8 ms·

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

153 points by koryk 3y ago

oldpersonintx 3y ago
[dead]
kstrauser 3y ago
Almost as bad IMO are companies that auto-respond with messages like "we'll contact you in the next few weeks to discuss next steps". Next few weeks? Are you under the impression that your competitors are all sitting around twiddling their thumbs? Yes, it's a hirer's market today, but that doesn't mean you can take your sweet time eventually getting around to interested applicants.
- dspillett 3y ago
  > under the impression that your competitors are all sitting around twiddling their thumbs? If the premise of the article is correct (that ghosting, and by inference other poor communication, is very much the norm) then that impression would hardly be massively inaccurate.
tekla 3y ago
Getting ghosted 95% of the time has been the default for decades.
- bachmeier 3y ago
  I had my first interview for a faculty job in 2001. I sent a couple of emails to find out where they are in the hiring process. Still waiting for a response.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    Maybe it's time to send one more email? ;D
- prettyStandard 3y ago
  Agreed. A bit besides the point, but I'm dating a recruiter that has worked in a few industries, but not tech. She says, as a rule, she doesn't provide feedback. People just don't listen or accept it, they just use it as an opportunity to argue. So what's the point?
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Detailed "here's why you suck" feedback, sure, but just a "no" would be more professional than this emotionally immature "ghosting" thing.
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      This isn't personal on their part. It might be a bit rude but if you're going into the corporate world, get used to that. Just move on, if you're sitting there stewing about getting "ghosted", you can be sure they are not. I don't think it would bother me any more than getting a templated, cliche rejection letter.
      - fragmede 3y ago
        It's less about the feelings going around, and more that the hiring committee managed to meet, decided against a candidate, and then the recruiter can't be bothered to give a candidate a canned "no"? What does a recruiter do? Doom scroll on Linkedin for $70k/yr?
        SoftTalker 3y ago
        Yeah the recruiter could spend some time preparing and sending communications back to all the candidates who were interviewed and then rejected, or could spend that time working on finding candidates for other positions he's trying to fill. What is he going to be incentivized to do?
Beefin 3y ago
as a founder recruiting engineers of various skillsets/expertise i simply don't have the bandwidth to respond to every non-qualified candidate.
- ivan_gammel 3y ago
  Do you ghost people whom you already talked to in the past or you misunderstood the article? Not responding after an interview cannot be a bandwidth problem.
  - drewcoo 3y ago
    I think at least half of the responses here just don't understand what ghosting is. Which means they've probably never been ghosted - good for them!
- dvaun 3y ago
  From what I’ve read, hiring was already difficult prior to the wave of layoffs. Would you say it became more or less difficult to find a target skillset with a larger pool of candidates, regardless of comp?
- shkkmo 3y ago
  > This means that if you apply and never hear back from a job, that’s not ghosting, a conversation never started. It only becomes ghosting when there is an expected next step that never happens. The article is specifically talking about ghosting people after a mutual process has been started, such as after an interview or coding assignment.
- greatpostman 3y ago
  Yup. It’s too much work, literally. Especially when 20% of the resumes you get end up being fake
  - georgespencer 3y ago
    If you have enough candidates that it's too much work to reject people, you likely have enough candidates to merit at least a simple templating and candidate management app or plugin. It is absolutely trivial to one-click reject groups of people.
waynesonfire 3y ago
[flagged]
boring_twenties 3y ago
Every time I've been passed over for a job, I've been notified in a timely manner. I would consider anything less to be grossly, outrageously unprofessional. It's never happened to me, but if it ever does, you best believe I am going to name and shame the hell out of that company. Everyone deserves to know, and people like this don't deserve to have anyone working for them.
- piloto_ciego 3y ago
  I’m trying to get started in this field, I am finishing grad school in the spring and applying everywhere… I mostly hear nothing. It is incredibly unprofessional.
  - drewcoo 3y ago
    No response to applications is normal. Ghosting is suddenly leaving you in the middle of a conversation. For example, not showing up for a scheduled Zoom interview then not replying to your concerned email, asking to reschedule. And yes, that's happened to me.
  - skeeter2020 3y ago
    again, hearing nothing is not the issue. I still think these companies should send you a canned automatic response, but it's about relationships, and the degree of personalized communication needs to match this.
- optymizer 3y ago
  This is the right attitude. If highly qualified applicants start avoiding companies that ghost, ghosting will stop.
thr0way120 3y ago
The ghosting problem is fixable in 2 seconds with any LLM + AI recruiting pipelining tool. That is the solution to this. Someone will figure it out in the next three months or less. On the other hand, here is the reality: In a "hiring company friendly" environment, where they cut all their expensive recruiters / or all recruiters / or simply don't care / or treat recruiters as disposable this is what you get. We are seeing a rising trend, which may reverse in a "Good Market" but part of me wonders if it ever will. White Collar workers are becoming / have become more and more "disposable." As disposable as recruiters. White Collar workers are not used to being disposable, we think we are unique and special butterfly hires. And much of silicon valley used to be structured around the messaging: "Your talent is so useful and valuable that we can't live without you." That pretense was never really true but they sort of put on an act to keep things friendly. Lately, that pretense is completely gone. And dropping. At some point employers, in my opinion, are going to find hires speaking out publicly. And naming names directly. Why? No consequences and the employers have nothing, as a class, to offer. I got to this point in my own professional career. I was treated so badly at one company, I saw no point in not directly naming and shaming them. I didn't even care if "their friends" didn't want to hire me. I didnt want to work with anyone who would be friends with people that evil. Here is the deal silicon valley wants: "We treat you like shit and you are expected to take it as a normal part of "professionalism," or we will black ball you and you will be deemed unhireable because you are unwilling to take being treated like shit gracefully, and we (employers) need employees who we can shit on and dispose of. If you complain after this treatment, you are a liability since you think you are worth literally anything as a human being ... when we require disposable parts." Even THAT contract, which is a VERY BAD AND ONE SIDED DEAL is fraying. I expect that you are going to see more and more people speaking publicly and directly naming these companies. Once THAT happens then you KNOW ITS ON. I suspect venture capital portfolios are going to need to directly tell CEOs not to do this because they are "angering the sheep." Shitting on applicants, if it continues to escalate, will become a net liability. Venture Capital companies and Venture Capital firms want to cut corners, access cheap talent and avoid treating employees like they are human beings. They will push this as far as possible until it becomes a net liability. I think we are going to see people getting so fed up they begin naming names, and THEN it will change.
- 3y ago
wutangisforever 3y ago
As someone who interviewed in the bay for the last 7 years, ghosting is pretty normal on both sides of the equation. It totally sucks when you go through the process and don't hear anything back but I also take it as a sign of feedback that I didn't kill on the interview. I have ghosted a ton on interviews, never purposely but things get lost in the shuffle if you aren't super passionate about the company It isn't a great habit/practice on either side, but by any means this isn't new
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > ghosting is pretty normal on both sides of the equation. I like that you mentioned this. As a job-seeker, if you've interviewed at a number of places and decided to take a position with one of them, letting the others know that you're no longer on the market is just as important as them letting you know if they've decided not to hire you, for all the same reasons.
hx8 3y ago
I think this would matter more to me if the feedback was ever useful. The feedback from these "no" is more cliche and less useful than a Dear John letter. All I ever hear are "another more qualified candidate", or rarely the slightly more useful "culture fit".
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Having been in industry 30 years, it’s only about 15% of the time that I have any specific constructive feedback that’s worth sharing. “When you’re talking about problem X, first make sure you understand the problem because it seemed like you jumped straight into a solution that missed a key element of the question.” Or something similarly specific. In most cases, it’s more “you did okay, but someone else did better in this noisy, wide error-bar interaction”; giving someone feedback of “just be better next time” isn’t particularly helpful or motivating and some candidates will take that as a invitation to press for further details which may not exist and certainly won’t be coming. In cases where there is specific feedback, I give it to recruiters who hopefully share it with the candidate. (Anecdotally, I have talked with recruiters who have done just that, which is how I know that some candidates just won’t drop it.) If you’re never getting specific feedback, it’s probably the case that you’re consistently doing fine in interviews and someone else just wiggled a little higher on that particular day.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    And often it boils down to an intangible "we felt a better vibe with candidate B" and that's probably something they will never come out and say. My reaction to the feedback he got when he finally jogged someone into responding was like yours. It was the typical cliche rejection letter. Maybe a bit more personal than some. I'm sure that the "wires got crossed" and the "email never made it to your inbox" are just a smokescreen for "we hired someone else and didn't bother to let you know."
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
CM30 3y ago
The new normal? This has been the case for years for almost all job applications. Maybe if you're lucky and the company has put you through like 4 rounds of interviews you might get feedback, but the general rule seems to be that useful feedback for an interview is the exception rather than the norm. And heck, even that isn't something you can rely on. I've had a fair few interviews get about 80% of the way through the recruitment process, then just ghost me without a trace. The main reason I have my current job is because the other company I was interviewing with just kinda faded away at the end of the application process. If being ghosted is the new norm for you, you must be insanely lucky.
