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I've heard startup founders pretending to hire, like it's a common best-practice.

Personally, I don't think it's very honest, and I'm going to wonder what other honesty they have flexibility about.

I wonder whether any of the third-party job-posting sites has figured out ways to say you're not much hiring -- or only hiring/promoting internally, or only filling a funnel for possible future openings, or only hiring if a rare unicorn comes along -- without that looking negative to people who only want simpleton metrics.

Maybe the cooling of "growth" theatre startups will make it OK to sound like you're not "growing" right now.



The most obvious approach I can think of would be some sort of post-application questionnare and comparing that to the companie's job posting, sort of, stats.

Say, the company has a lot of job postings, but the all the applicants say they're auto-rejected. That's a decently clear indicator.

Also, if you link your linkedin/stackoverflow/github or something, there could be a more or less automatic way of evaluating you as a candidate in general and your fit for this/similar position, which could be fed back into the post-interview questionnare processing. Obviously, not that good a way to evaluate candidate fitness, but a way nonetheless.

Rings privacy alarm bells, but oh well. Someone could build a decentralized version of it which would work via a browser extension. And, actually, 3rd party hiring companies have a way better relationship with the companies hiring than with the candidates, so I very clearly can see this mechanism weilded against us.


When it happened at my last job it was definitely foreshadowing other malevolent behavior.




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