Anonymously call out the bad behavior of “ghosting” by recruiters
ghostreply.com
ghostreply.com
A couple of suggestions: 1. Send these sorts of messages to the recruiter's boss/head of recruiting/head of HR. If the recruiter is ghosting out of laziness when they should not be, then making management aware of it will solve the problem. If the recruiter's told to do this by management, then management at least becomes aware that this policy is aggravating people.
2. Public shaming - make this a site where people can publicly name recruiters/companies who engage in this behavior. If companies see themselves incurring reputational damage from ghosting, it'll stop.
You can also privately shame these behaviours by directly reaching out to hiring managers at the companies they're recruiting into and informing them it's damaging to their reputation. I've done this after being hired - told the new company that they should switch recruiters due to bad practice.
But ghosting stands out as particular egregious because it's so, so, so easy to not do. We're talking seconds of effort to send a templated email. However high-pressure their environment may be, it doesn't excuse ghosting.
If you want some technical proof to this cultural concept, examine why blameless post-mortems exist. We learned a long time ago that naming larger organizations and not individuals incentivizes positive group-oriented change.
The more mature thing to do is develop relationships with recruiters so that your interactions are not so transactional. This requires you to be less lazy too, but leads to more positive outcomes overall as it has for me.
Personally I don't think anyone is tangibly harmed by someone posting "Google ghosted me" on Blind.
"all it does is make people walk on egg shells in the future" - well that depends a lot on how it's done. Here, we're presented with a behavior by recruiters that is very rude, and on top of that, incredibly easy to solve. You can literally have an email template ready to go to reject people, so we're talking under 30 seconds per person to avoid ghosting. If you shame them about ghosting, given the presence of such an easy solution, they just won't do it. This isn't shaming someone for some vague belief they have about something, it's a very specific behavior.
Blameless post-mortems are a poor comparison. You're talking about the failure of a system that is contributed to and designed by a group of people who are continuously working together. Ghosting a candidate is one person doing something rude. Apples and oranges.
Your solution is not useful at all for internal recruiters - you just don't develop relationships with them, because the nature of their job is a one shot thing with each candidate. As for agencies and external recruiters, I should not have to develop a collegial relationship with them to get them to act with basic politeness. That's ridiculous. If they reach out to me to try to make money by placing me into a position, they should behave politely. If they don't, there's no reason they shouldn't be shamed, so that people can work with other recruiters who do behave properly.
I was responding to someone suggesting naming and shaming individuals.
> Blameless post-mortems are a poor comparison. You're talking about the failure of a system that is contributed to and designed by a group of people who are continuously working together
Get to know some recruiters. There's one that replied on here. They too work within a system designed by someone external to them that has constraints, quotas, and asymmetrical input/output.
> Your solution is not useful at all for internal recruiters - you just don't develop relationships with them, because the nature of their job is a one shot thing with each candidate
I have relationships with both. All it means is I stay top of mind and when they hit me up it's for relevant jobs.
I know plenty of recruiters. The fact that they work within a system isn't relevant. Ghosting is not a complex issue that requires a post-mortem. It's not sending a single, short email. Quotas, constraints, and everything else that you've mentioned are totally irrelevant.
Creating public, negative consequences for people isn't inherently bad. Some kinds of it are, but it's not reasonable to say that in any form it will lead to abuse.
So why is it wrong for recruiters to do something that's bad form, but not for someone else to do something that's bad form?
Good to see lynching is still in style. Not even a pretence of allowing for good behaviour and rewarding that.
It's of course impossible to tell when people are lying since people don't apply for enough jobs to get a reputation that accounts in yelp etc get. All of which are still gamed anyway.
Lynchings after WW2 below - Perhaps they deserved it, and after so many dead what does it matter, but I intuitively feel like lynchings are bad and the way OPs web site is trying to solve the problem is far better.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/french-female-collaborator-...
I'm a recruiter.
I understand the feeling that this comes from.
Recruiters and recruiting don't have a great reputation in general.
If you're interested in WHY ghosting happens it's pretty simple:
Recruiters have a vast flow of inbound information (resumes).
Recruiters are contingency paid - they only get paid if they successfully place a person into a job - this focuses time and effort down a very specific path.
Recruiters manage many many recruiting processes simultaneously, each with varying likelihood of success.
Employers are part of the process.
The whole process is lumpy and drawn out.
Eventually the recruiter gets to hear if a candidate is successful or not.
I personally try to get back to anyone who does any sort of interview, because it's polite and I appreciate it cost that person time and effort.
Sometimes I don't - that task falls through the cracks.
That's all - that's why it happens. Perhaps some recruiters never get back to people but it's not really in their interests to behave like that.
AND FYI - recruiters get ghosted too by employers for various reasons - I just try to be patient and understand and focus on the future.
ALSO I'm a recruiter and also a programmer - I once got ghosted after doing 12 hours doing a coding test ... never heard from the company again. I know how it feels.
Having been ghosted a few times I now refuse to deal with recruiters whatsoever.
The negative reputation that recruiters have is both entirely of their own making and entirely within their means to remedy. The fact that recruiters as an industry aren't trying to address this just drives home the perception that you see job candidates as a fungible commodity.
But I agree that this app is not a good solution.
I had a spam problem once with an app of mine.
Spammers registered accounts, put an URL in the name field, essentially allowing them to send an email to anybody starting with:
Hello SKETCHY_URL, please activate your account...
Perhaps this is bias from dealing with that kind of spam on a regular basis, but my current position is that a captcha needs to be present any web form which can even indirectly or occasionally result in an email being sent.
At the same time it can be super irritating, and might even block legit users. Along with that you invade user privacy with solutions provided by Google, tracking every move on all pages.
But yeah, it may be nice to have the option, even if temporary, if you're experiencing an ongoing attack.
This is pretty insensitive to the hopes and dreams you are selling to candidates when they work with you.
It might be a numbers game for you, but to each of the people you are recruiting they have a lot on the line whether it is leaving a bad job or putting food on the table for their family or whatever else...
edit: I'm not saying you don't care - just that it seems like an organizational issue based on the amount of deals you are managing - and the job applicants don't care about any of that.
Regardless, about 1/3 of them fall in love with a specific job posting and lose a lot of time assuming their first choice will work out.
Everyone should treat the interviewing process like a numbers game. Apply to many companies. Don't get into a position where a single company decided to pass on you will destroy your finances or make it difficult to put food on the table. Don't become emotionally attached to companies before you've been hired.
The problem here is that as an applicant you're usually expected to show commitment, enthusiasm, passion for the work etc.
It's very hard to work yourself up about a job without actually caring about it. The underlying enormous asymetry of power between you and the employer means that what is strictly a numbers game for them will always have at least some emotional significance for you.
