 50 person company with a website that looks like it's from 2009. That company probably forgot to take the listing down.

> maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people

This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.

The target can also change constantly. At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.

> So you should apply to old job postings?

Yes. I recently got a job (IT infrastructure engineer with a non-tech company) on a posting that was 6 months old. they had filled it, and at the same time got approval for a second headcount so they never pulled it down

I got a job by applying to an old listing, for the wrong city.

Small companies may look to fill a certain set of skill-sets, and if that is filled by one person or three doesn't matter much; can puzzle around to make the workload fit what is found. large companies may hire 10 people generically, but may stop at 5 if they don't like the candidates, or hire 16 after a good set of resumes.

Forcing companies to be overly specific in the roles is just making it harder to apply.

If it’s a big company, anyway, then yeah. A FAANG type hires thousands of engineers a year. They are not going to have a bespoke ad per position.

You should, but you should always apply as early as possible.

The main reason the jobs are reposted are to get them to the top of the feed

It seems like if you're interested in a role it's ok to apply and be in their system and that much more discoverable.

Being able to reach out and have a chat with the HR manager either way also makes a candidate more human.

You pay for job listings so it would be silly to not take them down.

Been awhile since I’ve been in the job hunt but doesn’t Indeed at least have an option to display the number of roles open on each posting? Wouldn’t that solve this issue pretty easily?

50% is a pretty damn good response rate! I wouldn't complain about that.

It's not surprising about LinkedIn. They've made applying for jobs too easy so there's too much noise. I wouldn't bother applying for jobs there. LinkedIn is great for recruiters though - just put some effort into your profile, set it to "looking for work", and then reply to interesting recruiter spam. That's how I got my last 3 jobs.

This is probably too broad a category for anecdata to mean much, but just to balance the scales I've recently started looking in a job category that I thought was niche, but not that niche. I've heard back from something like 11/13 applications, often the same or next day.

https://careers.oreillyauto.com/us/en/c/information-technolo...

They've got a few open spots if you're interested in relocating to Springfield, MO (and even some entry level IT positions https://careers.oreillyauto.com/us/en/job/R203370/IT-Support... - that one was posted 09/21/2026)

aka the person willing to work for a fraction of their worth.

I mean, in 26 years in the industry I’ve never worked anywhere that kept ads up for jobs that had already been filled. Not even on their own websites where hosting those ads is effectively free (as opposed to LinkedIn et al where you have to pay).

I’m not saying there are no companies that keep non-live job ads up purely for fishing purposes but, in my experience, it’s not the norm. It would really piss jobseekers off and that’s the kind of word that tends to get around and make it harder to hire in future. Maybe not if you’re a FAANG, because so many people want to work for you anyway, but it’s going to cause problems for “normal” companies.

No, the exact opposite! A high percentage of ghost jobs indicates that there are very few actual jobs open in the field, which suggests an oversupply of workers.

Not necessarily indicates any 1 thing; it can be fake job posts to signal growth, could be an extra picky hiring manager, even a decrepit company that forgot to close it.

It’s a pipeline requisition or feeder requisition. Sometimes companies will close and refresh it. Can’t rely on job listings alone

How is it shitty behaviour. "I are hiring 10 people, we won't remove the job listing until 10 people are hired."

Well, no one else is making sense of it (or rather, the real answer is something we can't say), so people will do their own data gatherings and report their findings.

The only issue is that it's never one factor. Rising interest rates, s174, ghost jobs, outsourcing: them and many more factors all add up.

I've done hiring at AWS and many other companies and the OP is 100% accurate, so I don't know why you speak with such confidence

You could argue that AWS doesn't know what they're doing but they also hire way more software developers than all but a handful of other companies

> You have to understand that in that hour I might get 40 resumes. 1 or 2 are amazing, another 2-3 could be worth a look, and another 5 might have made the cut if I didn't just read those 2-5 much better resumes ahead of them.

This sounds like a dream. We posted a job a couple of weeks ago and had 1200 applications in around 2 days. Most are complete garbage. I'm confused why they took the time to apply at all, even if AI did it for them.

