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Did they ghost you?

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Re: Did they ghost you?

#141

Post by hunterpayne »

derektank wrote: post #17
nekusar wrote: post #3

The real answer is that many jobbads are fraudulent. And fraudulent job ads should be handled the same way a fraudulent advertisement for a good is handled: you either make good and prove hiring, or you're tried for felony fraud.

What do you mean by “make good” and “prove hiring” operationally? Say for example, a company posts 10 job openings, fills 9 of them, but for the tenth, they don’t receive good candidates initially, the hiring manager has to go back to their leadership and negotiate a higher salary for the position, it goes through HR, they update the PD, they do a round of interviews with two good candidates, but then the hiring mana…

"What do you mean by “make good” and “prove hiring” operationally?"

We aren't worried about your case. We are worried about ID theft rings who harvest information from CVs sent to fake job ads. If you hire for even a fraction of your ads and you are engaged in any sort of legitimate business (where the revenue doesn't come from the CVs or information harvested from them), we aren't worried about that.

Re: Did they ghost you?

#142

Post by FireBeyond »

atum47 wrote: post #109

There were two companies posting on hn some time ago that I suspect was just gathering training data (asking for a code challenge or to answer 2 questions about 60 seconds long answering some bs). I feel like we should denounce those as well. Posting jobs that don't actually exists. Specially those that post month after month.

Let's take a moment to talk about Wellfound, formerly AngelList.

I think Wellfound (f/k/a AngelList) is doing something similar.

The jobs advertised on there are real...

I'd been on the job market four months. Every day I did the rounds: Levels, Wellfound, YC/jobs, Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn.

It is what it is, as a crappy jobs market.

Wellfound? I didn't ever hear from anything from their job ads.I'm pretty certain that whatever Wellfound/AngelList was, it has become a company that just markets their resume writing services, resume review services, all sorts of other services that draw in your money somehow.

Why do I say that?

120+ applications on Wellfound since then. Crickets. Absolutely nothing.

One day I got an email, "Your profile has been viewed!". Weird, never seen an email like that from Wellfound. Indeed, "You have 1 profile view in the last 90 days".

Huh. 120+ applications, 120+ times me answering filling out Wellfound's content questions on "why you would be a good fit for this role", "tell us about x and y and z", no interviews, no contact, only ONE company has ever even viewed my profile (and for what it's worth, it's not a company that has any positions open).

Well, maybe my answers suck, you say. Maybe my resume isn't as impressive as I think it is.

But similar answers and the same resume get me fairly steady hits on every other site I mentioned, I've got to multiple final rounds, I've been explicitly told I was hirable, I was just the number two, I was "in the top three".

And to be clear, many of the companies I see on WF are advertising on other sites too.

My suspicion? WF DOES take job listings, but they also harvest them from other sites - the job is real, but there's no-one from the employer reviewing the applications to their "phantom" job at Wellfound... and meanwhile all people like me are doing is providing content for WF to harvest and train models for their real business model: AI-driven resume writing and review service and other products.

My AI video interview? Viewed... zero times.

Huh.

Re: Did they ghost you?

#143

Post by indrora »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #38
arcade79 wrote: post #10

Anecdotal, I know, but I was ghosted by Google back in 2004-2005 or thereabouts. Back and forth with a recruiter, who promised me that she would book phone screens. Then heard nothing. Pinged her repeatedly. Nothing. A few years later got another Google recruiter after me. Ended up getting hired in 2008. Looked up the previous recruiter. Her last day at the company was the day she promised she would book phone screen…

A few years ago I was "between roles" and applied for a developer position at Roku. For a short time they seemed moderately interested, and I exchanged a few emails with a senior in-house recruiter. And then they went completely quiet - no response to my follow-up emails. So I just put it behine me and got on with looking for a job. Just over a year later I received an email from another in-house recruiter at Roku, t…

I have a leaderboard of some of the longest turn-around times from initial contact to rejection. Thus far the winners (if you can call them that) have been:

Docusign (4 YEARS); Nintendo (34 months); Google (30 months); Starbucks (22 months); Netflix (18 months); Astral (13 months); Snowflake (8 months)

But I also have a short list of shortest turn-around times. I say this because some of them are truly insane:

GitHub (3 hours); Valve (4 hours, but it was a real human with actual comments); Lockheed martin (2 hours); UserTesting (1 hour); Mozilla (30 minutes); Cloudflare (-2 minutes); Matterport (0 minutes)

The -2 minutes you see there is one of the most insane things I've ever experienced: As I'm filling in the application, I get an email simultaneously thanking me for going throug the recruitment process but saying they "reviewed my application" (that hadn't even been fully submitted yet) and that I wasn't a good fit for the role.

