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.
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 have a leaderboard of some of the longest turn-around times from initial contact to rejection. Thus far the winners (if you can call them that) have been:
But I also have a short list of shortest turn-around times. I say this because some of them are truly insane:
GitHub (3 hours); Valve (4 hours, but it was a real human with actual comments); Lockheed martin (2 hours); UserTesting (1 hour); Mozilla (30 minutes); Cloudflare (-2 minutes); Matterport (0 minutes)
The -2 minutes you see there is one of the most insane things I've ever experienced: As I'm filling in the application, I get an email simultaneously thanking me for going throug the recruitment process but saying they "reviewed my application" (that hadn't even been fully submitted yet) and that I wasn't a good fit for the role.
Matterport wins the award for "well at least they're not bullshitting" -- as soon as I had submitted the application, I didn't even get an email saying thank you, just a straight up dialog box saying "You won't be considered for this position."
My worst experience was with Microsoft. Somewhere, their system is designed such that if you ever fall out of the standard process, you're "rejected" -- I have more rejection emails for a position I ended up getting (which got canned within the year, ironically enough) than any other kind of email, including daily emails with the recruiter and hiring manager. I got an email telling me "sorry no thanks" *after* I had already signed the paperwork.
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.
It should be illegal to ask for references - the purpose of the interview is to understand your capabilities and abilities. If they couldn't suss all about you in that process then they have a shitty interview process.
I interviewed at Linkedin in 2020 or so - interview went great, team fit was great, all the interviews were great, the recruiter told me he was going to prepare an offer... then I never heard from them again.
4 years later, a recruiter messaged me saying that they found my name as a potential candidate and knew that I declined the offer, back in 2020, so they wanted to know if I wanted to re-interview. I told the recruiter I never rejected anything. She looked into it and apparently it was your exact same situation: recruiter left that day, a bunch of candidates got marked as "declined" shortly after.
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.
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.
>it was a Finance company so people suddenly not coming in the next day was a thing.
Oh, I'd love to know why this is a thing.
I did work for a mutual fund company for 18 months, one of those companies where the title Vice President simply meant nothing more than "employee" (although it was fun showing my business card to my friends and family, who were impressed by the title even though it had no meaning), but I didn't notice anything special about employee retention, probably because I was in a tech team.
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 am building an interviewing and hiring platform (https://coderba.se/) but I've also hired/interviewed and shaped hiring processes at several companies before. It's ridiculous how easy it is to account for such trivial edge cases, yet most people just... dont. A big part of it is that, in spite of frequent chest beating about how "hiring is [one of] the most important thing[s] we do", the actual process is half-assed at best in most places, an effect particularly amplified by the current massive oversupply of talent.
The chance of a single hire being a make it or break it for the the business is pretty much null, so a single recruiter not having continuity in the processes they were doing once they get fired isn't really something to optimize for.
I had a similar experience. In my case, they gave me a few dates to fly out and do some sort of final boss talent show interview. Then… nothing.
I got the sense it was some internal political drama but maybe the recruiter disappeared… that honestly didn’t occur to me, and up until that point it was a pretty awesome and interesting process.
I’m on google’s list of special people who qualify for an interview whenever I’m ready, no screen required. I think most “big tech” employees are. I get an email every 6 months or so from a new recruiter letting me know they took over from the previous one, who’s no longer with the company.
I was on that list for a while, but thankfully it was because of someone else with my name, and one time they dropped a hint about my work with compilers at Microsoft, and I asked around and figured out actually they didn't really want me, they just don't understand names aren't unique.
> 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
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.
Ghosted by Apple here. Devops or SRE job for services teams if I'm remembering right. Did a months worth of rounds. Was told the offer letter would be coming within the next week. Turned down other companies on the gamble that it was actually coming. Never came. Pinged recruiter and finally after a month was told they stopped hiring and would reach back out in a few months when it started back. Never happened. That was 3 years ago. It was character building to say the least.
I got ghosted by Apple after traveling to Cupertino to do some phone interviews from an Apple conf room. I'm pretty sure I've been blacklisted there for reasons unknown. Their recruiters reach out from time to time and after a couple messages back and forth, they too ghost. I've even been referred by friends which results in a conversation with a recruiter that ghosts me shortly after.
I'm pretty good at what I do and I'm not weird. All the conversations seemed to go well so I have no idea what happened.
Sorry you went through that. I've been on the other side of it. I had interviewed a bunch of people, found a good candidate, had an offer ready to go. It was pulled at the last second by higher ups who decided they needed the headcount more than my department did. It sucks for everybody.
Yeah it was the lack of communication on it that killed me. If something had just been said I would have signed the other offer and moved on. But I went from 2 prospects to zero because of the lack of communication, that was the part that hurt. Anyway things happen, people lost bitcoins, people quit Google early on, blah blah, Pete best left. Life happens, move on.
Agreed and I would offer this advice to any junior struggling with the morality of the situation. I had a few reality checks to learn about larger companies and business in general.
