People are ‘ghosting’ at work, and it's driving recruiters crazy | Hacker News Reader

People are ‘ghosting’ at work, and it's driving recruiters crazy

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60 pointsdawhizkid76 comments

I think I can almost write a table-turned story.

"Bill Right, a software engineer, found a company he'd really like to work for. Good recommendations on Glassdoor, great name recognition... After applying and a couple of phone calls he got an interview, which went really well. Then suddenly company turned silent. Emails to hiring manager unanswered, phone calls to the recruiter switched to the answering machine... The company ghosted the applicant.

Across the whole industry engineers say lackluster market lead to companies stopping communicating with candidates - the practice more associated with rudeness and social ignorance than multi-million dollar companies. It prolongs job search, forcing hopefuls talking with multiple companies at once, as they feel constant significant pressure..."

The article is at least more balanced (and also refers to more than just the recruiting process) than the introduction.

FTA:

> He added: “The employers have been far worse about this than any of the job seekers.”

So basically after years of pulling this with employees, employers are now getting the same treatment.

I also have been ghosted couple of times by prospective employers. Only after they have someone on their payrolls that they will come back with an answer.

I think the problem here is that this has negative consequences for job seekers. As mentioned in the article, companies have started overbooking interviews, which can only end in tears.

I had to do this recruiters myself, because even after explicitly telling them I'm not interested in the position any more, they kept calling/texting me.

On another occasion I told the recruiter I'm not actively looking, but I'll hear them out, with one condition: not during 9-5, because I'm in my current office. I got 5 calls from them in 2 days, of course between 9-5.

Recruiters: there are 2 type of people out there. One has a current position and you're after them; the other doesn't have a current job and they're after you. You need to treat them differently.

That's not ghosting though. You turned them down and closed the conversation. They were being rude by hounding you.

> You need to treat them differently.

Really? Why?

If someone has a job, as the recruiter you have to be more respectful of asking for time out of their day. They may not want to talk ad-how in the middle of the day, and have lots of work commitments to work around. You can’t just ask them to show up on short notice. Someone without a job is thrilled to interview somewhere in short noticed and is happy to field calls in the middle of the day.

Not sure I agree. As a candidate you can simply decline calls and call back when convenient. If asked for an in-person on short notice you can simply state you need more lead time.

I would much rather have the recruiter be aggressive, giving me the chance to slow it down or keep the pace up.

> you have to be more respectful of asking for time out of their day

You have to be respectful always, right? Not only when you have a leverage?

> You can’t just ask them to show up on short notice.

Someone without job can have other things to worry about. You can always ask, of course, but you shouldn't just assume and proceed from that.

Yes respectful always. Just that it means different things for different people. The are calls and requests that may thrill the unemployed also annoy the employed.

The one with job has job during working hours. Has meetings and deadlines, cant answer any time. Want to proceed more slowly and respect current job commitments. The one without job has time during working hours and is available. Likely prefers more intensive contact and want proceed faster as job search is his priority.

I use a separate phone number and email when looking for work for this reason. Some agencies and recruiters will not stop.

> On another occasion I told the recruiter I'm not actively looking, but I'll hear them out, with one condition: not during 9-5, because I'm in my current office. I got 5 calls from them in 2 days, of course between 9-5.

No offense, but I think you're being too picky on this point. Recruiting is their 9-5 job, so IMO it's reasonable that they'd call during that time. Assuming they call your personal phone, it's no different than any other personal call.

Pmlnr told the recruiter up front that they were only willing to talk outside of 9-5. If the recruiter's schedule makes that impossible, the respectful thing to do is say so and end the engagement if necessary, not ignore pmlnr's terms.

Listen I think it’s important to keep people in the loop and I always do. It’s common courtesy. But after having experienced this as a job seeker countless times it’s hard for me to have sympathy with these companies now that the power dynamics have shifted a bit in favor of employees. Behaviors like this are learned.

The article actually acknowledges this:

> Where once it was companies ignoring job applicants or snubbing candidates after interviews, the world has flipped.

A few years ago the article would have been "Companies are ghosting people and driving them crazy". It would seem, on the surface, that if companies ghosting candidates is acceptable and "professional" then candidates ghosting companies is acceptable and "professional"

Yeah. Never ever seen any article about that other direction in contempt.

'...candidates — scarred from years of applying for jobs, spending hours preparing for interviews, only to get form rejections back — may not be to blame for going cold, said Peter Cappelli, a management professor and director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources. “I think they have learned it from the employers,” he said. “Employers were notorious for never getting back to people, and only letting them know what was going on if it turned out they wanted them to go to the next step. He added: “The employers have been far worse about this than any of the job seekers.”

