Quiet hirings are a thing now too…
Companies are putting up postings for positions they don’t have any intention of filling any time soon.
This way when they are ready to hire, they finally look at resumes and can start scheduling interviews ASAP. It’s shifting all the wait time of the process to applicants.
Combine the two, and you end up with companies being able to maintain bare minimum staffing regardless of workload without having to ever pay severance packages.
It’s actually really smart, as long as you don’t have the tiniest shred of empathy and think of workers as machines and not people.
That’s capitalism.
It only works when the government backs citizens over companies. Because a public company is required to put profits over everything else.
So there needs to be regulations getting passed to keep blocking whatever new bullshit someone set up.
All it would take would be requiring companies to have a start/end date on applications and only be able to hire from applications received in that window.
It’s already how the federal government does hirings. The government gets a lot of shit, but they’ve got one of the best unions around.
It also doesn’t work in a tight labor market. This happened to me, I just laughed and blocked them, because in the 6 months it took them to get around to me I already had a better paying job with a competitor.
Be careful
This exact thing happened at one place I worked years ago: the old plant manager retired so they sent out an interim manager from their home location states away from our facility.
Obviously she wanted to get back home so they made hiring a new plant manager a top priority. Eventually they found this guy who’d been like an assistant plant manager at some place that had closed down (maybe a red flag?!). So he got started and immediately, like within a month, started hiring on a bunch of his friends who’d lost their jobs at the old place when it shut down.
At first it was great because he was filling vacancies which made everyone’s load lighter. Then all the vacancies were filled but he still had more friends to bring in, so he started creating positions to bring in more people. Suddenly they were “coordinator” positions who basically only served as middlemen between other management, people who used to do their own work now had a staff of 2 or 3 people, etc.
Eventually even that bloated staff ran out of room for his old friends…and then all that staff started talking a toll on the budget…
…so over a few months they started mass layoffs of anyone who wasn’t part of the new plant manager’s circle of friends. Basically if you didn’t work with him before at the old place, weren’t part of the union, and weren’t part of his Thursday golf crew, you were sent packing. Over one week he got rid of like 30 people.
After I got it, I heard from friends that within a month they were mandating that any employee with specialized skills (read: I didn’t have any friends with that skill so we couldn’t get rid of you) had to take at least one weekend shift and pick up 8 extra hours through the week, every week, for minimum 56 hour weeks… because they no longer had the staffing to get it all done.
Really explaibs how I got an answer to my application 14 month later. But they were consulting work companies. So you were hired when they needed a consultant with your profile.
I interviewed with one company I wanted to work at, but no answer after 2 months, so I interviewed elsewhere. That place had me start within a month. 6 months into working at my job, the first company said “ok, we are ready to schedule your start date”. I took that as a sign that it probably wouldn’t have been a great place to work.
Well, that’s nothing new, it’s at least been a thing for the last 20 years I’ve been working.
Best use of that I’ve seen was a manager that always pushed to get new headcount, and then never wanted to fill it. Because the company counted cancelling unfilled positions toward a departments required layoff requirements, so several layoff rounds spared every actual employee in his department.
That works until the company re-evaluates how many people that team needs…
