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It's a great problem that you're trying to solve, but this just isn't a great solution - it's no different than getting a throwaway email and sending a message

It's a great problem that you're trying to solve, but this just isn't a great solution - it's no different than getting a throwaway email and sending a message yourself. Also, depending on the size of the company, the recruiter may have a good idea of who this is coming from. A couple of suggestions: 1. Send these sorts of messages to the recruiter's boss/head of recruiting/head of HR. If the recruiter is ghosting out of laziness when they should not be, then making management aware of it will solve the problem. If the recruiter's told to do this by management, then management at least becomes aware that this policy is aggravating people. 2. Public shaming - make this a site where people can publicly name recruiters/companies who engage in this behavior. If companies see themselves incurring reputational damage from ghosting, it'll stop.

bonestamp2 6y ago
Agreed. If I can tell ahead of time that the recruiter is a ghost, then I can tell them I don't want to work with them because they've got a bad reputation on the ghost-list. Like a bad yelp review, that will hopefully motivate them to change. As long as new reports keep coming in, their full history remains. But old reviews should start to fall off the ghost-list after a certain amount of time without a new report of ghosting (to reward the positive change in behavior).
- slg 6y ago
  If you give people who didn't get a job the chance to anonymously trash the reputation of a recruiter, the veracity of the reviews are going to be garbage.
  - awillen 6y ago
    I think this is overly cynical - the vast majority of people, particularly those interviewing for high-skill tech jobs, understand that the recruiter is the messenger when it comes to the actual decision.
    - slg 6y ago
      The problem is these review sites rely on complete honesty. Simply having "the vast majority of people" being honest isn't enough as it doesn't take many malicious actors to ruin an anonymous review system. You can ask basically any teacher for their thoughts on something like Rate My Professor.
  - bonestamp2 6y ago
    It's not a review though, it's a "did they ghost you" boolean.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      Even a simple boolean like that is still subject to mostly getting results from upset people. People don’t tend to fill out surveys or reviews unless they’re either (1) upset or (2) there’s a reward (like “$1 off your next order” surveys)
adzsroka 6y ago
I'd agree on the public shaming point - something like Glassdoor that could be anonymous? You can also privately shame these behaviours by directly reaching out to hiring managers at the companies they're recruiting into and informing them it's damaging to their reputation. I've done this after being hired - told the new company that they should switch recruiters due to bad practice.
- awillen 6y ago
  Yeah, I mean ultimately it's basically just Yelp for recruiters. I know people get mad about public shaming, but I think that a Yelp-esque site is useful in any competitive industry - shaming the bad ones means that the good ones get more business, which is good.
  - adzsroka 6y ago
    It's a shame because recruitment is another high pressure sales-like environment where targets and commission are king. Especially early career, taking shortcuts can seem the only way to keep up. The tech industry (in the UK at least) talks - a lot - and word gets around quick leading these behaviours to have a damaging, lasting impact.
    - awillen 6y ago
      I've worked with enough salespeople and recruiters to be sympathetic to the pressure put on them. There are a lot of behaviors that salespeople engage in, like selling futures and other questionable things, that I don't like, but I can understand based on the position that they're put in. But ghosting stands out as particular egregious because it's so, so, so easy to not do. We're talking seconds of effort to send a templated email. However high-pressure their environment may be, it doesn't excuse ghosting.
kodah 6y ago
Public shaming of individuals is really bad form. While it may solve problems in the immediate all it does is make people walk on egg shells in the future and doesn't really teach anything meaningful. In my opinion its tantamount to bullying or abuse. I see this kind of stuff on Blind all the time and it's disconcerting to see. If you want some technical proof to this cultural concept, examine why blameless post-mortems exist. We learned a long time ago that naming larger organizations and not individuals incentivizes positive group-oriented change. The more mature thing to do is develop relationships with recruiters so that your interactions are not so transactional. This requires you to be less lazy too, but leads to more positive outcomes overall as it has for me.
- nwsm 6y ago
  Are you implying you see individual recruiters or hiring managers called out by name on Blind? I've never seen that even once. Personally I don't think anyone is tangibly harmed by someone posting "Google ghosted me" on Blind.
  - kodah 6y ago
    I've seen this done with managers at my company, not specifically recruiters.
- awillen 6y ago
  Ghosting people is bad form, too. "all it does is make people walk on egg shells in the future" - well that depends a lot on how it's done. Here, we're presented with a behavior by recruiters that is very rude, and on top of that, incredibly easy to solve. You can literally have an email template ready to go to reject people, so we're talking under 30 seconds per person to avoid ghosting. If you shame them about ghosting, given the presence of such an easy solution, they just won't do it. This isn't shaming someone for some vague belief they have about something, it's a very specific behavior. Blameless post-mortems are a poor comparison. You're talking about the failure of a system that is contributed to and designed by a group of people who are continuously working together. Ghosting a candidate is one person doing something rude. Apples and oranges. Your solution is not useful at all for internal recruiters - you just don't develop relationships with them, because the nature of their job is a one shot thing with each candidate. As for agencies and external recruiters, I should not have to develop a collegial relationship with them to get them to act with basic politeness. That's ridiculous. If they reach out to me to try to make money by placing me into a position, they should behave politely. If they don't, there's no reason they shouldn't be shamed, so that people can work with other recruiters who do behave properly.
GeeRep 6y ago
Thank you for the comments. 1) There's a section for management feedback. That part doesn't go anywhere as of right now, it's just saved. The thought is it could be batched and eventually shared with companies' HR leadership if there are enough. 2) When there's a critical mass of users of the site and multiple messages being sent to folks at the same companies, the plan is to put together a "naughty list" to display. By company, not individual. Also a lot of folks are using it right now to just mess around, so there's a good bit of manual data cleaning to do first!
aaron695 6y ago
> Public shaming Good to see lynching is still in style. Not even a pretence of allowing for good behaviour and rewarding that. It's of course impossible to tell when people are lying since people don't apply for enough jobs to get a reputation that accounts in yelp etc get. All of which are still gamed anyway. Lynchings after WW2 below - Perhaps they deserved it, and after so many dead what does it matter, but I intuitively feel like lynchings are bad and the way OPs web site is trying to solve the problem is far better. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/french-female-collaborator-punished-head-shaved-publicly-mark-1944/ https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/french-female-collaborator-...
- allarm 6y ago
  Thing is the OPs site does not solve any problem, so it’s not a good alternative. Also even shaming people is tempting, I don’t think it’s a good solution either. The okayish solution is to blame companies and there’s already a lot of resources that allow that.

