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.
I actually had a positive, although a bit weird, experience with Microsoft. First, I got a response 3 months after I applied to schedule an interview! I figured it was due to the holidays. After the interview the recruiter called me personally and gave me the bad news that I didn’t get the job, but actually gave me specific feedback on where I did well and poorly on the interview. I was shocked! I think it’s the only time I’ve ever received non generic feedback.
I’ve heard a lot of bad experiences too, so unfortunately I think I was an exception!
I had the same experience with Cloudflare, It's been awhile, but I recall I uploaded my resume as one of the first steps and while I was filling out the later steps (copying the resume contents into fields) I got the same rejection error on trying to move to the next step. I presumed it was looking for specific resume keywords.
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.
It's a data point, not a final or primary determinant.
Vast majority of corporate team members or leads are not allowed to say anything bad or much other than whether that person was employed or not.
Nevertheless :
1. If a person has a comprehensive long resume but cannot provide meaningful references, that poses a significant question as to why
2. A person will not typically say anything bad about their ex colleague or team members due to legal and policy constraints. Nevertheless if they stick to the "this person was employed here" and don't give even a perfunctory "oh Bob? Yeah he was a good guy. He was employed here from 2023 to 2025" even after some soft prompting, again, a data point.
Depends what you're looking for in an employee or colleague. If "history of not completely burning bridges to the ground " is relevant to you, references are "a" data point.
It kinda sucks though if you end up being a bad culture fit a couple times in a row. You end up being rejected on that basis alone. Forever. And there is nothing you can do about it, even of you are qualified for the jobs you apply for.
It's usually last manager and co-workers where the company has a policy of not allowing references. Plus who wants to bother other people asking for a reference after you've been working for 25 years.
I have never heard of not allowing references. Is that a US thing?
While I don't love providing references, given they are such a standard part of the employment process (at least here in Australia), I can't see how a company could disallow providing character references. That would be a big red flag if I discovered that after starting to work somewhere.
In the company I worked for, we were strictly prohibited from saying anything other than “name, rank, and serial number” (date of arrival, date of departure, position).
It was a legal liability issue. I’m told it’s pretty much de rigueur, these days.
One of the nice things, after leaving, was finally being able to give good references for former employees, for whom I really wanted to give glowing references.
Happens in Europe too. I think it’s a liability issue, not allowing the employee to speak in the name of the company. So the guidance is “tell the reference seeker to contact the HR department” and they’ll eventually reply that “this person worked here as <job title> between <time period>”.
That makes more sense. That's still a reference I guess. I was more confused about straight up denying somebody a reference, that would immediately make tenure at a company worth less.
The big issue is that a lot of companies don’t allow asking their employees for references. Many even require references for their own hiring process (!!!)
Many companies don't allow details, but are allowed to confirm a person was employed in a specific role. That's in many cases a sufficient to serve as a reference.
E.g. In my company we have a very strict policy for this, but are still allowed to answer "yes, Bob was employed as problem manager team lead from 2023 to 2025". Conversely as a hiring manager, I'll take that as a minimally sufficient data point in confirming resume entry.
My understanding is that the "were they employed" thing is covered by background checks. I know equifax (experian? I always get them confused) have a product where they will reveal your past titles AND your salaries. It's a little wild and I don't like that, but the point is that I don't think you gain much info from "yes they worked here" from HR.
A reference is really intended as a statement of character IMO. "They worked here" from HR, who doesn't know you, is not that.
It's always worth considering whether you have people who will give you genuine glowing references.
I've only ever once been at a place where there was a policy saying "all you are allowed to say during reference checks is "yes, they worked here as [job title], from {month/year} to {month/year}". And even with that policy/restriction I still found ways to be much much more positive about the people who were genuinely great.
One great way around that kind of policy - at least if you far enough into your career for it - is to provided references for people who are also no longer at the company they're being a referee for. There are 3 or 4 people from that job I mentioned that didn't allow me to elaborate, where I've subsequently provided reference including something like "Ratica? Yeah - she is great! She lead my QA team and worked magic! You might want to warn the company she's applying to that as soon as I get a role and budget that suits her QA skills, I'll 100% be trying to headhunt her away from them."
Nah, she got the job. And that lead to her next even better one. Now I'd need something to go spectacularly right for me to be able to afford to head hunt her.
(We still catch up for coffee every 6 or 12 months.)
> Many companies don't allow details, but are allowed to confirm a person was employed in a specific role.
WDYM by "allowed"? In my jurisdiction, a company is required to confirm (or deny, as the case may be) the dates and roles of employment when asked.
A reply along the lines of "we can not confirm $PERSON's employment as a $ROLE between $DATE1 and $DATE2" when $PERSON has salary slips for those dates is a slam-dunk winning lawsuit!
In my company we have a very strict policy for this
My company is so strict about it that it farms out reference checks to a third company so that nobody inside the company knows that references were checked. Seems a little extreme to me.