- doubleorseven 3y ago
  Maybe only now it reached America? In Israel, for the last 13 years atleast, I don't think there was ever an alternative.
- piloto_ciego 3y ago
  When I was a pilot just starting out, in 2007 I’d see a human response maybe 1/100 applications. It’s pretty gross out there for people other than tech employees. What’s pretty funny is now that I’m changing into this field it seems to be adjusting to treat people like crap. So, I guess you’re welcome guys and gals - it’s my fault.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - skeeter2020 3y ago
    This isn't really about applications though - not getting a human response at the first step has always been common, especially with electronic postings. It's as easy to apply as post, so you do get a lot of spam applicants. If you've had human contact and then radio silenc - IMO that's inexcusable.
    - piloto_ciego 3y ago
      Literally all the time in aviation. Now I’m just cynical and do a quantity over quality approach
frognumber 3y ago
One of my top lessons I've learned doing successful startups: 1. Recruiting is the #1 job of any startup CEO, and the #1 determiner of corporate success. 2. Up market, down market, side market, it doesn't matter: You will get better employees if you treat candidates with respect and you will be more competitive. 3. It's a lot of work for the 95% of clowns out there you interview, and there's a push towards automated process, but it will hurt your business. 4. There's a lot more to recruiting than just treating candidates with respect. It involves how you present yourself as an employer (participating in conferences / meetups / etc.), how you find candidates, checking references, reviewing github repos, etc. It's a crazy amount of work. 5. This is hard, but if you can do this, you will have a huge edge. The flip side is that as an employee, doing a good job interviewing / recruiting, especially at a big company, is one of the lowest value-add tasks you can bring on, from a purely selfish / incentive structures perspective. This friction, I think, is a major reason why recruiting is handled so badly. There is absolutely no upside to doing a good job, and it takes a lot of time to do so.
- tayo42 3y ago
  > is one of the lowest value-add tasks you can bring on, from a purely selfish / incentive structures perspective. At one place I worked, interviewing was one of the check marks you could participate in for promotions.
  - 1920musicman 3y ago
    But that's exactly what it is then: a check mark. I can interview dozens of candidates, and then add a total count to my self review. There is no incentive to do a good job (how would that even be evaluated?..).
    - filoleg 3y ago
      > how would that even be evaluated? Depends on the company. At my current workplace, the candidate is given an option to provide feedback at the end (either through a form or an email), and all interviewers are also required to submit written notes on how everything went down. Given that a candidate at the onsite will get interviewed by 4-5 people, with each of them providing a very detailed set of notes, it would be fairly trivial to smell out a misbehaving interviewer, if one cared to do so. What actually happens at the end of the day with those notes and candidate feedback, that’s the part i am not sure about. Once they get submitted to the hiring committee (or HR), it is out of my hands. But just saying, they do have ways of evaluating it, just on a less precise scale and more on a “bad/good enough/amazing” scale. With only the “bad” outcome raising any eyebrows/having any meaningful effect, and with 99% of them getting the “good enough”/“amazing” ratings. And how often the signal for that “bad” rating gets caught is also not something I know much about. P.S. Your assessments and notes are all preserved in the centralized hub, so you (and some others) can always access them later as well. And, sometimes, you indeed have people checking them out for assessment or such. Especially during your first couple interviews, you have a person supervising you and taking notes in parallel as well, and then you discuss them and they give you improvement suggestions and such.
firtoz 3y ago
I got ghosted twice by the same guy working for Citi, for the initial chat. Needless to say, I or my friends won't bother applying for any jobs there.
solatic 3y ago
Both of the following can be true at the same time: 1. I personally owe a response to anyone who reaches out to me, in a timely manner, even if that answer is no, because to intentionally ignore a request is unethical. 2. I will strive to have built up many and different areas in my life, such that my sense of confidence is not impacted by the actions or inactions of people who are, in essence, strangers. If you want to inure yourself to people ghosting you, spend some time in a sales gig doing cold calls. The vast majority of people will not respond to you and that is not only OK, that is a good thing. You want to be with people who give you a positive return on your energy, not people who sink your energy. Move on.
- andy99 3y ago
  I mostly agree with the sentiment. But I'd say the difference with the kind of ghosting he's talking about is you're already (well) into the interview process. So you've invested a fair bit already. Like in sales, getting ignored or told to get lost immediately is easy to shake off, going deep into the process and then not hearing anything is different. You don't know if you should still expect something, you've got to balance persistence with being professional, you were to some extent counting on it at least possibly happening. I've been looking for a job recently, and was also surprised about how much ghosting seems to to on, especially after already talking to people but also never hearing at all. The best application experience I've had recently was probably one that 24 hours after I applied told me no. There I at least could move it out of my mind entirely. I do agree for sure that it's not personal. And how you're treated during recruitment is also good information.
- sk11001 3y ago
  Not getting responses from cold calls or applications isn't ghosting according to the author of the article (and I agree): > In order for it to be ghosting, the ghosted party has to expect the conversation will continue. This means that if you apply and never hear back from a job, that’s not ghosting, a conversation never started. It only becomes ghosting when there is an expected next step that never happens.
- skeeter2020 3y ago
  My Rule: The nature of a negative (i.e. final) communications should equal how personal the relationship is. If you applied electronically and we stated "only those considered will be contacted" or you cold-emailed me some sales pitch, we don't have a relationship at all and you deserve nothing. If you contacted me and I responded with a short email, my final answer should be a shjort email. If you spent several hours in face-to-face interviews and we're not moving forward I owe you a phone call or email with some explanation of why - in a TIMELY manner. Seems pretty easy to me.
kleiba 3y ago
This is a pet peeve of mine. In the olden days, pre-digital, companies would send you a proper letter back together with your application documents so you could possibly reuse them. That was actually a little work for them to do! These days, sending an effing canned email to all applicants that didn't get hired costs a company next to nothing, and still ghosting happens. It's indecent.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  Can’t expose the precious organization to any form of liability. What if you accidentally leak the internal communication about the candidate *eyeroll*
- forinti 3y ago
  I once applied to a position in the IAEA. I didn't get the job, but they sent me a letter. I kept that letter for a decade because it was such an unusual occurrence in my carreer. I got a nice letter from a UN agency, when local companies couldn't be bothered to send an email.
- arprocter 3y ago
  I recall being taken aback to receive a dead tree rejection letter in the mid 2000s (the only interaction had been me emailing my CV) The recruiters that meet you in person, talk a big game and then complete silence annoy/confuse me the most - possibly they get commissions for signups?
- firebat45 3y ago
  In the olden days, people took time to apply for each job. Nowadays, they spam out applications to hundreds of places in a day. The problem is on both ends and stems from rewarding quantity over quality.
k310 3y ago
I recall getting feedback from one or two companies at which I attended day-long interviews. I had to ask, and after the "well, we can't tell you that," got a couple of "we hired someone with more specific experience with XYZ". Otherwise, many days sent down a black hole, followed by beers, to recover from the day's ordeal. My wild-ass hyperbolic guess is that once they make a choice, staying silent is their way of grabbing a beer or two and forgetting their own ordeal, and having no regrets. "We hired a genius. All the others were run of the mill" They're human, after all, but maybe humans won't be involved any more. Machines decide who will serve them.
- wombat-man 3y ago
  Sometimes they just aren’t sure, or they have a couple other candidates in the pipe that seem good. I’ve been on the other side where we didn’t hire the person for random reasons that I try to not take it personally. But it is frustrating for candidates for sure.
dr_kiszonka 3y ago
I know ghosting is "normal," but what do you do when it means you are not getting reimbursed for travel?
- fragmede 3y ago
  Throwaway AskReddit/AskHN thread for "advice" followed by small claims court.
kthejoker2 3y ago
100% in the "nobody remembers what you did, everyone remembers how you made them feel" camp. An automated no is such a no-brainer versus the reputational risk of being seen as a bad or callous employer. And people have looooong memories / impressions created in this space. I honestly have no idea if General Electric is a good or bad employer, but the Jack Welch era still lingers in my mind.
- atrettel 3y ago
  I completely agree with this. I have only been ghosted after the interview stage twice but both times left bad feelings in my mind. I did try to contact people but did not receive a response obviously. I never applied to any jobs at those organizations again. I think many companies and other organizations need to realize that even an automated denial is much better than nothing.
JohnFen 3y ago
Is it new, though? I've been in the industry for a very long time, and being ghosted has always been my standard experience when I didn't get a position I interviewed for.
cco 3y ago
What I've never really understood is that though recruiters (external but also in-house) are typically paid on hiring candidates, much like sales people. And in that paradigm, why is ghosting so common? As a recruiter, a lot of your value is your professional network that you can pull from to place candidates. Why would you ever ghost people that, while not a good fit for this role, could be a good fit for a different role in the future? Even as someone not in recruiting, I've made several connections with folks in the interviewing process (both as interviewer and interviewee) that have led to either new business deals or job placement later on. Just never really made sense to me, interviewing is "free" networking. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- skeeter2020 3y ago
