Why Recruiters at the World’s Biggest Companies Are Ghosting Applicants — and the Psychological Toll It Takes

Imagine this. You go through three rounds of interviews, each of which goes well enough to leave you with a sense of cautious optimism. Next, have a sit-down lunch with the team you would be overseeing at a restaurant in Canary Wharf or midtown. This is the type of meal where everyone is chatting and having a good time, and someone says, “We’ll be in touch soon.” Then a week goes by. Next, two. After that, you send a thoughtful, polished follow-up email. Nothing. You send one more. Nothing yet. You eventually stop checking your phone every 20 minutes—not because you’ve come to terms with the outcome, but rather because the act of checking has become embarrassing.

Corporate ghosting is what this is. And by all accounts, it is currently one of the distinguishing characteristics of the contemporary hiring process.

According to a study conducted in early 2025 by the headhunting company Robert Walters, 86% of job seekers in the UK reported that their applications had been rejected or received no response at all. Eighty percent of hiring managers acknowledge ignoring candidates after first encounters, according to a different survey. These are neither startup failures to scale nor fringe cases. At some of the biggest and most well-known businesses on the planet, they are standard operating procedure. These companies spend a lot of money on DEI commitments, employer branding, and candidate experience frameworks, which don’t seem to include the simple act of sending a rejection email.

Companies typically give structural explanations for ghosting, though some of them are genuinely compassionate. In just a few days, a mid-sized company’s recruiter managing a popular position may receive hundreds of applications. It is truly difficult to respond to all of them without an appropriately set up applicant tracking system. Sometimes hiring managers vanish in the middle of the process—taking a leave of absence, switching positions, or losing control over the position—leaving applicants suspended in an information void that no one can fill. Priorities in business change. Roles become frozen.

Quietly, reorganizations take place. Technology executive and author Mark Herschberg has written about the hiring process. In some cases, ghosting is not even deliberate; rather, the person who would have sent the note simply no longer has a role to send it about, and no one told them to close the loop.

Beneath the data is something less sympathetic as well. In one survey, about 40% of hiring managers acknowledged creating fictitious job postings to give the impression that their business is expanding. Applicants wait for responses to positions that never existed, sometimes spending hours creating materials. That number may be an anomaly, the result of self-selected respondents, but even if it is only partially true, it depicts a practice that verges on disrespect for the individuals being hired. There’s a feeling that at some point, the asymmetry of the hiring process became so commonplace that big businesses ceased to value applicants’ time.

Even though it frequently comes up in online forums and LinkedIn comment threads, the effects of repeated silence on one’s sense of self are less discussed. Tanzanian professional Abraham Mmbaga, who has written about this with remarkable candor, said of his experience: “You prepare for everything, give it your all, and nothing comes in return.” Not even a denial. You feel like you’re yelling into thin air and nobody is interested enough to answer. He continued by discussing anxiety, burnout, and a gradual decline in self-worth that he found hard to acknowledge in public. Hundreds of people who understood exactly what he was describing responded to his post.

It’s difficult to ignore how infrequently the professional press discusses this aspect of the ghosting debate. There is extensive discussion of the business ramifications, including squandered recruitment funds, tarnished employer brands, and trouble luring future talent. The psychological cost to the person on the other side, who might have taken days off from their current job to attend interviews, spent weeks preparing, or told people they were in an exciting late-stage process, usually receives no more than a paragraph. An HR data analyst mentioned maintaining a ledger of all the companies that abandoned them. “If you can act like I don’t exist now,” they said, “imagine how you would treat me as an employee.” It makes sense, and the resentment is justified.

“Fundamentally — and not just in recruitment — we don’t connect as humans as much as we used to,” stated James Milner, managing director of Exalto Consulting, in a straightforward statement that most recruiters are reluctant to make. In a system, you are frequently viewed as a number rather than a human being. Early-stage screening automation hasn’t been beneficial. These days, algorithms completely reject some applications before a human even reads a single line. At 11 p.m. on a Tuesday, candidates receive automated emails that start “After careful consideration” and provide no helpful explanation for why they weren’t chosen because no human was involved in the process. In the same way that the accountability was engineered out of the process, the friction was also engineered out.

In obvious ways, the cycle has begun to turn against employers. According to 60% of job seekers, it’s reasonable for employers to ghost them in return. According to reports, nearly one-third of Gen Z applicants have accepted a job offer but failed to show up on the first day. This practice has been dubbed “career catfishing,” but it’s really just silence on the other side. Employers may lose up to half of their recruitment budget due to wasted time and repeated hiring cycles when candidates ghost them, according to one survey. Businesses are starting to realize, albeit somewhat late, that a convenience-driven practice has turned into an operational issue and a reputational liability.

Quietly, some recruiters are resisting. A global director of talent acquisition gained notoriety on LinkedIn for personally answering each of the 800 applications for a single position. He explained that he had recently been a candidate and recalled the particular annoyance of not hearing back. In recruitment circles, the post went somewhat viral, indicating how low the bar has dropped to the point where responding to applicants one-on-one is now noteworthy enough to be shared. Talent acquisition head Katie Rakusin has pushed for what she refers to as the “no update update,” which is a succinct statement that merely states that the candidate has not been forgotten and that the process is still ongoing. Less than thirty seconds pass. The majority of businesses still don’t.

The solution is simple. Simply put, it’s not free. Instead of viewing applicants as data points passing through a funnel, it necessitates treating them as individuals with a stake in the outcome. Even when the news is unfavorable and the conversation is awkward, someone must take responsibility for closing the loop. Writing rejection emails is not hard. When volume is high and no one is calculating the cost of not sending them, it is challenging to prioritize them. The silence is likely to persist until businesses begin quantifying that expense, whether it be in lost candidates, brand damage, or the silent accumulation of people who will never apply to them again. And somewhere, someone is still checking their email, waiting, after spending three weeks getting ready for an interview they thought went well.