> a third company so that nobody inside the company knows that references were checked
That’s actually really interesting. If you are actively looking that prevents anyone in the company from knowing you are looking, even if they did a reference check. That might be because of some previous lawsuits around terminating someone while getting a reference check before actually getting a new job/leaving.
I big red flag for what? your social habits? lol - i guess if you have to work in a team then yeah, that would be important. but some jobs you just need to get in the truck and drive or w/e, but recruiters still stuck in the time old habit of asking for 3 references. its weak.
I imagine even in such a job, your shift lead, team boss, or warehouse manager or whatever, would be able to confirm "yes, Bob worked here in truck driving capacity from 2022 to 2024".
References have many levels of usefulness, but the bar starts low - did this person actually perform the job / hold the role they claim in a resume.
Next, and the one I'll agree you don't get as much in modern environment, is how much did they burn bridges / how competent they were. The team boss might be allowed to say "Bob?!? He drove well but god dammit the guy never showed up on time for his shift!". Or they might not.
Thanks for the perspective, I like the low bar usefulness, without that people can claim anything on their resume I guess. But I really dislike the opinions on peoples usefulness aspect. Much better to start someone off on a 3 or 6 month trial and if you think theyre not worth the money let them go. Heck, even keep the 6 mo review going forever if you want.
Mixed. I disagree because you can't get culture fit out of a few hours of interviews, so having people who worked with you can help a lot.
I primarily agree because some companies get way too haughty and try to ask for references in the job app. There's no way I'm giving contact info of my leadership to you to bother them (2 of which very carefully avoid posting their contact info on the internet) unless I'm dead sure I'm in consideration for a role. Certainly not before I can talk to a human.
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.
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.
I once had an interview loop where after the final round I didn't hear back from the recruiter point-of-contact for awhile. After 1.5 weeks, I sent an email following up: the recruiter replied "I was on vacation dammit, btw you didn't get the job."
In 2017 I was talking to a recruiter who genuinely forgot about my application. As in I pinged them, things got moving again, and I actually got hired.
In 2021, I talked to a quantum startup and all indications were that the feedback was "overall extremely positive", and the final step would be talking to the CTO or CEO. For some reason HR could not get that meeting scheduled for two weeks, before telling me I didn't get the job. This seemed like a communication thing, but a few years later the whole company shut down, so I guess I dodged a bullet and/or they changed their mind about hiring.
I have participated in at least 3 rounds of vocational rehabilitation, and one of the major takeaways was writing thank-you notes after any interview.
A note could be a card or an email, but a thank-you note simply expresses gratitude for the interviewer’s time and attention.
And moreover, a followup will keep your name in their mind, for better or worse. Following up after the interview series may have been the trick to landing my “pandemic job” in May 2020. I phoned or emailed the recruiter, just to thank her, just to say hello, and you know what? She said “yeah actually we were gonna call you with a job offer” and the rest is history.
So, before you complain that someone ghosted you, please consider who’s ghosting whom!
I hear this advice given quite a bit, but another perspective: I have never been pleased to receive a thank you email from a candidate. I do not want to receive something in my inbox that does not require me to act. It's a micro-annoyance, and if it's a bad day, I might have grumpy thoughts about the candidate being a brownnoser.
Show up to the interview clothed, be pleasant and polite, show off your game, and leave it at that.
Imagine being a recruiter, seeing someone genuinely interested in the position (or at least willing to put in the effort to make it seem that way), and getting annoyed rather than hyped. You in the wrong line of work, brother.
I presume the previous poster is one of many interviewers, not the recruiter.
As an interviewer myself, I get where they're coming from. My email is not shared with applicants, so finding it requires some stalking or at least digging me up on LinkedIn. By the time they reach out, I've already put in my notes, and any final decision is out of my hands. So while I'm not going to hold it against them, it's not a particularly useful move on the candidate's part either.
Not quite in job interviews, but when I'm selling to a client, I just ask in the interview if it is okay, if I connect with them on LinkedIn. Some say yes. Others say no.
Should work in a job interview setting as well.
It also has the benefit of giving me a signal. Usually if the interview went well, the interviewer will happily agree to be connected. If not, you'll see either a refusal or subtle body language indicating discomfort with the connection. And you can then form your own conclusions about the probability of getting an offer before the firm gets back to you (or often ghosts you.)
As an interviewer, you should be aware that there is a split on advice given on this topic. Half of the folks say to send an email, and half say not to. Several recruiters have told me that, all things being equal, a company will take the person who seems most interested in the job.
Definitely agree, at a big company anyway there is nothing to be gained by sending these, or by any communication not directly related to the process. It doesn’t come across as genuine, it’s neutral to slightly annoying and has no impact on anything, it’s basically a chance at rubbing someone the wrong way with no upside.
How can you determine if a thank you note is genuine or not if you don't read it in good faith?
One person might send a generic thank you that tells you nothing, and another might send a thoughtful message that in some specific way reiterates their interest and excitement in the job.
> ...and has no impact on anything...