I'm very lucky in that my current job hits on most of my skills as well as many of my non-work interests, and that's not a job I'd have to fake anything for, but it's not as if every startup coming down the pike is the greatest thing since sliced bread. This is a skill, and it is one that you can learn to be good at.
That enthusiasm is just the polite enthusiasm of a sales call. It may require a few minutes of reading and thinking (because tbh I also see a lot of folks who have no idea what a company does when they go in to interview), but it is almost always either a baseline "do they get what we do here?" check (which is what you can learn and practice for) or it is a cult you should avoid.
You don't have to show up with exaggerated, faked interested in the company or industry. In fact, it can come off as very fake if a candidate shows up and pretends they're supernaturally excited to work in our industry that they just learned about 2 days prior.
However, you can't expect to show up to a job interview and ooze disinterest and boredom and still be considered for the job.
Don't think of it as getting excited to work for a company. Think about it as getting to know your potential future coworkers. If you need to become emotionally invested in a company before applying, I'd strongly recommend that you work on breaking that habit before it makes your job search artificially difficult.
I wouldn't rush to dismiss a company just because they let the HR person spruce up the job description with some boilerplate. You really need to talk to the team you'll be working with and the future manager you'll be working under.
Unfortunately, it's just not possible to tell what a job will be like by reading a job description. You have to talk to the teams.
> Unfortunately, it's just not possible to tell what a job will be like by reading a job description.
While I agree completely, isn't this wrong though? Shouldn't a job description be well written? Isn't "sprucing up" just code for false advertising?
I for one have seen countless job descriptions that were a ridiculous exaggeration of the kind of work that you would actually have done. It's important to note that it always want one way: making the job sound a lot more interesting than it was and demanding a lot more skill than was actually needed. Nobody went overboard with downplaying things.
Often the interview process is based on an expectation that, for example, you will exaggerate your previous achievements. Every past project you describe has to sound amazing, your cv has to seem like a carefully thought out career path that will culminate in the final fulfillment of some great life goal.
You can't just say that you took some job for the money or just to be in the same town as your girlfriend etc., you have to pretend it was some significant step on a path. Otherwise you sound like you're unmotivated, not serious about your career etc.
My resume is, if you just look at it, not a "great" one. But it's good enough to get in the door, and then it's not really relevant anymore because we're then having a conversation about how I can bring value to the organization.
I've sat on both sides of the table, and know that isn't accurate. If it was accurate, everybody would be working for minimum wage.
BTW, if you're unemployed because of the pandemic, the best use of your time is to level up your skills so you'll be in a stronger position once it's over.
A lot of people actually are working for (close to) minimum wage.
> BTW, if you're unemployed because of the pandemic, the best use of your time is to level up your skills
I am not, but your recommendation only highlights the inequality I was referring to. In your conception the entire burden is placed on individuals. Companies seem to have no responsibility to train people at all, that's smth you have to do on your own time for free.
2.1% of workers work for minimum wage.
> Companies seem to have no responsibility to train people at all,
They don't. Neither do people owe them fealty.
> that's smth you have to do on your own time for free.
Consider a company that decides to train you for 4 years while paying you. Then, you decide to leave and take a better offer elsewhere. A company cannot make you stay. Taking that on would be very risky and very expensive for any company.
"Companies" that do this tend to force you to work for them so many years afterwards, like the military.
I'm pretty sure that's the federal minimum wage. Many states have a higher bar [1]. Many people working for 10 bucks an hour will still be earning minimum wage in their respective state.
If you take a look at the nation-wide wage distribution, you'll see things don't look that good. At the 50'th percentile the income for a family with 2.56 people is 57k, before tax etc.
> They don't.
Maybe they should. In the end they're benefiting from all the education that you as an individual pay for (or that is state-supported) and from all of the extra training you're supposed to do on the side without remuneration.
> Neither do people owe them fealty.
On the other hand there's no reason why people should ever owe fealty to a corporation. Societies are (de jure and should be de facto) centered on human individuals, not on various legal fictions. Corporations have no natural rights and they are not people (despite what the US supreme court might say) - no need for a human being to owe them anything.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
So are you, as you get paid more for the extra value the education imparted to you.
> no need for a human being to owe them anything.
You don't owe corporations anything, unless you made a deal with them and owe them your side of the deal. And vice versa. That's how free markets work.
Why should work relations be based on the "free market"? Why should we consider the market the core institution of a society, the concept underlying any form of relationship?
"Free" markets the way libertarians tend to imagine them do not exist, and for very good reason - they would lead to a hasty collapse of society. You can't for example sell yourself into slavery, you can't be hired to work more than a certain number of hours per week, or if you're younger than a certain age etc. There are countless restrictions on what a contractual relationship can look like between a worker and a corporation - things are definitely not "free".
I don't know where your information is coming from, but it isn't libertarianism. Under libertarianism, your rights are inalienable, and supersede contractual rights. Hence, you cannot sell yourself into slavery, because your right to liberty supersedes any contract. You can agree to work more than X hours per week, but you cannot be forced to stick to that agreement. Libertarianism only applies to legally consenting adults. Others (like children) have additional legal rights, such as not being bound by contracts.
There are many different meanings of "free". Common misunderstandings of libertarianism come from conflating different meanings of "free". The free in free markets generally means free from force or fraud.
As for "hasty collapse", the US was a reasonable approximation to a free market in its first century, excluding the slave south, and went from subsistence farming to superpower. This also saw the greatest mass rise from poverty to wealth the world has ever seen.
As for other countries, the more they embraced free markets, the more they prospered.
This seems to be debated both in popular libertarian forums [1] and among academics [2]. I haven't read source [2] in detail, but at a quick glance I can offer the following quote (p. 41):
"At the extreme right would be the libertarian philosophy I shall defend which maintains that everything should be legally alienable or commodifiable."
Robert Nozick himself seems to support the idea of voluntary slavery [3]:
"Most controversially, and unlike Locke and Kant, Nozick argued that consistent application of self-ownership and non-aggression principle[10] would allow and regard as valid consensual or non-coercive enslavement contracts between adults. He rejected the notion of inalienable rights advanced by Locke and most contemporary capitalist-oriented libertarian academics, writing in Anarchy, State, and Utopia that the typical notion of a "free system" would allow adults to voluntarily enter into non-coercive slave contracts."
> Libertarianism only applies to legally consenting adults. Others (like children) have additional legal rights, such as not being bound by contracts.
Again, it seems that leading libertarian theorists would disagree. Take Murray Rothbard for one [4]:
"In Rothbard's view of parenthood, "the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights". Thus, Rothbard stated that parents should have the legal right to let any infant die by starvation and should be free to engage in other forms of child neglect. However, according to Rothbard, "the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children". In a fully libertarian society, he wrote, "the existence of a free baby market will bring such 'neglect' down to a minimum"."