bonestamp2 6y ago

Agreed. If I can tell ahead of time that the recruiter is a ghost, then I can tell them I don't want to work with them because they've got a bad reputation on the ghost-list. Like a bad yelp review, that will hopefully motivate them to change. As long as new reports keep coming in, their full history remains. But old reviews should start to fall off the ghost-list after a certain amount of time without a new report of ghosting (to reward the positive change in behavior).

slg 6y ago
If you give people who didn't get a job the chance to anonymously trash the reputation of a recruiter, the veracity of the reviews are going to be garbage.
- awillen 6y ago
  I think this is overly cynical - the vast majority of people, particularly those interviewing for high-skill tech jobs, understand that the recruiter is the messenger when it comes to the actual decision.
  - slg 6y ago
    The problem is these review sites rely on complete honesty. Simply having "the vast majority of people" being honest isn't enough as it doesn't take many malicious actors to ruin an anonymous review system. You can ask basically any teacher for their thoughts on something like Rate My Professor.
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  It's not a review though, it's a "did they ghost you" boolean.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    Even a simple boolean like that is still subject to mostly getting results from upset people. People don’t tend to fill out surveys or reviews unless they’re either (1) upset or (2) there’s a reward (like “$1 off your next order” surveys)

adzsroka 6y ago

I'd agree on the public shaming point - something like Glassdoor that could be anonymous? You can also privately shame these behaviours by directly reaching out to hiring managers at the companies they're recruiting into and informing them it's damaging to their reputation. I've done this after being hired - told the new company that they should switch recruiters due to bad practice.