Sure it does. I hired lots of people in my career and things like this helped me determine if the candidate was thoughtful, professional and interested. On multiple occasions, I hired people who didn't technically meet my ideal requirements but explained why they were interested in the role and gave me greater confidence that they were up for the challenge and worth taking a chance on.
Cynicism by default does not serve you well in any aspect of life.
At NCC Group I once heard someone with hiring authority complain that an applicant had looked good, but never sent a thank you note for their interview. "What kind of person would do that?"
I was recently interviewing candidates for a senior software engineer in Boston. I did about 20 interviews and only got 1 follow up/thank you email. I didn't send rejection emails to candidates that didn't send a follow up.
This is probably bait but FYI it’s not normal to send thank you emails in much of the world following an interview so perhaps consider that not everyone thinks like you and it’s not a slight to receive no thank you emails. Where I live a thank you email would be seen as a strange way for someone to sneakily try to persuade you to hire them outside of the proper interview process. If you don’t get an email you may just be dealing with someone not from your culture.
I usually thank people in person after an interview. Why would I do that by email?
And if they inform me about the rejection in person, that's great. It's not getting any feedback at all that's impolite and frustrating, because it leaves you in the dark about what the status is. Is this something you need to wait for or care about? It teaches applicants not to care.
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.
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 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.
Dog eat dog world these days, and the employers broke the contract first. I'm sure they've had to reneg, ghost, or cancel interviewees. That kind of system begets more betrayal.
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.
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.
>the role is so cutthroat that you have to ghost most candidates.
There's no "have". We have automated systems and they have a list of contact info. Make a whitelist then blast out a generic message if you have to. But you never "have" to ghost.
>Mostly, unless they were on the payroll of the company they were hiring for, I have just felt they were lazy.
I think that's the biggest thing AI revealed in all of this; most people simply do not care, and now they have a solution to care even less. It's just preying off most people's genuine desire to do the bare minimum, to the detriment of the people around them. It's a vicious cycle.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Making this "illegal" does not solve the problem at all. People really need to stop providing this knee jerk outlawing reaction to things they don't like. I assume you'd also make it illegal for a person to turn down a company without a reason, right? How about we make that 6 months in prison.
> Making this "illegal" does not solve the problem at all.
Sure it does. You send an email politely reminding them they need to write out a basic reason, and then you get the reason. If they're crazy stubborn and absolutely refuse, small claims court is probably next.
I'm pretty skeptical about the idea of making this a law, but a law could solve the problem.
> I assume you'd also make it illegal for a person to turn down a company without a reason, right?
There's a huge power imbalance here, but okay sure why not? Not many people are turning down job offers after interviewing, but if they do they can spend two minutes writing why.
> How about we make that 6 months in prison.
This strawman is a good way to indicate you didn't spend a single second thinking through the actual implications.
> I'm pretty skeptical about the idea of making this a law, but a law could solve the problem.
We need more labor laws in general, but this one should be more of a good ol' fashioned social shaming situation. make it painful to try and outright ignore people you started talking to.
>People really need to stop providing this knee jerk outlawing reaction to things they don't like.
No, we need way more regulation on jobs in the US. This country is sacking millions in real time but reporting record profits. That isn't right nor healthy.
>I assume you'd also make it illegal for a person to turn down a company without a reason, right?
Who holds the cards in the relationship, again? It's illegal to distriminate against hirees, but a person can choose any reason to take an offer over another.
We're talking about being ghosted or rejected for applications and interviews. It actually seems very relevant. Details matter. Don't give anyone a reason to reject you, because there are hundreds (or thousands) of applications who are also qualified and ran spellcheck. I'm really not trying to be a jerk.
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).
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.
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
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…
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.
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 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.
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.
The real answer is that many jobbads are fraudulent.
And fraudulent job ads should be handled the same way a fraudulent advertisement for a good is handled: you either make good and prove hiring, or you're tried for felony fraud.
What do you mean by “make good” and “prove hiring” operationally?
Say for example, a company posts 10 job openings, fills 9 of them, but for the tenth, they don’t receive good candidates initially, the hiring manager has to go back to their leadership and negotiate a higher salary for the position, it goes through HR, they update the PD, they do a round of interviews with two good candidates, but then the hiring manager has a death in the family and takes leave, one candidate accepts a different position in that time, and then when presented with the offer, the second candidate backs out because they were expecting a salary at the higher end of the range in the PD despite having limited experience, then after 6 months and the team prepping for another interview round, the financial situation has changed and executive leadership freezes all hiring indefinitely and the job gets taken down.
Has the company made good in this case? If not, and this was an example of fraud, what is the mechanism for detecting it as such? Are there law enforcement officers actively scrubbing for possible violations? How much does that cost? Is it worth pulling a prosecuting attorney from a civil rights lawsuit over?
Or, if the company has made good, what compliance could a company do to prove that they haven’t committed fraud? How many man hours do we expect the company to spend on that compliance?
