Is "Ghosting" becoming the new standard in hiring?
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"I’ve been talking to so many applicants lately who say they never hear back—not even an automated rejection. It feels like a black box.
What’s the longest you’ve waited for a response? And does a lack of reply change how you view that company or university?"
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Raycast
@chrismessina: You’re spot on, Chris—it’s definitely an old scar. But after watching my friends struggle through recent layoffs, 'just the way it is' didn't feel like a good enough answer anymore.
Most trackers out there are just 'productivity tools'—they're great for organizing links, but they don't tell you if you’re wasting your time. I haven't seen a truly community-driven approach that 'tags' ghosting behavior in real-time.
We built this to move from a 'black box' to a 'gray box.' If an applicant knows a company has a 90% ghosting rate, they can spend their energy elsewhere. It’s about moving the needle from just tracking to actual accountability.
I'm curious—since this has been broken for so long, have you ever seen this kind of transparency layer actually work? We're trying to make it so people can finally stop guessing and start applying where they actually have a shot.
Raycast
@howtoabroad I mean, I guess you can crowd-source this information, but I'm not sure it's a good signal.
If I see that a company ghosts 90% of the time, should I not apply there? If I need a job, it's like dating: a numbers game.
If most companies ghost, and I stop applying to them because of that, that just means I've narrowed my window of effort.
I'm not sure if hiring is broken, or that education isn't preparing people with the level of depth, skills, and ingenuity that's necessary to thrive in a more competitive and fast-moving environment.
@chrismessina When you crowdsource data, you see exactly what’s happening on the ground in real-time. It allows candidates to decide for themselves whether to apply with much more realistic expectations, as they can see a company's actual behavior over the last 2–3 months.
Our system also weighs feedback based on profile matching to filter out the noise. If a candidate isn’t a fit, a rejection is expected, so their feedback carries less weight. However, when you see highly qualified candidates—say, senior developers with the exact tech stack required—getting rejected without an interview, a pattern emerges. You can tell if a company is deliberately ignoring talent or just ghosting.
The reality is that many companies use job postings for alternative motives. Some just want to harvest candidate data, while others are essentially "hiring" just to get free feedback on their products or find initial users. We never tell people not to apply, but we do suggest they don’t sink too much time into these specific applications.
Ultimately, it depends on the volume of people tracking the job. It’s like Product Hunt: if a product isn’t topping the weekly launch, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad product. It might just mean people haven’t discovered it yet. Then again, it could also just be a bad product. Crowdsourcing is what helps us distinguish between the two.