5 ms·

Anecdotal, I know, but I was ghosted by Google back in 2004-2005 or thereabouts. Back and forth with a recruiter, who promised me that she would book phone scr

Anecdotal, I know, but I was ghosted by Google back in 2004-2005 or thereabouts. Back and forth with a recruiter, who promised me that she would book phone screens. Then heard nothing. Pinged her repeatedly. Nothing. A few years later got another Google recruiter after me. Ended up getting hired in 2008. Looked up the previous recruiter. Her last day at the company was the day she promised she would book phone screens, or the day after (can't remember exactly, this is quite a few years ago). I can only assume she was suddenly let go. Ever since, I keep wondering how many ghostings happen because the person holding the strings disappears for some reason, and there's a lack of system to follow up on that.

com2kid 2mo ago
> Ever since, I keep wondering how many ghostings happen because the person holding the strings disappears for some reason, and there's a lack of system to follow up on that. This has happened to be more than once. At various points in time Microsoft has used external vendors for its recruiting/hiring pipeline (which, IMHO, is a bad idea, you want people with a vested interest in the company doing all of the recruiting and hiring...). So yeah, working with a recruiter, wait awhile, nothing, message "oh sorry she left, but the company wants to go forward." Ugh. It wasn't any better when I was a hiring manager at Microsoft trying to hire people. :( Flip side of this is I stopped giving honest feedback after I interviewed a candidate who, on paper, was a stretch for the role. They generally interviewed well but had obvious gaps in their knowledge from being self taught. At the end of the interview they asked me if I had any recommendations for what they could study up on, I emailed some suggested reading (popular tech blogs, probably something by Petzold as well) and got an angry letter back accusing me of being sexist and some other stuff.
- jimnotgym 2mo ago
  >which, IMHO, is a bad idea, you want people with a vested interest in the company doing all of the recruiting and hiring For engineers at a large software company perhaps. But if you were a distribution company that hires one developer per year, then it is hard to maintain the network required to get good candidates
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
minimaxir 2mo ago
I once had an interview loop where after the final round I didn't hear back from the recruiter point-of-contact for awhile. After 1.5 weeks, I sent an email following up: the recruiter replied "I was on vacation dammit, btw you didn't get the job."
- ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
  I have participated in at least 3 rounds of vocational rehabilitation, and one of the major takeaways was writing thank-you notes after any interview. A note could be a card or an email, but a thank-you note simply expresses gratitude for the interviewer’s time and attention. And moreover, a followup will keep your name in their mind, for better or worse. Following up after the interview series may have been the trick to landing my “pandemic job” in May 2020. I phoned or emailed the recruiter, just to thank her, just to say hello, and you know what? She said “yeah actually we were gonna call you with a job offer” and the rest is history. So, before you complain that someone ghosted you, please consider who’s ghosting whom!
  - slowerturnip 2mo ago
    I hear this advice given quite a bit, but another perspective: I have never been pleased to receive a thank you email from a candidate. I do not want to receive something in my inbox that does not require me to act. It's a micro-annoyance, and if it's a bad day, I might have grumpy thoughts about the candidate being a brownnoser. Show up to the interview clothed, be pleasant and polite, show off your game, and leave it at that.
    - atomicnumber3 2mo ago
      I wouldn't want to work for or with someone who can't even stand a thank you note.
    - kulahan 2mo ago
      Imagine being a recruiter, seeing someone genuinely interested in the position (or at least willing to put in the effort to make it seem that way), and getting annoyed rather than hyped. You in the wrong line of work, brother.
andyjohnson0 2mo ago
A few years ago I was "between roles" and applied for a developer position at Roku. For a short time they seemed moderately interested, and I exchanged a few emails with a senior in-house recruiter. And then they went completely quiet - no response to my follow-up emails. So I just put it behine me and got on with looking for a job. Just over a year later I received an email from another in-house recruiter at Roku, thanking me for my application but regretting that they wouldn't be going forward with it (or some such corporate-speak). Which was kind of surprising. I did a few searches and discovered that the date they went quiet roughly coincided with a sizeable round of redundancies. I also looked up the new recruiter and found that they were new to the company and quite junior. So, presumably, their first task had been to clear-up the backlog. That year was by far the longest I've ever waited for a response to a job application.
- SoftTalker 2mo ago
  And they didn't address the delay at all in their response to you?
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - andyjohnson0 2mo ago
    Nope
- indrora 2mo ago
  I have a leaderboard of some of the longest turn-around times from initial contact to rejection. Thus far the winners (if you can call them that) have been: Docusign (4 YEARS); Nintendo (34 months); Google (30 months); Starbucks (22 months); Netflix (18 months); Astral (13 months); Snowflake (8 months) But I also have a short list of shortest turn-around times. I say this because some of them are truly insane: GitHub (3 hours); Valve (4 hours, but it was a real human with actual comments); Lockheed martin (2 hours); UserTesting (1 hour); Mozilla (30 minutes); Cloudflare (-2 minutes); Matterport (0 minutes) The -2 minutes you see there is one of the most insane things I've ever experienced: As I'm filling in the application, I get an email simultaneously thanking me for going throug the recruitment process but saying they "reviewed my application" (that hadn't even been fully submitted yet) and that I wasn't a good fit for the role. Matterport wins the award for "well at least they're not bullshitting" -- as soon as I had submitted the application, I didn't even get an email saying thank you, just a straight up dialog box saying "You won't be considered for this position." My worst experience was with Microsoft. Somewhere, their system is designed such that if you ever fall out of the standard process, you're "rejected" -- I have more rejection emails for a position I ended up getting (which got canned within the year, ironically enough) than any other kind of email, including daily emails with the recruiter and hiring manager. I got an email telling me "sorry no thanks" *after* I had already signed the paperwork.
