You sure about that? Maybe they wanted an easy way to tell people no. Maybe that 1/20 requirement was very heavily weighted compared to the other 19. Maybe they didn't really want to hire anyone at all or wanted to hire a specific person, but had to make a job posting for political/legal/policy reasons...

Most of our decisions (especially to pass) have nothing to do with the candidate. And they have no way to know, so instead they over-analyze their resume or what was said during the interview to try to extract some kind of clue. Which is 99% wrong.

Some examples to give you an idea:

- we like you, you did well at the interview. But we have one position open right now, and Joe, who is the star engineer at our competitor, is making signs that he'd be willing to finally join us. We have been courting him for two years. So we put your application on hold, until Joe makes a move. Nothing you can do, and we sure won't tell you, in case Joe doesn't jump ship, and then we call you back as if nothing had happened.

- we like you, but we are about to close a new contract in the middle of Texas. If that contract closes, we'll need to hire someone ASAP there, instead of here. So while technically the position we have is here, we are waiting just a bit to see if the contract closes and if we need to shift our hiring. We should know this week, so no point in telling you anything. One week later, it turns out the contract is not signed yet, but it looks really close. Let's wait another week, we should know for sure by then... A month goes by...

etc.

BOTH of your examples are things that in no way whatsoever make you liable legally and you have no reason not to tell the candidate in either situation. You could literally tell the candidate even vaguely that there might be issues that will take awhile to clear up before the company can make a hiring decision. You can vaguely say that these are based on internal business processes that you aren't at liberty to explain.

Please TELL the candidate that they did well and you would hire them and might be interested in hiring them in the future if not for 'vague thing that lets the candidate know it is the company and not you'. This is incredibly frustrating and there is no reason for lying about it.

My recommendation: If they delay or have excuses then don't bother. How they treat you before is how they treat you after. My rule for professional communications is 24-72 hours.

From the perspective of running several consulting/job-shop types of business, this happens all the time from clients/customers/prospects (who are effectively employers, and are in very analogous positions here).

We'll be going along through the process of sales, project definition, quoting, etc, and then all of a sudden they just go silent. No reason, no explanation, just ghosted. For days, weeks or months.

Then, suddenly, with no warning or explanation, they call/email again, and the process picks up as if not a day has passed -- the only difference is often they are in a bigger rush and want the project more. (seen similar with VCs too)

So what happened? Almost anything. Other business have their own priorities, and their own fires to put out, and can often quickly get distracted from a project.

The difference is one of perspective. For us the employee or service provider, this job is a critical priority. For them, it's one of many, even for top priority projects.

It's just not the same sense of urgency from different sides of the table. I've learned (after way too much anxiety) to just accept and ignore it -- mostly.

And the times I couldn't just ignore it and felt that I had to do something, and only barely managed to hold myself back? Almost always glad I played it cool (even if I wasn't cool inside my head).

YMMV

I just don't put this int the category of disrespect, but of "they've probably got their own problems, so I ought to have a bit of compassion".

(If I put any unannounced hiatus in the sales process in the disrespect category, I'd have very few clients left, as I generally fire clients that treat us with any significant disrespect.)

It'd certainly be nicer if they were more forthcoming, but I've seen it in two industries, software & manufacturing, and it just seems that

1) they're writing the checks and determining the schedule, and 2) their schedule is often determined by THEIR clients, and when that has a hiccough, the entire downstream supply chain gets a cold.

I've just found it better for everyone to be sanguine.

Of course, if you are using a proverbial “you”, my comment doesn’t apply.

I've applied to jobs that required a long and tedious hiring process and in the end unfortunatley I didn't get hired, but I also had nice HR drones contacting me to provide a thorough review of my application.

Regardless of your decision process, if you don't give any feedback to those job seekers you turned down then you are the problem. The reason why candidates overanalyze stuff is because you left a wide gaping hole by providing no feedback.

Moving the goalpost to more specific information, weakens the employer position. Now they are no longer interviewing potentially qualified people, but interviewing people trying to intentionally pass themselves off as specializing in a few skills. Weak hiring practices are the norm, so the strategy of hiding information (the most valuable skills) benefits the employers. People are very good at faking skills at a cursory (or specific depth, like side projects), which is part of the reason Headhunters are derided, prepping both sides to fail for their own commission.

That's great, but others do want it and also find any feedback to be very helpful.

Of course, it's also plausible that they just never took the posting down.

Either way -- in tech (and for some reason more so than in other industries) -- when it comes to hiring, it's head games all up and down. And generally to an extent far more than can really be called "necessary".

Contrast that with a large company with a specific HR department that is in charge of taking a job requirement sheet and finding and filtering candidates. These people have no idea what any of these technologies are, so for them it's a liability on their ass if they let people through that don't satisfy the "requirements". Managers, when you write up "requirements" and that is being sent to an HR department, keep in mind you might want to move some of those to a "nice to have" category.

That being said, there ARE competent, non-technical HR departments that do understand technical hiring.

Edit: Ohh... I wanted to add too, it's nice being in a startup where you really don't just "leave it up for a year". In a startup each and every candidate is literally needed when it's posted. It's kinda crazy and shows just how much larger companies hire just to hire if they can just sit on positions for a long time. Are they really "needed" if the position can go unfilled for an entire year?

Apparently they gave her a list of questions and answers. The questions were structured so that none of the answers were open-ended. ("What is the OSI seven layer model? What is a Unix signal?")

So, yeah, I'm not sure I would call it a real interview, but sometimes HR does get called upon to screen candidates.

But yeah, for the most part, those kinds of questions help. It does depend on what your needs are.

I've been posting this for ages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18358038

We have well over a hundred people doing that sort of stuff.

This idea of "filling" a "position" is wrong. There is a need for competent technical staff who can contribute to the team. We hire them as we find them. There isn't a fixed number of slots to fill with warm bodies.

I've been part of a hiring process that took a couple months (and by the end had management breathing down our necks to just hire -someone-), but that was because we were hiring into an out-of-the-way location that generally lacked the skills locally that we were looking for. Neither of which would apply to FAANG.

I would add be more general if possible. Someone with 5 years of postgres sql will pick up sql server pretty quickly. So maybe just: Relational Database experience. Somebody who has used 5 different ui frameworks will pick up the whichever you use pretty quickly. So perhaps: Web UI development. Etc.

I have a feeling this isn't any different at a startup.

They can only really reject you for lack of qualifications for such a job ad by law so that's probably what happened. If it was open for a while, they probably have a few internal candidates they needed it for.

I know of at least one person at a fairly well known UK company that had to undergo the same waiting process.

Generally if the position is ultra-specific compared to their other postings, it's for someone they have in mind.

applying to employer sponsors green card though does require proof of lack of local hires, and job reqs that are created to prove this often go to this crazy level and have to be met 100%.

Fake job openings to keep HR people busy?

Also I think you can drop the English requirement as most people willing to go to China will speak English (it is certainly not independent).

With this corrected, we get around 0.5 which still means it is unlikely they find someone.

So I get where you are coming from, but not having the 1/20 requirement is a much easier excuse than explaining why they don't want someone who thinks it's ok to do this.

The only way in which this bothers me is that these (I assume) fake, unfilled jobs are used for political reasons. But that's a global problem.