If you talk about YC work at a startup, I can tell you that when hiring from that site that 99% of applicants didn't read our job description and missed to realise that they are not qualified. This leads to candidates not getting a response.

At least for software engineering, your job ads aren't very specific. E.g. this one:

https://angel.co/company/shipamax/jobs/2198087-backend-devel...

There are a lot of compsci grads who have three years of experience as software engineers and some experience with Javascript or Typescript. If you're looking to get fewer unsuitable applications, I'd recommend fleshing the JD out a bit. As it stands probably the majority of software engineers in London are 'qualified' according to the criteria in the ad.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing. I hope I was not doing that but it is always possible.

Most of the jobs are fake, swathes of potential new hires is a positive signal to investors as the ship is going down.

Would be interesting to hear more about this. You mention fake jobs. Do you mean companies advertise vacancies but have no intention of hiring, or do they actually hire but only have useless work for the new employees?

I know this way of job posts from my former company. They had a lot of applications out there, but had a STOP to get new employees. This lasts more than 6 months. I asked the HR-manager about it, and he told me that all the offers are out there to not show the internal problem. This was more than 10 years ago in Germany. Seems nothing changed, even not in other countries.