This statistic constantly confuses people who haven't done hiring.

If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that. At a large or fast growing company, we might never stop interviewing and hiring senior software engineers. The listing stays open for a year or more.

There are also specialty roles where hiring takes months. I've had niche roles open where we didn't get any applicants with any experience on the topic for over 90 days on multiple occasions.

So you should apply to old job postings? Consensus in LATAM seems to be, they just forgot to take them down and they already have someone or in Latin America if you repost the same opening over and over the consensus seems to be the company is toxic they have a turnover problem, maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people

I was recently job searching and roughly 50% of all jobs ghosted me. Just an automated email and then... silence. And when applying via LinkedIn only ~5% of companies even opened my application.

I can believe that your company has a good reason for keeping the job up, but I also know that some job ads are black holes were no one bothers to do the bare minimum including taking the posting down. I have no idea how to differentiate one from the other.

As someone with a niche job and title (and comes pretty decorated), I would expect to hear back on my applications more often and yet I get nothing either. There are some prominent companies (cough Figma, Smartsheet, Stripe cough) who literally have had an open role for exactly my job for nearly 3+ years without filling it.

Maybe I'm thinking a bit too much of myself, but it doesn't seem like they are that interested in really filling it.

Then you'd still only have a small number of roles up, not the thousands of positions the article is showing for some companies. They'd be hiring hundreds of thousands a year if they were constantly interviewing for all of them, and I don't believe O'Reilly Auto Parts is recruiting people as quickly as a nation at war.

The article is a content marketing piece. The goal is to attract attention, not necessarily to be precise or accurate

Another confounder is the opposite. When I've been hiring I'd often open up different public recs for the same role to cast a broader net. Some people self identify with certain terms and may not realize they'd be a fit.

So what would happen is I'd have say 10 real openings, I may have 5 different job postings, and all of them would stay open until I filled all 10 openings.

I'm curious, for the niche or senior roles, have you personally read through the resumes or do you depend on the recruiter? I hear you on the entry and early-career jobs, but I see Director and VP roles also open for months. With all the layoffs, it's hard to belief there is not SOME talent in there worth hiring or at least training up.

> If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that. At a large or fast growing company, we might never stop interviewing and hiring senior software engineers. The listing stays open for a year or more.

How on earth am I, a potential job seeker, supposed to be able to figure out if your year-old job posting is still up because you: couldn't find anyone after a year, are constantly hiring and never take it down, actually hired your quota six months ago and HR forgot to take the listing down, the job listing isn't for a real job and is just a trap to collect resumes, the listing is for a ghost job to placate the overworked current staff, some other reason?

You also have to deal with delusional hiring managers. A few months ago I remember seeing a comment on here from someone who had kept job listings up for years while hiring because he couldn't find anyone with the "right experience". Clearly there was no actual imminent need to fill the role and he was just hoping that some superstar would stumble across it, but he kept insisting that this counted as "really hiring for the role".

This is exactly why hiring is such a mess, lazy managers who don't want to repost job listings or put any effort into hiring. Job seekers need to apply to thousands of jobs because they have no way of knowing if a company is actually hiring. Which means hiring managers (who we have already established are lazy) now are incentivised to find ways to not look at resumes.

having experienced the UK & US markets - I can tell you within the startup cohort those using lever / Ashby etc - it's not that they have multiple positions - but they're tryna pull an illusion of growth specially in the UK market.

because luckily in the UK market - companies books are open to the public.

Can’t be bothered to update a job ad on your own websites. Can’t be bothered to respond to applicants.

WTF do these people doing hiring actually do?

I mean, naïvely you’d think encouraging more higher quality applicants would be important somehow, but no.

This doesn't make any sense. You try to explain a 28% by arguing based on edge cases.

agree. am working somewhere that does the same. we can't find enough of the right engineers to join and it's been a long/slow journey. hiring can be tough for both sides (speaking of those looking for the other side).

That's fair but still indicates shortage, no?

> We leave it open and collect resumes through that.

This is really shitty behavior. If you aren't hiring, remove the posting.

I see this for experienced roles too, especially where pay isn't super competitive. If you need a lead software engineer in a certain city for a certain salary, that often means waiting months for them to come across it. 10 junior engineers may apply but ultimately they just can't perform the role required

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I think people just latch onto ideas that try to simplify and make sense of frustrating situations where they dont have control. "Ghost jobs" are thing to blame now, for a while is was that taxcode thing for software engineers.

I don't think you've actually done any hiring.

Companies don't need a "software engineer" x100.

Large companies have teams, and every team puts out a different job description based on their particular requirements, stack, desired experience, etc.

I've never encountered a scenario where someone wants engineers in bulk and then they'll decide where to place them within the organization.

Your response tells me you haven’t done much hiring, if at all, or, even if you have, you haven’t done it very well. You’re being unnecessarily defensive. Someone who actually knows what they’re doing, when hiring multiple people, keeps a count of the positions and, if they want to be transparent, updates it as people are hired and onboarded. It’s not that hard.