SecondHandTofu 2mo ago
This happened at my old company. My manager went away for a holiday and never came back. We never found out why, but it was a Finance company so people suddenly not coming in the next day was a thing. This completely broke the interview pipeline, and in the disorder no one realised. The company got some bad reviews in that period for just stopping a bunch of processes mid-way.
- nabbed 2mo ago
  >it was a Finance company so people suddenly not coming in the next day was a thing. Oh, I'd love to know why this is a thing. I did work for a mutual fund company for 18 months, one of those companies where the title Vice President simply meant nothing more than "employee" (although it was fun showing my business card to my friends and family, who were impressed by the title even though it had no meaning), but I didn't notice anything special about employee retention, probably because I was in a tech team.
fenykep 2mo ago
To be fair if employees are being fired that abruptly with so little consideration to operational continuity it might be a worse red flag than a recruiter ghosting you.
- colordrops 2mo ago
  [flagged]
brandall10 2mo ago
Had this happen at the beginning of the pandemic. Did well on the full loop. The Friday of that week the recruiter reaches out to get references. A week goes by, I hear nothing. I contact one of my references, they heard nothing. A month later another recruiter from the company reaches out and explains the recruiter I was talking to was let go that day. Told me in the system that I was approved to hire, but unfortunately along with the layoff came a 6 month hiring freeze for engineering.
- sccvcxv 2mo ago
  It should be illegal to ask for references - the purpose of the interview is to understand your capabilities and abilities. If they couldn't suss all about you in that process then they have a shitty interview process.
  - BigTTYGothGF 2mo ago
    If you can't get three people to vouch for you, honestly or otherwise, then that's a pretty big red flag.
    - ipaddr 2mo ago
      It's usually last manager and co-workers where the company has a policy of not allowing references. Plus who wants to bother other people asking for a reference after you've been working for 25 years.
      - chrysoprace 2mo ago
        I have never heard of not allowing references. Is that a US thing? While I don't love providing references, given they are such a standard part of the employment process (at least here in Australia), I can't see how a company could disallow providing character references. That would be a big red flag if I discovered that after starting to work somewhere.
        2mo ago
wombat-man 2mo ago
what's weird about that though is they must have had some system to track candidates that would have been turned over to somebody.
smnscu 2mo ago
I am building an interviewing and hiring platform (https://coderba.se/ https://coderba.se/) but I've also hired/interviewed and shaped hiring processes at several companies before. It's ridiculous how easy it is to account for such trivial edge cases, yet most people just... dont. A big part of it is that, in spite of frequent chest beating about how "hiring is [one of] the most important thing[s] we do", the actual process is half-assed at best in most places, an effect particularly amplified by the current massive oversupply of talent.
- mlinhares 2mo ago
  The chance of a single hire being a make it or break it for the the business is pretty much null, so a single recruiter not having continuity in the processes they were doing once they get fired isn't really something to optimize for.
laweijfmvo 2mo ago
I’m on google’s list of special people who qualify for an interview whenever I’m ready, no screen required. I think most “big tech” employees are. I get an email every 6 months or so from a new recruiter letting me know they took over from the previous one, who’s no longer with the company.
- toast0 2mo ago
  I was on that list for a while, but thankfully it was because of someone else with my name, and one time they dropped a hint about my work with compilers at Microsoft, and I asked around and figured out actually they didn't really want me, they just don't understand names aren't unique.
herval 2mo ago
I interviewed at Linkedin in 2020 or so - interview went great, team fit was great, all the interviews were great, the recruiter told me he was going to prepare an offer... then I never heard from them again. 4 years later, a recruiter messaged me saying that they found my name as a potential candidate and knew that I declined the offer, back in 2020, so they wanted to know if I wanted to re-interview. I told the recruiter I never rejected anything. She looked into it and apparently it was your exact same situation: recruiter left that day, a bunch of candidates got marked as "declined" shortly after.
aaron695 2mo ago
[dead]
anyfoo 2mo ago
> Her last day at the company was the day she promised she would book phone screens And the emails you sent didn't bounce after that?
Spooky23 2mo ago
I had a similar experience. In my case, they gave me a few dates to fly out and do some sort of final boss talent show interview. Then… nothing. I got the sense it was some internal political drama but maybe the recruiter disappeared… that honestly didn’t occur to me, and up until that point it was a pretty awesome and interesting process.
hiddencost 2mo ago
Have you ever done the math on how much that cost you? I'm guessing at least $20M?

