I wonder if companies are now more likely to keep those postings open despite not actually hiring. I’m personally (and of course anecdotally) aware of a number of such cases.
Open job postings have no downside to the company, but a lot of upside:
- You can tell overworked employees that reinforcements are due soon.
- You can tell the government to ease visa requirements to increase your worker supply (so you can pay lower salaries)
- You signal (to the market, your employees and applicants) that you're a successful company in need of talent at literally no cost.
Its not just a "now" thing, been going on for at least 20 years and probably longer. I worked all my career at small companies and generally there was little to no interviewing for any of our so-called "open positions". The last company I worked at was in a defacto hiring freeze most of the time I was there; for about 2 years I was the last IC hire they had made, and some people left too. The whole time we had multiple open positions advertised. We did cycle through a few contractors which seemed all that management was interested in.
So I don't know what bigtech does, but smalltech just seems to use open positions to signal "we're healthy" or just forget they even have them out there.
And population is growing all the time so that will make new openings positions too, but it doesn't necessarily translate into higher percent employment.