I don’t ask these questions just to poke holes, I think there would be a lot of benefits to the job market for both employers and employees if everyone applying to a job could be confident that the position was open. But I am skeptical that anyone has done a serious cost benefit analysis to determine if the juice is worth the squeeze.
Then should be a paper trail of the position, and a final decision by a person to not fill the position.
I feel that as part of unemployment insurance all job postings should tie back to a canonical job position registered with the state with mandatory reporting of applications received,number of interviews conducted,date hired or date position withdrawn, and final dispensation: external hire, internal hire, contract hire, or position withdrawn.
If HR isn’t bullshitting everyone, they should have that data. State agencies and nonprofits already tract the information.
As far as it goes, I think that alone is a fairly reasonable ask (though a heavier touch than I personally would feel comfortable legislating without serious consideration). But I’m not sure it really solves the problem if all you need to do is have someone sign off and say, hey, we didn’t find any good candidates. It seems susceptible to pencil whipping. So, what’s the next step. What is the trigger for prosecution? Where’s the line drawn between a fraudulent job posting and the merely poorly managed? Or, if they’re the same, what’s the definition? Are there a minimum number of interviews that need to be conducted each week?
I mean companies also already feel quite content bullshitting DOL/ESD with "reason for termination of employment" - I've had multiple friends deal with "was fired for cause" appeal this only to have the employer no-show the hearing or actually admit "no, there wasn't cause", generally with no consequence.
"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.
But this is an issue with all legislation (or tabletop game design), right? You also don't want to fall on the opposite end of the scale where the people tasked with prosecuting these violations are allowed to go just by feel.
> It's obviously a difficult problem to write rules around
Bull-fucking-shit
Companies claim all the time that "if you give us a 10 year abatement we will bring X jobs to the area"
Well, time to quantify that, asshole.
We pay for it. And if you can't, I want C level blood. Id be OK with 100% of all taxes, with a 30% yearly interest, payable, to prevent jailing of the whole C level board.
> 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.
Not lost on me that you had your name scrubbed from comments, the "offending" account banned, all under the guise of "harassment", and then you come back and solicit more trouble - as if you can't get enough.
Hahah.
I forgot you existed, Neil. And don't be too hard on yourself - job market is cooked. The time to build your legacy is now.
You could be waiting to hear back from one company before telling another company that may have extended an offer yes or no, and it can take a while before you determine if you're ghosted or if they're just busy and haven't made a decision yet.
We've entered into an era when self-defense is more important than outdated notions of politesse. In dating, for instance, it's usually advantageous for a woman to ignore (ghost) a man she wants nothing to do with rather than reject him, to avoid the argument or retaliation that may come with explicit rejection. Too many bad actors have changed the strategy. If you can't handle ghosting, maybe you don't belong in the job or dating markets.
Dating is different. It's IMO fully inappropriate to draw that comparison.
Professionals act professionally. Ghosting is profoundly unprofessional. It is their job to manage the process with full information. End of story.
> If you can't handle ghosting, maybe you don't belong in the job or dating markets.
Ehhh? This is a very weird, I think silly, perhaps even insulting thing to say. I can handle it. I just think it's rude and unprofessional from a potential employer — someone that I have wasted my time and perhaps might have actually risked my job security to interview with.
Not every employer reacts well when they find out you're out there going to interviews, and they do find out.
As a freelancer, if I go to an interview it is my time they are wasting if they aren't going to handle the process professionally.
How have they wasted less of your time if they write you a letter vs. ghost you? Either way, you spent time preparing for and following their application/interviewing process. I agree ghosting is unprofessional but it doesn't really cost you anything.
One of your last questions in any interview should be "when should I expect to hear your decision" and if you've heard nothing by then, take it as a "no."
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 :)
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.
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.
Those are some long turnaround times!
I actually had a positive, although a bit weird, experience with Microsoft. First, I got a response 3 months after I applied to schedule an interview! I figured it was due to the holidays. After the interview the recruiter called me personally and gave me the bad news that I didn’t get the job, but actually gave me specific feedback on where I did well and poorly on the interview. I was shocked! I think it’s the only time I’ve ever received non generic feedback.
I’ve heard a lot of bad experiences too, so unfortunately I think I was an exception!
I had the same experience with Cloudflare, It's been awhile, but I recall I uploaded my resume as one of the first steps and while I was filling out the later steps (copying the resume contents into fields) I got the same rejection error on trying to move to the next step. I presumed it was looking for specific resume keywords.
And they didn't address the delay at all in their response to you?
Nope
> 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.
It's a data point, not a final or primary determinant.
Vast majority of corporate team members or leads are not allowed to say anything bad or much other than whether that person was employed or not.
Nevertheless :
1. If a person has a comprehensive long resume but cannot provide meaningful references, that poses a significant question as to why
2. A person will not typically say anything bad about their ex colleague or team members due to legal and policy constraints. Nevertheless if they stick to the "this person was employed here" and don't give even a perfunctory "oh Bob? Yeah he was a good guy. He was employed here from 2023 to 2025" even after some soft prompting, again, a data point.