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 have had many poor experiences with recruiters. You have heard all the same stories I have to tell.
The ones you may not have heard is the odd post on LinkedIn from a recruiter which suggests that the role is so cutthroat that you have to ghost most candidates.
The one person I know from college who became a tech recruiter was someone who was not technical (English/philosophy double major) who loved telling people how stupid and wrong they were about things. He bemoaned once to me candidates that applied for job x which required experience x and not y which the candidate had, and how dumb they were for thinking it was equivalent. (They were mostly equivalent, which I knew having had a year of both under my belt; he never asked what I was doing at work in that conversation)
You can draw your own conclusions. I have met recruiters I felt were under enormous pressure to find the best candidates. I have met some who were the scum of the earth. Mostly, unless they were on the payroll of the company they were hiring for, I have just felt they were lazy.
Yup. Recently I had one all buddy buddy with me, even to the point of unprofessionalism, in hindsight. After the final rounds, there was a little delay but he wanted to reassure me that they'd be finalizing things and would have exciting news...
... that turned out to be that I'd been the runner up candidate.
Earlier this year I was interviewing at Figma. My interview was at 3:00.
I signed the required NDA.
At 3:00:55 I received an email saying thanks for your time but you're not being considered anymore.
I emailed the recruiter and heard nothing back.
---
Jerred,
Thank you for your interest in Figma! We know that applying for jobs takes time, and we appreciate your interest in joining our team. After reviewing your application for Software Engineer, Full Stack, we've decided not to move forward with your candidacy at this time.
Your resume is in our system for future opportunities, and we hope you'll keep an eye on our careers page. Best of luck with your job search!
Had this happen to me several times. Recruiter reaches out super excited they found you, tells you you're the next best thing since sliced bread, asks you for availability and then dies.
I've never actually been ghosted but in my early 20s, I had applied to a company doing something to do with processing geographic data from for NASA as a contractor. It sounded really cool and I heard about it from a guy who worked there who was the brother of an acquaintance and reached out to me to ask if I was interested. We went out to lunch, talked it over, and then followed up by email, and he put me in touch with their HR department. They asked my availability over the next couple weeks for an interview and I gave it to them, and they never responded. I followed up and got nothing. Then about a month later, they emailed me apologizing and explaining that they had just been so busy. I wrote back and again got nothing in return. This happened over and over for about 6 months. They'd email apologizing, I'd respond, and they'd ignore me. Then there was another six month pause before I got one last big apology and request for availability which I never responded to. In hindsight, I probably should have politely told them I was no longer interested after the first gap but I was young and really wanted to say I did work for NASA.
Anyway, I never attributed any kind of malice to it, just poor management and poor candidate handling. I suspect that's often the case, especially with smaller start ups with likely overwhelmed employees wearing many hats. If anything, it's good signal that it's maybe not a great place to work. Imagine how they treat the people who work there if that's how they treat candidates.
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
Is https://didtheyghostyou.com/companies/robert-half an artifact of vibe coding you think? Robert Half is apparently an HR consulting firm but in TFA it links to a very sus `https://www.google.com/aclk`. What an oversight given the assurances that submissions are reviewed and moderated. Or is Google outsourcing HiRing to Robert Half now?
... and Robert Half is like a massive temp staffing firm on top of that (I've seen them working call center contracted remote support gigs before), so there's certain scales of companies being involved in 'ghosting' candidates from both top-level positions and super low-level positions, so...
There were two companies posting on hn some time ago that I suspect was just gathering training data (asking for a code challenge or to answer 2 questions about 60 seconds long answering some bs). I feel like we should denounce those as well. Posting jobs that don't actually exists. Specially those that post month after month.
Let's take a moment to talk about Wellfound, formerly AngelList.
I think Wellfound (f/k/a AngelList) is doing something similar.
The jobs advertised on there are real...
I'd been on the job market four months. Every day I did the rounds: Levels, Wellfound, YC/jobs, Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn.
It is what it is, as a crappy jobs market.
Wellfound? I didn't ever hear from anything from their job ads.I'm pretty certain that whatever Wellfound/AngelList was, it has become a company that just markets their resume writing services, resume review services, all sorts of other services that draw in your money somehow.
Why do I say that?
120+ applications on Wellfound since then. Crickets. Absolutely nothing.
One day I got an email, "Your profile has been viewed!". Weird, never seen an email like that from Wellfound. Indeed, "You have 1 profile view in the last 90 days".
Huh. 120+ applications, 120+ times me answering filling out Wellfound's content questions on "why you would be a good fit for this role", "tell us about x and y and z", no interviews, no contact, only ONE company has ever even viewed my profile (and for what it's worth, it's not a company that has any positions open).
Well, maybe my answers suck, you say. Maybe my resume isn't as impressive as I think it is.
But similar answers and the same resume get me fairly steady hits on every other site I mentioned, I've got to multiple final rounds, I've been explicitly told I was hirable, I was just the number two, I was "in the top three".