> the US was a reasonable approximation to a free market in its first century [...] This also saw the greatest mass rise from poverty to wealth the world has ever seen.
I'm sure the American indians, the original inhabitants of the continent, would not exactly agree that the outcomes of that century were so great. Also, to my knowledge, the award for greatest rise from poverty would go to the China of recent decades (not a particularly nice place).
> excluding the slave south
You really shouldn't.
> and went from subsistence farming to superpower
Not in its first century. That happened a bit later, once the US was a far more centralized entity with a far stronger federal government (again, I don't think becoming a superpower is a good thing or a good argument for free markets).
> As for other countries, the more they embraced free markets, the more they prospered.
Do you have any arguments or examples for this?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLibertarians/comments/7u7r2m/am_...
[2] https://cdn.mises.org/17_2_3.pdf
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nozick#Political_philos...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard#Children's_rig...
THAT!! Everyone should try and get as many interviews as possible. And a friendly and weird suggestion is this.. record your call (YOUR voice) and replay the mp3 later. And listen to what you said. 99% of the people never wonder what they said, never have mock interviews with a friend/colleague. You hear them on a call with a recruiter, it is a trainwreck, and you ask them and they think it was brilliant.
Feedback, feedback, feedback!
If you have a communication line open with someone for some sort of transactional activity, you do not just drop off into oblivion. Ever. It's rude and disrespectful, full stop.
Yes, I agree that the interview process can be a numbers game: candidates should apply to many opportunities that fit their skills, and expect no interest from nearly all of them.
But if a candidate has received a response, and there's any kind of open dialog, no matter how minimal, then out of a sense of basic civility and respect, they deserve a reply, even if it's just a canned one-liner rejection.
That's the only decent thing to do. Anything else is disrespectful.
Regardless of how the communication is flowing (or not), candidates shouldn't perform their job search as a serial process. Parallelize as much as possible and don't stop searching until you've been given a start date somewhere.
Maybe you're the one that is being pretty insensitive.
Well, they should. If you don't understand this reply, I guess you are applying for a junior role? Looking at jobs as if the hot girl you met at a bar doesn't call you back, isn't exactly a great strategy. And as with girls, being obsessive about employers pretty much has similar consequences. You lower your value, the chances of getting in and your relationship with them will become one-sided, fester and die, unless you change.
Employers are there to pay you, because you need money. They need you, because you are doing a great a job and if they don't call you back, who gives a f*? You've got other options. Actually the more I think about it, the more I like the relationship analogy, even though incentives and goals usually are different, unless you've come to employ a gold digger.
And guess what, hot girls have to sift through so many applicants, you really can't fault them for not notifying every poor soul who tried, that they are not interested.
I agree employment is like a relationship. And good communication is essential in a good relationship. I'm not interested in a girl that browses for relationships as if she was on a meat market, same with employers. It has to 'click'. And if it does it's very unfair not to get feedback either way.
Having said that I've rarely been ghosted. I've always got decent feedback when I didn't get a job, including on what went 'wrong' and how to improve my chances. That information is very valuable. In most cases it just didn't 'click' and I didn't want the job anyway.
I also rejected a job offer once because I didn't like the work atmosphere there (I asked to see the workplace after the interview). The HR guy was absolutely livid :D I don't get that, why would he want me in a job where I'm unhappy? I always ask to see the place so I can get an idea of where I'll be spending a large part of my life. Money isn't the only thing I care about.
The one interview that really stood out, where I was amazed at the lively atmosphere, it was with the company I still work for 17 years on. It was a crappy callcenter job I started at but when I walked in there I could see the people were happy and had time to have fun as well as work.
> each of the people you are recruiting they have a lot on the line whether it is leaving a bad job or putting food on the table for their family or whatever else...
isn't helpful, because there are a lot of reasons to change jobs which don't involve having a lot on the line. Having a vague interest in changing fields, wanting to move from a stagnating career, stability, salary, moving to a nicer place, what have you.
It would be interesting to see some numbers on this. Unfortunately I don't expect it's the sort of information anyone is collecting, mostly because I wouldn't expect job seekers to volunteer it.
That seems like a life organizational issue based on the amount of job hunt stress you're managing. Recruiters don't care about any of that.
For "jobs" in general, the situation might be slightly different. If we're confining ourselves to the tech world... talk to multiple recruiters. They owe you nothing, and you owe them nothing (until/unless a contract is signed).
They're not selling "hopes and dreams". They're selling the potential to go work for someone where they take a cut of your earnings. That's it.
Don't put your 'hopes and dreams' in the hands of anyone but yourself.
Pretending the recruiter takes "a cut" of your salary creates an unnecessarily adversarial tone.
That's how it looks from an accounting point of view but it is not how it works in reality. Employers have no interest in what your take-home pay is, they only are interested in what it costs to hire you.
Those costs are compared with what value you provide to the company. The (value - cost)/cost is the "opportunity cost", and market forces tend to push this to be around 1.15, or 15%.
The cut paid to the recruiter, as well as benefits, so-called "employer contributions" to social security, etc., all come out of your take-home pay one way or another.
It's a numbers game for the candidate, too, as they often apply for dozens of jobs simultaneously. Recruiters also aren't doing it for fun, they're on commission. If they don't make a placement, they don't put food on the table for their families.
Ghosting is impolite, but people do it all the time, including to their dates, friends, etc. The best thing to do is don't take it personally and move on.
Do you use LinkedIn a lot?
I've noticed this cadence of speaking.
It's like, a LinkedIn-ese.
Every sentence is punctuated by a paragraph.
Is that intentional or something subconsciously picked up?
If you're trying to get your point across to busy people, short paragraphs help.
Some large companies hire engineers non-specifically into large talent pools, then assign them to specific teams or positions later. If you're operating at this scale, there's no excuse for not moving quickly and following up with candidates.
Most companies don't operate like this, though. They're looking for one candidate to fill one specific position, and hiring the wrong person is a costly mistake. It takes time to gather candidates for a narrowly-scoped job description, coordinate interviews that work with their schedule, get approvals, and push the hire through.
Going into this, I thought communicating weekly with candidates would be a good thing, as more communication is better. To my surprise, frequent communications without progress is misinterpreted as a negative signal by a lot of candidates. I could send the most harmless e-mail explaining that we're still moving forward with the hiring process but haven't made any decisions yet, and candidates would assume this meant they were going to be rejected. Younger candidates were especially prone to over-reactions, with some of them explicitly withdrawing from the process to avoid the possibility of explicit rejection (Usually remedied with a phone call).
