My new favorite place to scroll is Reddit. I’ve tried to dip my toe in before, but that was when I was a marketer looking for new channels and attribution. Now, I am looking for emotion. I go there because I want to know how people really feel about issues when they’re not worried about pissing off their family on Facebook or answering questions from their boss on LinkedIn.
Of course in the process of finding threads and chats I enjoy about all my personal interests, I landed on the ones related to recruiting. My favorite thread is RecruiterHell which is a nice way of saying “this is the place I vent when a recruiter makes my life hell.” My general impression? Candidates are not big fans and they often use not so nice adjectives before the word recruiter.
If you’ve scrolled any social media channel where job seekers are venting, you can probably guess the most common topic: why recruiters ghost them. The posts are like a Jerry Springer of hiring. There’s the secrets revealed. The angry emails. They’re just missing the paternity tests.
Why Recruiters Ghost Candidates
Ghosting was the most popular topic in 2009 when I worked at Monster.com as their social media ninja (yes, real title), too. During that dot com bubble, and today’s edge of recession, the numbers were staggering. 61% of U.S. job seekers reported post-interview ghosting by employers in early 2025. Underrepresented job seekers face higher rates of ghosting, with 66% experiencing post-interview ghosting compared to 59% of white candidates. (Read the survey here.) This isn’t just a persistent trend, it’s another reflection of how bias creeps into our process.
But recruiters typically give you the same logic for why they ghost people: we just get too many applications. It’s not personal. Blah blah blah. To that, I call bullshit. The volume of applications is not the problem at all.
It’s the volume of requisitions aka jobs they are trying to fill at once. Recruiters aren’t working with reasonable workloads. They’re often working on 10+ jobs which might not seem like a lot to people who don’t recruit. But that’s 10 jobs x 500 applications to review, 50 phone screens, 5 in person interviews and all of the coordination emails it takes to make those steps happen. Naturally, if you’re not top of mind in those steps - you’re probably the last priority.
Candidate Ghosting Service Level Agreements
Now, that doesn’t mean recruiters are stuck ghosting candidates. It also doesn’t mean they will magically have less on their desk because I complained in a blog (we all wish, right?). It means we need to set different expectations and automations to ensure people get messages. This is an area where AI for recruiting can really help. But remember, AI can only execute a process that’s spelled out. So, spell out your candidate up strategy.
It could be something as simple as this:
- Anyone who applies to a job gets an automated email back that’s not a generic thanks for your application. In an ideal world, it’s customized in some way. At a minimum, explain what will happen next. For example, “if we don’t contact you within four weeks of this application, you will not be moving forward at this time.”
- Anyone who completes more than 2 rounds of your process, like an assessment and a phone screen for example, gets an email from the person they talked to. It doesn’t have to be just for them, you can use a template for everyone that isn’t moving forward. This is called small batch automation. Ask your HR technology rep about this.
- Anyone who completes more than 3 steps of your hiring process gets an email from you to them. No batches. How much information you provide there is up to you.
What do you say in those emails? My perspective from the Reddit feeds is that there is no right answer to what you say when you reject people. Feedback isn’t universally well taken or delivered.
The reality is that whoever is on the other side of the email is not going to like what you say. Just remember, people are having emotional reactions because hope is an emotion you feel when you apply to a job. Expect them to act accordingly. Hell, maybe recruiters could, too, by not ghosting them in the first place.
