I talked to a hiring manager friend at a big company you've definitely heard of. I was looking for a job so I sent him a link to one of his jobs and said "can I interview for this?"

He said: Oh, I have 23 recs on the job site but none of them are open. They just keep them there to make us look like we're still hiring like crazy.

Yeah, common knowledge sadly. Can get even worse, a friend had recently an interview with a, not-so-well-known, but you heard of them company and they didn't do any face to face interview, just AI driven via email, all steps. When he failed a step: they offered him some credits on the platform, literally a funnel via a job post (it's a dev platform).

This is called ghost jobs. More than 90% of posted jobs are like this.

In HN's Who's Hiring it is very close to 100%, so I don't look at that thread anymore.

The solution: use AI robots for jobs.