And to be clear, many of the companies I see on WF are advertising on other sites too.
My suspicion? WF DOES take job listings, but they also harvest them from other sites - the job is real, but there's no-one from the employer reviewing the applications to their "phantom" job at Wellfound... and meanwhile all people like me are doing is providing content for WF to harvest and train models for their real business model: AI-driven resume writing and review service and other products.
Ghosting is rude. Companies should at least politely reject you.
Chances are if they ghosted you, you didn't do as well as you think. You nailed a tech interview, but you only nailed part 1 of 3 and the interviewer didn't have the heart to tell you there was 2 other questions.
It happens to everyone. We've all done these interviews with nice candidates that just aren't right for that job. Don't worry! You'll find the job that works for you.
Last year I interviewed with Epic Games and I didn't get the job but they arranged a meeting to let me down easily, encourage me to apply for other positions. I really appreciated that!
I was once ghosted mid interview day. They left me in conference room and completely forgot. I was going to walk out after 30 minutes but I just wanted to see how long I could stay there. It took them five hours. And this was in a “highly secure” building so not sure how they invite someone to interview and let them just hangout inside the building for five hours.
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.
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.
Sometimes it can help articulate your stance after the fact. I’ve used it to thank the panel and to clarify a few of my answers so they had something to research. I have also used it to pull the emergency escape hatch and thank them for their time.
I always follow up because it's honestly how I got my 2nd job. I got a generic recruiter response and did your normal call. Then nothing. Followed up in a few weeks and it was clear they simply forgot to report back to the team. Then they scheduled me for a call with my future lead.
On the other hand, it's hard to forget when I went 5 stages into an interview, then did 3 follow ups: 3 days later, a week after that, then 2 weeks after that. I got a response each time pretty quickly saying "yeah, your're still in consideration", and then nothing. Not even a generic rejection. I just cut my losses because if they can give weekly interviews for a month but need more than a month to consider me, it's not happening.
This should include the hiring manager, recruiter or other point of contact. Particularly at large companies. That aligns individual incentives with the goal of reducing this behavior.
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.
I got email offer from Snowflake with numbers after a full round of office interviews. They first matched me with a team and then themselves decided to pivot me to another team. I wasn't feeling fully interested in second team's work; the manager told me it's completely OK to explore with 1-2 hiring managers before accepting. I asked the recruiter to help connect. The next email was "Thank you for your time!" and ghosting on all follow ups.
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.
my friend had been waiting for offer after passing final interview, but recruiter suddenly went silent. she responded nearly 2 years after saying that she had been on parental leave (yeah it's this long in our country), and he would have to start whole process again. of course he moved on and never applied to this company again
After several interviews with a big telecommunications company, I got a verbal job offer from the recruiter over the phone. I accepted. They said the formal job offer would be coming in the next week or so.
I never received the formal job offer. I called after a month and was told not to worry, it was still happening. I think I called again after 3 months, but stopped thinking about it after that.
Eventually I went to work for an internet company (which also delayed the formal job offer for several months. Deja Vu! But only because the background checking firm was having trouble completing the background check).
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.
"What do you mean by “make good” and “prove hiring” operationally?"
We aren't worried about your case. We are worried about ID theft rings who harvest information from CVs sent to fake job ads. If you hire for even a fraction of your ads and you are engaged in any sort of legitimate business (where the revenue doesn't come from the CVs or information harvested from them), we aren't worried about that.
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.
Most company managers don't care about letting the rejected candidates know what their fate is. They just want to find the right candidate and make their daily hiring quota.
Thank you for the site. I shall make good use of it as I am constantly getting ghosted :)
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
As a hiring manager I take candidate experience seriously because I know it’s easy to get wrong and leave people with a really bad taste in their mouth at a sensitive time.
As a candidate, though, I have learned not to take offense to being ghosted or the million other indignities that one is subjected to in a modern interview pipeline. It’s just a part of the modern economy, and far from the worst one. As terrible as it is, it’s not a hill worth dying on, suck it up and just move on with your search.
A few years ago I was considering setting up something like this for B2B startups that get stuffed around / dragged along / ghosted by corporates to try and change behaviour. Including positive reviews…
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.
The real person that should be held responsible for ghosting is the HR. They represent the company. It takes very little effort to even send an automated email intimating the rejection and better yet if possible, a one liner reason - even from a drop down so as to help the candidate improve themselves. Instead, all the fucking HR does all day long is make cringe videos on TikTok these days and create imaginary problems that don't exist to justify their existence to management.
Robert Half ghosted someone they were actively trying to find a job for? Why would they even do that? They have more clients, the recruiter loses if they don't get you somewhere.
If you got "ghosted" from a recruiting company, there was probably a good reason for it.
Do they distinguish ghosting after an interview vs before?
Nvidia ghosted me some years ago after a full interview. They said they'd get back to me in two weeks. After three weeks I pinged the recruiter and she said "definitely by the end of the week".
