Candidate ghosting
Ending contact with a candidate without telling them the outcome of their application.
Last reviewed
In practice
It is close to universal at the application stage and common even after interviews. Surveys of candidates consistently find it is the single most-cited complaint about hiring, ahead of process length and interview difficulty.
The cause is incentives rather than manners. Individual feedback for hundreds of applicants is unpaid work at the end of a closed process, legal teams worry about specific feedback creating specific exposure, and nothing measurable happens to the employer that stays silent.
Which is why exhortation does not fix it. What fixes it is making the outcome message a byproduct of a decision that has already been recorded, so sending it costs nobody an hour.
Related
Selection rate
The proportion of candidates from a given group who pass a particular stage of a hiring process.
Skills-based hiring
Selecting candidates on demonstrated ability to do the work, rather than on proxies for it such as degrees, job titles or previous employers.
How CalHire handles this: Zero ghosting and candidate report cards
Read further
Longer pieces on this and the arguments around it.
Why candidates get ghosted, and how to actually stop
Ghosting is almost never malice. It is what happens when closing the loop is optional, unowned and manual. The four structural causes, and the fix for each.
ReadHow to write rejection feedback that is actually useful
Most rejection feedback is either a form letter or a risk. How to write something specific and safe, using the scores you already have.
Read