I've applied to Apple before and never received a response. Same for Goog. But even worse, I did a 5-hour on-site with Amazon and never heard back from anyone lol. Seems like standard practice for big corps these days.
A cold resume going into a black hole is unfortunately fairly common. Not hearing anything after an on-site is definitely not normal. Whoever was the Amazon recruiter you were working with definitely dropped the ball.
Definitely dropped the ball. It may seem like a small thing to that recruiter, but this can affect their reputation among talent pool. It happened to me with Microsoft back in the 90s (I was young, in my 20s). I spent a lot of time preparing an application package and solid interviews but then they just went silent. Never heard back. Calls were not returned.
Fast forward to the 2000s (some more years under my belt) Microsoft was actively trying to hire me. But the book was closed on ever working there. I let them know why politely and took a position elsewhere.
Its just lazy to not update candidates. And if the individual HR person cannot, an automated message would be better than nothing. This is just common decency, not rocket science.
I'll second this. When the recruiters drop the ball like this, I discount the entire company. It's probably unfair, especially for a big company, but it's natural.
Normally I'd agree with "definitely not normal", but that was also my experience at Amazon less than a year ago.
4 hour onsite, no message afterwards. That was not the only procedural mess with the interview, either. No biggie, though, because the interview convinced me that I didn't want the job.
Amazon recruiters are a mixed bag, but the nice thing is you can always get another one easily. I’ve been ghosted by lots of recruiters and companies during my job search, even after multiple in-person interviews where I thought I almost had the job.
Apple is a really big place, so there is a lot of variability. On top of that, there is little internal pressure to clean out postings that are essentially stale (no longer have a budget behind them). So you sort of have to get lucky and apply for one that is active.
The other way to find the active ones is to find the recruiters (internal or external) that are posting on non-Apple sites. These are generally active posts, but not all active posts go through them.
And to paraphrase a developer who was talking about another Apple Developer Relations channel, "Great! Another channel for Apple to ignore us on!" (internally I can say that there is a lot of listening, just not a lot of reacting).