awillen 6y ago
Yeah, I mean ultimately it's basically just Yelp for recruiters. I know people get mad about public shaming, but I think that a Yelp-esque site is useful in any competitive industry - shaming the bad ones means that the good ones get more business, which is good.
- adzsroka 6y ago
  It's a shame because recruitment is another high pressure sales-like environment where targets and commission are king. Especially early career, taking shortcuts can seem the only way to keep up. The tech industry (in the UK at least) talks - a lot - and word gets around quick leading these behaviours to have a damaging, lasting impact.
  - awillen 6y ago
    I've worked with enough salespeople and recruiters to be sympathetic to the pressure put on them. There are a lot of behaviors that salespeople engage in, like selling futures and other questionable things, that I don't like, but I can understand based on the position that they're put in. But ghosting stands out as particular egregious because it's so, so, so easy to not do. We're talking seconds of effort to send a templated email. However high-pressure their environment may be, it doesn't excuse ghosting.

kodah 6y ago

Public shaming of individuals is really bad form. While it may solve problems in the immediate all it does is make people walk on egg shells in the future and doesn't really teach anything meaningful. In my opinion its tantamount to bullying or abuse. I see this kind of stuff on Blind all the time and it's disconcerting to see. If you want some technical proof to this cultural concept, examine why blameless post-mortems exist. We learned a long time ago that naming larger organizations and not individuals incentivizes positive group-oriented change. The more mature thing to do is develop relationships with recruiters so that your interactions are not so transactional. This requires you to be less lazy too, but leads to more positive outcomes overall as it has for me.

nwsm 6y ago
Are you implying you see individual recruiters or hiring managers called out by name on Blind? I've never seen that even once. Personally I don't think anyone is tangibly harmed by someone posting "Google ghosted me" on Blind.
- kodah 6y ago
  I've seen this done with managers at my company, not specifically recruiters.
awillen 6y ago
Ghosting people is bad form, too. "all it does is make people walk on egg shells in the future" - well that depends a lot on how it's done. Here, we're presented with a behavior by recruiters that is very rude, and on top of that, incredibly easy to solve. You can literally have an email template ready to go to reject people, so we're talking under 30 seconds per person to avoid ghosting. If you shame them about ghosting, given the presence of such an easy solution, they just won't do it. This isn't shaming someone for some vague belief they have about something, it's a very specific behavior. Blameless post-mortems are a poor comparison. You're talking about the failure of a system that is contributed to and designed by a group of people who are continuously working together. Ghosting a candidate is one person doing something rude. Apples and oranges. Your solution is not useful at all for internal recruiters - you just don't develop relationships with them, because the nature of their job is a one shot thing with each candidate. As for agencies and external recruiters, I should not have to develop a collegial relationship with them to get them to act with basic politeness. That's ridiculous. If they reach out to me to try to make money by placing me into a position, they should behave politely. If they don't, there's no reason they shouldn't be shamed, so that people can work with other recruiters who do behave properly.

GeeRep 6y ago

Thank you for the comments. 1) There's a section for management feedback. That part doesn't go anywhere as of right now, it's just saved. The thought is it could be batched and eventually shared with companies' HR leadership if there are enough. 2) When there's a critical mass of users of the site and multiple messages being sent to folks at the same companies, the plan is to put together a "naughty list" to display. By company, not individual. Also a lot of folks are using it right now to just mess around, so there's a good bit of manual data cleaning to do first!

aaron695 6y ago

> Public shaming Good to see lynching is still in style. Not even a pretence of allowing for good behaviour and rewarding that. It's of course impossible to tell when people are lying since people don't apply for enough jobs to get a reputation that accounts in yelp etc get. All of which are still gamed anyway. Lynchings after WW2 below - Perhaps they deserved it, and after so many dead what does it matter, but I intuitively feel like lynchings are bad and the way OPs web site is trying to solve the problem is far better. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/french-female-collaborator-punished-head-shaved-publicly-mark-1944/ https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/french-female-collaborator-...

allarm 6y ago
Thing is the OPs site does not solve any problem, so it’s not a good alternative. Also even shaming people is tempting, I don’t think it’s a good solution either. The okayish solution is to blame companies and there’s already a lot of resources that allow that.