  recruiters are a lot like real estate agents - there's very little barrier to entry or exit, so the good ones do well in both hot and cold markets, while the shitty ones exit when times get tough and compete like crazy for limited supply when they are good. The former builds value in their network and will likely never ghost you; you'll earn them several commissions over a career. The bad ones get fired or voluntarily leave so the network has no value. I suspect we're seeing an uptick in ghosting right now because: 1. There are a lot more newer people in tech today who are now going through their first downturn and involuntarily looking for a job. As a stereotype these people are far more public on the interwebs and sharing their experiences. 2. We're still in the downward trajectory so the crappy recruiters haven't been purged and companies don't have to compete on quality of service to get limited talent... yet. Wait until the next upswing - I'd bet far less people got ghosted on job applications 2-3 years ago.
- RajT88 3y ago
  In-house recruiters I have much better experiences with. Recruiters working for staffing/headhunting firms in my experience tend to: 1. Be focused on high volume, hence the ghosting. They save time by ghosting you and spend that time on candidates which are sure bets. 2. They ask to be friends on LinkedIn up front (probably even if they know they are going to ghost you). This is to take advantage of your network. They get something out of the interaction; you get nothing. 3. They sometimes line you up for interviews which you aren't a good fit for. What in the actual fuck. I don't friend recruiters from anything but the tech companies hiring. At my career stage, I won't even talk to recruiters which aren't working directly for the company doing the hiring. I would happily go back to this if I was at the phase of "I need a job; any job for now". The icky feelings I've gotten from recruiters over the years is akin to the icky feelings I've gotten from car salesmen and real estate agents. As I am writing this now, I am reminded of some of the headhunting/staffing firms I've talked to over the years. I just removed all of those recruiters from my network.
zitterbewegung 3y ago
This is anecdotal but, if the new normal was 10 years ago then sure. I stared out my career then and ghosting was common….
Niksko 3y ago
I've been ghosted twice lately. One was someone reaching out via Hacker News for an initial chat where they said "let's put you through our interview process" and then ghosted. The other was for a startup, similar situation, "let's set up a chat with our CEO", then ghosted. The commonality here is an inability to just be honest and say "doesn't seem like a good fit". Disappointing, and ironically, an indication that it really wouldn't be a good fit. I don't want to work with people who are unable to deliver uncomfortable news respectfully, or even, at all.
- machomaster 3y ago
  Often it is not about people not being honest, but about them having bad task management processes and things falling through. There is so muvh inefficiency and incompetency in basic skills it's crazy.
lapcat 3y ago
I once interviewed with the owner of a small tech company. I thought the interview went well, and the owner said he would get back to me the next week. But he never did. I never heard another peep from them. Months later, I saw that the company had hired someone for the position, and the person looked to be very qualified, impressive credentials, so I had no complaints about being passed over. All they had to say was that they decided to go with another candidate, yet they didn't bother to treat me with a modicum of respect. Fast forward to a year later, it turns out that their new employee left the company, and they had to advertise for the same position again. Guess who did NOT apply this time. Karma.
tayo42 3y ago
So glad I wrapped up my 6mo job search lol. It was an extremely dehumanizing process. I think Ive mostly repressed my feelings since it ended, part of me wishes I wrote about it. These companies acting like everything they do is so important and urgent that they cant be bothered to give real feedback or tell me no. I suspect part of the lack of real feedback is that most people have no clue how to interview, even these large companies. Companies should run their own employees through the hiring process or something. This would definitely show how bad almost all tech recruiters are along with their interview process in general. I ended my search with a couple companies I don't want to work for now. Meaningless I guess, I'm sure they still have an endless stream of candidates and these large companies past a certain point will never actually die. They make worse decisions then being rude to applicants daily and have no real repercussion.
skeeter2020 3y ago
This is NOT the new normal, and we should NOT accept it. Everyone here should do their part; for example, I'm more often a hiring manager and will not tolerate ghosting anyone who gets to any interaction with engineering. IME it's lazy recruiters who are responsible for this, and they're about as big of a part of tech as an accountant, i.e. very little. I don't understand why many people are hesitant to name and shame the individuals and companies. It doesn't matter if it was intentional or accidental the outcome is the same, and I have consistently been very vocal with my being ghosted experiences. Surprise, surprise: they're consistent on a company-basis and highly corelated to other shitty experiences, both before and during employment.
- sshine 3y ago
  At the least, ghosting sends a clear signal that the employer is not a place where clear communication is valued. I would much rather be ghosted than waste time communicating poorly for an extended period of time.
- y-c-o-m-b 3y ago
  There should definitely be a larger effort to name and shame. I'm not currently job hunting, but in the past I have considered starting a site to document companies and the individual recruiters that are ghosting. It might be worth-while for anyone job hunting currently to start a google sheet or something along those lines to do just that since it's so common now.
- tayo42 3y ago
  > I don't understand why many people are hesitant to name and shame the individuals and companies. The risk for repercussion isn't worth it. Your going to go online and stir up shit? Corporate culture is way to risk averse. If you are the kind of person getting ghosted and rejected from interviews you evidently aren't a person with any leverage in the hiring market.
  - stevekemp 3y ago
    In my experience companies with bad practices (be they recruitment, or otherwise) are named and shamed frequently - but only locally, and in-person. I'm not going to relocate from my current city (Helsinki), though perhaps I could go back to working remotely 100% of the time in the future. So really the only companies I'm ever going to apply for are based locally. I think via IRC, facebook, random geeky chats in pubs, and other face to face conversations I'm slightly familiar with most of the big players. There are certainly companies I've heard of that I'd never consider applying to, and would outright reject if a recruiter tried to head-hunt me for. And I think the reverse is true - some companies are well known locally for having fun challenges, awesome people, and a good environment.
zero-sharp 3y ago
Here's a relevant experience. I applied for a job a few days ago. The recruiter reached out to me through email to schedule a phone call and I scheduled a time through her online calendar. To give you some more context in terms of timing: she emailed me in the morning and I responded in the afternoon. Less than 24 hours after she reached out to me, the job ad on the company page is taken down and now says the position is filled. No response from the recruiter. What the hell was that?
- deleted 3y ago
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- TheChaplain 3y ago
  My guess, you were not fast enough? Imagining myself as a recruiter, I would probably be working with a fair number of leads at the same time. Any of those who are a good fit and quick to respond would get sent to HR. My recent job I landed because I was pushy, I called the recruiter by phone and sold them on me, got the contact for the company manager, called them too and got hired. I got decent technical skills, but talking to people is what gave results. Just one thing, "talk the talk, walk the walk" is real. Bullsh*ting will put you in a bind sooner or later.
  - zero-sharp 3y ago
    I'm not sure what part of the story I just described was "bullshitting."
    - TheChaplain 3y ago
      I didn't mean you were, I just said that talking to people is effective but some take it up a level where it likely ends badly.
    - RobRivera 3y ago
      They were making a comment on the general case, not your specific case
- 3y ago
vinay_ys 3y ago
At every company I worked at, each interviewer would have gone through training to do interviews, write feedback, participate in debriefs and actually do those things in a timely fashion. Senior people would have participated/chaired in semi-formal or more-formal hiring committees and helped make hire/no-hire decisions. And the hiring tools we used showed if the candidate has applied earlier for same/different roles, and did interviews and what were the feedback earlier. There would also internal confidential ref-checks based on overlap in candidate's work history with anyone at the company currently. If the candidate was rejected at any stage, the recruiter is informed and they have access to almost all of these data in the same tool. And they are expected to communicate that back to the candidate. And there is a feedback tool for the candidate to rate the whole experience and this feedback is analyzed carefully, and processes tweaked accordingly, especially if the company is growing and expected to continue to grow for a while. In companies that had to do aggressive cost cutting, the recruiters were the first to be impacted. These roles have had high churn and sufficient training and experience quality monitoring may have suffered during this period. That could be the reason why the certain steps in the process involving recruiters (like communicating back to the rejected candidates) may have suffered w.r.t quality of interactions.
deleted 3y ago
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Brian_K_White 3y ago
I don't understand why companies don't understand: "If you don't care about me, why should I care about you?"
ugh123 3y ago
My first rule of recruiting for my own technical teams: don't let a recruiter be the face of your company or team. Set rules on interaction, follow-ups, etc. Insert yourself or someone directly from the team into the process as early as time allows. Also, don't let a recruiter contact candidates on your behalf. I've seen this go sideways several times where unprofessionalism can be conducted IN YOUR NAME by the recruiter.
cryptodan 3y ago
It's all sector's in the industry not just isolated to tech jobs.
zaptheimpaler 3y ago
