Comment by samdoesnothing 2 days ago
If the mods aren't going to enforce the rules what other options do we have? Serious question. This ad has been posted in 11/12 threads this year. Perhaps there should be a cooldown on the same posting after 3 months?
Job applicants are under enough stress as it is, they shouldn't be fooled into wasting their time applying to ghost jobs.
Thanks for your response :) In my experience almost all companies claim to respond to applications or inquiries but I expect most seekers would say it's more like 1/10.
It may be worth mentioning that you're continuing to open new positions and hire in the next thread. That would be (imo) a positive signal for others and would dispel these types of concerns. Because like others have said, they remember the companies who post over and over again and tend to not bother with them, under the assumption that they just aren't filling the position (if they even exist).
How do you propose that we enforce it, even if we had the resources to do so? We can't tell which job ads are real and which ones aren't, just as we can't tell which posters in "Who Wants to Be Hired" are real and which one's aren't. There's a lot of fraud and heartache on both sides of this transaction right now. Sorting wheat from chaff is an unsolved problem. To work on that, we'd have to become specialists in it, which is not going to happen.
If you want, you could take a look at some of my past explanations about this as well - they're listed in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45094610. If you do that, and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
The solution has been mentioned in the threads you linked, and I haven't seen any argument against it - let users share their experiences and/or question job postings in the replies. Heck, the author responded to my comment and had mine not been detached, people could have read the exchange and come to their own conclusions. You're simply protecting the companies with this type of one sided moderation. The way to combat fraud isn't to prevent people from speaking out against it.
If you aren't capable of telling what postings are real/not real (and fair enough, it's a hard problem) what makes you think you can do the same for the replies?
I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling like it's very one sided, and in the current market which heavily favours hirers over seekers it's just another thing going against the seekers. Who often have real concrete stressors like the threat of homelessness.
Either that or remove the rules that by your own words are unenforceable, so people aren't mislead into thinking this board is more curated than, say, indeed or LinkedIn.
> makes you think you can do the same for the replies
We can't, and that's the issue. There's no fair way of adjudicating which such complaints are true and valid, vs. which are partly true but distorted, vs. which are outright false.
It seems to me that the status quo is the least-bad feasible option, which is why we stick with it, even though of course it has downsides. I still think the Who Is Hiring threads are valuable, even with those downsides, and trying to do significantly better is one of those things it's important to say 'no' to. The problem is not that it wouldn't be valuable—it's that it would be valuable, but would consume too much of our limited resources and ultimately distract from the main goal of trying to run a good (or good-enough) forum.
I don't know if it's about trying to do significantly better, but rather who these threads are for. If they're for the seekers, you would let them speak freely about their experiences. If it's for the companies, it makes sense to censor replies. Unfortunately you're put in a position to make this choice no matter if you want to or not.
Thanks for listening to feedback :)
Hi! I happened to see this post before it was detached.
For a bit of additional context: we hire for multiple roles and have actually hired multiple people through these threads :)
We review every application by hand and get back to every single applicant, usually within 72 hours, despite thousands of LLM-generated spam/fraud applications. It takes a tremendous amount of time and energy, but we do it because we know how much time and energy candidates invest in applying to our open roles.
If you previously applied and didn't hear back, please shoot me an email so I can look into it: jared.silver@brilliant.org