Article URL: https://nanomicon.com/blog/260730-the-job-board-is-lying-to-you Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187792 Points: 7 # Comments: 1

27% of LinkedIn job listings don't exist. AI companies like micro1, DataAnnotation, and Mercor flood job boards with vague postings as data harvesting funnels. Even traditional-looking jobs are annotation work in disguise. I spent two years working for myself. When I finally opened LinkedIn to test the waters, I searched for my skills and filtered by the past week. The results were garbage. Hundreds of links pointed to companies I had never heard of. Mercor. micro1. Outlier. DataAnnotation. They all wanted an "AI Trainer" or an "RLHF Evaluator." No salary bands. No team details. Just vague copy about the future of artificial intelligence. I kept scrolling. The main feed was worse. Finding an actual open position felt like digging through a landfill. They post a broad job listing. They make it sound revolutionary. Applicants swarm the posting. Within hours, candidates receive a "skills assessment" that takes three hours to complete. You finish the test. The company promises to be in touch. You never hear from them again. This is a data acquisition pipeline. Your test work and interview recordings become free training data. Mercor's TOS writes it right into the terms - they own commercial rights to applicant contributions. micro1 tracks your audio, video, and browser tabs during interviews. These are data brokers wearing the skin of recruitment firms. Mercor raised $100 million from Peter Thiel. They ran 100,000 interviews and spiked their revenue to $500 million in 17 months. Nobody knows how many people they actually hired. Meanwhile, AI job postings are up 134% while real tech hiring is down 34%. I applied to a posting that looked completely normal. Traditional title. Real company. Valid salary range. I applied. I got an interview.