The whole point thing about having half a breakdown after being ghosted is not going to be remedied by receiving a generic rejection email.. even the actual response he did get after pestering them was just "you were good but another guy was better" and yeah this is 90% of all anyone will ever say anyways. Like you can simply assume that 1. a better candidate was found or 2. the job opening was already closed because already hired or budget or role reconsidered if it helps you feel better. The whole idea that we can apply the norms of personal relationships to a business transaction like this with 100s of candidates, no pre-existing relationship beyond 1-2 calls at mostand at best a generic rejection is basically displaced disappointment turned to resentment and anger. To which I say, you can either rant about it online and hope they change, or you can learn to regulate your own emotions.
- kdmccormick 3y ago
  FTA: > The effect of getting ghosted for me, and likely others, is impactful. The narrative in my head played out like this: “was I really so bad that they wouldn’t even tell me no?” It was also a chilling effect for my projects that involved generative AI. I didn’t want to work on them. Every time I logged into my Github, I was reminded of the company because I still had a fork of the take home assignment. It took about a month for my project work to feel normal again, but I shelved some of my LLM projects and moved on. How is this "half a breakdown"? They stopped working on their side projects for a month. That's a completely understandable result after having spend hours of your life interviewing and not even getting the courtesy of a "no". I'm happy with myself when I make any significant movement in my side projects within a month, so I can certainly imagine that a disappointing professional experience would zap my personal coding motivation for a few weeks. That's a not a breakdown--that's human nature. Most people aren't coding on the side at all. > The whole idea that we can apply the norms of personal relationships to a business transaction like this with 100s of candidates, no pre-existing relationship beyond 1-2 calls at mostand at best a generic rejection is basically displaced disappointment turned to resentment and anger. To which I say, you can either rant about it online and hope they change, or you can learn to regulate your own emotions. What? We can't extend common courtesy into business transactions? You sound... tough to work with. Yes, resiliency is important and great and we should all strive for it. That doesn't mean we should throw away longstanding norms of professional decency. Also, calling this a "rant" is unfair. It was well-written and calmly worded. A lot of people are reading it. Some of them might go back to their job Monday and think "oh, I should ask if the recruiter ever followed up with the rejected candidates".
momocowcow 3y ago
I’ve been ghosted a few times over the years. It stung at first but now that I have grey hair, I no longer take it personally. I actually started ghosting job offers and invitation to continue to the next phase of the interview process. If they’re really interested, they’ll find an alternate way to contact me.
- optymizer 3y ago
  I sincerey hope nobody reads this and thinks "I should start ghosting too". We want less ghosting in this process, not more.
  - sevagh 3y ago
    Operating with integrity in a domain where nobody else is is a shortcut to getting fucked.
    - operatingthetan 3y ago
      Interpersonal enshittification's cause in a nutshell.
    - dspillett 3y ago
      Responding with “Yeah, nah.” or a more formal equivalent is hardly going out of your way to operate with integrity in a manner that will get you massively fucked. Yes, ghost those who don't take “sorry, but no” (or more succinctly just “no”) for an answer, especially those who have done so repeatedly (those are a time sink and deserve ghosting), but I wouldn't take it as my default position. Try not to become what you hate. OK, so I tell a bit of a lie: ignorance is my default and only response wrt LinkedIn these days. I see the “you have messages/requests / people are looking at you” alerts regularly by mail, but I've not logged into the site in half a decade or more which anyone looking at my profile (rather than just being a gattling-gun invite spammer or similar) could probably tell with ease (the fact they bother contacting me is a good indication that they aren't a useful lead!).
    - JohnFen 3y ago
davedx 3y ago
Jeez. On one hand, sure, it’s frustrating when this happens. But for everyone trying to get hired out there: don’t just sit passively waiting for results - call your damn recruiter on the phone! Recruiters are human and yes they make mistakes. Sometimes a phone call may actually result in jiggling you along in the process and actually make the difference between getting hired or not. Don’t sit at home and feel sad and stroke your beard and neglect your side projects. Communicate, sell yourself, don’t be afraid to be a bit pushy!
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I didn't even realize that this had to be said until you said it. Yes, you should 100% follow up on this stuff. Looking for a position requires being proactive, and the effort required doesn't end when the interview does.
pcai 3y ago
one seldom-mentioned reason employers ghost candidates deep in the process SEEMS silly, but is selfishly rational: they are hedging their bets. you came in second place, and they are waiting to see if their preferred candidate accepts before getting back to you.
senderista 3y ago
This has happened to me multiple times, including from large YC-funded companies. I'm tempted to name-and-shame, but I doubt it would do any good. I don't consider anyone obligated to respond to a resume or application, but stopping communication in the middle of the interview process is utterly disrespectful and does not speak well of your company's values and culture.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
I think its cultural. Disrespect has become normalised as part of "fast paced modern life". If we give toddlers a TV or tablet to play with instead of attentive parenting they grow up with damaged attachment patterns. We stop them playing outside and interacting with other children. They go through metal detectors to attend hostile schools in a locked-down environment and communicate only through text messages. They are watched night and day by CCTV cameras. They're made to feel ashamed of simply existing because they're using up air and "killing the planet". Do this for 20 or 30 years and we have a generation of timid, avoidant people with no interpersonal skills who as Julia Roberts' character in Sam Esmail's new movie "Leave the World Behind" puts it just "hate other people". And then we use dating apps that reduce other humans to a dismissibe swipe. Those are our peers today. We treat each other like machines and mutual threats, because that's all we've ever experienced. Is it any wonder that people in companies are too terrified to engage in a risky human-human interaction?
- andy99 3y ago
  https://genius.com/John-lennon-working-class-hero-lyrics https://genius.com/John-lennon-working-class-hero-lyrics Spot on but not new
hartator 3y ago
Literally give the middle finder emoji to the interviewer and wonder why they don't want to hire him.
sjducb 3y ago
If you get ghosted it usually means that you were almost good enough, or it was something unrelated to you. The bad candidates get an immediate rejection. The best candidates get offers quickly. Candidates that are kind of good enough, but not amazing are the ones who get ghosted. The employer doesn’t want to say yes in case they find someone better. They also don’t want to say no because you are “good enough” and if the next 3 candidates suck then you’ll get the job. Then they forget to tell you when they hire #3. The other ghosting is when the whole project gets cancelled mid interview. Often people involved aren’t sure if the project will be cancelled so they don’t tell the candidates early. Then when the cancellation is in full swing everyone has forgotten about the candidates.
billy_bitchtits 3y ago
My company ghosted me for an internal advancement opportunity. A short interview with the HR recruiter then silence for 2 months, even from my manager. I had to complain to the head of HR to get a response letting me know that they're going with an external hire.
ponderings 3y ago
Here is a truly stupid idea: What if you could buy a job interview. You pay say 100 bucks, you get the deluxe tour, all the attention and dedication you deserve, a nice letter highlighting your qualities. Make the process into a real product that is worth buying. I've never experienced it and I don't know if they still do it but I hear in Belgium they do a lot of things over dinner. If nothing useful comes out of it you split the bill.
- jzebedee 3y ago
  Exactly what an already exploitative labor market needs: paid interviews! I can't see a single way this could go wrong.
- firebat45 3y ago
  Well, at least you got the first part right. That is a truly stupid idea.
satokema 3y ago
There is no excuse for not sending a no. Recruiters this day are using one of a dozen or so recruiting platforms, all of which either have or ought to have functionality that tracks communications. "Slipping through the cracks" isn't the issue. The issue is a lack of professionalism and diligence, which aren't things I want to see from someone that is going to filter out future employees.
teunispeters 3y ago
Could be worse, interviewers could be bullying and degrading interviewees they don't like ... on a wider level. sigh 2 really good interviews, and then that. Work in my field, with tech I'd had decades on, and that. Worse experience of the last year of unemployment, and worst interview ever. I had a rough time with google interviews because I don't have a PHD (or degree of any kind) but nothing on that level, ever, before.
deleted 3y ago
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tennisflyi 3y ago
Been this was for everyone outside of tech. Welcome and enjoy the purgatory
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chrismcb 3y ago
A "few" years ago (back in the last economic crisis) I was job hunting. Interviewed with a ton of people, and almost no one would get back to you. A few did, but most just ghosted me. I just found myself back in the job hunt, but this time almost everyone sent me a response. It sucks getting a "no" but I'd rather get a "you are the worst programmer in the world, go jump on a lake" than get boring at all. I did one interview, had to give a presentation, out a lot of time into it. Never to hear from them again. But the point is, it was definitely better this time around (well better in the housing sense)
Barbaraklaus 3y ago
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nedt 3y ago
In 2020 here in Austria I had people clearly tell me when I was a fit and when I wasn't and with a reason. As a background I'm working for 20 years so I'd call myself very senior for a typical dev job. The only exception was Automattic. They are very proud of everything and how clear their communication is, which it was for most of the time. I got invited to slack, got links with a lot of information. Then I had the interview, which from my point of view wasn't too bad. After the interview I got told that they won't move forward. I can apply again after a year after I improved my skills. No word about what they thought didn't match the position. Slack channel closed, no response to my email asking what they were missing.
gudmundmolly 3y ago
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153 points by koryk 3y ago

