Ask HN: What's with the repeated job posts on "Who's hiring"?
68 rafavento 36 6/3/2025, 5:30:50 PM
I've been applying to some jobs (EM) that are posted on "Who's Hiring", getting rejected without even an interview and then see them posted again and again.
I'm ok with me not being the best candidate but I can't fathom the idea that not a single candidate was good enough in months.
What's going on here?
unless you (the royal you) are posting it for other motives other than hiring.
*unclear if experience from 5 years ago is relevant to current practice.
Lol, these interviews make me so uncomfortable.
https://www.reddit.com/r/recruiting/comments/1kzvlau/comment...
I was once interviewed by a girl who was probably not much more than an intern, I ended up explaining a couple things for her during our call; she didn't know AWS services had quotas, for instance. She was interviewing me for a Devops job that required 10 years (yeah, 10) of experience with AWS.
After our call, the CTO came back to me (we are somehow acquainted, that's why I applied there in the first place), to tell me the feedback he got from this woman is that I don't seem to know my stuff real well ... It's been two years and their team are mostly the same people, I don't think they ever hired anyone.
Big waste of time. A lot of people on these nu-companies are just LARPing, they do that until money runs out, blame it on "the economy" and move along.
How else are you supposed to hire people better then yourself?
- consuming time and attention from people who help them
- time spend checking and fixing their work
- additional maintenance costs from poorly thought out solutions
- time spent reproducing and fixing bugs
- lowering morale of better engineers
- creating whatever the opposite of “a culture of excellence” is
- consuming management time in performance management
- inability to interview or saying “yes” to even worse hires
As other posters said, if you get a bad hire (or even mediocre hire), it might be total negative - both because of negative contributions, but also because maybe the management only gave you one spot, and now you've given it to mediocre person, you no longer have a chance to giving to someone better.
Back when I was at a startup, we've were looking for the new people basically constantly. Very few people applied however (we were C++, not web, and in the constrained system...) and even fewer people passed, so we ended up with 1-2 people per year total.
As a hiring a manager, I posted a job offer in Who’s hiring, and doubt I’ll do it again anytime soon.
In my field of work, I am looking for skills other than software (maths, physics, engineering…). There were few qualified applicants coming from the thread. Most of them were nice. One candidate, whose background was unrelated to my field of work, got very offended when I told them it wasn’t the right fit.
This never happened when screening candidates that reached out other means (LinkedIn, Lever…)
On the other side, techniques recruiting is getting harder. They've long had to deal with applications that have nothing to do with the job, by people with no experience, and people who can't code. Now, AI's might be writing applications or sample code. On busy sites like HN, they might also just get many applications. Even a reasonable, hiring manager might have difficulty trusting an application enough for an interview.
Those are my two theories for most of it. Others include companies prioritizing culture fit, status, or job adds that are schemes. Some of these happen in other places.
I do have myself as a counter example but that’s small N and as usual always others are lazy ;)
It is like they are never interested in what I do know and experienced but picking some thing they pride themselves on.
Like I never ran into issues with file descriptors on Linux and interview was about C# development well senior level so I guess it is fine.
Other time well I have comp sci degree so for a software dev with C# in web development it is perfectly reasonable to ask math questions I wasn’t expecting and then conclude I wasn’t prepared and wasted their time.
Well one time it was about C# development and writing code using generics that one I most likely should have practiced more often but I don’t use it as much and it would take me couple hours to brush up on it to be proficient - but was shot down as I couldn’t remember the syntax correctly.
HR filters I probably haven’t seen from all the ones I never heard back from.
And if you look further there are enough of people who were actually hired because of this.
Though with a large pool you’d expect it to close.
Hope they are real jobs.