com2kid 2mo ago

> Ever since, I keep wondering how many ghostings happen because the person holding the strings disappears for some reason, and there's a lack of system to follow up on that. This has happened to be more than once. At various points in time Microsoft has used external vendors for its recruiting/hiring pipeline (which, IMHO, is a bad idea, you want people with a vested interest in the company doing all of the recruiting and hiring...). So yeah, working with a recruiter, wait awhile, nothing, message "oh sorry she left, but the company wants to go forward." Ugh. It wasn't any better when I was a hiring manager at Microsoft trying to hire people. :( Flip side of this is I stopped giving honest feedback after I interviewed a candidate who, on paper, was a stretch for the role. They generally interviewed well but had obvious gaps in their knowledge from being self taught. At the end of the interview they asked me if I had any recommendations for what they could study up on, I emailed some suggested reading (popular tech blogs, probably something by Petzold as well) and got an angry letter back accusing me of being sexist and some other stuff.

jimnotgym 2mo ago
>which, IMHO, is a bad idea, you want people with a vested interest in the company doing all of the recruiting and hiring For engineers at a large software company perhaps. But if you were a distribution company that hires one developer per year, then it is hard to maintain the network required to get good candidates

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

minimaxir 2mo ago

I once had an interview loop where after the final round I didn't hear back from the recruiter point-of-contact for awhile. After 1.5 weeks, I sent an email following up: the recruiter replied "I was on vacation dammit, btw you didn't get the job."

ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
I have participated in at least 3 rounds of vocational rehabilitation, and one of the major takeaways was writing thank-you notes after any interview. A note could be a card or an email, but a thank-you note simply expresses gratitude for the interviewer’s time and attention. And moreover, a followup will keep your name in their mind, for better or worse. Following up after the interview series may have been the trick to landing my “pandemic job” in May 2020. I phoned or emailed the recruiter, just to thank her, just to say hello, and you know what? She said “yeah actually we were gonna call you with a job offer” and the rest is history. So, before you complain that someone ghosted you, please consider who’s ghosting whom!
- slowerturnip 2mo ago
  I hear this advice given quite a bit, but another perspective: I have never been pleased to receive a thank you email from a candidate. I do not want to receive something in my inbox that does not require me to act. It's a micro-annoyance, and if it's a bad day, I might have grumpy thoughts about the candidate being a brownnoser. Show up to the interview clothed, be pleasant and polite, show off your game, and leave it at that.
  - atomicnumber3 2mo ago
    I wouldn't want to work for or with someone who can't even stand a thank you note.
  - kulahan 2mo ago
    Imagine being a recruiter, seeing someone genuinely interested in the position (or at least willing to put in the effort to make it seem that way), and getting annoyed rather than hyped. You in the wrong line of work, brother.

andyjohnson0 2mo ago

A few years ago I was "between roles" and applied for a developer position at Roku. For a short time they seemed moderately interested, and I exchanged a few emails with a senior in-house recruiter. And then they went completely quiet - no response to my follow-up emails. So I just put it behine me and got on with looking for a job. Just over a year later I received an email from another in-house recruiter at Roku, thanking me for my application but regretting that they wouldn't be going forward with it (or some such corporate-speak). Which was kind of surprising. I did a few searches and discovered that the date they went quiet roughly coincided with a sizeable round of redundancies. I also looked up the new recruiter and found that they were new to the company and quite junior. So, presumably, their first task had been to clear-up the backlog. That year was by far the longest I've ever waited for a response to a job application.

SoftTalker 2mo ago
And they didn't address the delay at all in their response to you?
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- andyjohnson0 2mo ago
  Nope
indrora 2mo ago
I have a leaderboard of some of the longest turn-around times from initial contact to rejection. Thus far the winners (if you can call them that) have been: Docusign (4 YEARS); Nintendo (34 months); Google (30 months); Starbucks (22 months); Netflix (18 months); Astral (13 months); Snowflake (8 months) But I also have a short list of shortest turn-around times. I say this because some of them are truly insane: GitHub (3 hours); Valve (4 hours, but it was a real human with actual comments); Lockheed martin (2 hours); UserTesting (1 hour); Mozilla (30 minutes); Cloudflare (-2 minutes); Matterport (0 minutes) The -2 minutes you see there is one of the most insane things I've ever experienced: As I'm filling in the application, I get an email simultaneously thanking me for going throug the recruitment process but saying they "reviewed my application" (that hadn't even been fully submitted yet) and that I wasn't a good fit for the role. Matterport wins the award for "well at least they're not bullshitting" -- as soon as I had submitted the application, I didn't even get an email saying thank you, just a straight up dialog box saying "You won't be considered for this position." My worst experience was with Microsoft. Somewhere, their system is designed such that if you ever fall out of the standard process, you're "rejected" -- I have more rejection emails for a position I ended up getting (which got canned within the year, ironically enough) than any other kind of email, including daily emails with the recruiter and hiring manager. I got an email telling me "sorry no thanks" *after* I had already signed the paperwork.