In an ideal world we'd move as fast as possible from interview to hire. In the real world, coordinating interviews with more than 5 candidates while everyone is also trying to do their regular job duties just takes time. Still, it should be standard practice to let candidates know when the position has been filled or they have been removed from consideration.
I've also noticed that expectations from some candidates, especially the recent college grads, are getting out of control. For example, I've had a few candidates get irate that our offer letters had expiration dates set 2 weeks in the future. There's a growing misconception that any expiration date on an offer is an "exploding offer" and therefore a predatory practice. I have to explain that we can't keep the position open for them indefinitely, and if they don't want the job then we can't keep our 2nd choice candidate on the hook forever.
I've done my fair share of hiring. We have hiring windows too, and have to close a candidate in a reasonable time. But when we started down this path, I made sure that we explained the time frames and where they came from up front, and agreed with the candidate on a reasonable window. At the time of interviewing, which is the crucial part.
That way everyone knew where they stood, and more importantly, the candidates who were in the middle of a lengthier interview process with another company could arrange the time frames to suit us. Most of the time 2 weeks was perfectly fine. Some of the candidates needed 3 weeks. One ended up requiring a month.
But because the expiration windows were agreed upon together with candidates when they were still early in the process, they were not caught off guard.
An expired offer letter doesn't mean the candidate is rejected. It simply means that we need to move on to other candidates by that date. If someone has pressing circumstances, we'll make it work.
However, when you have a specific position to fill it doesn't make senes to reserve a spot for a candidate who wants to spend months interviewing at many different companies. The longer you reserve the spot for someone, the more interviews they're likely to take and the naive odds that they'll join your company continue to go down.
If you aren't in a rush to fill the position and you really like the candidate, it might make sense to hold on. Otherwise, it's best to move on to other candidates. If you can't find anyone else, you can always regenerate a new offer letter for the first candidate.
That's because many companies did start using or are using that as a pressure tactic even when there's no 2nd choice candidate.
In the last decade while demand for candidates was high and supply was low and investor money was easy to come by, you could probably safely assume that most companies were running open ended hiring pipelines for developers. That has matured somewhat, but college grad expectations might not have caught up.
Unfortunately as long as offer expiration is being used as the lever, you can't entirely separate the pressure from the need to fill the position. But working with the candidate to come up with a timeline is absolutely a more generous and fair approach.
If you're only talking about the biggest software companies, that might be true. It's definitely not true for the long tail of smaller companies.
> Unfortunately as long as offer expiration is being used as the lever, you can't entirely separate the pressure from the need to fill the position.
Two weeks is already a generous amount of time to wait for a candidate to make up their mind. If someone needs extra time, the hiring company is almost always happy to regenerate a new offer letter if they haven't already filled the position.
Companies obviously aren't going to reject otherwise qualified candidates simply because an arbitrary date has passed.
However, it's not reasonable to expect a company, or multiple companies, to reserve a spot for someone indefinitely while they decide which company to join. The show must go on.
I would rather guess it is interpreted as that they are the 2nd or 3rd choice and that you are still holding the lure. Candidates are probably just going for other choices if they have any.
If the recruiting manager doesn't have mandate to close recruites there is no way to make anything smooth.
Then two-months later they can give notice when the slow deciding company they really want to work at finally makes an offer.
You take an offer, start working at a place, then two months later you go: "Welp, sorry guys, grass is greener on the other side, I'll be going now. It's not you, it's that you use Angular and they have React over there. Screw you and the effort you put into training and onboarding me for the past 8 weeks."
Am I out of touch or something?
A VP of Engineering at my first tech job was the first to tell me to never be loyal to a company because they will never be loyal to you.
Later the worst example of this I experienced was when I was a hotshot contractor at a medtech startup. About a week after I started, they pivoted and fired almost everyone except me and another recently hired contractor. Junior devs and most marketing/biz dev folks were offloaded. They were w-2 employees not contractors like me and my buddy.
Many of the folks there had been recently hired as the company was spinning up for a product release. They had been grinding for weeks to get ready for a trade show demo.
I found out about the pivot and layoffs when I heard some of my office neighbors crying.
I lined up another gig and left soon after.
Eveyone ghosts everyone, all the time... and that's okay? I may be in the minority here, but to be honest I think I actually prefer getting ghosted.
It's like the proverb: "A wise man hears one word and understands two." I don't need a polite but almost always vacant pleasantry, which is what this site is saying is missing ("manners"). If I didn't get a reply, that's a lot of information already. That's all I need to know.
Now, many people do want to know why they didn't get a job, what they can improve upon, etc. That's a way more relatable gripe for me. Still, everything in life is a numbers game. You'll always want to know why someone broke up with you, and part of growing up for me was realizing that you'll never find out and that's okay.
EDIT: To clarify, not advocating ghosting and certainly not something I practice in my personal life. It's definitely better to be polite and direct whenever possible.
I don't think it's appropriate for recruiters to ghost candidates.
However, I will say that I think many younger candidates really would prefer being ghosted to being explicitly rejected. The nature of interviewing means that I send a lot more rejection e-mails than offer letters. A surprising number of candidates have very negative reactions to rejection letters, from trying to argue that we've made a mistake to posting negative reviews of our company on Glassdoor or even Google Maps. People hate the feeling of rejection.
I still send polite rejection letters, but I can see how jaded interviewers would err on the side of ghosting candidates to avoid possible retribution. It only takes a few serious over-reactions to make you extra careful about dealing with candidates.
It’s my own fault really, because I should’ve just contacted multiple lenders, but I had an existing relationship with this place and was giving them the courtesy of first priority.
This goes beyond manners - wanting a concrete response is a matter of practicality for me. Most of the time, interviewers don't give you a concrete time by which to expect a reply and when they do, they intentionally exaggerate it in case something stalls the process for a bit. I might be waiting for a month and a bit to hear back, even though the hiring process might've already concluded after 2 weeks. Those are 2 weeks I could've spent getting/doing more interviews.
I've never been part of the hiring process, but I can't imagine sending an automated rejection email would be too difficult. There's got to be some sort of kanban board (like Trello) with a rejection pile at the end. As soon as a card is dropped there, the email can be fired out and those people can know for sure that they should look elsewhere. It might even be good for the company - how many great engineers didn't apply for your listing because they were still waiting to hear back from the first batch? You might be missing out...
I'd divide the job search into two parts. 1) Send out "pings" of different sorts, get back expressions of interest of 2) Each side expresses interest, each side invests a little more in learning about the other, until things work-out or they don't.
An explicit or implied "no" can happen at any point here and whether that happens by ghosting or by form-letter-level no really shouldn't matter to you. That's part you should legitimately just toughen up to even though it's challenging. A formulaic "sorry but it was great to meet and you have great skills but they aren't the skills we want" can be just as infuriating as ghosting imo. Get used to the "frenemy" relationship with your employer. Professionalism is only gloss on that, though it's a useful gloss. Lack of professionalism isn't good sign but it's just a sign.