Depends what you're looking for in an employee or colleague. If "history of not completely burning bridges to the ground " is relevant to you, references are "a" data point.
It kinda sucks though if you end up being a bad culture fit a couple times in a row. You end up being rejected on that basis alone. Forever. And there is nothing you can do about it, even of you are qualified for the jobs you apply for.
If you can't get three people to vouch for you, honestly or otherwise, then that's a pretty big red flag.
It's usually last manager and co-workers where the company has a policy of not allowing references. Plus who wants to bother other people asking for a reference after you've been working for 25 years.
I have never heard of not allowing references. Is that a US thing?
While I don't love providing references, given they are such a standard part of the employment process (at least here in Australia), I can't see how a company could disallow providing character references. That would be a big red flag if I discovered that after starting to work somewhere.
In the company I worked for, we were strictly prohibited from saying anything other than “name, rank, and serial number” (date of arrival, date of departure, position).
It was a legal liability issue. I’m told it’s pretty much de rigueur, these days.
One of the nice things, after leaving, was finally being able to give good references for former employees, for whom I really wanted to give glowing references.
> “name, rank, and serial number”
That's what you give if captured as a prisoner of war.
I know. It was a figure of speech. Should have known better than to try.
Sorry about that, Chief (also a figure of speech, but a bit more obscure).
Happens in Europe too. I think it’s a liability issue, not allowing the employee to speak in the name of the company. So the guidance is “tell the reference seeker to contact the HR department” and they’ll eventually reply that “this person worked here as <job title> between <time period>”.
That makes more sense. That's still a reference I guess. I was more confused about straight up denying somebody a reference, that would immediately make tenure at a company worth less.
The big issue is that a lot of companies don’t allow asking their employees for references. Many even require references for their own hiring process (!!!)
Can you elaborate?
Many companies don't allow details, but are allowed to confirm a person was employed in a specific role. That's in many cases a sufficient to serve as a reference.
E.g. In my company we have a very strict policy for this, but are still allowed to answer "yes, Bob was employed as problem manager team lead from 2023 to 2025". Conversely as a hiring manager, I'll take that as a minimally sufficient data point in confirming resume entry.
My understanding is that the "were they employed" thing is covered by background checks. I know equifax (experian? I always get them confused) have a product where they will reveal your past titles AND your salaries. It's a little wild and I don't like that, but the point is that I don't think you gain much info from "yes they worked here" from HR.
A reference is really intended as a statement of character IMO. "They worked here" from HR, who doesn't know you, is not that.
It's always worth considering whether you have people who will give you genuine glowing references.
I've only ever once been at a place where there was a policy saying "all you are allowed to say during reference checks is "yes, they worked here as [job title], from {month/year} to {month/year}". And even with that policy/restriction I still found ways to be much much more positive about the people who were genuinely great.
One great way around that kind of policy - at least if you far enough into your career for it - is to provided references for people who are also no longer at the company they're being a referee for. There are 3 or 4 people from that job I mentioned that didn't allow me to elaborate, where I've subsequently provided reference including something like "Ratica? Yeah - she is great! She lead my QA team and worked magic! You might want to warn the company she's applying to that as soon as I get a role and budget that suits her QA skills, I'll 100% be trying to headhunt her away from them."
Congratulations, you cost her the job because the company didn't want to deal with an increased risk of her being poached. She's suing, by the way.
Nah, she got the job. And that lead to her next even better one. Now I'd need something to go spectacularly right for me to be able to afford to head hunt her.
(We still catch up for coffee every 6 or 12 months.)
> Many companies don't allow details, but are allowed to confirm a person was employed in a specific role.
WDYM by "allowed"? In my jurisdiction, a company is required to confirm (or deny, as the case may be) the dates and roles of employment when asked.
A reply along the lines of "we can not confirm $PERSON's employment as a $ROLE between $DATE1 and $DATE2" when $PERSON has salary slips for those dates is a slam-dunk winning lawsuit!
In my company we have a very strict policy for this
My company is so strict about it that it farms out reference checks to a third company so that nobody inside the company knows that references were checked. Seems a little extreme to me.
> a third company so that nobody inside the company knows that references were checked
That’s actually really interesting. If you are actively looking that prevents anyone in the company from knowing you are looking, even if they did a reference check. That might be because of some previous lawsuits around terminating someone while getting a reference check before actually getting a new job/leaving.
I big red flag for what? your social habits? lol - i guess if you have to work in a team then yeah, that would be important. but some jobs you just need to get in the truck and drive or w/e, but recruiters still stuck in the time old habit of asking for 3 references. its weak.
I imagine even in such a job, your shift lead, team boss, or warehouse manager or whatever, would be able to confirm "yes, Bob worked here in truck driving capacity from 2022 to 2024".
References have many levels of usefulness, but the bar starts low - did this person actually perform the job / hold the role they claim in a resume.
Next, and the one I'll agree you don't get as much in modern environment, is how much did they burn bridges / how competent they were. The team boss might be allowed to say "Bob?!? He drove well but god dammit the guy never showed up on time for his shift!". Or they might not.
