Over the last three years, a certain emotion has become ingrained in the American job search process. The sensation of submitting an application and then being met with complete silence. Not a denial. It is not proof that the application has been read. The first “we have received your submission” email that appears in thirty seconds is the only automated acknowledgement. Days, weeks, and months pass and there is no sound. The initial opportunity has long since closed by the time the candidate has moved on emotionally and filed dozens of more applications into the same void. The candidate was never informed in any significant way. They were simply ghosted, to use the term that is now often used to describe this phenomena.
Contrary to what the experience implies, the physics underlying the ghosting are more routine. For the past ten years, applicant tracking systems have been steadily gaining influence in the hiring process. They have already attained a level of operational dominance that almost replaces the previous practice of individualized recruiter communication. Thousands of applications are received by the systems. They sort, filter, and rank.
The system stops advancing applications once a position has been filled or halted. Candidates whose materials are still in the database become functionally invisible. No one has been tasked with following up with them. In many instances, there is no longer any assumption in the recruiting function that the recruiter’s role is to follow up. The system doesn’t communicate by design. The candidates believe they made a mistake. In general, they didn’t.
Speaking with recruiters at big businesses gives the impression that the volume issue has drastically altered how the position functions. For a single engineering position listed on the company’s careers page, a senior recruiter at a large technology company reported receiving, on average, two to four thousand applications. The ATS is used for the actual screening process. Most of the time, the recruiter only sees the top twenty or thirty applicants that the algorithm has found.
From the recruiter’s point of view, the remaining 95% or more of applicants are just numbers in a database that they will never look at in person. By all operational metrics, it is not feasible to send individual rejections to thousands of applicants who were never examined. When an automated rejection occurs, it frequently takes weeks or months to occur, by which time the candidate has ceased checking.
Perhaps the more challenging form of the issue is post-interview ghosting. Interviews are conducted in three, four, and occasionally five rounds. They have meetings with senior leadership, the hiring manager, and the team. Throughout the procedure, they get encouraging signs. After being in constant communication, the recruiter abruptly stops answering. Emails are not responded to. Voicemails receive calls. After extensive management, the interview process just comes to a close.
The candidate is left without an explanation after devoting a substantial amount of time and emotional energy to the chance. When the causes finally become clear, they are typically systemic rather than personal. a budget freeze that was not disclosed to the recruiter until much later in the hiring process. The role was eliminated amid a reorganization. a choice to keep the position vacant while internal candidates are assessed by the organization. In all of these situations, the candidate was never explicitly turned down. Simply put, they were no longer involved in an ongoing process.
All of this has a major cumulative psychological impact that the labor market hasn’t yet properly considered. In contrast to previous generations of job seekers, talented professionals who spend months actively searching for a job now frequently describe periods of melancholy, professional confusion, and erosion of confidence. A category of professional uncertainty that did not exist when hiring was mostly done through personal networks and in-person interviews is created by the combination of high application numbers, poor response rates, and nearly no actionable feedback. There is no method for the candidate to gain knowledge from the experience. There is no possibility for the candidate to get better. In many instances, the candidate is unaware that a human has ever reviewed their documents.
Ironically, the most successful adaptation to this environment may be the one that has existed all along. establishing connections. Not the networking equivalent of LinkedIn spam, in which applicants bombard anyone with a recruiter title with dozens of generic connection requests. the longer-lasting, slower version. establishing connections with employees of businesses the candidate is interested in. conversing over coffee without explicitly requesting a job. keeping up sincere professional communication across years rather than weeks.
Candidates that enter a company through internal referral channels—that is, through an employee who directly recommends them—virtually completely avoid the applicant tracking system. The hiring manager receives their materials directly. They are interviewed. They receive comments. Instead than being regarded like numbers in a database, they are treated as individuals. This strategy has much higher success percentages than cold online application. The drawback is that it necessitates a large time commitment and access to professional networks, which not all applicants have.
Observing the evolution of the recruiting function gives one the impression that the industry has created something that benefits employers more than prospects. There are actual cost savings for businesses. Recruiters can save a significant amount of time. In this arrangement, the candidates have borne the majority of the practical, financial, and emotional costs associated with the automation.
It’s unclear if the labor market will accept this imbalance indefinitely. Laws pertaining to AI hiring transparency are starting to emerge at the state level. The unequal effects of automated screening techniques are still being investigated by the EEOC. The effects of prolonged job searches on individual careers as well as more general patterns of economic mobility are being documented by workforce researchers.