The one thing that I think people often are angry about and should be angry about, is situations where an employer sets up a situation that requires the job seeker to invest far more energy in the job-search than the employer. For example, suppose an employer sends each of a thousand applicants a quiz that takes a day to complete and then filters the best 10 results by whether some underling likes them, maybe hires someone, maybe not. That employer has wasted a lot of time of a lot of people. And that's different from a detailed onsite quiz from the people you might work with in a situation where they might indeed hire you. The company still might not hire you based on purely subjective criteria but then you've invested your time knowing there's a legitimate possibility of being hired, since they're investing their time and money so demonstrating sincerity.
We are pissed at all recruiters, but when you say "I get ghosted by employers too!" its like oooh okay you are a third party recruiter..... so even less likely to know what our skillset is! Pitch forks now lit on fire.
They went so far, to only drop the ball at the very end. I understand third-party (kind I was working with) and in-house recruiters operate a little differently, but I still found this surprising.
I could give an absolute minimum, but that would be an anchor I don't want to be tied to.
A recruiter is a lot like a real estate agent. Understanding how their business works and how they operate, leads to a good professional relationship with them that works for both of you.
In other words, there is no way to truly know the limit until you've reached the end of the funnel. Maybe the company's struggled with finding a candidate, and now has decided to shell out a premium upon request. You'll never have that context. But true cards will only played at the end, not the beginning, of the conversation.
As the process goes on, the company may decide you offer more value than they originally anticipated, hence are worth a higher limit.
Sounds like the process was working as intended?
> We were so close to a deal, but my recruiter didn't want to go that extra mile. So, they made $0 since no conversion.
I think you're assuming malice or laziness where the simpler explanation is that the company simply had a firm salary range for the position.
It's more likely that the recruiter simply kept searching to find the client what they ordered: Someone who fit within their explicit compensation budget.
There is a lot of good online job seeking and negotiating advice available these days, but I'm afraid that some of it has become a little too optimistic about how easy it is to squeeze more money out of every employer under the sun. There are many times where the budget is the budget, and the upper limit really is the upper limit.
This is common, the recruiter wants to be transparent, but they can't. You wish the negotiation was characterized by symmetry of information flow, but it isn't.
That line to me is unacceptable. Your(recruiters) job is entirely dealing with people, no coding, no architecture, no design mockups, no capacity analysis or quality testing.
The fact that you cannot even get the people portion right means there is alot of recruiters that should not be in that position. I get that the company itself may be somewhat to blame but not getting back to a candidate should be an offense similar to an engineer pushing untested changes to a production application blindly(meaning it should never happen).
In the beginning, I really made an effort to be courteous and polite to every single candidate and give them their optimal chance at learning something from the interview process, but I realized that recruiting is a process that really does suck for everyone. Especially now that we're scrambling to grow, I need to constantly prioritize in order to just stay sane and get forward.
If I've interviewed 10 candidates in a week and there was one or two which were really interesting, that's what I'll be focusing on first. Whether I get to write 8 rejections in detail, it doesn't matter for the company. At least in the short term.
And chances are >50% that candidates don't perceive detailed and honest feedback in a good way (even with the best intentions), so I might get stuck in a discussion about details going forward when nothing changes that "no". Nothing good came from that for either me or the candidate ever. Rejections always feel like failure and honestly I hate writing them as well, as I know I'm always hurting someone.
It's not a part of my job that I'm proud about (hence the throwaway too), but this is frankly my thought process around the whole thing.
I've been on the other side of the table multiple times, so I know how much the candidate experience sucks, but that's how it goes.
If you're searching for a job, just do yourself a favor and go broad while not taking anything too personal. It's very much in your best interest to get the bidding war for your person on, so never fall in love with any single job offer.
It sounds like you’re rationalizing how desensitized you are behaving and scapegoating it with being busy as an excuse.
Either you care and you make time to solve them problem (including by growing slower so your humanity and dignity remains intact, which sounds pretty questionable) or else admit you openly don’t care about candidates and you choose to value the marginal use of your time focused on growing the business higher than you value doing the right thing or coming up with a solution that meets some minimum level of care.
> you choose
You're mixing two separate things here. The mindset is there because it's necessary, not because people choose to adopt it. If you don't, you won't succeed - those are the constraints of the system.
You could try and not participate in the system by not taking investor money and growing slowly, but then you're risking getting beaten by someone who did - which, depending on your situation, might be risking your and your family's livelihood.
I imagine this number will surprise people.
meh to the site: anonymity is pointless and makes this a spam tool, at best. i could see this working after a few iterations on it, but as it stands it's quite poor.
As an industry, recruiters (myself included), need to do a better job managing rejection. But it is not as simple as name and shame.
When you speak in LinkedIn.
One to two sentences per line.
Speaking of good recruiters, you’re in the good books. Keep it up :)
I hope you’re doing well, and the team is going great!
I emailed patio11 about it. He brought their head of recruiting into the conversation to remedy the situation. Their head of recruitment suggested we hop on a call to discuss.
I can't make this shit up, but guess what the head of recruitment did? Didn't show up to the call.
It's hard to imagine why recruiters get a bad shake /s
I've had very senior people come back years later asking me for references or an "in" at another company. You cant do that later if you abused your privilege back when you could.
Please let us rectify the situation. We can discuss your opportunity with our COO this time!
You can book the time slot here: calendly.com/stripe-coo.
I have little within my immediate locus of control, particularly with many of my coworkers being away on break at the moment (as I am), but can promise we'll look into what happened. This would be well below our bar. I respect that it might be too late to help you out, but we will postmortem the process.
For the benefit of other HNers: we try to be extremely accessible. There are some operational challenges in working with (a very large number) of candidates per year, but those are our operational challenges rather than yours, and to the extent we ever drop the ball we would far prefer knowing than not. If you ever feel like you need a bat signal, my email address is my HN username at stripe.com, and Patrick Collison's is patrick at the same domain.
Nothing we do on any given Tuesday is more important than making sure Stripe is still capable of hiring great engineers/etc.
Often I've heard time cited as a factor, but these same recruiters sometimes spoke to me for an hour. Yet even a semi impersonal email was too much to hope for I guess.
I just assume at any moment any recruiter / company HR contact may be my last.
Sadly it is a vicious cycle now as recruiter spam is so prevalent that now I don't have time to bother with with them or respond to them as soon as I think they're not really paying attention / holding up their end of the conversation / the job sound bad, and so forth.
It's all just noise.
The 'hiring people industrial complex' is just a huge amount of work... and I'm not sure anyone is good at doing that thing, so they add more layers, more recruiters and everyone is farther from each other.