Matterport wins the award for "well at least they're not bullshitting" -- as soon as I had submitted the application, I didn't even get an email saying thank you, just a straight up dialog box saying "You won't be considered for this position."

My worst experience was with Microsoft. Somewhere, their system is designed such that if you ever fall out of the standard process, you're "rejected" -- I have more rejection emails for a position I ended up getting (which got canned within the year, ironically enough) than any other kind of email, including daily emails with the recruiter and hiring manager. I got an email telling me "sorry no thanks" *after* I had already signed the paperwork.

Re: Did they ghost you?

#144

Post by FireBeyond »

wombatpm wrote: post #29
derektank wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by “make good” and “prove hiring” operationally? Say for example, a company posts 10 job openings, fills 9 of them, but for the tenth, they don’t receive good candidates initially, the hiring manager has to go back to their leadership and negotiate a higher salary for the position, it goes through HR, they update the PD, they do a round of interviews with two good candidates, but then the hiring mana…

Then should be a paper trail of the position, and a final decision by a person to not fill the position. I feel that as part of unemployment insurance all job postings should tie back to a canonical job position registered with the state with mandatory reporting of applications received,number of interviews conducted,date hired or date position withdrawn, and final dispensation: external hire, internal hire, contract…

I mean companies also already feel quite content bullshitting DOL/ESD with "reason for termination of employment" - I've had multiple friends deal with "was fired for cause" appeal this only to have the employer no-show the hearing or actually admit "no, there wasn't cause", generally with no consequence.

Re: Did they ghost you?

#145

Post by mlinhares »

smnscu wrote: post #110
arcade79 wrote: post #10

Anecdotal, I know, but I was ghosted by Google back in 2004-2005 or thereabouts. Back and forth with a recruiter, who promised me that she would book phone screens. Then heard nothing. Pinged her repeatedly. Nothing. A few years later got another Google recruiter after me. Ended up getting hired in 2008. Looked up the previous recruiter. Her last day at the company was the day she promised she would book phone screen…

I am building an interviewing and hiring platform ( https://coderba.se/ ) but I've also hired/interviewed and shaped hiring processes at several companies before. It's ridiculous how easy it is to account for such trivial edge cases, yet most people just... dont. A big part of it is that, in spite of frequent chest beating about how "hiring is [one of] the most important thing[s] we do", the actual process is half-as…

The chance of a single hire being a make it or break it for the the business is pretty much null, so a single recruiter not having continuity in the processes they were doing once they get fired isn't really something to optimize for.

Re: Did they ghost you?

#146

Post by wewewedxfgdf »

syntaxing wrote: post #65

I had a Meta recruiter talking to me a while back (maybe 5 years) and she ghosted me. Found her obituary online a couple weeks later. Recently, had another Meta recruiter ghost me but that’s because of the Meta layoff round robin. Probably for the better since FRL has more or less been gutted due to AI focus.

The most literal ghosting possible.

Re: Did they ghost you?

#147

Post by efilife »

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #4

Based on the strange emoji use in place of some buttons, I'm guessing this is vibe coded- and a lot of this is really nice looking front end - great color, topography, border styles... Would be interested to know how much intervention there was or if this is where we are

The font is a dead giveaway

The one used in "A public record of professional silence." specifically

Re: Did they ghost you?

#148

Post by Spooky23 »

arcade79 wrote: post #10

Anecdotal, I know, but I was ghosted by Google back in 2004-2005 or thereabouts. Back and forth with a recruiter, who promised me that she would book phone screens. Then heard nothing. Pinged her repeatedly. Nothing. A few years later got another Google recruiter after me. Ended up getting hired in 2008. Looked up the previous recruiter. Her last day at the company was the day she promised she would book phone screen…

I had a similar experience. In my case, they gave me a few dates to fly out and do some sort of final boss talent show interview. Then… nothing.

I got the sense it was some internal political drama but maybe the recruiter disappeared… that honestly didn’t occur to me, and up until that point it was a pretty awesome and interesting process.

Re: Did they ghost you?

#150

Post by reactordev »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #124
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #43

Those are quite small sample sizes. I assume that this is supposed to grow? In my experience, I was usually ghosted (sometimes, rather brutally). In a couple of instances, I was able to get the companies to confirm that I was toast, but only after I bugged them.

Did follow ups ever help anyone get a job?

Sometimes it can help articulate your stance after the fact. I’ve used it to thank the panel and to clarify a few of my answers so they had something to research. I have also used it to pull the emergency escape hatch and thank them for their time.
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