At this point why don't you try to go out and contact candidates yourself or via a recruiter rather than posting jobs? It seems to me that with LLM-based tools you are going to find it increasingly difficult to get those 2-3 out of the 40; all 40 will be LLM-written to perfect match your posting.

> If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.

That assumes that I am writing my resume for just your job posting. If I am just going to copy and paste the job requirement verbatim on my resume, doesn't that make your job screening applicants for actual experience much harder? Often times the difference is splitting hairs anyway ("we're looking for someone who paints brown houses").

But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them, I would just frankly not have the time to do so.

Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody. The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.

>You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.

Resumes are only a 1 page summary (2 if you're really experienced) and this kind of market has you doing hundreds of submissions if you lack connections (or your connections are also job searching). You don't have the time to tailor every application for every role.

A shame because LLMs should really be perfect at this. Most current tools are too obsessed with writing for you (and creating a blander resume) instead of just taking a master CV and drag and dropping the most applicable roles/projects/experiences in.

> Firms accepting only a single candidate CV from a recruiter instead of 5 or more

Why though? I've done hiring before - it takes less than 30 seconds to skim a resume. The recruiters also have no idea what the responsibility is for the jobs they are hiring for - it's a terrible place to bottleneck candidates on.

It sounds like everyone, including recruiters, are being sent on a snipe hunt.

The way I got my current job is that the company I applied for rejected my application and then hired a recruiter who brought me in with the same application.

The company essentially handed the recruiter $10k because they were too bad at reviewing their own applications.

After I scheduled an appointment which I realized was a "recruiter" the zoom link showed the local time zone for the recruiter was from some West African country. I cancelled the appointment.

This. I can't tell you how many times I've been contacted by a recruiter looking to fill a job that I myself am the hiring manager for or is within my reporting line. When recruiters can't even be bothered to look at the job, company and potentially hiring manager before contacting someone, the system is broken.

Investors for one. If these are larger companies, they will often inflate their actual hiring numbers to make it look like they are anticipating more growth than they are actually expecting.

But I certainly feel ripped off applying for jobs they never intended on filling. If they put up a lot of hoops to jump through to apply (submit a portfolio, set up an account, write a cover letter specific to our company), times that by the 1000 people who have applied, and it's an exorbitant amount of human time getting wasted.

The job market should be just that, a market, between buyers and sellers, not people who pretend to be buying in order to look like they've got money.

I know this analogy breaks down a little bit since this behavior does actually happen, sort of, in real life p2p markets but the point is, it sucks and if you've ever sold anything on fb marketplace you know how obnoxious it is dealing with people who demand a lot of you but do not intend to actually commit to buying what you're selling.

Investors maybe. Makes your company look better than it is.

> eminently reasonable

Companies feel like they have no choice, for two reasons:

1. Jurisdictions where workers must give minimum notice periods before leaving their prior employer - the worker accepts a competing offer, gives notice, waits out the notice period, then starts. And many workers often ask for additional unpaid time between jobs before starting (since no vacation days have been accrued yet at the new job).

2. Hiring happens by committee. In most companies, job candidates must be interviewed by, at the absolute minimum, an HR screener, the hiring manager, and the hiring skip-level; and usually also by people who will be peer teammates, plus an HR "culture" interview. If you need to pass a committee of 3-6 people, interviews must be scheduled with each member of the committee; at one committee member per week, that is 3-6 weeks.

6 weeks (1.5 months) plus background checks plus getting pay packages approved plus 30 day notice periods plus two weeks unpaid vacation is, yes, a multiple month endeavor at minimum to fill a role. The only way to fill a role within a week is to grant full hiring autonomy to the hiring manager and only hire people who are currently unemployed (and therefore have no notice period or desire to take more unpaid time before starting), which in most companies beyond early startup size, is a complete non-starter.

