Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

One of my top lessons I&#x27;ve learned doing successful startups:<p>1. Recruiting is the #1 job of any startup CEO, and the #1 determiner of corporate success.<p>2. Up market, down market, side market, it doesn&#x27;t matter: You will get better employees if you treat candidates with respect and you will be more competitive.<p>3. It&#x27;s a lot of work for the 95% of clowns out there you interview, and there&#x27;s a push towards automated process, but it will hurt your business.<p>4. There&#x27;s a lot more to recruiting than just treating candidates with respect. It involves how you present yourself as an employer (participating in conferences &#x2F; meetups &#x2F; etc.), how you find candidates, checking references, reviewing github repos, etc. It&#x27;s a crazy amount of work.<p>5. This is hard, but if you can do this, you will have a huge edge.<p>The flip side is that as an employee, doing a good job interviewing &#x2F; recruiting, especially at a big company, is one of the lowest value-add tasks you can bring on, from a purely selfish &#x2F; incentive structures perspective. This friction, I think, is a major reason why recruiting is handled so badly. There is absolutely no upside to doing a good job, and it takes a lot of time to do so.

The new normal? This has been the case for years for almost all job applications. Maybe if you&#x27;re lucky and the company has put you through like 4 rounds of interviews you might get feedback, but the general rule seems to be that useful feedback for an interview is the exception rather than the norm.<p>And heck, even that isn&#x27;t something you can rely on. I&#x27;ve had a fair few interviews get about 80% of the way through the recruitment process, then just ghost me without a trace. The main reason I have my current job is because the other company I was interviewing with just kinda faded away at the end of the application process.<p>If being ghosted is the new norm for you, you must be insanely lucky.

Both of the following can be true at the same time:<p><pre><code> 1. I personally owe a response to anyone who reaches out to me, in a timely manner, even if that answer is no, because to intentionally ignore a request is unethical. 2. I will strive to have built up many and different areas in my life, such that my sense of confidence is not impacted by the actions or inactions of people who are, in essence, strangers. </code></pre> If you want to inure yourself to people ghosting you, spend some time in a sales gig doing cold calls. The vast majority of people will not respond to you and that is not only OK, <i>that is a good thing</i>. You want to be with people who give you a positive return on your energy, not people who sink your energy.<p>Move on.

I once interviewed with the owner of a small tech company. I thought the interview went well, and the owner said he would get back to me the next week. But he never did. I never heard another peep from them.<p>Months later, I saw that the company had hired someone for the position, and the person looked to be very qualified, impressive credentials, so I had no complaints about being passed over. All they had to say was that they decided to go with another candidate, yet they didn&#x27;t bother to treat me with a modicum of respect.<p>Fast forward to a year later, it turns out that their new employee left the company, and they had to advertise for the same position again. Guess who did NOT apply this time. Karma.

This is a pet peeve of mine. In the olden days, pre-digital, companies would send you a proper letter back together with your application documents so you could possibly reuse them. That was actually a little work for them to do!<p>These days, sending an effing canned email to all applicants that didn&#x27;t get hired costs a company next to nothing, and still ghosting happens.<p>It&#x27;s indecent.

100% in the &quot;nobody remembers what you did, everyone remembers how you made them feel&quot; camp.<p>An automated no is such a no-brainer versus the reputational risk of being seen as a bad or callous employer.<p>And people have looooong memories &#x2F; impressions created in this space. I honestly have no idea if General Electric is a good or bad employer, but the Jack Welch era still lingers in my mind.

I&#x27;ve been ghosted twice lately. One was someone reaching out via Hacker News for an initial chat where they said &quot;let&#x27;s put you through our interview process&quot; and then ghosted. The other was for a startup, similar situation, &quot;let&#x27;s set up a chat with our CEO&quot;, then ghosted.<p>The commonality here is an inability to just be honest and say &quot;doesn&#x27;t seem like a good fit&quot;. Disappointing, and ironically, an indication that it really wouldn&#x27;t be a good fit. I don&#x27;t want to work with people who are unable to deliver uncomfortable news respectfully, or even, at all.