Never heard from them. Two months later the site showed it was still pending. Some time later it finally changed to "rejected". Not even an automated email.
I stopped applying and responding to their recruiters. Some years later a manager reached out to me saying I'd be a good candidate but I need to formally apply to schedule. I applied. Crickets.
Amazon routinely ghosted me prior to scheduling the full interview. They'd do a screening round that I'd pass. Then they'd say they want to go ahead with a full interview and that I'll be called for scheduling. They never called and the recruiter never responded. Probably happened five times.
> Wait until you get an overly smug rejection letter that the author seemed too eager to write, and took too much joy in writing.
I got one of those a few years ago, from a prominent tech startup CEO (non-YC).
The funniest thing is that I'm pretty sure it's a person who has some kind of recurring episodes of anonymously attacking HN infrastructure and dang.
Who then also attacked me on HN (and elsewhere, it looks like), while seeming to reference that earlier rejection, and emphasizing how much they thought I was unworthy.
> That means there's no record of you ever getting denied for the position.
Or record held in the mind, even years later, of someone who sometimes acts out maliciously.
This comment is so specific I know what you’re talking about and that you’re wrong about at least 2 details.
Whether you made it up or are confusing multiple people idk
Dang isn’t a great person, no mod is. Censorship is evil and we’re still in the dark ages.
In the future they will say in 2026 people were something like illiterate - nobody cared about solving death or aging (nobody is even working on it) and the authority of our day was way more into censoring ideas and collecting rent.
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.
Companies at which I worked sometimes went silent because there was no decision. It's hard to send an email that says something like "Hey, I know it's been three months, but I can't get my boss off the stick to make a decision here."
I don't know how many times I had this conversation:
Me: Hey boss, you know how Matt quit last week and we're down a guy? We really need someone in that role. The project is going to slip if we don't replace him.
Boss: The project can't slip. My bonu... I mean, it will make the whole team look bad if it slips.
Me: Great. When are you scheduling technical interviews?
Boss: There's a company wide hiring freeze. We can't replace anyone.
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.
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 have a leaderboard of some of the longest turn-around times from initial contact to rejection. Thus far the winners (if you can call them that) have been:
Docusign (4 YEARS); Nintendo (34 months); Google (30 months); Starbucks (22 months); Netflix (18 months); Astral (13 months); Snowflake (8 months)
But I also have a short list of shortest turn-around times. I say this because some of them are truly insane:
GitHub (3 hours); Valve (4 hours, but it was a real human with actual comments); Lockheed martin (2 hours); UserTesting (1 hour); Mozilla (30 minutes); Cloudflare (-2 minutes); Matterport (0 minutes)
The -2 minutes you see there is one of the most insane things I've ever experienced: As I'm filling in the application, I get an email simultaneously thanking me for going throug the recruitment process but saying they "reviewed my application" (that hadn't even been fully submitted yet) and that I wasn't a good fit for the role.
Matterport wins the award for "well at least they're not bullshitting" -- as soon as I had submitted the application, I didn't even get an email saying thank you, just a straight up dialog box saying "You won't be considered for this position."
My worst experience was with Microsoft. Somewhere, their system is designed such that if you ever fall out of the standard process, you're "rejected" -- I have more rejection emails for a position I ended up getting (which got canned within the year, ironically enough) than any other kind of email, including daily emails with the recruiter and hiring manager. I got an email telling me "sorry no thanks" *after* I had already signed the paperwork.
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And they didn't address the delay at all in their response to you?
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> redundancies
Surely you meant lay-offs, or firings, not this corporate-speak.
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.
It should be illegal to ask for references - the purpose of the interview is to understand your capabilities and abilities. If they couldn't suss all about you in that process then they have a shitty interview process.
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I interviewed at Linkedin in 2020 or so - interview went great, team fit was great, all the interviews were great, the recruiter told me he was going to prepare an offer... then I never heard from them again.
4 years later, a recruiter messaged me saying that they found my name as a potential candidate and knew that I declined the offer, back in 2020, so they wanted to know if I wanted to re-interview. I told the recruiter I never rejected anything. She looked into it and apparently it was your exact same situation: recruiter left that day, a bunch of candidates got marked as "declined" shortly after.
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.
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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.
>it was a Finance company so people suddenly not coming in the next day was a thing.
Oh, I'd love to know why this is a thing.
I did work for a mutual fund company for 18 months, one of those companies where the title Vice President simply meant nothing more than "employee" (although it was fun showing my business card to my friends and family, who were impressed by the title even though it had no meaning), but I didn't notice anything special about employee retention, probably because I was in a tech team.
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.
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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!
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I am building an interviewing and hiring platform (https://coderba.se/) but I've also hired/interviewed and shaped hiring processes at several companies before. It's ridiculous how easy it is to account for such trivial edge cases, yet most people just... dont. A big part of it is that, in spite of frequent chest beating about how "hiring is [one of] the most important thing[s] we do", the actual process is half-assed at best in most places, an effect particularly amplified by the current massive oversupply of talent.