Part of being a professional is learning how to communicate, even when the other party is not acting respectfully. It's entirely appropriate to send a follow-up e-mail, from your own e-mail account, asking about the status of a job opening.
However, using anonymous tools like this is extremely unprofessional. Leaning on anonymity to vent frustrations is a bad habit to get into. Furthermore, it's usually not hard to figure out which candidate sent these things. Don't think that this is a way to communicate anger without burning bridges.
I agree that this is not the correct tool (I think an anonymous Glassdoor-like approach would be the best); but completely disagree that "using anonymous tools is extremely unprofessional".
At least in the US [1], there is a severe asymmetry regarding candidates and job opportunities. Large corporations control access to decent healthcare, for one thing. Also, you can be fired at any time, for any reason in the majority of positions. There is little to no social safety net to protect a person when they get fired.
Given this kind of an asymmetrical environment, anonymity helps restore the balance. The candidate doesn't have to risk their entire livelihood every time they make a statement about how they were badly treated by a company.
And on a deeper level, what is "professional" anyway? 20 years ago we were told that you should wear only suits and ties to the office because "that is professional". Today you would be laughed out of several tech companies for saying that. Similarly, being kinder to people and stricter to corporations is a direction that professionals in the US software industry seem to be taking, and I think we are better for it. Maybe in 20 more years it will be seen as basic "professional" courtesy to your fellow software developers to leave a rating on a hypothetical RateRecuiters when you finish any interview process!
--------------------------------------------
[1] I think your statement about not seeking anonymity would apply far more in European countries or other places where there are strong laws protecting labor, and a robust safety nets.
But I'm not sure where the best place is to apply pressure:
(a) privately shame recruiters to the employers they represent, or
(b) publicly shame recruiters so that employers and candidates can avoid that recruiter, or
(c) publicly shame the employers who hire such recruiters.
Also, the anonymous nature seems like a double-edged sword. One could imagine hoax / malicious reports being submitted by competitors and/or rejected candidates. I imagine that once that loophole starts getting exploited, employers will rightfully ignore all the reports.
I see lots of people (including some commenters in threads on this article) offering the excuse "Well, you see, recruiters behave badly because the incentives set up by Acme, Inc. are such that behaving badly gets them paid the most per year".
Hence, naming (and potentially, shaming) Acme, Inc. is the right thing to do here.
When I was younger, a recruiter for interns at Nvidia ghosted me entirely. It left a bad taste in my mouth because the internship time was particularly stressful for me since I procrastinated till very late. In comparison, the Microsoft recruiter just told me that while they'd take me, they'd filled their capacity. Whether they were truthful or were letting me down nicely, I appreciated the response.
But that was then. I was upset at all of Nvidia back then. But at some point, the perspective shifted. Now if there's something to get, I go take it. If the recruiter ghosts me, I LinkedIn their recruiting team, Rocketreach or PeopleDataLabs myself their emails, and use an automailer to drip them with where I'm stuck in the process.
The way I see it is that punishing people is work I'd have to do to make a company more effective at something. I want a reward for that. No one will reward me for that. What they will reward me for is shotgunning everyone else.
And is anyone seriously going to GDPR or CCPA me? If they tried, I'd shit on their faces on Twitter and even if they revealed the so-called underhandedness of my tactics people will remember them as the guys who ghosted someone and then sued that guy when he tried to unghost them.
Hyperoptimize for your own objectives. Everyone else's problem is their problem.
lol in some of the realms I have worked in...I've done as you suggest. Been blocked by immediate superior...gone to foreman to find out what to do (aka i'd run out of jobs and my superior was too busy to give me a new one). I got fired that day on the spot for approaching my team leaders boss...4 days on the job lol.
The external view is very friendly, and I definitely don't apply this inside the org. Inside the org I play by the rules.
This genuinely doesn’t seem like a strategy that would work.
There are bad actors that wouldn't think twice about ruining the career of somebody else for no reason. And even people who feel victimized may actually not be and there may be nuance if you get the full context.
And what is is with this idea of destroying the livelihood of someone else because you feel slighted?
Stop this nonsense.
never even think about how their services will inevitably be used against others.
That's the yelp way.
I mean I think it’s pretty clear why recruiters would keep their options open up until the last second and limit information sharing.
The way to respond to that is to create urgency by having multiple parallel interviews in the pipeline and letting them know your deadlines. This works like magic if you are even a moderately strong candidate. That will have about a infinitely greater effect than sending whiny anonymous emails.
I've experienced this often enough that whenever I have an interview that goes exceptionally well then I joke with my wife that I'll probably never hear from them again (and that tends to be the case.)
If they know you are interviewing elsewhere then it should be closer to 2-3 days max contact gap. Tip: If you don’t hear back from A, maybe you’ll have an on-site scheduled with B, and then you can ping A with that info “for scheduling purposes” and trust me you will suddenly hear back if they are interested. Again, urgency is your friend here.
I won't do this, though. I don't feel that it would be particularly professional, on my part; despite the fact that their unprofessional (and self-destructive) behavior does piss me off.
I just make every effort not to do that with people that I deal with. I give others respect, and don't require it in return.
Recruiters, these days, are a vastly different breed from what I remember.
"Click here to rate our overall interactions during the hiring process"
The surveys could be one-time use, would only allow feedback after X-weeks and would be sent to the head of recruiting weekly. This would allow a path for the potential-hire to provide feedback (good or bad) to someone other than the recruiter, but wouldn't spam the recruiter directly (like this tool would).
I'm sure some would use it for "revenge", but I think the survey could account for that and it's up to the head of recruiting to filter through that anyway (i.e. sort through data on how their subordinates are doing).
Applying for jobs is a black box: you do a bunch of work, something happens, and you have no idea why, so you have no way to improve.
I wanted someone to say "you misspelled something in your cover letter", or "you were standoffish in the interview", or "there were several qualified candidates, we hired the one with the most experience", or even "we didn't like your stupid face". If that's too much work, send me a form letter: "Rejected for reason 13B: poor personal hygiene or fashion sense". Literally anything. Anything.
I understand that companies feel that giving feedback opens them up to potential litigation or bad publicity, but I would happily have signed something to remove their liability. I would have sign an NDA to prevent me from publishing. I just want some data.
Reward is small. Risk of trouble is very large. Being sued is extremely time consuming.
And recently, I’ve been rejected by multiple companies in the interview process and all of them said why they rejected me.
If I had to guess, most of the time it’s that telling people why they didn’t even get an interview is time consuming and not all that productive. But telling people why they didn’t get hired following interviews makes sense since the candidate made a substantial effort to get there.
Recruiters deal in volume and so their work is highly transactional, not personal.