Thanks for the perspective, I like the low bar usefulness, without that people can claim anything on their resume I guess. But I really dislike the opinions on peoples usefulness aspect. Much better to start someone off on a 3 or 6 month trial and if you think theyre not worth the money let them go. Heck, even keep the 6 mo review going forever if you want.
A truck driver has to deal with a lot of people at the two ends of the trip and needs to work in a team.
> purpose of the interview is to understand your capabilities and abilities
And the purpose of the reference is to understand your actual performance.
If you’re lazy or cruel to coworkers, they won’t want to hire you.
Mixed. I disagree because you can't get culture fit out of a few hours of interviews, so having people who worked with you can help a lot.
I primarily agree because some companies get way too haughty and try to ask for references in the job app. There's no way I'm giving contact info of my leadership to you to bother them (2 of which very carefully avoid posting their contact info on the internet) unless I'm dead sure I'm in consideration for a role. Certainly not before I can talk to a human.
You sound like someone that is frequently calling in sick!
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.
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.
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.
Or maybe quantum didn't happen?
Or it did and didn't.
I assume you mean, “or it did and didn’t”, in which case, hats off to you.
I did and didn't.
Hats off and on to them
I have participated in at least 3 rounds of vocational rehabilitation, and one of the major takeaways was writing thank-you notes after any interview.
A note could be a card or an email, but a thank-you note simply expresses gratitude for the interviewer’s time and attention.
And moreover, a followup will keep your name in their mind, for better or worse. Following up after the interview series may have been the trick to landing my “pandemic job” in May 2020. I phoned or emailed the recruiter, just to thank her, just to say hello, and you know what? She said “yeah actually we were gonna call you with a job offer” and the rest is history.
So, before you complain that someone ghosted you, please consider who’s ghosting whom!
I hear this advice given quite a bit, but another perspective: I have never been pleased to receive a thank you email from a candidate. I do not want to receive something in my inbox that does not require me to act. It's a micro-annoyance, and if it's a bad day, I might have grumpy thoughts about the candidate being a brownnoser.
Show up to the interview clothed, be pleasant and polite, show off your game, and leave it at that.
Imagine being a recruiter, seeing someone genuinely interested in the position (or at least willing to put in the effort to make it seem that way), and getting annoyed rather than hyped. You in the wrong line of work, brother.
I presume the previous poster is one of many interviewers, not the recruiter.
As an interviewer myself, I get where they're coming from. My email is not shared with applicants, so finding it requires some stalking or at least digging me up on LinkedIn. By the time they reach out, I've already put in my notes, and any final decision is out of my hands. So while I'm not going to hold it against them, it's not a particularly useful move on the candidate's part either.
Not quite in job interviews, but when I'm selling to a client, I just ask in the interview if it is okay, if I connect with them on LinkedIn. Some say yes. Others say no.
Should work in a job interview setting as well.
It also has the benefit of giving me a signal. Usually if the interview went well, the interviewer will happily agree to be connected. If not, you'll see either a refusal or subtle body language indicating discomfort with the connection. And you can then form your own conclusions about the probability of getting an offer before the firm gets back to you (or often ghosts you.)
Use every signal your prospect gives you.
As an interviewer, you should be aware that there is a split on advice given on this topic. Half of the folks say to send an email, and half say not to. Several recruiters have told me that, all things being equal, a company will take the person who seems most interested in the job.
The obvious solution is to just send half an email!
Dear, thank
There's no consistent advice for anything related to interviewing or getting jobs.its a mess
For your email perhaps it is hard to find. At many companies it is attached to the Teams/Zoom invitation
Definitely agree, at a big company anyway there is nothing to be gained by sending these, or by any communication not directly related to the process. It doesn’t come across as genuine, it’s neutral to slightly annoying and has no impact on anything, it’s basically a chance at rubbing someone the wrong way with no upside.
> It doesn’t come across as genuine...
How can you determine if a thank you note is genuine or not if you don't read it in good faith?
One person might send a generic thank you that tells you nothing, and another might send a thoughtful message that in some specific way reiterates their interest and excitement in the job.
> ...and has no impact on anything...
Sure it does. I hired lots of people in my career and things like this helped me determine if the candidate was thoughtful, professional and interested. On multiple occasions, I hired people who didn't technically meet my ideal requirements but explained why they were interested in the role and gave me greater confidence that they were up for the challenge and worth taking a chance on.
Cynicism by default does not serve you well in any aspect of life.
I wouldn't want to work for or with someone who can't even stand a thank you note.
You know why a thank you works? It puts them back in your inbox. It shows professionalism and often genuine desire for the position.
You sound like someone who most would absolutely dread to work with.
At NCC Group I once heard someone with hiring authority complain that an applicant had looked good, but never sent a thank you note for their interview. "What kind of person would do that?"