If you get ghosted it usually means that you were almost good enough, or it was something unrelated to you.<p>The bad candidates get an immediate rejection.<p>The best candidates get offers quickly.<p>Candidates that are kind of good enough, but not <i>amazing</i> are the ones who get ghosted. The employer doesn’t want to say yes in case they find someone better. They also don’t want to say no because you are “good enough” and if the next 3 candidates suck then you’ll get the job. Then they forget to tell you when they hire #3.<p>The other ghosting is when the whole project gets cancelled mid interview. Often people involved aren’t sure if the project will be cancelled so they don’t tell the candidates early. Then when the cancellation is in full swing everyone has forgotten about the candidates.

Every time I&#x27;ve been passed over for a job, I&#x27;ve been notified in a timely manner. I would consider anything less to be grossly, outrageously unprofessional. It&#x27;s never happened to me, but if it ever does, you best believe I am going to name and shame the hell out of that company. Everyone deserves to know, and people like this don&#x27;t deserve to have anyone working for them.

The whole point thing about having half a breakdown after being ghosted is not going to be remedied by receiving a generic rejection email.. even the actual response he did get after pestering them was just &quot;you were good but another guy was better&quot; and yeah this is 90% of all anyone will ever say anyways. Like you can simply assume that 1. a better candidate was found or 2. the job opening was already closed because already hired or budget or role reconsidered if it helps you feel better.<p>The whole idea that we can apply the norms of personal relationships to a business transaction like this with 100s of candidates, no pre-existing relationship beyond 1-2 calls at mostand at best a generic rejection is basically displaced disappointment turned to resentment and anger. To which I say, you can either rant about it online and hope they change, or you can learn to regulate your own emotions.

This is NOT the new normal, and we should NOT accept it. Everyone here should do their part; for example, I&#x27;m more often a hiring manager and will not tolerate ghosting anyone who gets to any interaction with engineering. IME it&#x27;s lazy recruiters who are responsible for this, and they&#x27;re about as big of a part of tech as an accountant, i.e. very little.<p>I don&#x27;t understand why many people are hesitant to name and shame the individuals and companies. It doesn&#x27;t matter if it was intentional or accidental the outcome is the same, and I have consistently been very vocal with my being ghosted experiences. Surprise, surprise: they&#x27;re consistent on a company-basis and highly corelated to other shitty experiences, both before and during employment.

So glad I wrapped up my 6mo job search lol. It was an extremely dehumanizing process. I think Ive mostly repressed my feelings since it ended, part of me wishes I wrote about it.<p>These companies acting like everything they do is so important and urgent that they cant be bothered to give real feedback or tell me no. I suspect part of the lack of real feedback is that most people have no clue how to interview, even these large companies.<p>Companies should run their own employees through the hiring process or something. This would definitely show how bad almost all tech recruiters are along with their interview process in general.<p>I ended my search with a couple companies I don&#x27;t want to work for now. Meaningless I guess, I&#x27;m sure they still have an endless stream of candidates and these large companies past a certain point will never actually die. They make worse decisions then being rude to applicants daily and have no real repercussion.

What I&#x27;ve never really understood is that though recruiters (external but also in-house) are typically paid on hiring candidates, much like sales people.<p>And in that paradigm, why is ghosting so common? As a recruiter, a lot of your value is your professional network that you can pull from to place candidates. Why would you ever ghost people that, while not a good fit for this role, could be a good fit for a different role in the future?<p>Even as someone not in recruiting, I&#x27;ve made several connections with folks in the interviewing process (both as interviewer and interviewee) that have led to either new business deals or job placement later on.<p>Just never really made sense to me, interviewing is &quot;free&quot; networking. ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯

At every company I worked at, each interviewer would have gone through training to do interviews, write feedback, participate in debriefs and actually do those things in a timely fashion. Senior people would have participated&#x2F;chaired in semi-formal or more-formal hiring committees and helped make hire&#x2F;no-hire decisions. And the hiring tools we used showed if the candidate has applied earlier for same&#x2F;different roles, and did interviews and what were the feedback earlier. There would also internal confidential ref-checks based on overlap in candidate&#x27;s work history with anyone at the company currently. If the candidate was rejected at any stage, the recruiter is informed and they have access to almost all of these data in the same tool. And they are expected to communicate that back to the candidate. And there is a feedback tool for the candidate to rate the whole experience and this feedback is analyzed carefully, and processes tweaked accordingly, especially if the company is growing and expected to continue to grow for a while.<p>In companies that had to do aggressive cost cutting, the recruiters were the first to be impacted. These roles have had high churn and sufficient training and experience quality monitoring may have suffered during this period. That could be the reason why the certain steps in the process involving recruiters (like communicating back to the rejected candidates) may have suffered w.r.t quality of interactions.

Jeez. On one hand, sure, it’s frustrating when this happens. But for everyone trying to get hired out there: don’t just sit passively waiting for results - call your damn recruiter on the phone! Recruiters are human and yes they make mistakes. Sometimes a phone call may actually result in jiggling you along in the process and actually make the difference between getting hired or not.<p>Don’t sit at home and feel sad and stroke your beard and neglect your side projects. Communicate, sell yourself, don’t be afraid to be a bit pushy!

I think its cultural. Disrespect has become normalised as part of &quot;fast paced modern life&quot;.<p>If we give toddlers a TV or tablet to play with instead of attentive parenting they grow up with damaged attachment patterns. We stop them playing outside and interacting with other children. They go through metal detectors to attend hostile schools in a locked-down environment and communicate only through text messages. They are watched night and day by CCTV cameras. They&#x27;re made to feel ashamed of simply existing because they&#x27;re using up air and &quot;killing the planet&quot;.<p>Do this for 20 or 30 years and we have a generation of timid, avoidant people with no interpersonal skills who as Julia Roberts&#x27; character in Sam Esmail&#x27;s new movie &quot;Leave the World Behind&quot; puts it just &quot;hate other people&quot;.<p>And then we use dating apps that reduce other humans to a dismissibe swipe. Those are our peers today. We treat each other like machines and mutual threats, because that&#x27;s all we&#x27;ve ever experienced.<p>Is it any wonder that people in companies are too terrified to engage in a risky human-human interaction?

Almost as bad IMO are companies that auto-respond with messages like &quot;we&#x27;ll contact you in the next few weeks to discuss next steps&quot;. Next few <i>weeks</i>? Are you under the impression that your competitors are all sitting around twiddling their thumbs?<p>Yes, it&#x27;s a hirer&#x27;s market today, but that doesn&#x27;t mean you can take your sweet time eventually getting around to interested applicants.

I think this would matter more to me if the feedback was ever useful. The feedback from these &quot;no&quot; is more cliche and less useful than a Dear John letter. All I ever hear are &quot;another more qualified candidate&quot;, or rarely the slightly more useful &quot;culture fit&quot;.

I recall getting feedback from one or two companies at which I attended day-long interviews. I had to ask, and after the &quot;well, we can&#x27;t tell you that,&quot; got a couple of &quot;we hired someone with more specific experience with XYZ&quot;.<p>Otherwise, many days sent down a black hole, followed by beers, to recover from the day&#x27;s ordeal.<p>My wild-ass hyperbolic guess is that once they make a choice, staying silent is their way of grabbing a beer or two and forgetting their own ordeal, and having no regrets. &quot;We hired a genius. All the others were run of the mill&quot;<p>They&#x27;re human, after all, but maybe humans won&#x27;t be involved any more. Machines decide who will serve them.

Here&#x27;s a relevant experience. I applied for a job a few days ago. The recruiter reached out to me through email to schedule a phone call and I scheduled a time through her online calendar. To give you some more context in terms of timing: she emailed me in the morning and I responded in the afternoon. Less than 24 hours after she reached out to me, the job ad on the company page is taken down and now says the position is filled. No response from the recruiter.<p>What the hell was that?