We are at the moment hiring for a L3 (no fresh graduate but someone with 3-5 years of experience). The role has been open for two months now (it was a backfill). I personally am in charge of the technical screen which is the second interview after the hiring manager. I am already getting a filtered set of candidates after the recruiter and the hiring manager review candidates. Of the 5 that have come my way, I’ve said yes to 1 person and 1 as a yes, pending another technical screen. We are not even wanting an exact match, nor are we expecting cure for cancer. Yes there are a lot of people looking for jobs but you don’t realize how many candidates are just not what their resumes portray. It takes forever to get someone competent in the pipeline and even then, you know nothing about their work ethic. The reason the pipeline is slow is because the candidate pool is flooded with over the top resumes that are not backed by actual talent and once you hire a wrong candidate it is extremely difficult to fire them, even with at will employment contracts.

Any manager will tell you, they’d rather not go through the long hiring process.

Most tech companies have a: - recruiter screen - tech screen - multiple interviews during an "onsite" round

Job is posted. You apply along with hundreds of other people. The recruiter/hiring manager needs to spend some time sifting through them along with juggling all the other tasks they have going on. Let's say that this takes 1-2 weeks. Some places may let the opening sit longer to get more applicants.

Several candidates are identified as possible fits. Recruiter reaches out to them to schedule the recruiter screen. Schedules need to line up. This likely takes 1-2 weeks until the recruiter screen happens.

The recruiter needs to schedule the tech screen after a successful recruiter screen. Again, schedules need to line up. This could take another 1-2 weeks.

Feedback needs to be submitted and then the onsite round is scheduled. This could take another 1-2 weeks.

The onsite round will have multiple interviewers. This means more people to collect feedback from which likely increases delays in getting that. A debrief is normally scheduled with everyone who interviewed them. But let's say one week to gather this and make a decision.

An offer is made. It takes some time to prepare and get sign off. There will be time to discuss with the recruiter to explain the details, plus some time needed for negotiation and thinking it over. This could be another 1-2 weeks.

Additionally, some candidates may want to ask for more time during these phases in order to prepare better or align their schedules. This pushes back the process for all other candidates if the company is hiring for a specific job in order to give all candidates a fair assessment against the pool.

Adding this all up, we arrive at 6-10 weeks.

True. But if your job is HR taking a long time to hire people and maintaining a high level of turnover is probably good for your job security. I don't think it is overt, but I have noticed that large orgs have a lot of HR process, small companies just try hard to maintain staff.

A lot of it has to do with how long it takes to find the right candidate. As someone who has been involved in a lot of hiring over the last 20 years, I can say there's been a huge shift within the last couple of years and open reqs get 10-25x the number of applicants, which instead of increasing choice in a positive way has just resulted in the average applicant quality decreasing. That means recruiters and hiring managers spend a LOT more time vetting and also invest in parallel candidates to try to hedge, because so many candidates applying are legitimately unqualified.

It may sound like I'm blaming candidates, and sometimes it might be fair to, but this is also a problem caused by companies not investing in training and hiring junior level employees, which means that people who are unqualified feel forced to apply for more senior roles, as those are the only roles hiring. It's honestly shocking how many candidates I've interviewed in my career who don't even meet the basic bar for the role they've applied for, and are essentially just hoping to get lucky and snag a high-paying tech job even if it ultimately results in them being terminated, they can collect a check for 3-9 months without delivering.

Mass applications, AI cheating, fraudulent representation (e.g. saying you are person X but are actually interviewing on behalf of person X who you are not), lying on resumes and in screeners, and even nation state attacks on hiring (see North Korea trying to farm tech jobs for money to get around sanctions), it's not great on the hiring side either.

Hiring the wrong person in corporate roles is very, very, very expensive. New hires are expected to be unproductive right out the gate, and it's hard to measure productivity in general, so you can easily end up in scenarios where it takes months to notice there's an issue and a year or more before you can get the person back out the door. So you really do have to double and triple check that a prospective hire is the right choice.

It can move faster than months, of course, when everyone's willing to prioritize it. But as anyone who's worked in hiring can tell you, the set of people who want hiring to move faster is much larger than the set of people who are willing to accept inconvenient interviews and fill out their feedback promptly.