If you don't get a 'yes' then it's a 'no'.
They are busy, don't hate the player, hate the game.
I have done this before, and received apologies. In general I don't have a lot of time for people wanting to do things anonymously.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the objective behind the service but I just feel it lacks some degree of perspective. It's yet another indication of how gaping the chasm between the 9% and the 90% is becoming.
Social norms are only norms if there's a mechanism in place to enforce them. Often that enforcement comes in the form of shaming people who violate the norm. If non-tech people are willing to continue to get treated poorly in this manner, I guess that's up to them, but I would rather work in a field where people show basic respect for each other. I know we all have a long way to go for that to be a universal thing, but stuff like this is a nice small step.
Technically you are quite correct: it's up to non-tech people to decide to be treated better. But the reality behind that phrase hides a far more complicated reality than the mere words would imply. Just saying that you'd "rather work in a field where people show basic respect" completely elides the reality of the situation. It's like telling a trucker who just got automated "Well just learn some code and work harder, buddy!"
I interviewed at one of the big companies and did not get the job, but I remembered one of the hiring managers I met during the interview process and followed up with them on LinkedIn and ended up getting another interview for a similar role and got that job.
I've tried running startups so I know how much work recruiting is. The recruiter made an effort to stay in touch with me but for reasons unknown to me I stopped getting replies. I'd put months of effort into getting positive signals from a company I really wanted to work with, and I noticed that they actively monitored their Glassdoor. I left a detailed message on the situation I was in. I wasn't rude, I didn't throw a tantrum because I didn't know how the situation the recruiter was in. It's possible they were in a bad life or organizational spot and didn't know what to do. People are humans. But it was my last effort before I moved onto something else.
That message was picked up by someone senior in the org, and they explained that even though they wanted to hire me, I wasn't as far along in the process of getting hired as I thought. This was a bit sad to me, but they referred me to another recruiter that would be handling my case. I decided to work with them nonetheless, since I really liked that place. It took about 6 months from that initial email to me getting a visa, just as COVID-19 began to impact borders.
If it had been another company, I would likely have given up. But, humans are humans and unfortunately recruiting, especially from overseas, isn't an area with the best experience.
Had a recruiter from a Valley newcomer disappear on me for ~10 days, after having talked offers and how impressive the interviews had been. Then she called back out of the blue wanting to negotiate salary. I gave her my ask, and she wanted to low-ball, and then I gathered the VP, for whom I would be working, called BS on my ask, even though it was market rate and a bit lower than what a Valley resident would command. More radio silence. I had two much better offers and little pressure. It kept feeling like timed negotiating tactics to me.
Finally they presented me with a dumpster of an employee stock program offering to make up for their salary hair-splitting. I would have been more impressed if they’d given me an actual Monopoly board game with it, at least then the Monopoly money would have been tangible. Then I caught this recruiter in a lie about part of the company’s “newly conceived” ESP conditions. I backed away for a couple days, and hashed out the worst thing I could do in light of the employer/recruiter wasting my time and scheming. Give that recruiter a dirty yes.
So I dragged them out telling them I was taking the job for over a week and to expect the offer letter as soon as I thought on it more. I never signed further, slowed any responses, and then I just stopped responding. Even got some angry text messages from the recruiter screaming, “TELL ME WHY!” The worst kinds of people, and you will find no sympathy from me.
I don't say this as an insult or an accusation. I am simply pointing out that we often judge others based on a lack of complete information. It isn't necessarily fair to blame recruiters for every indignity that occurs during the recruitment process. Inherently almost everyone who interacts with a recruiter comes away feeling disappointed and slighted. It is a tough job.
Assume the same.
You are a luxury item, many will look, most can't afford you and will settle for something inferior and cheap. You have the good stuff and you need to continue to sell it until the right customer comes along.
But if there's any kind of back-and-forth at all after that, especially if a candidate has gone through a phone screen or interview, I think everyone is owed some sort of closure in the process. Just as if the candidate accepts another job, they should let the recruiter know, a recruiter should let the candidate know if they're being rejected. There's no legitimate excuse for not even sending a canned one-liner rejection email.
I had a form readers of my blog could fill out to contact me. It asked for their name and email address. After they submitted the form I sent them a nice automatic reply along the lines of:
Hello <name>,
Blah blah blah.
Thanks,
frompdx
Regardless, I think this is needlessly passive aggressive and not a good way to handle something like this in general. For one, I think there is a good chance the recruiter will still know who sent the message. It's a small world. Why burn bridges?
I know how it feels to never get a reply back. Yes it is frustrating. I just don't think this is the solution to the problem. Someone being unprofessional to you is not justification to be unprofessional to them. Reputation is a two way street. Don't let others catch you on the wrong side of the road over something like this.
The balance is such for every gig there are at least dozens of applicants (supply) who are qualified - and this supply shifts over time - and this supply has urgent demand.
Ghosting is currently not a top issue for managers or recruiters. I don't see how name-and-shame changes that at all.
That said, this service isn't actually doing that - it's sending anonymous notes to the alleged bad actor in private, which of course wouldn't have that effect.
However, those recruiters who are ghosting candidates will not care, and if they get more of those emails, they will just block the email address of this app. That's my personal experience with many recruiters, even from big corps.
So these tools like this one are not trying to help; they are only a way how to anonymously bully people. The only way HOW to change things is to reach the managers of those recruiters and provide feedback. If their bonuses are affected by bad feedback, they will care a lot. But if they get anonymous emails, they will just remove them because they will not care at all. That's my personal experience with those recruiters. If their salary is affected, they will care more!
Ghosting also happens in both way - as a hiring manager, I've had a many times where I had to reach out to the candidate patiently waiting for their response to the next round or getting back to me for a coding exercise with no response (the bad ones) or a "sorry, I forgot to tell you that I got the job already."
Finding a job is a lot like dating, it takes 2 parties to make it work. So just like ghosting in dating scene, ghosting in hiring process will always exist, it's not a technology problem but it's a human behavior problem. By the way, anonymously calling out the other party of ghosting is even worse IMO.
Yes, they can spend that time, and no, it would not be "countless hours". I'm not even saying that recruiters must respond to every cold email they get with a resume. But if there's been any back-and-forth at all, the candidate is owed some kind of response, period.
> Ghosting also happens in both way - as a hiring manager, I've had a many times where I had to reach out to the candidate patiently waiting for their response to the next round or getting back to me for a coding exercise with no response
That's also shitty, and candidates shouldn't do that. But "candidates are disrespectful so I can be disrespectful too" is not an excuse.
> Finding a job is a lot like dating
No, it's not. Finding a job is a business transaction, while dating is a social/romantic activity.
And for the record: ghosting in dating sucks too.