As someone who interviewed in the bay for the last 7 years, ghosting is pretty normal on both sides of the equation.<p>It totally sucks when you go through the process and don&#x27;t hear anything back but I also take it as a sign of feedback that I didn&#x27;t kill on the interview.<p>I have ghosted a ton on interviews, never purposely but things get lost in the shuffle if you aren&#x27;t super passionate about the company<p>It isn&#x27;t a great habit&#x2F;practice on either side, but by any means this isn&#x27;t new

Could be worse, interviewers could be bullying and degrading interviewees they don&#x27;t like ... on a wider level.<p><i>sigh</i> 2 really good interviews, and then that. Work in my field, with tech I&#x27;d had decades on, and that. Worse experience of the last year of unemployment, and worst interview ever. I had a rough time with google interviews because I don&#x27;t have a PHD (or degree of any kind) but nothing on that level, ever, before.

Is it new, though?<p>I&#x27;ve been in the industry for a very long time, and being ghosted has always been my standard experience when I didn&#x27;t get a position I interviewed for.

I got ghosted twice by the same guy working for Citi, for the initial chat. Needless to say, I or my friends won&#x27;t bother applying for any jobs there.

This has happened to me multiple times, including from large YC-funded companies. I&#x27;m tempted to name-and-shame, but I doubt it would do any good.<p>I don&#x27;t consider anyone obligated to respond to a resume or application, but stopping communication in the middle of the interview process is utterly disrespectful and does not speak well of your company&#x27;s values and culture.

In 2020 here in Austria I had people clearly tell me when I was a fit and when I wasn&#x27;t and with a reason. As a background I&#x27;m working for 20 years so I&#x27;d call myself very senior for a typical dev job.<p>The only exception was Automattic. They are very proud of everything and how clear their communication is, which it was for most of the time. I got invited to slack, got links with a lot of information. Then I had the interview, which from my point of view wasn&#x27;t too bad.<p>After the interview I got told that they won&#x27;t move forward. I can apply again after a year after I improved my skills. No word about what they thought didn&#x27;t match the position. Slack channel closed, no response to my email asking what they were missing.

My company ghosted me for an internal advancement opportunity. A short interview with the HR recruiter then silence for 2 months, even from my manager. I had to complain to the head of HR to get a response letting me know that they&#x27;re going with an external hire.

one seldom-mentioned reason employers ghost candidates deep in the process SEEMS silly, but is selfishly rational: they are hedging their bets. you came in second place, and they are waiting to see if their preferred candidate accepts before getting back to you.

A &quot;few&quot; years ago (back in the last economic crisis) I was job hunting. Interviewed with a ton of people, and almost no one would get back to you. A few did, but most just ghosted me. I just found myself back in the job hunt, but this time almost everyone sent me a response. It sucks getting a &quot;no&quot; but I&#x27;d rather get a &quot;you are the worst programmer in the world, go jump on a lake&quot; than get boring at all. I did one interview, had to give a presentation, out a lot of time into it. Never to hear from them again. But the point is, it was definitely better this time around (well better in the housing sense)

My first rule of recruiting for my own technical teams: don&#x27;t let a recruiter be the face of your company or team. Set rules on interaction, follow-ups, etc. Insert yourself or someone directly from the team into the process as early as time allows.<p>Also, don&#x27;t let a recruiter contact candidates on your behalf. I&#x27;ve seen this go sideways several times where unprofessionalism can be conducted IN YOUR NAME by the recruiter.

There is no excuse for not sending a no.<p>Recruiters this day are using one of a dozen or so recruiting platforms, all of which either have or ought to have functionality that tracks communications.<p>&quot;Slipping through the cracks&quot; isn&#x27;t the issue. The issue is a lack of professionalism and diligence, which aren&#x27;t things I want to see from someone that is going to filter out future employees.

