[narnarpapadaddy]

And to actually answer the question: 2 and 50.

You’re replacing half the staff each year. Any given month you expect to lose .5 and 25 employees respectively. With a lead time of 3-4 months in the former, that means during any given hiring cycle you expect to lose 1-2 employees. Anyone interviewing during slot is eligible, even if a role is not open _right that second_. For the latter, 25-50.

One thing applicants don’t realize is that by keeping the pipeline full I can fill a position “immediately” upon vacancy. If it had to start up a hiring pipeline it’d take 3 months. This means that in aggregate the hiring process is _more efficient_ than it otherwise would be. This means that _you get hired_ more quickly than you otherwise would. A cold-start wouldn’t necessarily improve your odds, it’d just make the whole process longer and more expensive for everyone.

[rkeene2]

You are wrong.

It improves the efficiency for the company at the expense of all of the people who spent time applying for something other than what was stated.

For example, you could not tell them that you would or would not hire them after a certain point in time -- which is something they will ask about and you will be unable to disclose, and so you'll wrap your lie in some vague language.

If these kinds of pipeline hirings were disclosed as such then your math would be correct. But, as stated, the purposeful information asymmetry (lying by another name) means that you are externalizing the uncertainty to the job-seeker.

You're making a trade-off, not getting a free lunch -- that trade-off is just at the expense of someone you are not legally obligated to expose this to.

It isn't nice.

(disclaimer: I've never done it, but I have talked to people who have; additionally I've never applied to a ghost/pipeline rec)

[narnarpapadaddy]

Agree to disagree.

My experience is that it’s quite a bit more nuanced and complex than that.

The uncertainty works both ways. I don’t know at the moment I open a position when or if someone qualified will apply or be hired. I don’t even know with precision exactly when positions open up. How long is the grace period for taking down open job positions after one is filled? 3 days? 1? An hour? Just the mechanics of filling out HR paperwork means there’s lag between reality and the job posting. If I’m constantly opening/closing positions (as one would be at a team size of 500) there’s just as much chance of a position actually being open and not having a listing as the other way around if I’m attempting to always update the posting.

I do know that a chunk of applicants will be baristas, uber drivers, and construction works, another chunk will have keyword-optimized resumes that are incomprehensible, and many more will simply be too junior for a role because everyone is aiming high hoping to make to their next move. Employers are absolutely flooded with garbage.

Similarly, when trying to hire I spend most of my time on it between resume reviews, phone screenings, and actual interviews. It’s incredibly labor intensive to hire good engineers and/or technical managers. I’m working just as hard as the applicants.

I don’t use vague language. If it’s the case that I don’t have a position open at the moment of a phone screen, I tell an applicant when and how many positions I expect to have open.

And it’s not just the time spent on the process. It takes weeks to months to restart the process after it’s shut down. You have to update job descriptions, train your talent team on what to look for in resumes, train engineers on how to do technical interviews, and may sure they are “calibrated”. If they are out of practice they fumble the interviews and the company looks bad to applicants, and they tend over-estimate an interviewee’s performance because they don’t have a recent point of comparison to work with. This means I have to do 5-10 throw-away interviews to grease the wheels. If I fully stopped a pipeline and treated each position as a special snowflake, and everyone else in the world did the same, it’d just create even _more_ overhead for all parties involved.

I’m not saying it’s a good system. But humans are human and on balance any system is going to be gamed. There’s no way around that. For every one applicant who’s only applying to jobs they are interested in and qualified for there's 10 more just spamming every posting they come across. As a hiring manager I have to deal with that reality. The only way I know to reduce that overhead is to not add more by grinding the hiring pipeline to a halt whenever a position is filled.

[rkeene2]

As a hiring manager you are being paid to do that work, while the job-seeker is doing it on speculation. These are not equal positions, even though your falsely equate them.

Think about this: If you are not externalizing the costs, why not disclose in the job listing that this job posting does not correspond to a job opening ? What do the company gain ? What does the job-seeker lose ?

As someone who has done hundreds of interviews and built a team from the ground up for my current startup as well as others, the rest of your post just strikes me as hyperbole and excuses.

[narnarpapadaddy]

I can’t speak to your experience. If you haven’t been completely inundated with junk applications you’ve discovered a process I never have, and I would love to hear about it. How do you go about hiring at scale?

100s of interviews a month is typical for my org. If you believe that’s hyperbole, I don’t know what to say. Believe as you wish.