~ I wonder if that is the root cause? It seems possible this is another example of internet era behavioral changes, where people are far more casual about applying for jobs and have less respect for formal perceptions of job application than in the past...

As a people manager this only happened to me once, when an engineer was a no show. It was quite a shocker after all the effort that went into bringing them into the big corp I was at back then...

People are more casual about applying for jobs because they get treated this way by employers. Playing on a job market they learn from them that this is an acceptable behavior.

But why are employers ghosting candidates so much lately? Are there too many people on the market to choose from and they just can't answer? Or maybe they learn this from some large trend-setting corporation that secretly wants to put down candidates to make them more corporate drony, but publicly justifies such policy as legal risk or something. I have a feeling this is where it starts.

There's this perception in the corporate world that telling a candidate why they were rejected opens up the company to a potential lawsuit. I have no idea if there's any truth to that statement or if it's just a convenient excuse that gets repeated.

I would happily sign a waiver for some feedback.

That said, I would bet that a lot of decisions, especially among "finalists" are essentially random (who seems smarter/better put together/whatever).

You're not going to get someone saying "well, you took 10.3 minutes to sketch out a solution to our first problem, which was too long. We would have hired you if you finished in under 9 and half minutes though."

Telling them that they were rejected would be a start in some cases...

It's too bad there's no way to efficiently track candidates in some sort of "data store" and then send them all "automated messages" when someone else has been selected for the job.

Well I sincerely hope this trend catches on. It's about time.

Throughout my career recruiters are active about contact for two reasons only: To chase you for leads and contacts in your current place (sometimes so blatantly that the moment you put the phone down they're calling someone else in the same office and you get strong déjà vu), or when you're #1 chance - so please accept this (role|interview|phone interview). Rest of the time it's like they cease to exist so you never get answer to your question, or find out feedback of an interview.

There were a tiny minority who treated candidates as professional people.

I vividly remember an incident in 1999 when I was sitting in an open plan office of about thirty programmers in San Francisco and a recruiter war-dialed every phone in the company in numerical order, which also happened to describe a space-filling curve throughout the office. As a joke, we had the same guy answer the last half dozen calls.

I graduated high school in 2008 and wanted to work before continuing with my academic career, and I was absolutely astonished by how many employers don't keep you in the loop as an applicant. That being the Recession, I now understand that the vast number of applicants for few positions gave the companies the luxury to not really care about how their communication worked. More applicants would come knocking next month anyway.

So, while I sympathize with these employers I can understand why my generation has started behaving this way because this behavior was among the first we experienced in the business world. This trend of ghosting employers highlights that no one "side" can dictate the culture of business, we need to live up to the standards we hold others to or we will not be given respect back.

The casualties of this development are businesses that did go through the pains to keep their applicants informed about the process who are now suffering for other businesses' stupid decisions. The business who is experiencing ghosting after having treated applicants the same way, however? Please, acknowledge what you've done and ask what you can do yourself to fix this mess you've contributed to.

One of the hardest experiences for a job seeker is getting no feedback from a potential employer after an onsite. This has happened to me a few times when I was seeking opportunities after grad school. It is interesting to see how times have changed.

This is very typical in India in almost every interaction. People ghost all the time, including but not limited to business deals, interviews, any kind of appointments etc.

There is an entire system developed which handles these kind of situations. Its a cultural thing here where saying a “no” outright is considered bad behaviour and offensive. One simply stops responding and that is how the other party knows that they are no longer interested.

Interestingly, it also “leaves the door open” if/when the party saying no by being silent changes their mind. They simply make up a BS but a reasonable explanation to pick up the process where it was left off.

I think leaving the door open, or at least hoping to leave the door open, is a big reason why people ghost in this case as well. From the article:

> The engineer who ghosted ultimately did get back to her — six weeks after her call — to say she had accepted another job at her current employer.

In other words, only after she was sure of another job did she turn down the original one.

Don't think it's just in India to be honest. I think society in general seems to prefer 'ghosting' people more than saying no now.

Personally I suspect the internet and the general increase in invitations/transactions/communications probably had an effect overall. If you're flooded with requests and invitations and applications, then it can easier to just 'ignore' everything than to actually come back with an answer. Well, and email I guess. Seems like people are treating everyday communications like emails in their inbox, something to just pretend doesn't exist if they find it awkward or annoying to deal with.