I’ve been ghosted a few times over the years. It stung at first but now that I have grey hair, I no longer take it personally. I actually started ghosting job offers and invitation to continue to the next phase of the interview process. If they’re really interested, they’ll find an alternate way to contact me.

It&#x27;s all sector&#x27;s in the industry not just isolated to tech jobs.

I don&#x27;t understand why companies don&#x27;t understand: &quot;If you don&#x27;t care about me, why should I care about you?&quot;

This is anecdotal but, if the new normal was 10 years ago then sure. I stared out my career then and ghosting was common….

Here is a truly stupid idea: What if you could buy a job interview. You pay say 100 bucks, you get the deluxe tour, all the attention and dedication you deserve, a nice letter highlighting your qualities. Make the process into a real product that is worth buying.<p>I&#x27;ve never experienced it and I don&#x27;t know if they still do it but I hear in Belgium they do a lot of things over dinner. If nothing useful comes out of it you split the bill.

I know ghosting is &quot;normal,&quot; but what do you do when it means you are not getting reimbursed for travel?

Literally give the middle finder emoji to the interviewer and wonder why they don&#x27;t want to hire him.

Been this was for everyone outside of tech. Welcome and enjoy the purgatory

Getting ghosted 95% of the time has been the default for decades.

The ghosting problem is fixable in 2 seconds with any LLM + AI recruiting pipelining tool. That is the solution to this. Someone will figure it out in the next three months or less.<p>On the other hand, here is the reality:<p>In a &quot;hiring company friendly&quot; environment, where they cut all their expensive recruiters &#x2F; or all recruiters &#x2F; or simply don&#x27;t care &#x2F; or treat recruiters as disposable this is what you get.<p>We are seeing a rising trend, which may reverse in a &quot;Good Market&quot; but part of me wonders if it ever will.<p>White Collar workers are becoming &#x2F; have become more and more &quot;disposable.&quot;<p>As disposable as recruiters.<p>White Collar workers are not used to being disposable, we think we are unique and special butterfly hires. And much of silicon valley <i>used</i> to be structured around the messaging: &quot;Your talent is so useful and valuable that we can&#x27;t live without you.&quot;<p>That pretense was never <i>really</i> true but they sort of put on an act to keep things friendly.<p>Lately, that pretense is completely gone. And dropping.<p>At some point employers, in my opinion, are going to find hires speaking out publicly.<p>And naming names directly.<p>Why? No consequences and the employers have nothing, as a class, to offer.<p>I got to this point in my own professional career. I was treated so badly at one company, I saw no point in not directly naming and shaming them. I didn&#x27;t even care if &quot;their friends&quot; didn&#x27;t want to hire me. I didnt want to work with anyone who would be friends with people that evil.<p>Here is the deal silicon valley wants:<p>&quot;We treat you like shit and you are expected to take it as a normal part of &quot;professionalism,&quot; or we will black ball you and you will be deemed unhireable because you are unwilling to take being treated like shit gracefully, and we (employers) need employees who we can shit on and dispose of. If you complain after this treatment, you are a liability since you think you are worth literally anything as a human being ... when we require disposable parts.&quot;<p>Even THAT contract, which is a VERY BAD AND ONE SIDED DEAL is fraying.<p>I expect that you are going to see more and more people speaking publicly and directly naming these companies.<p>Once THAT happens then you KNOW ITS ON.<p>I suspect venture capital portfolios are going to need to directly tell CEOs not to do this because they are &quot;angering the sheep.&quot;<p>Shitting on applicants, if it continues to escalate, will become a net liability.<p>Venture Capital companies and Venture Capital firms want to cut corners, access cheap talent and avoid treating employees like they are human beings. They will push this as far as possible until it becomes a net liability.<p>I think we are going to see people getting so fed up they begin naming names, and THEN it will change.

as a founder recruiting engineers of various skillsets&#x2F;expertise i simply don&#x27;t have the bandwidth to respond to every non-qualified candidate.