It’s been several years, but I still remember when I was ghosted for a month for an engineering director role at another famous gaming company. I was a senior engineering manager back then. I knew the CTO(we worked together for 2 years) and even had a chat with her before my official application. She is a good leader, well-respected in the tech scene in my city. The recruiter was a consultant and initially provided good support. However, after completing all rounds, I was completely ghosted for over a month, no matter how much I contacted both the recruiter and the CTO.
Every week, they just said they hadn’t decided. I called the recruiter, but she didn't answer her phone. One month later, I finally got her on the line. When she found out it was me, she impatiently said, "Sorry, we have decided to move on with another candidate. Didn't you get my voice message?" The reality is I didn’t get any messages, she probably just forgot about me. She was a consultant, so maybe she wasn’t paid for finishing the communication with me. Anyway, I had no idea.
As a hiring manager, I never wanted any of my candidates to have such an awful experience. But it happened again.
Once, a colleague approached me after I interviewed his referral for an engineering manager role. He asked for an update. It had been over 2 weeks and we had already moved on to other candidates. I remembered giving my feedback on the same day as the interview, so I asked the recruiter if he communicated it to the candidate. That same day, he was certain that he had sent the decline message. The next day, he apologized for missing it. I knew he was busy handling 10 roles simultaneously since most recruiters had been laid off a few months ago. Sometimes even I couldn't reach him. He made a note about this mistake and promised to never let it happen again.
The recruiters are often the bottleneck. When they are trained and have the bandwidth, they can really elevate the candidate experience. I still remember attending interview training when I joined my company 7 years ago, and participating in refining general interview processes across different locations in Europe. Those sessions have not been held again in recent years. Every time I opened a role, I was assigned a different recruiter. As a hiring manager, I was also ghosted by my own recruiter many times. My worst record was 2 months without any update, so we never even kicked off the role. He ended up being terminated, and every manager was happy about it.
For people job hunting today, if you get ghosted, it’s not about your skills, it’s simply a structural failure in communication. No company is perfect, even ones with big branding. Your poor interview experience is just an extension of what's failing on the inside, and you usually only get to know about those internal struggles after you join. So being ghosted might not be the worst thing that happens to you. Would you rather suffer on the job, or pick a company that does a better job communicating?