SecondHandTofu 2mo ago

This happened at my old company. My manager went away for a holiday and never came back. We never found out why, but it was a Finance company so people suddenly not coming in the next day was a thing. This completely broke the interview pipeline, and in the disorder no one realised. The company got some bad reviews in that period for just stopping a bunch of processes mid-way.

nabbed 2mo ago
>it was a Finance company so people suddenly not coming in the next day was a thing. Oh, I'd love to know why this is a thing. I did work for a mutual fund company for 18 months, one of those companies where the title Vice President simply meant nothing more than "employee" (although it was fun showing my business card to my friends and family, who were impressed by the title even though it had no meaning), but I didn't notice anything special about employee retention, probably because I was in a tech team.

fenykep 2mo ago

To be fair if employees are being fired that abruptly with so little consideration to operational continuity it might be a worse red flag than a recruiter ghosting you.

colordrops 2mo ago
[flagged]

brandall10 2mo ago

Had this happen at the beginning of the pandemic. Did well on the full loop. The Friday of that week the recruiter reaches out to get references. A week goes by, I hear nothing. I contact one of my references, they heard nothing. A month later another recruiter from the company reaches out and explains the recruiter I was talking to was let go that day. Told me in the system that I was approved to hire, but unfortunately along with the layoff came a 6 month hiring freeze for engineering.

sccvcxv 2mo ago
It should be illegal to ask for references - the purpose of the interview is to understand your capabilities and abilities. If they couldn't suss all about you in that process then they have a shitty interview process.
- BigTTYGothGF 2mo ago
  If you can't get three people to vouch for you, honestly or otherwise, then that's a pretty big red flag.
  - ipaddr 2mo ago
    It's usually last manager and co-workers where the company has a policy of not allowing references. Plus who wants to bother other people asking for a reference after you've been working for 25 years.
    - chrysoprace 2mo ago
      I have never heard of not allowing references. Is that a US thing? While I don't love providing references, given they are such a standard part of the employment process (at least here in Australia), I can't see how a company could disallow providing character references. That would be a big red flag if I discovered that after starting to work somewhere.
      - 2mo ago

wombat-man 2mo ago

what's weird about that though is they must have had some system to track candidates that would have been turned over to somebody.

smnscu 2mo ago

I am building an interviewing and hiring platform (https://coderba.se/ https://coderba.se/) but I've also hired/interviewed and shaped hiring processes at several companies before. It's ridiculous how easy it is to account for such trivial edge cases, yet most people just... dont. A big part of it is that, in spite of frequent chest beating about how "hiring is [one of] the most important thing[s] we do", the actual process is half-assed at best in most places, an effect particularly amplified by the current massive oversupply of talent.

mlinhares 2mo ago
The chance of a single hire being a make it or break it for the the business is pretty much null, so a single recruiter not having continuity in the processes they were doing once they get fired isn't really something to optimize for.

laweijfmvo 2mo ago

I’m on google’s list of special people who qualify for an interview whenever I’m ready, no screen required. I think most “big tech” employees are. I get an email every 6 months or so from a new recruiter letting me know they took over from the previous one, who’s no longer with the company.

toast0 2mo ago
I was on that list for a while, but thankfully it was because of someone else with my name, and one time they dropped a hint about my work with compilers at Microsoft, and I asked around and figured out actually they didn't really want me, they just don't understand names aren't unique.

herval 2mo ago

I interviewed at Linkedin in 2020 or so - interview went great, team fit was great, all the interviews were great, the recruiter told me he was going to prepare an offer... then I never heard from them again. 4 years later, a recruiter messaged me saying that they found my name as a potential candidate and knew that I declined the offer, back in 2020, so they wanted to know if I wanted to re-interview. I told the recruiter I never rejected anything. She looked into it and apparently it was your exact same situation: recruiter left that day, a bunch of candidates got marked as "declined" shortly after.

aaron695 2mo ago

[dead]

anyfoo 2mo ago

> Her last day at the company was the day she promised she would book phone screens And the emails you sent didn't bounce after that?

Spooky23 2mo ago

I had a similar experience. In my case, they gave me a few dates to fly out and do some sort of final boss talent show interview. Then… nothing. I got the sense it was some internal political drama but maybe the recruiter disappeared… that honestly didn’t occur to me, and up until that point it was a pretty awesome and interesting process.

hiddencost 2mo ago

Have you ever done the math on how much that cost you? I'm guessing at least $20M?