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- Hacker News
- Ghosting is rude. Companies should at least politely reject you.
Chances are if they ghosted you, you didn't do as well as you think. You nailed a tech interview, but you only nailed part 1 of 3 and the interviewer didn't have the heart to tell you there was 2 other questions.
It happens to everyone. We've all done these interviews with nice candidates that just aren't right for that job. Don't worry! You'll find the job that works for you.
by blobbers - Sadly, not a new phenomenon. It does seem to have gotten a lot worse.
One time, way back in ~2012, I did an all-day onsite interview with several people, lunch with the team, and everything. A full 8-hour gauntlet, and they ghosted me after it.
by kilroy123 - Last year I interviewed with Epic Games and I didn't get the job but they arranged a meeting to let me down easily, encourage me to apply for other positions. I really appreciated that!by djmips
- I was once ghosted mid interview day. They left me in conference room and completely forgot. I was going to walk out after 30 minutes but I just wanted to see how long I could stay there. It took them five hours. And this was in a “highly secure” building so not sure how they invite someone to interview and let them just hangout inside the building for five hours.by lvl155
- Did you get an offer????by stephenhuey
- > It took them five hours.
Presumably the Yucca plant in the corner put on a spurt of growth after your visit?
by GJim - There were two companies posting on hn some time ago that I suspect was just gathering training data (asking for a code challenge or to answer 2 questions about 60 seconds long answering some bs). I feel like we should denounce those as well. Posting jobs that don't actually exists. Specially those that post month after month.by atum47
- Let's take a moment to talk about Wellfound, formerly AngelList.
I think Wellfound (f/k/a AngelList) is doing something similar.
The jobs advertised on there are real...
I'd been on the job market four months. Every day I did the rounds: Levels, Wellfound, YC/jobs, Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn.
It is what it is, as a crappy jobs market.
Wellfound? I didn't ever hear from anything from their job ads.I'm pretty certain that whatever Wellfound/AngelList was, it has become a company that just markets their resume writing services, resume review services, all sorts of other services that draw in your money somehow.
Why do I say that?
120+ applications on Wellfound since then. Crickets. Absolutely nothing.
One day I got an email, "Your profile has been viewed!". Weird, never seen an email like that from Wellfound. Indeed, "You have 1 profile view in the last 90 days".
Huh. 120+ applications, 120+ times me answering filling out Wellfound's content questions on "why you would be a good fit for this role", "tell us about x and y and z", no interviews, no contact, only ONE company has ever even viewed my profile (and for what it's worth, it's not a company that has any positions open).
Well, maybe my answers suck, you say. Maybe my resume isn't as impressive as I think it is.
But similar answers and the same resume get me fairly steady hits on every other site I mentioned, I've got to multiple final rounds, I've been explicitly told I was hirable, I was just the number two, I was "in the top three".
And to be clear, many of the companies I see on WF are advertising on other sites too.
My suspicion? WF DOES take job listings, but they also harvest them from other sites - the job is real, but there's no-one from the employer reviewing the applications to their "phantom" job at Wellfound... and meanwhile all people like me are doing is providing content for WF to harvest and train models for their real business model: AI-driven resume writing and review service and other products.
My AI video interview? Viewed... zero times.
Huh.
by FireBeyond - Based on the strange emoji use in place of some buttons, I'm guessing this is vibe coded- and a lot of this is really nice looking front end - great color, topography, border styles... Would be interested to know how much intervention there was or if this is where we areby jasonjmcghee
- I recently vibe-coded an app in Codex and it has nearly the exact same style.by Yhippa
- The font is a dead giveaway
The one used in "A public record of professional silence." specifically
by efilife - Is https://didtheyghostyou.com/companies/robert-half an artifact of vibe coding you think? Robert Half is apparently an HR consulting firm but in TFA it links to a very sus `https://www.google.com/aclk`. What an oversight given the assurances that submissions are reviewed and moderated. Or is Google outsourcing HiRing to Robert Half now?
- Earlier this year I was interviewing at Figma. My interview was at 3:00.
I signed the required NDA.
At 3:00:55 I received an email saying thanks for your time but you're not being considered anymore.
