Ghosting after interviews: tips and ideas to avoid it

Ghosting after interview may be the demonstration of a company’s lack of ethics and principles in the recruitment process.

Although we have referred to the responsibility of companies in this practice, it should also be noted that some employees, after making the cut in a personnel selection, disappear and are never heard from again. 

However, in this article, we are going to focus on the case in which it is the company who does not give any sign of life after interviewing a candidate applying for a vacancy in the organization. 

So, it should be noted from the outset that to be ghosted after final interview is not uncommon, in fact, it is an experience that a large number of candidates for a position have suffered in the flesh, so in this article we will talk about what is ghosting after interviews and some tips and ideas to avoid it. 

What does it mean to be ghosted after an interview?

We have already clarified that job ghosting is a situation that can affect both the candidate and the employer and that we are going to focus on the case of the company.  

Well, the fact that the organization does not communicate with the candidates interviewed, shows a logical sequence of reasoning that leads to think that they have not passed the cut that the HR department considers minimum to go ahead with the selection process and subsequent incorporation into the company. 

As a result of this failure to meet the minimum requirements, the company stops contacting candidates and does not deign to tell them that they are out of the process and that the hiring will not be carried out. 

In the absence of official communication, candidates can get to intuit it, seeing that they do not receive updates on the status of their applications, there is no answers to the emails or calls they make to inquire about the status of the process but, at the same time, they do not find evidence that they have been formally rejected and are out of the process. 

Thus, they find themselves in a limbo in which they feel unfairly treated, angry at the company’s lack of courtesy and ethics, but they may still be hopeful that the lack of news hides a reason for not informing them. 

Generally, the lack of response after an interview is mainly due to three reasons: 

1. The successful candidate is someone else.
2. The selection process has undergone changes but they cannot tell the candidates. 
3. They have forgotten to contact you to tell you that you are out. 

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Is it common to be ghosted after an interview?

Unfortunately, to be ghosted after an interview is more common than it seems and a high percentage of candidates have experienced this type of situation first hand at some point in their working life. 

According to information presented by CNBC in the article “Ghosting gets more common in the job market” 40 % of candidates said an employer had ghosted them after a second- or third-round interview in 2023, up from 30 % in 2022.

But not only this because 52 % of job candidates admits having been ghosted with a recruiter, as the “2024 Greenhouse candidate experience report” from hiring platform Greenhouse has revealed.

The data does not invite doubt. There are a large number of recruitment processes that could be described as unempathetic to candidates, not to mention ethical, of course.  

Tips and ideas to avoid ghosting after interviews

As a company you have a moral and ethical responsibility to the people who participate in your recruitment processes. 

If you are an organization that allows your HR department to practice ghosting after interviews because the number of candidates that do not fit is high, perhaps you should reconsider the different steps of the process to refine the search. 

Here are some ideas that may help: 

• Write job descriptions that are a good fit for the vacancy. Specify necessary skills such as soft skills or interpersonal skills and the roles to be filled precisely. 
• Establish specific timelines for hiring. A timeline of the selection process for the vacancy can be a great help. This schedule can include notifications to candidates when they have been shortlisted, time ranges for each stage of the interview process, notifications of application status progress and final notifications when they have been selected.
• Share transparent information from the job posting until the successful candidate is hired to filter and only attract talent that matches the company’s needs. 
• Filter candidates based on their skills to streamline the selection process and focus only on those with real potential. Skills-based hiring has many benefits.
• Design a communication plan for recruiters showing what they can tell, what they can’t and when both can be done. It is critical that recruiters keep candidates informed of their progress from start to finish.  
• Invest time in showing candidates the company culture so that they become familiar with the organization and so that those who are not a good fit fall off on their own, easing the number of candidates to manage. 
• Explore incentives to offer as a candidate screening measure. If applicants are clear about the possible incentives and you show them, those who do not agree with them will be discarded on their own, making it easier not to ghosting them because they are not chosen or because the process has become unmanageable for the HR department.

At Smowltech we know how important it is to have environments where ethics, respect and safety are the fundamentals. 

Therefore, we have kept this in mind when developing our proctoring plans and we offer it to our clients. If you would like us to show you how we can support you with our software, just ask for a free demo where you will see first hand how we can adapt our solutions to your projects.

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