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Almost as bad IMO are companies that auto-respond with messages like "we'll contact you in the next few weeks to discuss next steps". Next few weeks? Are you under the impression that your competitors are all sitting around twiddling their thumbs? Yes, it's a hirer's market today, but that doesn't mean you can take your sweet time eventually getting around to interested applicants.

dspillett 3y ago
> under the impression that your competitors are all sitting around twiddling their thumbs? If the premise of the article is correct (that ghosting, and by inference other poor communication, is very much the norm) then that impression would hardly be massively inaccurate.

tekla 3y ago

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

bachmeier 3y ago
I had my first interview for a faculty job in 2001. I sent a couple of emails to find out where they are in the hiring process. Still waiting for a response.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  Maybe it's time to send one more email? ;D
prettyStandard 3y ago
Agreed. A bit besides the point, but I'm dating a recruiter that has worked in a few industries, but not tech. She says, as a rule, she doesn't provide feedback. People just don't listen or accept it, they just use it as an opportunity to argue. So what's the point?
- fragmede 3y ago
  Detailed "here's why you suck" feedback, sure, but just a "no" would be more professional than this emotionally immature "ghosting" thing.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    This isn't personal on their part. It might be a bit rude but if you're going into the corporate world, get used to that. Just move on, if you're sitting there stewing about getting "ghosted", you can be sure they are not. I don't think it would bother me any more than getting a templated, cliche rejection letter.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      It's less about the feelings going around, and more that the hiring committee managed to meet, decided against a candidate, and then the recruiter can't be bothered to give a candidate a canned "no"? What does a recruiter do? Doom scroll on Linkedin for $70k/yr?
      - SoftTalker 3y ago
        Yeah the recruiter could spend some time preparing and sending communications back to all the candidates who were interviewed and then rejected, or could spend that time working on finding candidates for other positions he's trying to fill. What is he going to be incentivized to do?