The chance of a single hire being a make it or break it for the the business is pretty much null, so a single recruiter not having continuity in the processes they were doing once they get fired isn't really something to optimize for.
I had a similar experience. In my case, they gave me a few dates to fly out and do some sort of final boss talent show interview. Then… nothing.
I got the sense it was some internal political drama but maybe the recruiter disappeared… that honestly didn’t occur to me, and up until that point it was a pretty awesome and interesting process.
I’m on google’s list of special people who qualify for an interview whenever I’m ready, no screen required. I think most “big tech” employees are. I get an email every 6 months or so from a new recruiter letting me know they took over from the previous one, who’s no longer with the company.
I was on that list for a while, but thankfully it was because of someone else with my name, and one time they dropped a hint about my work with compilers at Microsoft, and I asked around and figured out actually they didn't really want me, they just don't understand names aren't unique.
> Her last day at the company was the day she promised she would book phone screens
And the emails you sent didn't bounce after that?
> 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
Have you ever done the math on how much that cost you? I'm guessing at least $20M?
what's weird about that though is they must have had some system to track candidates that would have been turned over to somebody.
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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.
The most literal ghosting possible.
I had an interview and no response. The interviewer got into a horrible car accident. Bad stuff happens.
Ghosted by Apple here. Devops or SRE job for services teams if I'm remembering right. Did a months worth of rounds. Was told the offer letter would be coming within the next week. Turned down other companies on the gamble that it was actually coming. Never came. Pinged recruiter and finally after a month was told they stopped hiring and would reach back out in a few months when it started back. Never happened. That was 3 years ago. It was character building to say the least.
I got ghosted by Apple after traveling to Cupertino to do some phone interviews from an Apple conf room. I'm pretty sure I've been blacklisted there for reasons unknown. Their recruiters reach out from time to time and after a couple messages back and forth, they too ghost. I've even been referred by friends which results in a conversation with a recruiter that ghosts me shortly after.
I'm pretty good at what I do and I'm not weird. All the conversations seemed to go well so I have no idea what happened.
Sorry you went through that. I've been on the other side of it. I had interviewed a bunch of people, found a good candidate, had an offer ready to go. It was pulled at the last second by higher ups who decided they needed the headcount more than my department did. It sucks for everybody.
Yeah it was the lack of communication on it that killed me. If something had just been said I would have signed the other offer and moved on. But I went from 2 prospects to zero because of the lack of communication, that was the part that hurt. Anyway things happen, people lost bitcoins, people quit Google early on, blah blah, Pete best left. Life happens, move on.
> It sucks for everybody
Sure but it sucks more for some than others
You can just take the other offer while you wait and then quit when the one you really want comes in.
Agreed and I would offer this advice to any junior struggling with the morality of the situation. I had a few reality checks to learn about larger companies and business in general.
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I did that, and had to take a bollocking from the HR guy at the company I took the first offer from, but I don't regret it.
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They responded as soon as you reached out. I don't think that counts as ghosting
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.
Full story: https://idiallo.com/blog/dont-ghost-me
Recruiters are never your friend. Ever.
I have had many poor experiences with recruiters. You have heard all the same stories I have to tell.
The ones you may not have heard is the odd post on LinkedIn from a recruiter which suggests that the role is so cutthroat that you have to ghost most candidates.
The one person I know from college who became a tech recruiter was someone who was not technical (English/philosophy double major) who loved telling people how stupid and wrong they were about things. He bemoaned once to me candidates that applied for job x which required experience x and not y which the candidate had, and how dumb they were for thinking it was equivalent. (They were mostly equivalent, which I knew having had a year of both under my belt; he never asked what I was doing at work in that conversation)
You can draw your own conclusions. I have met recruiters I felt were under enormous pressure to find the best candidates. I have met some who were the scum of the earth. Mostly, unless they were on the payroll of the company they were hiring for, I have just felt they were lazy.
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Yup. Recently I had one all buddy buddy with me, even to the point of unprofessionalism, in hindsight. After the final rounds, there was a little delay but he wanted to reassure me that they'd be finalizing things and would have exciting news...
... that turned out to be that I'd been the runner up candidate.
Wow, thanks.
Earlier this year I was interviewing at Figma. My interview was at 3:00.
I signed the required NDA.
At 3:00:55 I received an email saying thanks for your time but you're not being considered anymore.
I emailed the recruiter and heard nothing back.
---
Jerred,
Thank you for your interest in Figma! We know that applying for jobs takes time, and we appreciate your interest in joining our team. After reviewing your application for Software Engineer, Full Stack, we've decided not to move forward with your candidacy at this time.
Your resume is in our system for future opportunities, and we hope you'll keep an eye on our careers page. Best of luck with your job search!
Best, Figma Recruiting
---
Jerred Shepherd's interview with Figma!
M_____ F_____ canceled this event.