I was recently interviewing candidates for a senior software engineer in Boston. I did about 20 interviews and only got 1 follow up/thank you email. I didn't send rejection emails to candidates that didn't send a follow up.
This is probably bait but FYI it’s not normal to send thank you emails in much of the world following an interview so perhaps consider that not everyone thinks like you and it’s not a slight to receive no thank you emails. Where I live a thank you email would be seen as a strange way for someone to sneakily try to persuade you to hire them outside of the proper interview process. If you don’t get an email you may just be dealing with someone not from your culture.
I usually thank people in person after an interview. Why would I do that by email?
And if they inform me about the rejection in person, that's great. It's not getting any feedback at all that's impolite and frustrating, because it leaves you in the dark about what the status is. Is this something you need to wait for or care about? It teaches applicants not to care.
You should consult for your god complex
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.
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 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
what's weird about that though is they must have had some system to track candidates that would have been turned over to somebody.
Have you ever done the math on how much that cost you? I'm guessing at least $20M?
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.
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.
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.
Dog eat dog world these days, and the employers broke the contract first. I'm sure they've had to reneg, ghost, or cancel interviewees. That kind of system begets more betrayal.
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.
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.
>the role is so cutthroat that you have to ghost most candidates.
There's no "have". We have automated systems and they have a list of contact info. Make a whitelist then blast out a generic message if you have to. But you never "have" to ghost.
>Mostly, unless they were on the payroll of the company they were hiring for, I have just felt they were lazy.
I think that's the biggest thing AI revealed in all of this; most people simply do not care, and now they have a solution to care even less. It's just preying off most people's genuine desire to do the bare minimum, to the detriment of the people around them. It's a vicious cycle.
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.
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...
I recently vibe-coded an app in Codex and it has nearly the exact same style.
The font is a dead giveaway
The one used in "A public record of professional silence." specifically
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
> 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
For Companies Looking to Scale Ghostying Pipelines (Satire) https://staticfile-25978.wasmer.app/
ahahaha
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://ghostjobs.net/
https://ghostjobs.io/ (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.
Well, then they might just respond: Thank you, but no thank you… No liability, but at least they wouldn’t leave the person hanging…
Which should be illegal. You should be able to formulate why you prefer someone.
And it would prevent companies from ghosting people.
Making this "illegal" does not solve the problem at all. People really need to stop providing this knee jerk outlawing reaction to things they don't like. I assume you'd also make it illegal for a person to turn down a company without a reason, right? How about we make that 6 months in prison.
> Making this "illegal" does not solve the problem at all.
Sure it does. You send an email politely reminding them they need to write out a basic reason, and then you get the reason. If they're crazy stubborn and absolutely refuse, small claims court is probably next.
I'm pretty skeptical about the idea of making this a law, but a law could solve the problem.
> I assume you'd also make it illegal for a person to turn down a company without a reason, right?
There's a huge power imbalance here, but okay sure why not? Not many people are turning down job offers after interviewing, but if they do they can spend two minutes writing why.
> How about we make that 6 months in prison.
This strawman is a good way to indicate you didn't spend a single second thinking through the actual implications.
> I'm pretty skeptical about the idea of making this a law, but a law could solve the problem.
We need more labor laws in general, but this one should be more of a good ol' fashioned social shaming situation. make it painful to try and outright ignore people you started talking to.
>People really need to stop providing this knee jerk outlawing reaction to things they don't like.
No, we need way more regulation on jobs in the US. This country is sacking millions in real time but reporting record profits. That isn't right nor healthy.
>I assume you'd also make it illegal for a person to turn down a company without a reason, right?
Who holds the cards in the relationship, again? It's illegal to distriminate against hirees, but a person can choose any reason to take an offer over another.
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.
We're talking about being ghosted or rejected for applications and interviews. It actually seems very relevant. Details matter. Don't give anyone a reason to reject you, because there are hundreds (or thousands) of applications who are also qualified and ran spellcheck. I'm really not trying to be a jerk.
petulAnt
I very much advocate for this, but only if you're past the HR/recruiter screen. Onsites, coding screen, second round, etc.
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.
"1 of 1 would interview with them again" is too small a sample. This site needs more data before they post recommendations.
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.
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
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…
As long as there has been recruiters… there has been ghosting.
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.
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_...
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.
Call the recruiters out by name.
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.
Did you get an offer????
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
I know more than a few people looking for a job right now and this is their number 1 complaint.
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.
wonder if this would count as sousveillance [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance]
the 4-year Docusign one raises the question of whether they were ghosting or just running the world's slowest background check
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.
for a moment i thought this was a commentary about my relationships
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.
The real answer is that many jobbads are fraudulent.
And fraudulent job ads should be handled the same way a fraudulent advertisement for a good is handled: you either make good and prove hiring, or you're tried for felony fraud.
What do you mean by “make good” and “prove hiring” operationally?