Google did this to me about 8-9 years ago. I interviewed, it went very well, then nothing for weeks. I called the recruiter, got the runaround, finally talked to someone who tells me, "Oh I called and left a message letting you know we weren't interested." No, they didn't. I have voicemail just like everyone else. No missed calls, no missed messages. But it turned out for the best, so no worries. Needless to say, the 90 or so times since then that they've contacted me to come in for more interviews, I've simply ignored them.

Having some friends who recently went through tech hiring recently, some of these companies are still waiting 1-2 weeks after passing the last interview before extending an offer.

Both of them joined companies that ran through the whole interview cycle within 1 week, and started just days later.

If you’ve already been at a new company for a week, it’s pretty easy (though a little rude) to ignore the recruiter trying to schedule a call still days out to extend an offer.

I'd say it's particularly rude not to respond promptly (or even notify them in advance), if the slower recruiter/company had initially correctly set the timeline expectations.

It's one thing if they say "you're the first candidate we spoke to, so we'll need a couple weeks before we get back to you with a decision" and another if they say "we'll let you know in a few days" (or set no expectation at all).. and then say nothing until 2 weeks later.

In the latter case, a reasonable candidate would assume a tacit rejection, as has been common in the industry, and could be forgiven for forgetting about that company entirely, even a week later.

The article talks about a recruiter who will have candidates not respond to her...

I am sure most of us US based tech talent have had dozens or hundreds perhaps even more recruiters gather some info on them and than ghost them.

I think recruiters are the master ghosters here.

I don't think a recruiter ever ghosted me. Companies that I've emailed, yes, but not a recruiter who gets paid for getting me a job.

I've stopped responding to many recruiters because there are just so many of them. I used to not understand what people were talking about and thought they were being pricks for complaining about being so wanted, but now that I've almost finished university at a well known study, it would take an annoying amount of time to politely say no to each of them (I feel obliged to say why when saying I don't want to talk to them). Many contact me even though it's clear I'm not going to be interested if they had read my profile. Well, sorry, but then I can't be arsed.

> Companies that I've emailed, yes, but not a recruiter who gets paid for getting me a job.

We're not talking about freelance recruiters here, we're talking about HR foot soldiers.

I've had freelance recruiters ghost me. It makes me wonder if it was more convenient for them or if they were themselves ghosted by the company they applied me to.

I want to give IBM—of all places—a shout-out here.

I applied for a few jobs there after grad school. Every application was promptly followed up. Hiring managers and HR folks replied to emails, often within the same day. I was notified when the jobs were closed, and one hiring manager even scheduled a brief phone call to explain why they weren't hiring me and what I should do if I wanted to reapply.

"Still, HR teams are bemoaning the emotional rollercoaster they’ve suddenly found themselves on, dealing with the kind of “what just happened?” situations once reserved to those on the dating circuit."

Kind of hard to feel sorry for them since so many have operated this way to employees for years. That said, I always recommend to people that they stay courteous to the recruiter folks. There may come a time when you really need there help and like it says elsewhere in the article they have very long memories.

It costs nothing to just let someone know you've gone a different way.

The only time I recall getting a rejection letter was from a UN agency. I thought it was very considerate of them and actually kept the letter for a long time. The one time I gave feedback to a company turning them down, they blacklisted me because they thought I was snobbing them.

I applied for a ton of jobs after finishing grad school. I dug up the spreadsheet and, nearly five years later, I still haven't heard from > 50 percent of them.

It's understandable that companies don't put effort into candidates that got screened out automatically or by HR (though really, how much work would a form email be). However, a few of these places spent literally thousands of dollars (transcontinental flight, hotel, rental car, plus a day worth of interviews). A short email afterward really seems like the least they could do!

I have to admit I find this trend amusing because I've experienced companies doing it to me, but I'm also baffled why somebody would do it. Why go out of the way to put strikes against yourself in a future job search? What happens when that recruiter moves to a company you really do want to work for?

On a side note, I'm about to take a year off of work to go skiing and do some long distance bike touring, so it's great to hear the job market is doing so well.

This is the world these companies have created. They show no loyalty to employees, rarely train people or pass on professional norms, and rarely reach out when they drop employees at different stages of a search. I wouldn't ghost a recruiter for various reasons, but I hardly feel like recruiters or companies much deserve the respect they seem to think they deserve in this article. The shoe is on the other foot.

typical poorly written article, as i would expect from LI.

but, it did make me very happy. good on the ghosters! i know now how i will treat declined job offers. i'll accept and not show up!! lol i'm way too happy about this. j/k i could never bring myself to do that. it's a nice thought though.

about TFA itself, it is so contradictory. from: this is now endemic, to: a recruiter doesn't need a list because the number of folks doing this is so small they can be kept in her head. it's pure stream of thought, here's a point i want to make ... oh ok i can't make it who cares i'll now make the counterpoint. this would receive a 'D' grade as a high school essay.