Had this happen to me several times. Recruiter reaches out super excited they found you, tells you you're the next best thing since sliced bread, asks you for availability and then dies.
I've never actually been ghosted but in my early 20s, I had applied to a company doing something to do with processing geographic data from for NASA as a contractor. It sounded really cool and I heard about it from a guy who worked there who was the brother of an acquaintance and reached out to me to ask if I was interested. We went out to lunch, talked it over, and then followed up by email, and he put me in touch with their HR department. They asked my availability over the next couple weeks for an interview and I gave it to them, and they never responded. I followed up and got nothing. Then about a month later, they emailed me apologizing and explaining that they had just been so busy. I wrote back and again got nothing in return. This happened over and over for about 6 months. They'd email apologizing, I'd respond, and they'd ignore me. Then there was another six month pause before I got one last big apology and request for availability which I never responded to. In hindsight, I probably should have politely told them I was no longer interested after the first gap but I was young and really wanted to say I did work for NASA.
Anyway, I never attributed any kind of malice to it, just poor management and poor candidate handling. I suspect that's often the case, especially with smaller start ups with likely overwhelmed employees wearing many hats. If anything, it's good signal that it's maybe not a great place to work. Imagine how they treat the people who work there if that's how they treat candidates.
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
Is https://didtheyghostyou.com/companies/robert-half an artifact of vibe coding you think? Robert Half is apparently an HR consulting firm but in TFA it links to a very sus `https://www.google.com/aclk`. What an oversight given the assurances that submissions are reviewed and moderated. Or is Google outsourcing HiRing to Robert Half now?
... and Robert Half is like a massive temp staffing firm on top of that (I've seen them working call center contracted remote support gigs before), so there's certain scales of companies being involved in 'ghosting' candidates from both top-level positions and super low-level positions, so...
The font is a dead giveaway
The one used in "A public record of professional silence." specifically
I recently vibe-coded an app in Codex and it has nearly the exact same style.
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He's responding _positively_ to the design and querying if this is accessible to everyone.
Clearly, they care
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There were two companies posting on hn some time ago that I suspect was just gathering training data (asking for a code challenge or to answer 2 questions about 60 seconds long answering some bs). I feel like we should denounce those as well. Posting jobs that don't actually exists. Specially those that post month after month.
Let's take a moment to talk about Wellfound, formerly AngelList.
I think Wellfound (f/k/a AngelList) is doing something similar.
The jobs advertised on there are real...
I'd been on the job market four months. Every day I did the rounds: Levels, Wellfound, YC/jobs, Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn.
It is what it is, as a crappy jobs market.
Wellfound? I didn't ever hear from anything from their job ads.I'm pretty certain that whatever Wellfound/AngelList was, it has become a company that just markets their resume writing services, resume review services, all sorts of other services that draw in your money somehow.
Why do I say that?
120+ applications on Wellfound since then. Crickets. Absolutely nothing.
One day I got an email, "Your profile has been viewed!". Weird, never seen an email like that from Wellfound. Indeed, "You have 1 profile view in the last 90 days".
Huh. 120+ applications, 120+ times me answering filling out Wellfound's content questions on "why you would be a good fit for this role", "tell us about x and y and z", no interviews, no contact, only ONE company has ever even viewed my profile (and for what it's worth, it's not a company that has any positions open).
Well, maybe my answers suck, you say. Maybe my resume isn't as impressive as I think it is.
But similar answers and the same resume get me fairly steady hits on every other site I mentioned, I've got to multiple final rounds, I've been explicitly told I was hirable, I was just the number two, I was "in the top three".
And to be clear, many of the companies I see on WF are advertising on other sites too.
My suspicion? WF DOES take job listings, but they also harvest them from other sites - the job is real, but there's no-one from the employer reviewing the applications to their "phantom" job at Wellfound... and meanwhile all people like me are doing is providing content for WF to harvest and train models for their real business model: AI-driven resume writing and review service and other products.
My AI video interview? Viewed... zero times.
Huh.
Ghosting is rude. Companies should at least politely reject you.
Chances are if they ghosted you, you didn't do as well as you think. You nailed a tech interview, but you only nailed part 1 of 3 and the interviewer didn't have the heart to tell you there was 2 other questions.
It happens to everyone. We've all done these interviews with nice candidates that just aren't right for that job. Don't worry! You'll find the job that works for you.
Last year I interviewed with Epic Games and I didn't get the job but they arranged a meeting to let me down easily, encourage me to apply for other positions. I really appreciated that!
I was once ghosted mid interview day. They left me in conference room and completely forgot. I was going to walk out after 30 minutes but I just wanted to see how long I could stay there. It took them five hours. And this was in a “highly secure” building so not sure how they invite someone to interview and let them just hangout inside the building for five hours.
> It took them five hours.
Presumably the Yucca plant in the corner put on a spurt of growth after your visit?
Did you get an offer????
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.
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.
> but only after I bugged them
working as a Redteamer/Purpleteamer, I read this as you physically planting a (listening) bug in the HR office to get that info :D
Did follow ups ever help anyone get a job?
