Anecdotal, I know, but I was ghosted by Google back in 2004-2005 or thereabouts. Back and forth with a recruiter, who promised me that she would book phone screens. Then heard nothing. Pinged her repeatedly. Nothing.
A few years later got another Google recruiter after me. Ended up getting hired in 2008.
Looked up the previous recruiter. Her last day at the company was the day she promised she would book phone screens, or the day after (can't remember exactly, this is quite a few years ago). I can only assume she was suddenly let go.
Ever since, I keep wondering how many ghostings happen because the person holding the strings disappears for some reason, and there's a lack of system to follow up on that.
Had this happen at the beginning of the pandemic. Did well on the full loop. The Friday of that week the recruiter reaches out to get references. A week goes by, I hear nothing. I contact one of my references, they heard nothing.
A month later another recruiter from the company reaches out and explains the recruiter I was talking to was let go that day. Told me in the system that I was approved to hire, but unfortunately along with the layoff came a 6 month hiring freeze for engineering.
To be fair if employees are being fired that abruptly with so little consideration to operational continuity it might be a worse red flag than a recruiter ghosting you.
A few years ago I was "between roles" and applied for a developer position at Roku. For a short time they seemed moderately interested, and I exchanged a few emails with a senior in-house recruiter. And then they went completely quiet - no response to my follow-up emails. So I just put it behine me and got on with looking for a job.
Just over a year later I received an email from another in-house recruiter at Roku, thanking me for my application but regretting that they wouldn't be going forward with it (or some such corporate-speak). Which was kind of surprising.
I did a few searches and discovered that the date they went quiet roughly coincided with a sizeable round of redundancies. I also looked up the new recruiter and found that they were new to the company and quite junior. So, presumably, their first task had been to clear-up the backlog. That year was by far the longest I've ever waited for a response to a job application.
I once had an interview loop where after the final round I didn't hear back from the recruiter point-of-contact for awhile. After 1.5 weeks, I sent an email following up: the recruiter replied "I was on vacation dammit, btw you didn't get the job."
In 2017 I was talking to a recruiter who genuinely forgot about my application. As in I pinged them, things got moving again, and I actually got hired.
In 2021, I talked to a quantum startup and all indications were that the feedback was "overall extremely positive", and the final step would be talking to the CTO or CEO. For some reason HR could not get that meeting scheduled for two weeks, before telling me I didn't get the job. This seemed like a communication thing, but a few years later the whole company shut down, so I guess I dodged a bullet and/or they changed their mind about hiring.
I have participated in at least 3 rounds of vocational rehabilitation, and one of the major takeaways was writing thank-you notes after any interview.
A note could be a card or an email, but a thank-you note simply expresses gratitude for the interviewer’s time and attention.
And moreover, a followup will keep your name in their mind, for better or worse. Following up after the interview series may have been the trick to landing my “pandemic job” in May 2020. I phoned or emailed the recruiter, just to thank her, just to say hello, and you know what? She said “yeah actually we were gonna call you with a job offer” and the rest is history.
So, before you complain that someone ghosted you, please consider who’s ghosting whom!
I hear this advice given quite a bit, but another perspective: I have never been pleased to receive a thank you email from a candidate. I do not want to receive something in my inbox that does not require me to act. It's a micro-annoyance, and if it's a bad day, I might have grumpy thoughts about the candidate being a brownnoser.
Show up to the interview clothed, be pleasant and polite, show off your game, and leave it at that.
Definitely agree, at a big company anyway there is nothing to be gained by sending these, or by any communication not directly related to the process. It doesn’t come across as genuine, it’s neutral to slightly annoying and has no impact on anything, it’s basically a chance at rubbing someone the wrong way with no upside.
Imagine being a recruiter, seeing someone genuinely interested in the position (or at least willing to put in the effort to make it seem that way), and getting annoyed rather than hyped. You in the wrong line of work, brother.
I presume the previous poster is one of many interviewers, not the recruiter.
As an interviewer myself, I get where they're coming from. My email is not shared with applicants, so finding it requires some stalking or at least digging me up on LinkedIn. By the time they reach out, I've already put in my notes, and any final decision is out of my hands. So while I'm not going to hold it against them, it's not a particularly useful move on the candidate's part either.
This happened at my old company. My manager went away for a holiday and never came back. We never found out why, but it was a Finance company so people suddenly not coming in the next day was a thing.