Furthermore, LI's customers are companies. Do they not have any self-awareness at all? This article is going to promote the practice of candidate ghosting. lol.

I have zero sympathy. I have had multiple potential jobs end with a "ghosting" over the years.

Not only did I accept this, I didn't dare express any annoyance at this treatment - we all know that a potential hire who chewed out a recruiter for offering a fly out then going silent would at best be blacklisted internally, if not passed around via a whisper network as "difficult".

Sites like Glassdoor are useful, but it's relatively easy to identify someone who posts on a site like that if you give enough detail to be useful to other potential employees so prudent candidates opt not to utilize "anonymous" review sites either.

I'm very sympathetic to the idea that employers started this crap, and are basically getting a taste of their own medicine. That said, I will ignore spam from recruiters I have no conversation with, or if the recruiter shows signs of actually having read my resume and contacted me deliberately I will politely reply that I am not in the market, but I cannot imagine "ghosting" a recruiter or company that I have an ongoing conversation with, although some have done that to me. I try to treat people professionally, and in the way I would wish to be treated.

> Instead of formally quitting, enduring a potentially awkward conversation with a manager, some employees leave and never return. Bosses realize they’ve quit only after a series of unsuccessful attempts to reach them. The hiring process begins anew.

I don't understand how you can do this without knowing that you are leaving money on the table by "ghosting" from a job you are already working in.

I would think this happens only in blue-collar jobs / min-wage jobs like a flipper at burger king but the article mentions in a previous page that

> In fields ranging from food service to finance...

If you were working in Finance (or even Tech) and suddenly don't show up, and your manager realizes that you've quit after being unable to reach you, how will you (the "ghoster") determine what your last day was, and get paid until then? The Boss can simply tell HR / Payroll "I don't remember when he/she disappeared, so not sure for how many days we need to pay him/her".

In this case, you are potentially losing out on a few 100 to may be a 1000 or 2000 $ by not properly quitting and indicating your last day.

The US unemployment rate is at or near the practical minimum, yet wages are still stagnant. Something needs to give soon and it's not going to be the unemployment rate.

(Although, more than likely, we're about to be thrown into another recession thanks to ill-timed tax cuts, so maybe all of this is moot).

Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I feel like it's common courtesy to respond to any genuine communication irrespective of who it's from.

I get TONS of email from people I don't know and almost without fail I will respond, even if it's just two words "no thanks."

What constitutes "genuine communication"? I've had on my LinkedIn profile: "Recruiters, please don't contact me at this time as I am not currently interested in changing jobs," and they still contact me. WTF?

Not every recruiter finds you via LinkedIn. Sometimes they call someone else, ask them if they know anyone who might be interested, and that person gives them your name. Maybe they say something like "I don't know if aoent4ntor0 is looking right now, but you might give them a try." So of course the recruiter gives you a try. They're not going to track down your LinkedIn profile to see if it says not to call you...

>Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I feel like it's common courtesy to respond to any genuine communication irrespective of who it's from.

No one is obligated to interact with anyone. It takes a special level of entitlement to send someone an unsolicited communication then get angry if they are not interested in replying.

Also, a business communication is not "genuine". You're only interacting for your benefit.

But AndrewKemendo isn't saying that he is obligated. He said it's common courtesy, which is not the same thing. And he never said that the recruiters will get angry if he doesn't. So you're arguing against something other than what he said.

> Also, a business communication is not "genuine". You're only interacting for your benefit.

Fine, but it still may be to your benefit to interact with courtesy, rather than as a selfish jerk. It may be in your interest 20 years from now rather than today, but it still may be in your interest.

And this cuts both ways. I keep a file of recruiters who are decent (decent recruiters, and decent in how they treat people). When I need a recruiter, I'll pull out that file. It may be ten years since they demonstrated their decency, but they'll get my call.

>But AndrewKemendo isn't saying that he is obligated. He said it's common courtesy, which is not the same thing.

But later on in your reply, yourself say "it still may be to your benefit to interact with courtesy, rather than as a selfish jerk. It may be in your interest 20 years from now rather than today, but it still may be in your interest."

So basically, you're saying if someone doesn't reply to an unsolicited recruiting email, that recruiter may hold onto a grudge for multiple decades.

That certainly sounds like the parent is describing an interaction where the sender feels there is an obligation to respond to me.

Please don't put words in my mouth. I am capable of speaking for myself.

