Ghosting

Ghosting is not a communication breakdown. It is a decision, taken by people who worked out that the candidate cannot make them pay for it.

The dysfunction index puts it plainly: a party silently abandons an active recruitment interaction rather than explicitly closing it. Not delays it. Not handles it badly. Abandons it, and leaves the other person holding an open process that no longer exists.

Where it happens

Three points, and they get worse as they go.

After the application. One candidate counted (archive): six months, 120 applications, eight per cent that led to a screening interview, and more than forty-five per cent that drew no response at all — not a rejection, not an automated acknowledgement. A professional network that had carried every previous search produced exactly one referral.

After evaluation. This is the expensive kind, and the archive is full of it. Four rounds and five weeks, including a take-home project a candidate cancelled a weekend trip to finish, then nothing. Six rounds — an internal recruiter, the CMO, then four more executives, each with their own slot in the diary — then nothing. A take-home estimated at four hours that took ten, handed in, followed by the fortnight of silence the company had asked for, then two emails and a direct message to a founder, and still nothing.

Note the direction of travel. The further a candidate gets, the more the organisation has already spent on them, and the less likely they are to hear anything. Engagement is punished.

The worst version is where the silence is not indifference at all. A candidate was asked to shoot an original video in one of the company’s stores as an assessment. The rejection came on the first of May; the emails and calls that followed went unanswered. Then the company’s own account posted that video, rerecorded bar for bar. Somebody in that building was watching that work closely while nobody was answering the emails about it.

After a commitment. The index names this stage twice — Candidate Limbo, where an employer functionally abandons a candidacy without formally closing it, and Offer Integrity Failure, where an employer materially changes or withdraws a commitment the candidate has already relied on. The archive holds no account at this stage yet. That is a gap in what we have collected, not evidence that it does not happen.

Why it happens

The reason given is caution — legal exposure, or volume, or a requisition that might reopen. None of that survives contact with the six-round example. A company with enough process to spend a CMO’s attention and four executives' calendar time on one candidate has enough process to send two lines at the end.

The real reasons are structural, and the site has names for them.

Nobody owns the close. Decision Ownership Failure describes authority that is absent, unclear or spread across people with no distinct responsibility. Six interviewers each assume the answer is somebody else’s to send.

The cost falls on someone whose time does not count. That is people disposability, the first of the systemic drivers: your need for an answer does not register, so silence is reasonable.

And nothing forces the question. We’ve always done it this way is enough, because no organisation is required to justify a stage — or the absence of one.

What it costs the organisation

Not the thing most employers measure. The candidate who is ghosted does not write a complaint; they update their model of employers, and so does everyone they tell.

That is institutional distrust compounding. Candidates who expect silence apply in bulk and mean none of it, because tailoring an application is irrational when there is no reason to expect it will be read. The employer then receives more noise, adds another filter, and the signal gets worse for everyone. The organisation that would not spend one email spends the rest of the decade reading applications written for a machine.

What a working process does instead

The manifesto states the standard in two lines. Every interaction with a candidate or an employer deserves an answer. Silence is a choice we do not make.

In practice that is four things, none of them expensive.

Publish the stages before anyone applies, so a candidate knows what an open process looks like and when it should have ended.

Name the person who owns the decision at each stage. One name, written down. An unowned stage is where candidacies go to disappear.

Put a date on every stage and answer on it — including when the answer is still deciding. A held process that says so is not a ghosted one.

Close every interaction explicitly. Every application, every rejection after every round. If the organisation cannot afford one email per candidate, it cannot afford the process that generated the candidates.

Ghosting is the cheapest dysfunction on this site to fix. That it persists anyway is the most honest thing recruitment tells us about what it thinks candidates are worth.