This completely broke the interview pipeline, and in the disorder no one realised. The company got some bad reviews in that period for just stopping a bunch of processes mid-way.
> Ever since, I keep wondering how many ghostings happen because the person holding the strings disappears for some reason, and there's a lack of system to follow up on that.
This has happened to be more than once. At various points in time Microsoft has used external vendors for its recruiting/hiring pipeline (which, IMHO, is a bad idea, you want people with a vested interest in the company doing all of the recruiting and hiring...).
So yeah, working with a recruiter, wait awhile, nothing, message "oh sorry she left, but the company wants to go forward."
Ugh.
It wasn't any better when I was a hiring manager at Microsoft trying to hire people. :(
Flip side of this is I stopped giving honest feedback after I interviewed a candidate who, on paper, was a stretch for the role. They generally interviewed well but had obvious gaps in their knowledge from being self taught. At the end of the interview they asked me if I had any recommendations for what they could study up on, I emailed some suggested reading (popular tech blogs, probably something by Petzold as well) and got an angry letter back accusing me of being sexist and some other stuff.
>which, IMHO, is a bad idea, you want people with a vested interest in the company doing all of the recruiting and hiring
For engineers at a large software company perhaps. But if you were a distribution company that hires one developer per year, then it is hard to maintain the network required to get good candidates
Working in this industry, I often have to remind myself that I’m not interacting with actual individual humans most of the time, but simple pre-programmed animated objects who are good at mimicking human communication and hijacking human signals to achieve their purposes. AI really helped me understand this deeply: with these “people” who are merely performing functions, there is no need to spend CPU power on communication/empathy/etc. they can simply be prompted.
Sadly, not a new phenomenon. It does seem to have gotten a lot worse.
One time, way back in ~2012, I did an all-day onsite interview with several people, lunch with the team, and everything. A full 8-hour gauntlet, and they ghosted me after it.
During the pandemic, my Amazon recruiter became sort of a friend. We communicated maybe over a period of a month, I joined multiple Amazon online panels and got to meet some employees. Everything was going well until it stopped abruptly.
Covid was going full force, so I assumed something happened to her, especially since she was older. Emails and text went unanswered. I was worried... Until I checked LinkedIn and saw that she was posting daily.
I had a Meta recruiter talking to me a while back (maybe 5 years) and she ghosted me. Found her obituary online a couple weeks later. Recently, had another Meta recruiter ghost me but that’s because of the Meta layoff round robin. Probably for the better since FRL has more or less been gutted due to AI focus.
Based on the strange emoji use in place of some buttons, I'm guessing this is vibe coded- and a lot of this is really nice looking front end - great color, topography, border styles... Would be interested to know how much intervention there was or if this is where we are
Those are quite small sample sizes. I assume that this is supposed to grow?
In my experience, I was usually ghosted (sometimes, rather brutally). In a couple of instances, I was able to get the companies to confirm that I was toast, but only after I bugged them.
My anegdotal experience in EU is that ghosting AFTER the company responds to your application is very, very rare.
I would always get the usual "Unfortunately, we have decided..." charades. At least no ghosting.
I can think of only one situation, and it was kinda peculiar in its own right (they called me 8 months after my application because they were in a jam and I said I won't be able to start in such a short notice they wanted, and they warned me in advance they would ghost me because the HR was I presume in a crunch).
As for the ghostings BEFORE they even respond to the job application, I'd say that it is around 40% of job applications that I never get a response after "We have received your job application yada yada yada".
Again, this is just my anegdotal experience. Maybe my experience in EU job market is a rarity.
An API for reporting would be nice. Besides that: hope this page came to stay. It's nicely done. Couple of years ago there was a very similar project here on hn, which came to a halt after only a couple of days it got posted
This would probably be more effective (and controversial) if the reports included the linkedin profiles of the recruiters/employees involved in the ghosting.
I can imagine a lot of situations where it'd be unfair, so maybe giving them an opportunity to explain their side before it goes up might be important... but also fuck you if you ghost someone trying to find a job.
What that even means? What’s a “factual account”?! The story/events? The account you used to apply? Or what
That being said, ghosting and generic rejections are alike, usually when you don’t hear from a company within a week (or within the time you ask them when you would hear back), you know they went with someone else, going back at you after that time is a major redflag, either they are chaotic, or the other candidate ditched them in the negotiations because they don’t know how to negotiate and are looking for bargain not a skillsets.
