[awillen]

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.

[kodah]

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.

[awillen]

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.

[kodah]

> Here, we're presented with a behavior by recruiters that is very rude, and on top of that, incredibly easy to solve

I was responding to someone suggesting naming and shaming individuals.

> 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

Get to know some recruiters. There's one that replied on here. They too work within a system designed by someone external to them that has constraints, quotas, and asymmetrical input/output.

> 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

I have relationships with both. All it means is I stay top of mind and when they hit me up it's for relevant jobs.

[awillen]

My comments were about naming and shaming individuals. Ghosting is a behavior of individuals that is very rude of those individuals and very easy to solve by those individuals (all it takes is <30 seconds to send an email).

I know plenty of recruiters. The fact that they work within a system isn't relevant. Ghosting is not a complex issue that requires a post-mortem. It's not sending a single, short email. Quotas, constraints, and everything else that you've mentioned are totally irrelevant.

[kodah]

That's crazy. This behavior will ultimately end up propagating harassment and abuse. It seems like as long as people feel righteous they think that's okay. To me, it's answering a problem with an obvious problem.

[awillen]

No, it's crazy to say that a very specific behavior in response to a very particular situation will just end up harassment and abuse. If that logic were true, then the fact that sites like Yelp exist would've led to us burning the world down.

Creating public, negative consequences for people isn't inherently bad. Some kinds of it are, but it's not reasonable to say that in any form it will lead to abuse.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Ghosting people is bad form, too.

So why is it wrong for recruiters to do something that's bad form, but not for someone else to do something that's bad form?

[colejohnson66]

Id say because the recruiter is in a higher position of power. The have full veto power over hundreds of people while you don’t.

[kodah]

Given the number of recruiters I have met that have to deal with candidates that are fielding multiple offers, pinning offers against each other, or doing ghosting of their own I doubt this is true.

[nwsm]

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]

I've seen this done with managers at my company, not specifically recruiters.

[bonestamp2]

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]

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]

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]

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]

It's not a review though, it's a "did they ghost you" boolean.

[colejohnson66]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[GeeRep]

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]

> 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-...

[allarm]

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.