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Comment by pjlegato | Hacker News Reader

Tip to shiny new CEOs: Ghosting a job candidate is not only grossly unprofessional, it's extremely rude at a personal level.

The candidate went to all the trouble of engaging with you; you owe them (at the very least) a timely and professional rejection email if you don't want to proceed.

Yes, a rejection letter, because that's what you're doing -- rejecting them. Ghosting is still a rejection; it's just a rude rejection. There is no way to candy coat that, and you shouldn't try. Grow a spine, and write that rejection letter in the kindest way you can.

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Sometimes in dating, it seems that giving an explicit rejection early on can open yourself up to further undesired communication and wasted time/energy (i.e. rather than accept it and move on, they take it as an opportunity to engage further). I wonder if the same sort of thing happens in the job market? Perhaps this is the rationale (a subconscious one even) behind some of this "ghosting"?

Dating and job hunting work the same.

As someone who has hired, I have Ghosted candidates to my everlasting shame.

It's _a lot_ to keep track of and fire off emails to non-good candidates. Especially if you're having applicants apply to jobs@example.com.

Software can solve this problem....

Surely anyone for whom one takes the effort to reach out to for a phone screen can be sent an email, no?

I don't understand how that's hard to keep track of. Even using pencil and paper.

A generic, form-email consisting of

    It was great to meet you, and we appreciate your interest in <COMPANY, INC>. Unfortunately, we've decided not to move forward with you in our <JOB> candidate process.
    Thanks, <EMPLOYER>

would still be better than ghosting...

Yeah, you'd think. But when you get hundreds of emails, along with other day-to-day tasks to keep on top of... it's easy to let fall by the wayside.

Disciplined use of an Excel spreadsheet can solve this problem.

LinkedIn and Apple both ghosted me, it's not just new CEOs.

With Apple at least it depends on the group.

I've been ghosted by one department and actively sought after with months-later followups from others. I can imagine it's likely the manager had someone in mind for the position but the company's policy required a posting.

And there's always H1-B requirements to fill...

Maybe I should've written, "shiny new managers".

Ah, but it's the CEO (or at least someone at the director of engineering level) who sets the tone, and sets priorities and guidelines for their underlings to follow.

So when you get ghosted, it's not the engineers who fizz-buzzed you who "did" it... and it's certainly not the office manager (and/or "talent specialist") who's doing it. As with everything else a company does, "message"-wise -- it's coming from the top.

If their recruiters are contractors, it's possible the recruiter quit/left, and didn't transfer their list of candidates to a new recruiter. Recruiting seems like a high turnover job.

It's still bad, but possibly not intentional.

I was ghosted by Google.

I was actually told by one company I worked for previously to not respond to candidates I interviewed. Needless to say I'm not working for them anymore.

I was taken out to dinner and drinks, referred to as a new hire, and then ghosted. I had been interviewing for a while so it was fairly painful.

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