Also, I think instead of the company only, the recruiter/HR name should be there plus the company, public shaming is needed for those individuals, maybe other recruiters are good on following up, which is not fair for the good ones while the bad ones are hidden.
The real answer is that many jobbads are fraudulent.
And fraudulent job ads should be handled the same way a fraudulent advertisement for a good is handled: you either make good and prove hiring, or you're tried for felony fraud.
What do you mean by “make good” and “prove hiring” operationally?
Say for example, a company posts 10 job openings, fills 9 of them, but for the tenth, they don’t receive good candidates initially, the hiring manager has to go back to their leadership and negotiate a higher salary for the position, it goes through HR, they update the PD, they do a round of interviews with two good candidates, but then the hiring manager has a death in the family and takes leave, one candidate accepts a different position in that time, and then when presented with the offer, the second candidate backs out because they were expecting a salary at the higher end of the range in the PD despite having limited experience, then after 6 months and the team prepping for another interview round, the financial situation has changed and executive leadership freezes all hiring indefinitely and the job gets taken down.
Has the company made good in this case? If not, and this was an example of fraud, what is the mechanism for detecting it as such? Are there law enforcement officers actively scrubbing for possible violations? How much does that cost? Is it worth pulling a prosecuting attorney from a civil rights lawsuit over?
Or, if the company has made good, what compliance could a company do to prove that they haven’t committed fraud? How many man hours do we expect the company to spend on that compliance?
I don’t ask these questions just to poke holes, I think there would be a lot of benefits to the job market for both employers and employees if everyone applying to a job could be confident that the position was open. But I am skeptical that anyone has done a serious cost benefit analysis to determine if the juice is worth the squeeze.
Then should be a paper trail of the position, and a final decision by a person to not fill the position.
I feel that as part of unemployment insurance all job postings should tie back to a canonical job position registered with the state with mandatory reporting of applications received,number of interviews conducted,date hired or date position withdrawn, and final dispensation: external hire, internal hire, contract hire, or position withdrawn.
If HR isn’t bullshitting everyone, they should have that data. State agencies and nonprofits already tract the information.
As far as it goes, I think that alone is a fairly reasonable ask (though a heavier touch than I personally would feel comfortable legislating without serious consideration). But I’m not sure it really solves the problem if all you need to do is have someone sign off and say, hey, we didn’t find any good candidates. It seems susceptible to pencil whipping. So, what’s the next step. What is the trigger for prosecution? Where’s the line drawn between a fraudulent job posting and the merely poorly managed? Or, if they’re the same, what’s the definition? Are there a minimum number of interviews that need to be conducted each week?
What is your proposed time limit (when someone has to be hired to fill the position) and "cooldown period" (when hiring can re-open after someone does not meet expectations in practice)?
It's obviously a difficult problem to write rules around, and there are so many ways for companies to weasel out of any rule you write. The general principle is that you should not advertise a job if you don't actually intend to fill it. But you should also not do it if you have some "theoretical job" you can create and are just fishing for candidates. Any rules I write down here will have trivial ways to work around them though.
But this is an issue with all legislation (or tabletop game design), right? You also don't want to fall on the opposite end of the scale where the people tasked with prosecuting these violations are allowed to go just by feel.
You could be waiting to hear back from one company before telling another company that may have extended an offer yes or no, and it can take a while before you determine if you're ghosted or if they're just busy and haven't made a decision yet.
We've entered into an era when self-defense is more important than outdated notions of politesse. In dating, for instance, it's usually advantageous for a woman to ignore (ghost) a man she wants nothing to do with rather than reject him, to avoid the argument or retaliation that may come with explicit rejection. Too many bad actors have changed the strategy. If you can't handle ghosting, maybe you don't belong in the job or dating markets.
Dating is different. It's IMO fully inappropriate to draw that comparison.
Professionals act professionally. Ghosting is profoundly unprofessional. It is their job to manage the process with full information. End of story.
> If you can't handle ghosting, maybe you don't belong in the job or dating markets.
Ehhh? This is a very weird, I think silly, perhaps even insulting thing to say. I can handle it. I just think it's rude and unprofessional from a potential employer — someone that I have wasted my time and perhaps might have actually risked my job security to interview with.
Not every employer reacts well when they find out you're out there going to interviews, and they do find out.
As a freelancer, if I go to an interview it is my time they are wasting if they aren't going to handle the process professionally.