Sometimes it can help articulate your stance after the fact. I’ve used it to thank the panel and to clarify a few of my answers so they had something to research. I have also used it to pull the emergency escape hatch and thank them for their time.
Hard to tell, really. I doubt it would have made a difference, in my case.
But treating people with respect and dignity -that’s something that helps the company (not necessarily the applicant).
I always follow up because it's honestly how I got my 2nd job. I got a generic recruiter response and did your normal call. Then nothing. Followed up in a few weeks and it was clear they simply forgot to report back to the team. Then they scheduled me for a call with my future lead.
On the other hand, it's hard to forget when I went 5 stages into an interview, then did 3 follow ups: 3 days later, a week after that, then 2 weeks after that. I got a response each time pretty quickly saying "yeah, your're still in consideration", and then nothing. Not even a generic rejection. I just cut my losses because if they can give weekly interviews for a month but need more than a month to consider me, it's not happening.
This should include the hiring manager, recruiter or other point of contact. Particularly at large companies. That aligns individual incentives with the goal of reducing this behavior.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853401)
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.
My experience in France was that almost everyone ghosts you, including after three rounds of interviews.
It's probably because they don't want to be liable for giving a reason.
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Really no offense, but in all truth, I would probably skip an application with simple misspellings. Anecdotal is what you're looking for.
This comment really has no purpose other than being petulent.
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Likely, every company ghosts, either occasionally or often. So really this is kind of a 100% hit rate problem.
I very much advocate for this, but only if you're past the HR/recruiter screen. Onsites, coding screen, second round, etc.
I got email offer from Snowflake with numbers after a full round of office interviews. They first matched me with a team and then themselves decided to pivot me to another team. I wasn't feeling fully interested in second team's work; the manager told me it's completely OK to explore with 1-2 hiring managers before accepting. I asked the recruiter to help connect. The next email was "Thank you for your time!" and ghosting on all follow ups.
For Companies Looking to Scale Ghostying Pipelines (Satire) https://staticfile-25978.wasmer.app/
ahahaha
> Provide a factual account without names,
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.
my friend had been waiting for offer after passing final interview, but recruiter suddenly went silent. she responded nearly 2 years after saying that she had been on parental leave (yeah it's this long in our country), and he would have to start whole process again. of course he moved on and never applied to this company again
After several interviews with a big telecommunications company, I got a verbal job offer from the recruiter over the phone. I accepted. They said the formal job offer would be coming in the next week or so.
I never received the formal job offer. I called after a month and was told not to worry, it was still happening. I think I called again after 3 months, but stopped thinking about it after that.
Eventually I went to work for an internet company (which also delayed the formal job offer for several months. Deja Vu! But only because the background checking firm was having trouble completing the background check).
This was in the mid-aughts.
I used to have an active avoid list of companies based on:
Now I just remember it without needing that list
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.
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That should be relatively easy to prove.
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.
"What do you mean by “make good” and “prove hiring” operationally?"
We aren't worried about your case. We are worried about ID theft rings who harvest information from CVs sent to fake job ads. If you hire for even a fraction of your ads and you are engaged in any sort of legitimate business (where the revenue doesn't come from the CVs or information harvested from them), we aren't worried about that.
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.
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What does this have to do with the original comment?
"1 of 1 would interview with them again" is too small a sample. This site needs more data before they post recommendations.
Of course BJAK would be on there. Any company that quotes prices in anything other than USD isn't a company I would trust
Cease and desist letters from lawyers piling in 3 .. 2 ... 1 ... They should've done it in a form of .onion service.
Maybe we also need a site, that tracks /that/. Spineless companies, in which people don't want to take responsibility for the way they treat others.
Most company managers don't care about letting the rejected candidates know what their fate is. They just want to find the right candidate and make their daily hiring quota.
Thank you for the site. I shall make good use of it as I am constantly getting ghosted :)
In my personal experience, order of dodginess :)
1. Recruiter 2. Second-hand car salesman 3. Realtor 4. Mechanics 5. Lawyers
We’re gonna need a bigger wall.
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
As a hiring manager I take candidate experience seriously because I know it’s easy to get wrong and leave people with a really bad taste in their mouth at a sensitive time.
As a candidate, though, I have learned not to take offense to being ghosted or the million other indignities that one is subjected to in a modern interview pipeline. It’s just a part of the modern economy, and far from the worst one. As terrible as it is, it’s not a hill worth dying on, suck it up and just move on with your search.
A few years ago I was considering setting up something like this for B2B startups that get stuffed around / dragged along / ghosted by corporates to try and change behaviour. Including positive reviews…
I think that there should be a feature of "they turned me down/declined" and have an option for whether or not they gave you useful feedback.
We should also reward and encourage positive behavior by companies.
As long as there has been recruiters… there has been ghosting.
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.
I've been meaning to write something up about this myself but, suffice it to say, I've been asking myself this question a lot lately.
