[cco]

What I've never really understood is that though recruiters (external but also in-house) are typically paid on hiring candidates, much like sales people.

And in that paradigm, why is ghosting so common? As a recruiter, a lot of your value is your professional network that you can pull from to place candidates. Why would you ever ghost people that, while not a good fit for this role, could be a good fit for a different role in the future?

Even as someone not in recruiting, I've made several connections with folks in the interviewing process (both as interviewer and interviewee) that have led to either new business deals or job placement later on.

Just never really made sense to me, interviewing is "free" networking. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[RajT88]

In-house recruiters I have much better experiences with. Recruiters working for staffing/headhunting firms in my experience tend to:

1. Be focused on high volume, hence the ghosting. They save time by ghosting you and spend that time on candidates which are sure bets.

2. They ask to be friends on LinkedIn up front (probably even if they know they are going to ghost you). This is to take advantage of your network. They get something out of the interaction; you get nothing.

3. They sometimes line you up for interviews which you aren't a good fit for. What in the actual fuck.

I don't friend recruiters from anything but the tech companies hiring. At my career stage, I won't even talk to recruiters which aren't working directly for the company doing the hiring. I would happily go back to this if I was at the phase of "I need a job; any job for now".

The icky feelings I've gotten from recruiters over the years is akin to the icky feelings I've gotten from car salesmen and real estate agents.

As I am writing this now, I am reminded of some of the headhunting/staffing firms I've talked to over the years. I just removed all of those recruiters from my network.

[foobiekr]

Much like sales the professionals establish a pretty rigorous funnel and pay no attention to anyone who looks like they will fall out of the funnel. They optimize for offer and if they sense the candidate won’t get there they are better off trying to find one who will.

Also, honestly, a lot of recruiters suck. They are often hired with no qualifications and really not even any serious education. It is routine to hire people who formerly worked in retail or whatever for these jobs so on average they are themselves fodder for the process and often don’t last long.

[skeeter2020]

recruiters are a lot like real estate agents - there's very little barrier to entry or exit, so the good ones do well in both hot and cold markets, while the shitty ones exit when times get tough and compete like crazy for limited supply when they are good. The former builds value in their network and will likely never ghost you; you'll earn them several commissions over a career. The bad ones get fired or voluntarily leave so the network has no value. I suspect we're seeing an uptick in ghosting right now because:

1. There are a lot more newer people in tech today who are now going through their first downturn and involuntarily looking for a job. As a stereotype these people are far more public on the interwebs and sharing their experiences.

2. We're still in the downward trajectory so the crappy recruiters haven't been purged and companies don't have to compete on quality of service to get limited talent... yet. Wait until the next upswing - I'd bet far less people got ghosted on job applications 2-3 years ago.