Turning to the substance of your reply: I view "obligated" as meaning a moral duty, or at least a societal "should". That's different from "it would benefit me". Obligations, in fact, are often things that don't benefit you, but that you have to do anyway.

> Please don't put words in my mouth. I am capable of speaking for myself.

Quoting someone's reply is a normal part of internet discussions. Deal with it.

> I view "obligated" as meaning a moral duty, or at least a societal "should". That's different from "it would benefit me". Obligations, in fact, are often things that don't benefit you, but that you have to do anyway.

Actually, you know what? You're right... obligation isn't the right phrasing here. Entitlement is. You feel you're entitled to a reply, and will throw a temper tantrum if you don't get one.

Hell, I've had and have heard of service-industry level jobs doing this to people for years.

One of my first jobs was as a waiter. Showed up one day to check the schedule and couldn't find my name on any of the shifts. Management never told anyone that they were cutting staff, they would just stop schedule you and you were just supposed take the hint and move on. When I confronted them on it they were surprised that I hadn't just "gotten the hint."

And the practice must be rather wide spread. I've heard similar stories, even from corporate chains, were workers are just laid off not by a discussion with their manager but by just not being scheduled.

So I can hardly find employees doing unsympathetic.

I always return recruiter calls if I’m mid process. Careers are long games. You don’t know when you bump into people again.

Companies have peed in the water enough to make people not return calls. Probably 50% of the companies I’ve interviewed with ghosted me. I’ve had companies take me to the final round, promise an offer, and then say “the position wasn’t funded”. Anyone on LinkedIn has had to deal with unscrupulous headhunters. In aggregate companies and their reps started acting poorly. People return the favor and it’s not a surprise.

The one caveat is backing out of a signed offer is rough and should be handled with grace. Just not showing up isn’t graceful.

I've heard this happening in Singapore: the job market is so strong that you get people signing a contract and never showing up. I really wonder if they understand how mega-connected everyone is in this day and age, and how easily the burned entrepreneur can broadcast their name in their social network and make them radioactive to ... her friends, who are likely potential employers.

I can't understand why you are downvoted, except maybe that your argument is as self-contradictory as TFA.

which is it, the job market is so strong that candidates have all the cards, or the job market is tight and candidates can't afford to burn leads and get easily blacklisted?

btw, can you comment on singapore's privacy laws? such broadcasting would be illegal in eu.

>"Where once it was companies ignoring job applicants or snubbing candidates after interviews, the world has flipped. Candidates agree to job interviews and fail to show up, never saying more. Some accept jobs, only to not appear for the first day of work, no reason given, of course."

Author makes it sound like both described phenomena are already of comparable rate of occurrence.

Ghosting isn’t the right term if you haven’t started the interview process. Simply not responding to a job listing is just that.

It seems like many posters are conflating that with failure to respond after a job offer.

Funny when the boot is on the other foot

"If you do need to drop out of the process, say so."

Poor companies, candidates ghosting them. Hm, hey, don't companies stop responding to candidates all the time, or give little to no feedback about why they chose to reject someone. I wonder if they're somehow connected. Nah, impossible.

I'm sure we're all shedding tears for those poor recruiters.

On the one hand, it's abysmally unprofessional, and can give you a bad reputation.

On the other hand... at least both sides are being equally unprofessional now? -.-

Tit for tat, companies ghosting candidates don't give a good image to the candidate either.

Huh, strange. This post was the top comment for a long while (at exactly as many votes as the article itself, 48 upvotes), but then it jumped straight down to the bottom all of a sudden. I didn't know these kinds of measures occurred on HN. I certainly don't think my comment was off-topic, but I suppose it was the tone of it that made whatever moderator feel the need to push it down to obscurity.

Incorrect title, can we get that changed? It's mostly about recruiters, with only a tiny mention of employers.

HN posts tend to prefer the original article's title they're clickbait.

Doesn't matter to me whether it's clickbait or just confusing -- if it's not what I thought it was when I go to click, it's just irritating.

Clickbait title, correction: People are ghosting RECRUITERS and driving RECRUITERS crazy.

Which is neither surprising nor interesting.

That's not what clickbait is. Your title might be better, but people have been writing somewhat sensational headlines since the dawn of time. Clickbait would have been "This one trick drives recruiters crazy!"

No it’s clickbait. The title suggests that people are simply not showing up for work, in some new trend. It baits us into clicking as we expect an interesting story, only to see a fluff piece by a sad recruiter who has no idea that he’s just an annoyance.

sounds like a whining by HR teams who failed to adjust to the paradigm shift.

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