The real person that should be held responsible for ghosting is the HR. They represent the company. It takes very little effort to even send an automated email intimating the rejection and better yet if possible, a one liner reason - even from a drop down so as to help the candidate improve themselves. Instead, all the fucking HR does all day long is make cringe videos on TikTok these days and create imaginary problems that don't exist to justify their existence to management.
https://www.reddit.com/r/theprimeagen/comments/1tkgml2/bolt_...
I think companies that don’t even acknowledge your application also need to be in this list. Most companies ghost at the application level.
lol "robert half: google"
what am i supposed to gather from this?
Robert Half ghosted someone they were actively trying to find a job for? Why would they even do that? They have more clients, the recruiter loses if they don't get you somewhere.
If you got "ghosted" from a recruiting company, there was probably a good reason for it.
this is cool but the leaderboard is just going to converge on large companies unless it's normalized somehow
Call the recruiters out by name.
I know more than a few people looking for a job right now and this is their number 1 complaint.
wonder if this would count as sousveillance [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance]
for a moment i thought this was a commentary about my relationships
Do they distinguish ghosting after an interview vs before?
Nvidia ghosted me some years ago after a full interview. They said they'd get back to me in two weeks. After three weeks I pinged the recruiter and she said "definitely by the end of the week".
Never heard from them. Two months later the site showed it was still pending. Some time later it finally changed to "rejected". Not even an automated email.
I stopped applying and responding to their recruiters. Some years later a manager reached out to me saying I'd be a good candidate but I need to formally apply to schedule. I applied. Crickets.
Amazon routinely ghosted me prior to scheduling the full interview. They'd do a screening round that I'd pass. Then they'd say they want to go ahead with a full interview and that I'll be called for scheduling. They never called and the recruiter never responded. Probably happened five times.
I ignore Amazon recruiters.
the 4-year Docusign one raises the question of whether they were ghosting or just running the world's slowest background check
this is awesome and a scoreboard you might not want to win for your company xD
let this be done for u.k companies lol.
Nice name and shame
“Yes”
Yeah I thought it was gonna be a static page
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Is ghosting really such a big deal?
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
> Wait until you get an overly smug rejection letter that the author seemed too eager to write, and took too much joy in writing.
I got one of those a few years ago, from a prominent tech startup CEO (non-YC).
The funniest thing is that I'm pretty sure it's a person who has some kind of recurring episodes of anonymously attacking HN infrastructure and dang.
Who then also attacked me on HN (and elsewhere, it looks like), while seeming to reference that earlier rejection, and emphasizing how much they thought I was unworthy.
> That means there's no record of you ever getting denied for the position.
Or record held in the mind, even years later, of someone who sometimes acts out maliciously.
Apparently, it's a real thing.
This comment is so specific I know what you’re talking about and that you’re wrong about at least 2 details.
Whether you made it up or are confusing multiple people idk
Dang isn’t a great person, no mod is. Censorship is evil and we’re still in the dark ages.
In the future they will say in 2026 people were something like illiterate - nobody cared about solving death or aging (nobody is even working on it) and the authority of our day was way more into censoring ideas and collecting rent.
You’re basically a Savonarola fanboy
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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.
An offer extended is better than an offer you're just hoping might come. Act on what's real.
Just send a follow up email after a few days asking for a timeline.
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This is to some extent a generational thing, but yes. It’s rude. If you’re not ready to politely reject numerous candidates, don’t interview them.
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.
And this is why ghosting is a thing.
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.
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> there is nothing stopping you publishing it as a signal to others
Well, online moderation can stop you.
Glassdoor seems more about keeping things "squeaky clean" rather than "transparency" ;)
I don't think candidates (or customers for that matter) have much of a voice anymore online.
Everyone who's popular on social media who could reach huge audiences is already working for the brands.
Yeah, I don't get it. I think nothing is about the same as getting a generic "unfortunately" email.
And I actually prefer nothing to unsolicited feedback. I don't give a shit about what someone who can't even spell principal thinks about me.
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Only the site-making people would make a site? No shit Sherlock.
you mean you make a site using people? that's like a baby's toy
this is pointless because different teams/different recruiters within the same company operate differently (surprise surprise humans are different).
We need this for employees too. There are many who don’t act ethically when interviewing for a job.
Is it already provided by the background check companies?
Companies at which I worked sometimes went silent because there was no decision. It's hard to send an email that says something like "Hey, I know it's been three months, but I can't get my boss off the stick to make a decision here."
I don't know how many times I had this conversation:
Me: Hey boss, you know how Matt quit last week and we're down a guy? We really need someone in that role. The project is going to slip if we don't replace him.
Boss: The project can't slip. My bonu... I mean, it will make the whole team look bad if it slips.
Me: Great. When are you scheduling technical interviews?
Boss: There's a company wide hiring freeze. We can't replace anyone.
Me: So... the project is going to slip then.
Boss: No, the project can't slip.