Beefin 3y ago

as a founder recruiting engineers of various skillsets/expertise i simply don't have the bandwidth to respond to every non-qualified candidate.

ivan_gammel 3y ago
Do you ghost people whom you already talked to in the past or you misunderstood the article? Not responding after an interview cannot be a bandwidth problem.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  I think at least half of the responses here just don't understand what ghosting is. Which means they've probably never been ghosted - good for them!
dvaun 3y ago
From what I’ve read, hiring was already difficult prior to the wave of layoffs. Would you say it became more or less difficult to find a target skillset with a larger pool of candidates, regardless of comp?
shkkmo 3y ago
> This means that if you apply and never hear back from a job, that’s not ghosting, a conversation never started. It only becomes ghosting when there is an expected next step that never happens. The article is specifically talking about ghosting people after a mutual process has been started, such as after an interview or coding assignment.
greatpostman 3y ago
Yup. It’s too much work, literally. Especially when 20% of the resumes you get end up being fake
- georgespencer 3y ago
  If you have enough candidates that it's too much work to reject people, you likely have enough candidates to merit at least a simple templating and candidate management app or plugin. It is absolutely trivial to one-click reject groups of people.

waynesonfire 3y ago

[flagged]

boring_twenties 3y ago

Every time I've been passed over for a job, I've been notified in a timely manner. I would consider anything less to be grossly, outrageously unprofessional. It's never happened to me, but if it ever does, you best believe I am going to name and shame the hell out of that company. Everyone deserves to know, and people like this don't deserve to have anyone working for them.

piloto_ciego 3y ago
I’m trying to get started in this field, I am finishing grad school in the spring and applying everywhere… I mostly hear nothing. It is incredibly unprofessional.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  No response to applications is normal. Ghosting is suddenly leaving you in the middle of a conversation. For example, not showing up for a scheduled Zoom interview then not replying to your concerned email, asking to reschedule. And yes, that's happened to me.
- skeeter2020 3y ago
  again, hearing nothing is not the issue. I still think these companies should send you a canned automatic response, but it's about relationships, and the degree of personalized communication needs to match this.
optymizer 3y ago
This is the right attitude. If highly qualified applicants start avoiding companies that ghost, ghosting will stop.

thr0way120 3y ago

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

3y ago

wutangisforever 3y ago

As someone who interviewed in the bay for the last 7 years, ghosting is pretty normal on both sides of the equation. It totally sucks when you go through the process and don't hear anything back but I also take it as a sign of feedback that I didn't kill on the interview. I have ghosted a ton on interviews, never purposely but things get lost in the shuffle if you aren't super passionate about the company It isn't a great habit/practice on either side, but by any means this isn't new

JohnFen 3y ago
> ghosting is pretty normal on both sides of the equation. I like that you mentioned this. As a job-seeker, if you've interviewed at a number of places and decided to take a position with one of them, letting the others know that you're no longer on the market is just as important as them letting you know if they've decided not to hire you, for all the same reasons.

hx8 3y ago

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

sokoloff 3y ago
Having been in industry 30 years, it’s only about 15% of the time that I have any specific constructive feedback that’s worth sharing. “When you’re talking about problem X, first make sure you understand the problem because it seemed like you jumped straight into a solution that missed a key element of the question.” Or something similarly specific. In most cases, it’s more “you did okay, but someone else did better in this noisy, wide error-bar interaction”; giving someone feedback of “just be better next time” isn’t particularly helpful or motivating and some candidates will take that as a invitation to press for further details which may not exist and certainly won’t be coming. In cases where there is specific feedback, I give it to recruiters who hopefully share it with the candidate. (Anecdotally, I have talked with recruiters who have done just that, which is how I know that some candidates just won’t drop it.) If you’re never getting specific feedback, it’s probably the case that you’re consistently doing fine in interviews and someone else just wiggled a little higher on that particular day.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  And often it boils down to an intangible "we felt a better vibe with candidate B" and that's probably something they will never come out and say. My reaction to the feedback he got when he finally jogged someone into responding was like yours. It was the typical cliche rejection letter. Maybe a bit more personal than some. I'm sure that the "wires got crossed" and the "email never made it to your inbox" are just a smokescreen for "we hired someone else and didn't bother to let you know."

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CM30 3y ago

The new normal? This has been the case for years for almost all job applications. Maybe if you're lucky and the company has put you through like 4 rounds of interviews you might get feedback, but the general rule seems to be that useful feedback for an interview is the exception rather than the norm. And heck, even that isn't something you can rely on. I've had a fair few interviews get about 80% of the way through the recruitment process, then just ghost me without a trace. The main reason I have my current job is because the other company I was interviewing with just kinda faded away at the end of the application process. If being ghosted is the new norm for you, you must be insanely lucky.

doubleorseven 3y ago
Maybe only now it reached America? In Israel, for the last 13 years atleast, I don't think there was ever an alternative.
piloto_ciego 3y ago
When I was a pilot just starting out, in 2007 I’d see a human response maybe 1/100 applications. It’s pretty gross out there for people other than tech employees. What’s pretty funny is now that I’m changing into this field it seems to be adjusting to treat people like crap. So, I guess you’re welcome guys and gals - it’s my fault.
- deleted 3y ago
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- skeeter2020 3y ago
  This isn't really about applications though - not getting a human response at the first step has always been common, especially with electronic postings. It's as easy to apply as post, so you do get a lot of spam applicants. If you've had human contact and then radio silenc - IMO that's inexcusable.
  - piloto_ciego 3y ago
    Literally all the time in aviation. Now I’m just cynical and do a quantity over quality approach

frognumber 3y ago

One of my top lessons I've learned doing successful startups: 1. Recruiting is the #1 job of any startup CEO, and the #1 determiner of corporate success. 2. Up market, down market, side market, it doesn't matter: You will get better employees if you treat candidates with respect and you will be more competitive. 3. It's a lot of work for the 95% of clowns out there you interview, and there's a push towards automated process, but it will hurt your business. 4. There's a lot more to recruiting than just treating candidates with respect. It involves how you present yourself as an employer (participating in conferences / meetups / etc.), how you find candidates, checking references, reviewing github repos, etc. It's a crazy amount of work. 5. This is hard, but if you can do this, you will have a huge edge. The flip side is that as an employee, doing a good job interviewing / recruiting, especially at a big company, is one of the lowest value-add tasks you can bring on, from a purely selfish / incentive structures perspective. This friction, I think, is a major reason why recruiting is handled so badly. There is absolutely no upside to doing a good job, and it takes a lot of time to do so.

tayo42 3y ago
> is one of the lowest value-add tasks you can bring on, from a purely selfish / incentive structures perspective. At one place I worked, interviewing was one of the check marks you could participate in for promotions.
- 1920musicman 3y ago
  But that's exactly what it is then: a check mark. I can interview dozens of candidates, and then add a total count to my self review. There is no incentive to do a good job (how would that even be evaluated?..).
  - filoleg 3y ago
    > how would that even be evaluated? Depends on the company. At my current workplace, the candidate is given an option to provide feedback at the end (either through a form or an email), and all interviewers are also required to submit written notes on how everything went down. Given that a candidate at the onsite will get interviewed by 4-5 people, with each of them providing a very detailed set of notes, it would be fairly trivial to smell out a misbehaving interviewer, if one cared to do so. What actually happens at the end of the day with those notes and candidate feedback, that’s the part i am not sure about. Once they get submitted to the hiring committee (or HR), it is out of my hands. But just saying, they do have ways of evaluating it, just on a less precise scale and more on a “bad/good enough/amazing” scale. With only the “bad” outcome raising any eyebrows/having any meaningful effect, and with 99% of them getting the “good enough”/“amazing” ratings. And how often the signal for that “bad” rating gets caught is also not something I know much about. P.S. Your assessments and notes are all preserved in the centralized hub, so you (and some others) can always access them later as well. And, sometimes, you indeed have people checking them out for assessment or such. Especially during your first couple interviews, you have a person supervising you and taking notes in parallel as well, and then you discuss them and they give you improvement suggestions and such.

firtoz 3y ago

I got ghosted twice by the same guy working for Citi, for the initial chat. Needless to say, I or my friends won't bother applying for any jobs there.

