When I first set out to create Prompt Engineering Jobs, it was more of a personal experiment than a grand business plan. I used Hugo to spin up the site in a single weekend, fueled by the hype around the now-infamous $300k “Prompt Engineer” salary postings that went viral in 2023 [0]. The idea was simple: gather all prompt engineering job opportunities in one convenient place. Little did I know it would catch on so quickly.
After sharing it on Show HN [1], the site quickly gained traction, attracting over 10,000 visitors within three days. The momentum continued as it was featured in various newsletters. Despite the high initial interest, managing Prompt Engineering Jobs was surprisingly light work. Updating new listings took only about five minutes of my day, which felt manageable for something that started as a passion project.
A year later, the landscape has changed dramatically. The 10 job postings per day declined to 5 per week, sometimes less, as large language models (LLMs) continued to advance; Prompt Engineering became a skill rather than a role. Add to that the crises in techie jobs in the last 2 years, with thousands of layoffs.
However, the reason I am shutting down Prompt Engineering Jobs today is not just the decline of jobs; it is the alarming state of the hiring process which makes the job board a useless and time wasting concept. The rapid rise of automated job applications has only worsened the situation, leading to a broken system that I feel compelled to expose to job seekers. I want to help you answer the following questions:
- Why I’m getting ghosted?
- Why do I see expired jobs on job boards?
How does the job market work?
For the sake of simplicity, let’s categorize jobs into two types:
1. Direct from employers.
Most jobs you find have direct links on the company career page where you can fill out a form, upload a resume, answer some questions and hit apply. These career pages are usually on ATS (Applicant Tracking System), where your application will be converted to an entry, sometimes with a grade score on how much your application is relevant to the job (Matching), and you can be evaluated for the next step.
Some employers will post on LinkedIn or Indeed and use that as their career page.
2. Recruiters
External recruiters would contact a company that is hiring and can’t find the right candidates, telling them that they can provide the right talent on contingency. They would send resumes to the company, and if the company hired a candidate via them, the company would have to pay a percentage of the annual salary. A no win no fee scenario.
Recruiters use various advertising channels, including LinkedIn, their own website, job boards, and programmatic job advertising (more on that later). They also use tools such as access to resumes (CV Library, Indeed, etc.) and LinkedIn Recruiter.
Why I’m being ghosted?
You have applied to many jobs but didn’t hear back from any. There might be many reasons:
1. Too many applications (noise)
Put yourself in the hiring manager’s shoes. Your chance of being noticed is relatively low if they have received hundreds of applications. This was a big issue when posting on LinkedIn, as LinkedIn does not prevent applications outside your location. For example, if you post a job and specify that it’s for the UK only, you will end up having job applications from outside the UK. This is now a big issue due to automated job applications where each employer receives hundreds of applications; most are scoring high (due to LLM-tailored resumes matching the job description keywords).
2. Not a match
If your resume didn’t score high enough based on the Matching Algorithm by the ATS, your application might not even been looked at.
3. Unqualified Recruiter
While some recruiters are good and have domain experience, others just look at keywords and try to figure out if you’re a good match. Many articles mention that recruiters spend 6 seconds skimming a resume to determine if you’re qualified. That’s why you hear it’s a numbers game.
Why do I see expired jobs on job boards?
The second point concerns the job ads. It starts with why you see expired jobs on job boards.
The answer is that most job boards are just job aggregators where they trade clicks. It is the same Cost-per-Click (CPC) model in advertising. A job board will receive XML feeds from other sources. Each feed will have a list of jobs and the CPC of each one.
They will parse feeds, dedup them, keep the highest bidder, list the job on their job board, and send it via email alerts.
Now, most of these aggregators are getting feeds from the same sources, where a vendor (employer or recruiter) has set a budget for the job ad (for example, $200), and the job will expire after hitting the limit. The average time for parsing feeds is 4 hours. So, if the job hits the limit in the first hour of getting clicks from various job boards, it will expire, and the job board will not get paid for it at this point.
But since there are 3 more hours before the next feed parse, every job seeker clicking on that link will see the “This job is not available”.
There is another model called CPA (Cost Per Application), where the job aggregator is paid only when the candidate applies to the job. This is the same concept as affiliate marketing, where an affiliate is paid when a user purchases a product or a service.
The Big Issue
The current job market is very close to a broken trust point. For CPC (Cost Per Click), it is easier than ever to spin out bots to fake clicks and provide no value to job advertisers.
For CPA (Cost Per Application), there is a rise of Job Copilots and Automated Job Applications where job seekers can sign up for a service, see matching job applications, and the service will apply on their behalf. They charge job seekers a monthly fee to do this. The problems I see with this approach are:
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Job hunting in this market is stressful enough to add another financial burden on someone looking for a job.
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When more people use it, it will create the same noise issue. On the other hand, employers who are bombarded with hundreds of applications will not notice most of them.
There are some legitimate services that automate on behalf of employers, especially those with legacy ATSs, where it takes 30+ minutes to fill out an application. They genuinely help both sides simplify the application process.
Potential Solutions
I have thought of two solutions for the current issues:
1. Creating a “No Bot Application” service to work as a gateway to filter automated applications.
This will combine bot detection (think CloudFlare bot detection), a resume-based captcha, and email/SMS verification.
The solution will at least reduce the number of automated applications, helping employers filter the noise and ensure genuine candidates have better visibility.
2. Create a free resume service to help job seekers build high-quality resumes, then allow employers to search the database without accessing personal information.
There is nothing new about the concept; the only changes I am thinking of are:
- Provide a value first. You can create a resume and leave the website, but you will default opt out of the search service.
- When employers search for candidates, they see only the experience, skills, education, etc., without seeing the personal information. If they are interested, they click a button, which sends an email to the candidate to decide if they want to have a chat with the employer or not.
Again, there is nothing new about the search concept; the only differences are:
- Employers will only pay of the candidate responded.
- Candidates will control their data and decide who to proceed with.
Your opinion matters
I would love to hear which solution you see as more suitable for the hiring issues or if you have a better idea in mind. Please reach out at hello@prompt-engineering-jobs.com or comment on Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42554154.