> 3) I've seen big and small companies posting over and over the same job ad. For example a big consulting group has been posting the exact same job for more than a year (really) on linkedin and elsewhere - each time there are more than 100+ applicants on linkedin.

At the same time I’ve seen on the other end just endless unqualified applicants. Dozens and dozens of people who don’t pass a phone screening. Some jobs are tough to find the right applicant, or you’re looking in an area of high competition for a specific talent.

The issue with that response is that a random posting on LinkedIn isn't how you fill those positions though. Cookie cutter jobs sites are for cookie cutter jobs.

The question then becomes "how are applicants getting to the phone screening to begin with?"

Because from what I can tell, it seems like a complete toss up whether a qualified/unqualified applicant will even get that far, let alone how much further in the progress they'll get. I get the distinct feeling that most filtering systems are just dropping a lot of great candidates at the first hurdle, and then letting a bunch of unqualified ones through to the later rounds.

Have you ever had a stack for 100 resumes and had to figure out who to interview for the one position? You need to get rid of at least 80% quickly before it is worth your while to read them in more detail - that still leaves 20 to read, but that is way too much, now you are just looking for people who can probably do the job or meets any diversity requirements HR might have (and would be better, but you will interview anyone who lets you prove to HR you tried before hiring whoever comes out on top).

HR/HR software should be doing the first pass to filter that stack of 100 down and only giving you relevant candidates.

> did not even provide feedback after a rejection

Years ago, when I was heavily involved in hiring, I asked our CTO whether we can provide feedback to rejected candidates, because it could benefit them. The CTO answered that it may become a legal quagmire if a candidate decides to sue due to perceived discrimination, or something, based on the feedback, even without any merit. The probability is very low but the downside is very bad. So we had to abstain from giving feedback :(

How can you be discriminated on a technical level? Is there even a case of a candidate who sued a company at a technical stage we are aware of? This seems like a weak argument considering the hassle of time and potential legal fees, especially for someone who is looking for a job? Although I could understand why a candidate would try to bring a case like this in the US.

Anyhow, it's not even the feedback the problem, it is that I have enough work experience to understand some of those startups seem to operate on a thin line between what is a technical assignment related directly to their core tech and getting free consultancy. The least they could provide to candidates who have involved time is what was expected.

Just because it never happened doesn't mean it cannot.

Sure it is a weak argument, but when you get to cite that possibility and thus save 10 minutes of time creating more detailed feedback (which may or may not be used).

Yeah it's a variant on "anything you say can be used against you."

Any feedback you give can potentially be twisted to support some argument of unfair treatment. Even if it's frivolous, employers don't want to spend time dealing with that. So they just say nothing.

What is the point of a fake recruiting agency? I've heard claim of this but I wonder what the endgame is. Is it to harvest contacts? Scam people? Waste people's time?

One of the endgames is scamming. One that's been around for a few years, seemingly getting bigger as time goes on, goes something like:

1. Slurp up contact information, focusing on people trying to break into a cushier lifestyle (data entry, entry level analysts, LLM evaluation in some specialized domain, ...).

2. Cold-contact them about being eligible for one of many possible remote jobs, with high hourly rates listed (something specify, like a "salary" of $38.51/hr). They'll either have a legitimate-at-first-glance looking website (usually the ownership has been transferred a few days prior, sometimes a few months, but one of the operators seemed to have a pool of domains they'd been letting age for years to throw you off a bit more), or they'll spoof the spelling of a real company when they text/email you.

3. Go through some form of hiring process. It's as little effort as they can put in on their end to keep the semblance of them being a real company.

4. Then this turns into normal check fraud. Your cushy remote job requires expensive office supplies, so they "provide" those. A local member of the gang delivers fake equipment in real boxes. You pay $5k or something out of the $7k fake check they previously sent, the rest supposedly being a signing bonus.

AFAICT, many tens of thousands of people have gotten as far as step 4, and a decent fraction have fallen for the whole charade. If you're struggling to get a real job out of college and haven't seen what the normal interview process looks like, the confirmation bias (and desperation) combined with lack of real-world experience can cloud your judgement.

There are tons of other endgames. Not all are quite that nefarious, but none are good.

My bet is the collection and reselling of personal information, legally or illegally. Many (most?) people do put their real name, real address, real phone number and real email on their resume. You automate this on linkedin and can get a lot of CVs, I don't think this is a crazy idea.

The same vendors that sell Linkedin data in bulk include this level of personal information (phones, personal/work emails, addresses). Perhaps this is how they mine the data they sell, but I think it's more likely they take use the information scraped from Linkedin and send it to other vendors to enrich it with personal information.

This is exactly what's happening. My phone number and email are being targeted now.

I've sent out hundreds of applications over my career and never had this problem until now.

You got the job, but you'll need to pay a $50 fee for a background check!

And voila, they have stolen $50.

>1) There are so much BS jobs in BS companies it's hard to understand if those are even companies doing real thing (cf. David Graeber)

This time last year I was searching for a new job, something I've done a few times at this point in my career, and this was such a pronounced thing that I had not experienced in any of my previous searches. It felt so strange, like walking through some funhouse where I had to be skeptical of every turn and decision lest I walk face first into a mirror.

I eventually found a great job with a great team at a smaller company that I had some initial reservations about and even held back on applying from at first. Maybe it's just an additional symptom of (4), but if this is the future of finding employment it is a bleak one.

Not sure how old you are but this is all exactly how it was in 2002-2003 for the .com crash, only the # of people who had been laid off was massively larger.

We have HN threads about company "X laid off Y%". Back then it was "Company X has folded and laid off 100%", over and over and over again.

some notes from my ~4 month looking so far (also after a >half-year sabbatical):

* one company (behind 2 levels of middlemen) had "invented" some utopian form of LLMized auto-translate framework X into framework Y AND by-the-way, chop the monolith into microservices - so they needed "software curators", not programmers? But expert ones!

* some middleman company, before anything else, sent me to "AI"-led interview, which asks questions and records my answers. 1-2 minutes per question. Question 1: how would you write a streaming service in python?

* 50% of all job posting are either betting, crypto, or both. Unless something even more bogus

* 75% try to fit "AI", "ML", or "LLM" in the requirements somehow - for the sake of it being there?

* 20% of job postings repeat forever. Biting on them does not do much

* 70% of (my well intended) job applications go unanswered.. cannot know if they are real or not, or is it ageism? or blind keyword-matching? Who-knows..

* only 5% lead to initial interview ;

* one of the hopefuls, went further into tech/coding check, which passed but "we decided to change requirements of the job"

* etc. Complete mess

Ah. Have fun, i'll keep trying :)