A few years later got another Google recruiter after me. Ended up getting hired in 2008.
Looked up the previous recruiter. Her last day at the company was the day she promised she would book phone screens, or the day after (can't remember exactly, this is quite a few years ago). I can only assume she was suddenly let go.
Ever since, I keep wondering how many ghostings happen because the person holding the strings disappears for some reason, and there's a lack of system to follow up on that.
A month later another recruiter from the company reaches out and explains the recruiter I was talking to was let go that day. Told me in the system that I was approved to hire, but unfortunately along with the layoff came a 6 month hiring freeze for engineering.
Just over a year later I received an email from another in-house recruiter at Roku, thanking me for my application but regretting that they wouldn't be going forward with it (or some such corporate-speak). Which was kind of surprising.
I did a few searches and discovered that the date they went quiet roughly coincided with a sizeable round of redundancies. I also looked up the new recruiter and found that they were new to the company and quite junior. So, presumably, their first task had been to clear-up the backlog. That year was by far the longest I've ever waited for a response to a job application.
In 2021, I talked to a quantum startup and all indications were that the feedback was "overall extremely positive", and the final step would be talking to the CTO or CEO. For some reason HR could not get that meeting scheduled for two weeks, before telling me I didn't get the job. This seemed like a communication thing, but a few years later the whole company shut down, so I guess I dodged a bullet and/or they changed their mind about hiring.
A note could be a card or an email, but a thank-you note simply expresses gratitude for the interviewer’s time and attention.
And moreover, a followup will keep your name in their mind, for better or worse. Following up after the interview series may have been the trick to landing my “pandemic job” in May 2020. I phoned or emailed the recruiter, just to thank her, just to say hello, and you know what? She said “yeah actually we were gonna call you with a job offer” and the rest is history.
So, before you complain that someone ghosted you, please consider who’s ghosting whom!
Show up to the interview clothed, be pleasant and polite, show off your game, and leave it at that.
As an interviewer myself, I get where they're coming from. My email is not shared with applicants, so finding it requires some stalking or at least digging me up on LinkedIn. By the time they reach out, I've already put in my notes, and any final decision is out of my hands. So while I'm not going to hold it against them, it's not a particularly useful move on the candidate's part either.
This completely broke the interview pipeline, and in the disorder no one realised. The company got some bad reviews in that period for just stopping a bunch of processes mid-way.
This has happened to be more than once. At various points in time Microsoft has used external vendors for its recruiting/hiring pipeline (which, IMHO, is a bad idea, you want people with a vested interest in the company doing all of the recruiting and hiring...).
So yeah, working with a recruiter, wait awhile, nothing, message "oh sorry she left, but the company wants to go forward."
Ugh.
It wasn't any better when I was a hiring manager at Microsoft trying to hire people. :(
Flip side of this is I stopped giving honest feedback after I interviewed a candidate who, on paper, was a stretch for the role. They generally interviewed well but had obvious gaps in their knowledge from being self taught. At the end of the interview they asked me if I had any recommendations for what they could study up on, I emailed some suggested reading (popular tech blogs, probably something by Petzold as well) and got an angry letter back accusing me of being sexist and some other stuff.
For engineers at a large software company perhaps. But if you were a distribution company that hires one developer per year, then it is hard to maintain the network required to get good candidates
One time, way back in ~2012, I did an all-day onsite interview with several people, lunch with the team, and everything. A full 8-hour gauntlet, and they ghosted me after it.
Covid was going full force, so I assumed something happened to her, especially since she was older. Emails and text went unanswered. I was worried... Until I checked LinkedIn and saw that she was posting daily.
Full story: https://idiallo.com/blog/dont-ghost-me
In my experience, I was usually ghosted (sometimes, rather brutally). In a couple of instances, I was able to get the companies to confirm that I was toast, but only after I bugged them.
I would always get the usual "Unfortunately, we have decided..." charades. At least no ghosting.
I can think of only one situation, and it was kinda peculiar in its own right (they called me 8 months after my application because they were in a jam and I said I won't be able to start in such a short notice they wanted, and they warned me in advance they would ghost me because the HR was I presume in a crunch).
As for the ghostings BEFORE they even respond to the job application, I'd say that it is around 40% of job applications that I never get a response after "We have received your job application yada yada yada".
Again, this is just my anegdotal experience. Maybe my experience in EU job market is a rarity.
https://ghostjobs.io/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853401)
We should also reward and encourage positive behavior by companies.
