I saw somewhere that something like 70% of managers said they only post open positions to appease their overworked employees and they never have any intention of actually filling the position. And I 100% believe it.

I believe my old manager at my last job did it. We were short-staffed for 2+ years. She finally posted it, then said she couldn't find quality resumes. And it was several more months before they even did a single interview. Nothing came of those interviews. I finally had enough of 70 hour workweeks and 3 hours of commuting and left for a new company.

AJ02 said:

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I saw somewhere that something like 70% of managers said they only post open positions to appease their overworked employees and they never have any intention of actually filling the position. And I 100% believe it.

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I've been in HR for over a decade, I've never seen a manager do this before. It makes no sense. If the position is budgeted, why wouldn't they want to fill the position and lighten everyone's workload?

If a manager had no intention on hiring then HR would just close the position.

ea1060 said:

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AJ02 said:

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I saw somewhere that something like 70% of managers said they only post open positions to appease their overworked employees and they never have any intention of actually filling the position. And I 100% believe it.

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I've been in HR for over a decade, I've never seen a manager do this before. It makes no sense. If the position is budgeted, why wouldn't they want to fill the position and lighten everyone's workload?

If a manager had no intention on hiring then HR would just close the position.

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Further you're under budget, more money for raises and bonuses for you and your friends.

Maybe in some companies managers post positions they don't plan to hire for, but that would be dumb at mine. The manager has to do pretty much all of the work to get a role posted including writing the job description. If I'm going to put in that effort, I'm hiring somebody and so are the folks that work in my organization.

Also, raise/incentive budget for roles not filled goes back into the pot. I won't approve people gaming the system for not hiring people. Reflects poorly on them as leadership...

Doesn't work that way from my experience

$30,000 Millionaire said:

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Doesn't work that way from my experience

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Doesn't necessarily at a large corporation. Other places it does.

Why open a position at all then?

Because there's analysts looking at head counts.

I literally ran into a situation at a large company where ELT demanded the engineering groups fill budgeted head counts to get to a better utilization. They would post external to say they were trying only to purposefully hire an engineer away from another group. They then did the same. And the cycle went round and around.

I had to mandate only external hiring unless special approval until we made up the 60-70 vacancies. ELT was furious when I showed them the cost of what their Engineering managers were purposefully doing. They were only aware of what they were told by the group managers that they were posting external and interviewing.

I don't believe all were being malicious, but if ELT isn't paying attention, managers can make lots of decisions to benefit themselves and hurt the organization. Internal investigations took place and some interesting things were determined.

I imagine in this scenario there was over 100 different postings for engineering positions over 6-9 months that were black holes for external candidates.

AgLA06 said:

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Because there's analysts looking at head counts.

I literally ran into a situation at a large company where ELT demanded the engineering groups fill budgeted head counts to get to a better utilization. They would post external to say they were trying only to purposefully hire an engineer away from another group. They then did the same. And the cycle went round and around.

I had to mandate only external hiring unless special approval until we made up the 60-70 vacancies. ELT was furious when I showed them the cost of what their Engineering managers were purposefully doing. They were only aware of what they were told by the group managers that they were posting external and interviewing.

I don't believe all were being malicious, but if ELT isn't paying attention, managers can make lots of decisions to benefit themselves and hurt the organization. Internal investigations took place and some interesting things were determined.

I imagine in this scenario there was over 100 different postings for engineering positions over 6-9 months that were black holes for external candidates.

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So in other words, you saw it happen and get squashed quickly when the HR function figured out what was happening so it actually want a systemic problem?