I emailed the recruiter and heard nothing back.
---
Jerred,
Thank you for your interest in Figma! We know that applying for jobs takes time, and we appreciate your interest in joining our team. After reviewing your application for Software Engineer, Full Stack, we've decided not to move forward with your candidacy at this time.
Your resume is in our system for future opportunities, and we hope you'll keep an eye on our careers page. Best of luck with your job search!
Best, Figma Recruiting
---
Jerred Shepherd's interview with Figma!
M_____ F_____ canceled this event.
- Had this happen to me several times. Recruiter reaches out super excited they found you, tells you you're the next best thing since sliced bread, asks you for availability and then dies.by pluc
- I've never actually been ghosted but in my early 20s, I had applied to a company doing something to do with processing geographic data from for NASA as a contractor. It sounded really cool and I heard about it from a guy who worked there who was the brother of an acquaintance and reached out to me to ask if I was interested. We went out to lunch, talked it over, and then followed up by email, and he put me in touch with their HR department. They asked my availability over the next couple weeks for an interview and I gave it to them, and they never responded. I followed up and got nothing. Then about a month later, they emailed me apologizing and explaining that they had just been so busy. I wrote back and again got nothing in return. This happened over and over for about 6 months. They'd email apologizing, I'd respond, and they'd ignore me. Then there was another six month pause before I got one last big apology and request for availability which I never responded to. In hindsight, I probably should have politely told them I was no longer interested after the first gap but I was young and really wanted to say I did work for NASA.
Anyway, I never attributed any kind of malice to it, just poor management and poor candidate handling. I suspect that's often the case, especially with smaller start ups with likely overwhelmed employees wearing many hats. If anything, it's good signal that it's maybe not a great place to work. Imagine how they treat the people who work there if that's how they treat candidates.
by drfuzzy89 - During the pandemic, my Amazon recruiter became sort of a friend. We communicated maybe over a period of a month, I joined multiple Amazon online panels and got to meet some employees. Everything was going well until it stopped abruptly.
Covid was going full force, so I assumed something happened to her, especially since she was older. Emails and text went unanswered. I was worried... Until I checked LinkedIn and saw that she was posting daily.
Full story: https://idiallo.com/blog/dont-ghost-me
by firefoxd - Recruiters are never your friend. Ever.by sirsinsalot
- Ghosted by Apple here. Devops or SRE job for services teams if I'm remembering right. Did a months worth of rounds. Was told the offer letter would be coming within the next week. Turned down other companies on the gamble that it was actually coming. Never came. Pinged recruiter and finally after a month was told they stopped hiring and would reach back out in a few months when it started back. Never happened. That was 3 years ago. It was character building to say the least.by chrismarlow9
- They responded as soon as you reached out. I don't think that counts as ghostingby majani
- You can just take the other offer while you wait and then quit when the one you really want comes in.by paulcole
- Sorry you went through that. I've been on the other side of it. I had interviewed a bunch of people, found a good candidate, had an offer ready to go. It was pulled at the last second by higher ups who decided they needed the headcount more than my department did. It sucks for everybody.by heddhunter
- I got ghosted by Apple after traveling to Cupertino to do some phone interviews from an Apple conf room. I'm pretty sure I've been blacklisted there for reasons unknown. Their recruiters reach out from time to time and after a couple messages back and forth, they too ghost. I've even been referred by friends which results in a conversation with a recruiter that ghosts me shortly after.
I'm pretty good at what I do and I'm not weird. All the conversations seemed to go well so I have no idea what happened.
by uberduper - I had a Meta recruiter talking to me a while back (maybe 5 years) and she ghosted me. Found her obituary online a couple weeks later. Recently, had another Meta recruiter ghost me but that’s because of the Meta layoff round robin. Probably for the better since FRL has more or less been gutted due to AI focus.by syntaxing
- I had an interview and no response. The interviewer got into a horrible car accident. Bad stuff happens.by zippyman55
- The most literal ghosting possible.by wewewedxfgdf
- 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.
by arcade79 - 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.
by Spooky23 - I am building an interviewing and hiring platform (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.by smnscu
- 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."by minimaxir
- 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.