This is an anonymous post from an Elpha member.

flexport-ceo-rescinds-job-offers-short-notice-hiring-freeze-2023-9

Elke113·Sep 10, 2023

I'm writing to bring attention to a company that has been heavily promoted to job seekers on Elpha.

Since joining Elpha early this year, I have received over 20 emails advertising open roles at Flexport, in fact Elpha has recommended Flexport to me more than any other company. (I have applied, but received no response, which isn't unusual.) The most recent email was three weeks ago.

However, this article in Business Insider is reporting that not only has Flexport been in a hiring freeze for months, but has been rescinding job offers with 72 hours notice before start date. I really hope none of those affected were Elpha members.

I understand Elpha doesn't have intimate knowledge of employer's actual hiring practices, but I urge Elpha to re-evaluate its relationship with Flexport and to do what is in its power to avoid promoting fake job openings in the future. As a job seeker, it is acutely demoralizing to put effort into communicating with employers to find out the job openings are fake.

Ophelia153·Sep 11, 2023

Just for context: what happens is the founder fired the new hired CEO abruptly and the founder ordered the hiring freeze *on twitter* and fired a lot of people in the last few days? As far as I know it's very recent.I am not defending the company, just sharing what I saw on social media. Elpha is a business and likely receives payment from companies that post jobs here. That's how they make money.It doesn't look like these were 'ghost jobs'. They accepted job offers and were going to start on Monday. It's an awful thing for people who gave notice and were supposed to start working. What are they supposed to do now!!!! It is effed up.Also the industry they operate in, is very cyclical and the market was already on a downturn due to the decrease in shipping rates.

Aide26·Sep 11, 2023

The job listings weren't fake so much as the company was wildly disorganized and not aligned, and hired people over months when they weren't supposed to.Still awful, still messy.

cadran·Sep 11, 2023

Hi anon – Thanks for flagging this for us. I too hope Elpha members were not impacted by this and I feel for those with offers who had them rescinded. That must be an incredibly disappointing and stressful situation for everyone impacted.On the Elpha side, in terms of thinking about how to make sure this doesn't happen in the future – it's tricky. Agree with other commenters that these jobs were real, but the company itself made an abrupt change of direction (and please note: my take is based on publicly available info). To make sure that jobs we share are in fact open, we update job postings on Elpha multiple times per day. We do rely on each company's applicant tracking system to stay up to date with the jobs each company has open though. So if a company says they are hiring for a job actively, we do assume that info is true. And yes, companies that post on Elpha are paying to post – another thing that would make it much less likely for someone to share fake jobs. The situation at Flexport seems like a particularly unusual one. From reading the article, it sounds like internally the team was recruiting and hiring for these jobs and they were not even aware that they should not be. That kind of internal miscommunication would be very hard for us to detect from the outside. If you have ideas about how you'd like to see us update our process though, I'd love to hear your suggestions.