1. Recruiter 2. Second-hand car salesman 3. Realtor 4. Mechanics 5. Lawyers
I can imagine a lot of situations where it'd be unfair, so maybe giving them an opportunity to explain their side before it goes up might be important... but also fuck you if you ghost someone trying to find a job.
What that even means? What’s a “factual account”?! The story/events? The account you used to apply? Or what
That being said, ghosting and generic rejections are alike, usually when you don’t hear from a company within a week (or within the time you ask them when you would hear back), you know they went with someone else, going back at you after that time is a major redflag, either they are chaotic, or the other candidate ditched them in the negotiations because they don’t know how to negotiate and are looking for bargain not a skillsets.
Also, I think instead of the company only, the recruiter/HR name should be there plus the company, public shaming is needed for those individuals, maybe other recruiters are good on following up, which is not fair for the good ones while the bad ones are hidden.
And fraudulent job ads should be handled the same way a fraudulent advertisement for a good is handled: you either make good and prove hiring, or you're tried for felony fraud.
Say for example, a company posts 10 job openings, fills 9 of them, but for the tenth, they don’t receive good candidates initially, the hiring manager has to go back to their leadership and negotiate a higher salary for the position, it goes through HR, they update the PD, they do a round of interviews with two good candidates, but then the hiring manager has a death in the family and takes leave, one candidate accepts a different position in that time, and then when presented with the offer, the second candidate backs out because they were expecting a salary at the higher end of the range in the PD despite having limited experience, then after 6 months and the team prepping for another interview round, the financial situation has changed and executive leadership freezes all hiring indefinitely and the job gets taken down.
Has the company made good in this case? If not, and this was an example of fraud, what is the mechanism for detecting it as such? Are there law enforcement officers actively scrubbing for possible violations? How much does that cost? Is it worth pulling a prosecuting attorney from a civil rights lawsuit over?
Or, if the company has made good, what compliance could a company do to prove that they haven’t committed fraud? How many man hours do we expect the company to spend on that compliance?
I don’t ask these questions just to poke holes, I think there would be a lot of benefits to the job market for both employers and employees if everyone applying to a job could be confident that the position was open. But I am skeptical that anyone has done a serious cost benefit analysis to determine if the juice is worth the squeeze.
I feel that as part of unemployment insurance all job postings should tie back to a canonical job position registered with the state with mandatory reporting of applications received,number of interviews conducted,date hired or date position withdrawn, and final dispensation: external hire, internal hire, contract hire, or position withdrawn.
If HR isn’t bullshitting everyone, they should have that data. State agencies and nonprofits already tract the information.
Was a position (and tax revenue) hired for this position?
Were there no candidates qualified for this position?
Ohhhh, there were? Why didn't you hire them?
Many job ads are simply scams. And companies faking job ads can rie in a fire, or fined out of extinction.
Wait until you get an overly smug rejection letter that the author seemed too eager to write, and took too much joy in writing.
Some people love to reject, and would never miss an opportunity.
Another angle is -
If you've been ghosted, you still have not been told no. That means there's no record of you ever getting denied for the position.
(and maybe you really haven't been)
It's kinda better IMO
If you get a shitty rejection letter, you should see it as a lucky escape. A rejection burns both your bridge and theirs.
If it’s especially shitty, there is nothing stopping you publishing it as a signal to others that a recruiter or employer is wasting people's time.
Especially if you just did a coding exercise that looks suspiciously like code they might put a value on.
We've entered into an era when self-defense is more important than outdated notions of politesse. In dating, for instance, it's usually advantageous for a woman to ignore (ghost) a man she wants nothing to do with rather than reject him, to avoid the argument or retaliation that may come with explicit rejection. Too many bad actors have changed the strategy. If you can't handle ghosting, maybe you don't belong in the job or dating markets.
Professionals act professionally. Ghosting is profoundly unprofessional. It is their job to manage the process with full information. End of story.
> If you can't handle ghosting, maybe you don't belong in the job or dating markets.
Ehhh? This is a very weird, I think silly, perhaps even insulting thing to say. I can handle it. I just think it's rude and unprofessional from a potential employer — someone that I have wasted my time and perhaps might have actually risked my job security to interview with.
Not every employer reacts well when they find out you're out there going to interviews, and they do find out.
As a freelancer, if I go to an interview it is my time they are wasting if they aren't going to handle the process professionally.