Basically your argument boils down to "we're too busy, and everyone else is disrespectful in other parts of life, so this is fine". Not buying it.
We work in the software industry (well, a lot of us do). If individual human effort is not scaling, we write programs. "Dozens" or "hundreds" of candidates should be a cinch for a simple script to keep track of what candidates have been passed on; and they can be informed with a simple form letter.
If you don't have anyone at your company capable of writing these kinds of tools, maybe you should focus on hiring that person first. It will pay off in the longer run.
I feel that the healthier response is to have mercy on us both, and just move on. Same as with dating.
I think that's right, and it isn't very annoying to me because of this exact rule: Don't stop the job hunt until I have one in the bag. It's easier to move on if I don't come to a rest.
I've interviewed enough to have had very good ones that went nowhere and poor ones that got me hired. Having low or no expectations from any one prospect is healthy.
And yeah, even sending a short thanks but no thanks form-email can be emotionally taxing.
The way I see it, recruiters want to string you along just in case their first picks don’t work out and to prevent you from realizing that you probably need to be looking for gainful employment elsewhere.
This is on the more benign side of what recruiters get away with. You can sue Oracle for ageism, sexism, etc. You can’t reasonably sue JobsToday! because you wouldn’t get anything out of them and another recruiting firm would just pop up in its place. It boggles the mind that we allow companies to offshore their discriminatory hiring practices to recruiters.
That’s fine. Once the broader public becomes aware of recruiter abuse, I imagine they’ll get legislated or regulated out of existence.
Might as well just send them the note yourself.
To level the playing field, get rid of the information arbitrage. If you're an IC on a panel, ask for contextual details before giving your final vote. Follow up and see where the candidate went 6-12 months after the interview. Try to give candidates constructive feedback if you can.
Candidates can't do much here unfortunately. But the hiring managers of tomorrow are often the ICs of today. The path towards removing bias in hiring starts with being a more proactive interviewer.
They, mostly, spam mindlessly until they reach whatever quota they get. You can try and shame them but chances are they'll be at a new place spamming you again in a few months.
Either that or selling used cars.
I will admit: this was one of the rare occasions in which I lost my temper at the mundane eccentricities of how some companies operate. It wasn't the ghosting, it was the occupation of the moral high ground whilst rolling around in the gutter with everyone else. I did not get a reply.
I choose not to deal with recruiters. Ever. I’m pretty blunt to them about it, without being rude.
They are also 'blind' in a sense, since most recruiters have very little idea what to look for in a candidate other from the usual signals (resume, buzzwords, git repo and other wonky metrics).
I can't image how difficult it must be for them, and would be helpful if they could educate the uninformed of the challenges and potential frustrations. If that was well understood by candidates, I think they would be much less hurt by an occasional 'ghost' ..
I've ghosted all kinds of people. Including recruiters and sales people. I don't do it anymore.
Recruiters are human and have their own priorities and lives.
Just take the hints and move on. It's not that hard.
I'm convinced people who are upset by ghosting are probably not happy people because they are likely to be upset by every insignificant things. These people are probably not great at doing business as well.
I feel sorry for them that they are also shamed for being laid off and unable to reply to emails. I actually know one FB recruiter that left and just stop replying to my email.
Just move on. You are not the only person who has the problems.
Sometimes ghosting may be a very understandable human error and there should be some room in this conversation for that too.
> Sometimes I don't - that task falls through the cracks.
The only time I feel this is perhaps excusable is when both a candidate has fallen off your radar, AND the candidate didn't bother following up with you to ask the status.
"I was so disappointed and unprofessional, I just thought you should know."
I think you meant here: "It was so disappointing and unprofessional"?
- On a systemic level, you're just propagating the same crappy behaviour that you don't like to see in other people. I don't see how that makes things better for anyone.
- Candidates can decide they are not interested in the position anymore and ghost the recruiter/employer without warning
Similarly,
- Employers can ghost candidates and recruiters
- Recruiters can ghost candidates and employers
It's a ghosting triangle. Candidates probably get ghosted the most, but certainly recruiters and employers are ghosted as well.
>moving on can be tough
it can be tough but it also something that can be trained to overcome
Its usually easier to change your own behavior rather than other people behavior.
I sometimes handle interviews and I've been ghosted by a couple candidates in the past who wouldn't answer even after multiple emails and phone calls. Considering how overwhelming interviews are, I can sympathise...
Spoiler: They didn't.
This thing is gonna become a spam proxy before the end of the day.
Long story, it was worst experience of my professional work.
and the worst part is they ghosted me after it.
I am now of the opinion that recruiters should pay people for their time now. I will no longer be doing such recruitment exercises.
When I'm involved in the hiring process I've always approached it from the angle that you want to leave a good impression with the candidate regardless of whether you hire them or not. Careers are long, word gets around, and you'll reject way more candidates than you hire.
If your not a good fit for a job or romance that's life!
I completed an entire day of back to back Zoom interviews in March, thanked all the interviewers by email, saying "I'm looking forward to the next steps". There was a bunch of people on their side scheduling everything for me including dropping for flights and hotel (which the canceled and swapped for zoom a day or two before). Those were not recruiters as such, but admin assistants, directors and a CIO. I sent another "catching up" email with the director who was charged with handling my candidacy. I got a reply in June just under three months from the interview day.
> Apologies for the slow response. Things have certainly gotten crazy since > we last spoke! I managed to get out of <interview-city> and have been > on lockdown at my home in <home-town> with my family. Hope things are well > for you. > > As for the head of software engineering position, we have moved forward > with a different candidate. I hope we can stay in touch and work together > on something in the future.
In the meantime I'd gently nudged the two that referred me in as to what expectations I could have as a candidate and they were embarrassed. There's only so much you can do in this situation. You know, to a great degree those that refer people in have to recuse themselves.
I've been ghosted a few times since too. The above story is the max effort on my part to get to the ghost outcome.
I'd be keen on a site that was an agreed policy on candidate handling. Each time there's a candidate that gets put forward something that private key encrypted gets written to a public ledger ($1 charge to recruiter). Each time there's progress another record is written. Ghosting means no updates. The Ledger service will notify all parties of updates. Any of the parties could disclose the key to make all the records public. There's be terms and conditions for that. The candidate can pay a second fee - say $10 - for a review of the record and a change in the status of the recruiter. The recruiter can protect themselves from shitty clients with "sorry paul, I've heard nothing new from <client> re your candidacy. Each candidate/candidacy has a state "explicit rejection" or "effectively ghosted". That bit not encrypted. The recruiters get a badge they can use that makes it clear what their stats are.
There's some privacy concerns too for that service - how can the legal entity not monetize & not leak the bits that should remain private. In summary I'm thinking about something that's different to ghostreply.com which is like the "Just a Tip" site & email service from the 90's.