Say for example, a company posts 10 job openings, fills 9 of them, but for the tenth, they don’t receive good candidates initially, the hiring manager has to go back to their leadership and negotiate a higher salary for the position, it goes through HR, they update the PD, they do a round of interviews with two good candidates, but then the hiring manager has a death in the family and takes leave, one candidate accepts a different position in that time, and then when presented with the offer, the second candidate backs out because they were expecting a salary at the higher end of the range in the PD despite having limited experience, then after 6 months and the team prepping for another interview round, the financial situation has changed and executive leadership freezes all hiring indefinitely and the job gets taken down.
Has the company made good in this case? If not, and this was an example of fraud, what is the mechanism for detecting it as such? Are there law enforcement officers actively scrubbing for possible violations? How much does that cost? Is it worth pulling a prosecuting attorney from a civil rights lawsuit over?
Or, if the company has made good, what compliance could a company do to prove that they haven’t committed fraud? How many man hours do we expect the company to spend on that compliance?
I don’t ask these questions just to poke holes, I think there would be a lot of benefits to the job market for both employers and employees if everyone applying to a job could be confident that the position was open. But I am skeptical that anyone has done a serious cost benefit analysis to determine if the juice is worth the squeeze.
Then should be a paper trail of the position, and a final decision by a person to not fill the position.
I feel that as part of unemployment insurance all job postings should tie back to a canonical job position registered with the state with mandatory reporting of applications received,number of interviews conducted,date hired or date position withdrawn, and final dispensation: external hire, internal hire, contract hire, or position withdrawn.
If HR isn’t bullshitting everyone, they should have that data. State agencies and nonprofits already tract the information.
As far as it goes, I think that alone is a fairly reasonable ask (though a heavier touch than I personally would feel comfortable legislating without serious consideration). But I’m not sure it really solves the problem if all you need to do is have someone sign off and say, hey, we didn’t find any good candidates. It seems susceptible to pencil whipping. So, what’s the next step. What is the trigger for prosecution? Where’s the line drawn between a fraudulent job posting and the merely poorly managed? Or, if they’re the same, what’s the definition? Are there a minimum number of interviews that need to be conducted each week?
Public data that can’t be adjusted like Glassdoor reviews?
A way to keep recruiters honest? Is this for job xyz that has been reported filled as of Friday?
I’d certainly use it in interviews. Job x appears to posted every 10 weeks and reported a filled by internal hires. What is the problem with this job?
I mean companies also already feel quite content bullshitting DOL/ESD with "reason for termination of employment" - I've had multiple friends deal with "was fired for cause" appeal this only to have the employer no-show the hearing or actually admit "no, there wasn't cause", generally with no consequence.
"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.
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 is your proposed time limit (when someone has to be hired to fill the position) and "cooldown period" (when hiring can re-open after someone does not meet expectations in practice)?
It's obviously a difficult problem to write rules around, and there are so many ways for companies to weasel out of any rule you write. The general principle is that you should not advertise a job if you don't actually intend to fill it. But you should also not do it if you have some "theoretical job" you can create and are just fishing for candidates. Any rules I write down here will have trivial ways to work around them though.
But this is an issue with all legislation (or tabletop game design), right? You also don't want to fall on the opposite end of the scale where the people tasked with prosecuting these violations are allowed to go just by feel.
At this point I'd be completely fine with just going by feel. It would be better than what we have now.
> It's obviously a difficult problem to write rules around
Bull-fucking-shit
Companies claim all the time that "if you give us a 10 year abatement we will bring X jobs to the area"
Well, time to quantify that, asshole.
We pay for it. And if you can't, I want C level blood. Id be OK with 100% of all taxes, with a 30% yearly interest, payable, to prevent jailing of the whole C level board.
What does this have to do with the original comment?
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
Not lost on me that you had your name scrubbed from comments, the "offending" account banned, all under the guise of "harassment", and then you come back and solicit more trouble - as if you can't get enough.
Hahah.
I forgot you existed, Neil. And don't be too hard on yourself - job market is cooked. The time to build your legacy is now.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Dating is different. It's IMO fully inappropriate to draw that comparison.
Professionals act professionally. Ghosting is profoundly unprofessional. It is their job to manage the process with full information. End of story.
> If you can't handle ghosting, maybe you don't belong in the job or dating markets.
Ehhh? This is a very weird, I think silly, perhaps even insulting thing to say. I can handle it. I just think it's rude and unprofessional from a potential employer — someone that I have wasted my time and perhaps might have actually risked my job security to interview with.
Not every employer reacts well when they find out you're out there going to interviews, and they do find out.
As a freelancer, if I go to an interview it is my time they are wasting if they aren't going to handle the process professionally.
How have they wasted less of your time if they write you a letter vs. ghost you? Either way, you spent time preparing for and following their application/interviewing process. I agree ghosting is unprofessional but it doesn't really cost you anything.
One of your last questions in any interview should be "when should I expect to hear your decision" and if you've heard nothing by then, take it as a "no."
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.
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 :)
> 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.
this is awesome and a scoreboard you might not want to win for your company xD
Nice name and shame
“Yes”
Yeah I thought it was gonna be a static page
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.