solatic 3y ago

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

andy99 3y ago
I mostly agree with the sentiment. But I'd say the difference with the kind of ghosting he's talking about is you're already (well) into the interview process. So you've invested a fair bit already. Like in sales, getting ignored or told to get lost immediately is easy to shake off, going deep into the process and then not hearing anything is different. You don't know if you should still expect something, you've got to balance persistence with being professional, you were to some extent counting on it at least possibly happening. I've been looking for a job recently, and was also surprised about how much ghosting seems to to on, especially after already talking to people but also never hearing at all. The best application experience I've had recently was probably one that 24 hours after I applied told me no. There I at least could move it out of my mind entirely. I do agree for sure that it's not personal. And how you're treated during recruitment is also good information.
sk11001 3y ago
Not getting responses from cold calls or applications isn't ghosting according to the author of the article (and I agree): > In order for it to be ghosting, the ghosted party has to expect the conversation will continue. This means that if you apply and never hear back from a job, that’s not ghosting, a conversation never started. It only becomes ghosting when there is an expected next step that never happens.
skeeter2020 3y ago
My Rule: The nature of a negative (i.e. final) communications should equal how personal the relationship is. If you applied electronically and we stated "only those considered will be contacted" or you cold-emailed me some sales pitch, we don't have a relationship at all and you deserve nothing. If you contacted me and I responded with a short email, my final answer should be a shjort email. If you spent several hours in face-to-face interviews and we're not moving forward I owe you a phone call or email with some explanation of why - in a TIMELY manner. Seems pretty easy to me.

kleiba 3y ago

This is a pet peeve of mine. In the olden days, pre-digital, companies would send you a proper letter back together with your application documents so you could possibly reuse them. That was actually a little work for them to do! These days, sending an effing canned email to all applicants that didn't get hired costs a company next to nothing, and still ghosting happens. It's indecent.

barbazoo 3y ago
Can’t expose the precious organization to any form of liability. What if you accidentally leak the internal communication about the candidate *eyeroll*
forinti 3y ago
I once applied to a position in the IAEA. I didn't get the job, but they sent me a letter. I kept that letter for a decade because it was such an unusual occurrence in my carreer. I got a nice letter from a UN agency, when local companies couldn't be bothered to send an email.
arprocter 3y ago
I recall being taken aback to receive a dead tree rejection letter in the mid 2000s (the only interaction had been me emailing my CV) The recruiters that meet you in person, talk a big game and then complete silence annoy/confuse me the most - possibly they get commissions for signups?
firebat45 3y ago
In the olden days, people took time to apply for each job. Nowadays, they spam out applications to hundreds of places in a day. The problem is on both ends and stems from rewarding quantity over quality.

k310 3y ago

I recall getting feedback from one or two companies at which I attended day-long interviews. I had to ask, and after the "well, we can't tell you that," got a couple of "we hired someone with more specific experience with XYZ". Otherwise, many days sent down a black hole, followed by beers, to recover from the day's ordeal. My wild-ass hyperbolic guess is that once they make a choice, staying silent is their way of grabbing a beer or two and forgetting their own ordeal, and having no regrets. "We hired a genius. All the others were run of the mill" They're human, after all, but maybe humans won't be involved any more. Machines decide who will serve them.

wombat-man 3y ago
Sometimes they just aren’t sure, or they have a couple other candidates in the pipe that seem good. I’ve been on the other side where we didn’t hire the person for random reasons that I try to not take it personally. But it is frustrating for candidates for sure.

dr_kiszonka 3y ago

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

fragmede 3y ago
Throwaway AskReddit/AskHN thread for "advice" followed by small claims court.

kthejoker2 3y ago

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

atrettel 3y ago
I completely agree with this. I have only been ghosted after the interview stage twice but both times left bad feelings in my mind. I did try to contact people but did not receive a response obviously. I never applied to any jobs at those organizations again. I think many companies and other organizations need to realize that even an automated denial is much better than nothing.

JohnFen 3y ago

Is it new, though? I've been in the industry for a very long time, and being ghosted has always been my standard experience when I didn't get a position I interviewed for.

cco 3y ago

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

skeeter2020 3y ago
recruiters are a lot like real estate agents - there's very little barrier to entry or exit, so the good ones do well in both hot and cold markets, while the shitty ones exit when times get tough and compete like crazy for limited supply when they are good. The former builds value in their network and will likely never ghost you; you'll earn them several commissions over a career. The bad ones get fired or voluntarily leave so the network has no value. I suspect we're seeing an uptick in ghosting right now because: 1. There are a lot more newer people in tech today who are now going through their first downturn and involuntarily looking for a job. As a stereotype these people are far more public on the interwebs and sharing their experiences. 2. We're still in the downward trajectory so the crappy recruiters haven't been purged and companies don't have to compete on quality of service to get limited talent... yet. Wait until the next upswing - I'd bet far less people got ghosted on job applications 2-3 years ago.
RajT88 3y ago
In-house recruiters I have much better experiences with. Recruiters working for staffing/headhunting firms in my experience tend to: 1. Be focused on high volume, hence the ghosting. They save time by ghosting you and spend that time on candidates which are sure bets. 2. They ask to be friends on LinkedIn up front (probably even if they know they are going to ghost you). This is to take advantage of your network. They get something out of the interaction; you get nothing. 3. They sometimes line you up for interviews which you aren't a good fit for. What in the actual fuck. I don't friend recruiters from anything but the tech companies hiring. At my career stage, I won't even talk to recruiters which aren't working directly for the company doing the hiring. I would happily go back to this if I was at the phase of "I need a job; any job for now". The icky feelings I've gotten from recruiters over the years is akin to the icky feelings I've gotten from car salesmen and real estate agents. As I am writing this now, I am reminded of some of the headhunting/staffing firms I've talked to over the years. I just removed all of those recruiters from my network.

zitterbewegung 3y ago

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

Niksko 3y ago

I've been ghosted twice lately. One was someone reaching out via Hacker News for an initial chat where they said "let's put you through our interview process" and then ghosted. The other was for a startup, similar situation, "let's set up a chat with our CEO", then ghosted. The commonality here is an inability to just be honest and say "doesn't seem like a good fit". Disappointing, and ironically, an indication that it really wouldn't be a good fit. I don't want to work with people who are unable to deliver uncomfortable news respectfully, or even, at all.

machomaster 3y ago
Often it is not about people not being honest, but about them having bad task management processes and things falling through. There is so muvh inefficiency and incompetency in basic skills it's crazy.

lapcat 3y ago

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

tayo42 3y ago

So glad I wrapped up my 6mo job search lol. It was an extremely dehumanizing process. I think Ive mostly repressed my feelings since it ended, part of me wishes I wrote about it. These companies acting like everything they do is so important and urgent that they cant be bothered to give real feedback or tell me no. I suspect part of the lack of real feedback is that most people have no clue how to interview, even these large companies. Companies should run their own employees through the hiring process or something. This would definitely show how bad almost all tech recruiters are along with their interview process in general. I ended my search with a couple companies I don't want to work for now. Meaningless I guess, I'm sure they still have an endless stream of candidates and these large companies past a certain point will never actually die. They make worse decisions then being rude to applicants daily and have no real repercussion.

skeeter2020 3y ago

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

sshine 3y ago
At the least, ghosting sends a clear signal that the employer is not a place where clear communication is valued. I would much rather be ghosted than waste time communicating poorly for an extended period of time.
y-c-o-m-b 3y ago
There should definitely be a larger effort to name and shame. I'm not currently job hunting, but in the past I have considered starting a site to document companies and the individual recruiters that are ghosting. It might be worth-while for anyone job hunting currently to start a google sheet or something along those lines to do just that since it's so common now.
tayo42 3y ago
> I don't understand why many people are hesitant to name and shame the individuals and companies. The risk for repercussion isn't worth it. Your going to go online and stir up shit? Corporate culture is way to risk averse. If you are the kind of person getting ghosted and rejected from interviews you evidently aren't a person with any leverage in the hiring market.
- stevekemp 3y ago
  In my experience companies with bad practices (be they recruitment, or otherwise) are named and shamed frequently - but only locally, and in-person. I'm not going to relocate from my current city (Helsinki), though perhaps I could go back to working remotely 100% of the time in the future. So really the only companies I'm ever going to apply for are based locally. I think via IRC, facebook, random geeky chats in pubs, and other face to face conversations I'm slightly familiar with most of the big players. There are certainly companies I've heard of that I'd never consider applying to, and would outright reject if a recruiter tried to head-hunt me for. And I think the reverse is true - some companies are well known locally for having fun challenges, awesome people, and a good environment.