You’re not even hearing back from the recruiter for 14 days if the job posting just went up. I mean it takes 1-2 weeks from the day you got told that you’re getting an offer to the day when you sign it.

Same, in the past it was much faster.

IMO the reason it takes longer now is because multiple people are getting interviewed simultaneously.

Considering job postings are getting 10x more resumes than before, I'm not surprised companies are hedging their bets and interviewing way more people for the same position.

3 months? Try 6. 7-9 rounds of interviews over a 6 month period. It's insane.

7-9 rounds just means 7-9 conversations. Just talking to a recruiter and the manager are 2 rounds. So 5-7 interviews that evaluate competency. You usually get the lower end unless you ended up giving mixed signals.

Sounds like asking a lot from candidates but unfortunately candidates lie a lot and the cost of hiring candidates that don’t match up to the requirements when paying $300k-$500k/year is just too high. Firing people is hard and takes a long time, especially in management roles. My personal guidance to managers is to have rounds match the level and experience required for the job. You can hire an intern with 2 rounds after the hiring manager conversation but a staff IC probably needs 5, directors need 7.

That sounds pretty insane to me.

IME (hiring, not interviewing) it's always been 3-4 rounds. First is an HR phone screen (usually 20-30 minutes on the phone), 2nd with hiring manager, 3rd with a senior engineer/architect, and a 4th with the hiring VP. And those are almost always combined into a single morning or afternoon(2+3 or 3+4) and the final round doesn't always happen (VP's choice).

It's an effect of "once burned twice shy". Every time there was a "bad" hire they had to change things. People add to the list but no one ever wants to advocate for a lighter process since they might be blamed for it.

It's just cruel

I would never date someone with standards low enough to date a person like me. Huge red flag.

China

n of 1 and all, but most jobs I've gotten that were worth getting were from personal reference. To the extent that applying through job sites seems like a real waste of time unless I'm really desperate.

And to reflect that, the jobs I've gotten were the ones you'd only accept if you were really desperate.

(Covid Times, man: Covid Times.)

Do you have a source on that?

It would be genuinely shocking to me if someone came up with evidence that the majority of jobs on job sites were made by companies that actually intended to hire the best candidate that applied through that site!

If they can't do even a vibe check without reading from a screen, I'd say yeah, it's worse than cheating.

I've also caught a few people using LLM cheating software accidentally revealing it.

If I were in a meeting with a current employee, and discovered that they were reading an LLM script at me instead of considering and responding to my questions, I would definitely tell them and their manager that this is unacceptable.

How do you build a network? I have a few previous employers, but they don't have any help for me directly, and I haven't had any luck by applying or reaching out to recruiters or agencies.

It's very weird. You would think the people posting the jobs might know for sure, although different posters may have different motivations. It seems something that should be amenable to some journalistic investigation, but while it's getting a lot of talk between job seekers, including in these comments, nobody seems to have tried to do such investigation to get some clues as to what's going on.

Most job growth for the past several years has been in the healthcare, leisure and hospitality, and construction sectors. Removing these sectors makes job growth negative for 2024 and 2025, and wipes out the majority of job growth in 2026. See https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/economy/spotl...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery

Business doing good doesn't automatically mean populations of humans are doing good themselves.

The article is talking about "The Economy" (read: stocks and bonds), not employment numbers. The market can both be awful for job seekers and great for capital owners.

Speculation, but: if tech over hired during COVID our section of the market could be experiencing a corrective slowdown while others are booming in aggregate.

Any citations are welcome on this for my source of truth knowledge graph. Thank you in advance.

Hey, historically your "employer" would flog you if you tried to change "jobs".

Yeah the homepage toplines are pure vibeslop, they didn't even bother touching their own homepage. Trust is instantly vacated. Next.

These sites are popping up to exploit job seekers because the legit alternatives (linkedin et all) blow.

https://basecareer.co/ is basically the same slop.