Ask HN: Who is pretending to be hiring?

I’m looking for a job and like many people in this situation am finding it unusually difficult.

I’ve read rumors that many firms are actually in a hiring freeze, but they keep job reqs open for appearances. Apparently some investors use job postings as a company health metric.

From my contacts, I am personally aware of situations where internally-recommended CVs are ignored by HR, and other cases had open job postings and passed people successfully through the interview process, and then the hiring manager still didn’t pull the trigger. I have no way of knowing how widespread this is, but it is happening at some places.

Is your company like this? If you have real info and not just suspicions, let’s name some names.