zero-sharp 3y ago

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

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TheChaplain 3y ago
My guess, you were not fast enough? Imagining myself as a recruiter, I would probably be working with a fair number of leads at the same time. Any of those who are a good fit and quick to respond would get sent to HR. My recent job I landed because I was pushy, I called the recruiter by phone and sold them on me, got the contact for the company manager, called them too and got hired. I got decent technical skills, but talking to people is what gave results. Just one thing, "talk the talk, walk the walk" is real. Bullsh*ting will put you in a bind sooner or later.
- zero-sharp 3y ago
  I'm not sure what part of the story I just described was "bullshitting."
  - TheChaplain 3y ago
    I didn't mean you were, I just said that talking to people is effective but some take it up a level where it likely ends badly.
  - RobRivera 3y ago
    They were making a comment on the general case, not your specific case
3y ago

vinay_ys 3y ago

At every company I worked at, each interviewer would have gone through training to do interviews, write feedback, participate in debriefs and actually do those things in a timely fashion. Senior people would have participated/chaired in semi-formal or more-formal hiring committees and helped make hire/no-hire decisions. And the hiring tools we used showed if the candidate has applied earlier for same/different roles, and did interviews and what were the feedback earlier. There would also internal confidential ref-checks based on overlap in candidate's work history with anyone at the company currently. If the candidate was rejected at any stage, the recruiter is informed and they have access to almost all of these data in the same tool. And they are expected to communicate that back to the candidate. And there is a feedback tool for the candidate to rate the whole experience and this feedback is analyzed carefully, and processes tweaked accordingly, especially if the company is growing and expected to continue to grow for a while. In companies that had to do aggressive cost cutting, the recruiters were the first to be impacted. These roles have had high churn and sufficient training and experience quality monitoring may have suffered during this period. That could be the reason why the certain steps in the process involving recruiters (like communicating back to the rejected candidates) may have suffered w.r.t quality of interactions.

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Brian_K_White 3y ago

I don't understand why companies don't understand: "If you don't care about me, why should I care about you?"

ugh123 3y ago

My first rule of recruiting for my own technical teams: don't let a recruiter be the face of your company or team. Set rules on interaction, follow-ups, etc. Insert yourself or someone directly from the team into the process as early as time allows. Also, don't let a recruiter contact candidates on your behalf. I've seen this go sideways several times where unprofessionalism can be conducted IN YOUR NAME by the recruiter.

cryptodan 3y ago

It's all sector's in the industry not just isolated to tech jobs.

zaptheimpaler 3y ago

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

kdmccormick 3y ago
FTA: > The effect of getting ghosted for me, and likely others, is impactful. The narrative in my head played out like this: “was I really so bad that they wouldn’t even tell me no?” It was also a chilling effect for my projects that involved generative AI. I didn’t want to work on them. Every time I logged into my Github, I was reminded of the company because I still had a fork of the take home assignment. It took about a month for my project work to feel normal again, but I shelved some of my LLM projects and moved on. How is this "half a breakdown"? They stopped working on their side projects for a month. That's a completely understandable result after having spend hours of your life interviewing and not even getting the courtesy of a "no". I'm happy with myself when I make any significant movement in my side projects within a month, so I can certainly imagine that a disappointing professional experience would zap my personal coding motivation for a few weeks. That's a not a breakdown--that's human nature. Most people aren't coding on the side at all. > The whole idea that we can apply the norms of personal relationships to a business transaction like this with 100s of candidates, no pre-existing relationship beyond 1-2 calls at mostand at best a generic rejection is basically displaced disappointment turned to resentment and anger. To which I say, you can either rant about it online and hope they change, or you can learn to regulate your own emotions. What? We can't extend common courtesy into business transactions? You sound... tough to work with. Yes, resiliency is important and great and we should all strive for it. That doesn't mean we should throw away longstanding norms of professional decency. Also, calling this a "rant" is unfair. It was well-written and calmly worded. A lot of people are reading it. Some of them might go back to their job Monday and think "oh, I should ask if the recruiter ever followed up with the rejected candidates".

momocowcow 3y ago

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

optymizer 3y ago
I sincerey hope nobody reads this and thinks "I should start ghosting too". We want less ghosting in this process, not more.
- sevagh 3y ago
  Operating with integrity in a domain where nobody else is is a shortcut to getting fucked.
  - operatingthetan 3y ago
    Interpersonal enshittification's cause in a nutshell.
  - dspillett 3y ago
    Responding with “Yeah, nah.” or a more formal equivalent is hardly going out of your way to operate with integrity in a manner that will get you massively fucked. Yes, ghost those who don't take “sorry, but no” (or more succinctly just “no”) for an answer, especially those who have done so repeatedly (those are a time sink and deserve ghosting), but I wouldn't take it as my default position. Try not to become what you hate. OK, so I tell a bit of a lie: ignorance is my default and only response wrt LinkedIn these days. I see the “you have messages/requests / people are looking at you” alerts regularly by mail, but I've not logged into the site in half a decade or more which anyone looking at my profile (rather than just being a gattling-gun invite spammer or similar) could probably tell with ease (the fact they bother contacting me is a good indication that they aren't a useful lead!).
  - JohnFen 3y ago

davedx 3y ago

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

JohnFen 3y ago
I didn't even realize that this had to be said until you said it. Yes, you should 100% follow up on this stuff. Looking for a position requires being proactive, and the effort required doesn't end when the interview does.

pcai 3y ago

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

senderista 3y ago

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

nonrandomstring 3y ago

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

andy99 3y ago
https://genius.com/John-lennon-working-class-hero-lyrics https://genius.com/John-lennon-working-class-hero-lyrics Spot on but not new

hartator 3y ago

Literally give the middle finder emoji to the interviewer and wonder why they don't want to hire him.

sjducb 3y ago

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

billy_bitchtits 3y ago

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

ponderings 3y ago

Here is a truly stupid idea: What if you could buy a job interview. You pay say 100 bucks, you get the deluxe tour, all the attention and dedication you deserve, a nice letter highlighting your qualities. Make the process into a real product that is worth buying. I've never experienced it and I don't know if they still do it but I hear in Belgium they do a lot of things over dinner. If nothing useful comes out of it you split the bill.

jzebedee 3y ago
Exactly what an already exploitative labor market needs: paid interviews! I can't see a single way this could go wrong.
firebat45 3y ago
Well, at least you got the first part right. That is a truly stupid idea.

satokema 3y ago

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

teunispeters 3y ago

Could be worse, interviewers could be bullying and degrading interviewees they don't like ... on a wider level. sigh 2 really good interviews, and then that. Work in my field, with tech I'd had decades on, and that. Worse experience of the last year of unemployment, and worst interview ever. I had a rough time with google interviews because I don't have a PHD (or degree of any kind) but nothing on that level, ever, before.

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tennisflyi 3y ago

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

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chrismcb 3y ago

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

Barbaraklaus 3y ago

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nedt 3y ago

In 2020 here in Austria I had people clearly tell me when I was a fit and when I wasn't and with a reason. As a background I'm working for 20 years so I'd call myself very senior for a typical dev job. The only exception was Automattic. They are very proud of everything and how clear their communication is, which it was for most of the time. I got invited to slack, got links with a lot of information. Then I had the interview, which from my point of view wasn't too bad. After the interview I got told that they won't move forward. I can apply again after a year after I improved my skills. No word about what they thought didn't match the position. Slack channel closed, no response to my email asking what they were missing.

gudmundmolly 3y ago

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