[wps]

In the same way that credit card companies are required to tell you the exact reasons your score has changed, companies should be required to give at least any sort of notice of rejection. Something as simple as: we have proceeded with another candidate (if and only if the role was actually filled). I know this opens up a lot of questions about enforcement and employer discrimination, but something has to be done.

[Aurornis]

Every employer would send "We have decided not to continue with your application" once your entry in the database reaches the legally-mandated timeout period.

The part you wouldn't like is the unintended consequences: Every company would be forced to use an ATS to manage applicants, and all hiring would have to be pushed through the ATS. The ATS would have some default timeout where candidates who aren't hired get the e-mail to comply with the law. Nothing is gained because you're not getting real information, but now every company must force you to apply through an ATS portal to make sure every e-mail receives that alert.

I know it's frustrating, but stacking laws like this doesn't get useful information out of companies but it does force the application process to revolve around demonstrating compliance with the regulations.

[optionalsquid]

> Every employer would send "We have decided not to continue with your application".

That would still be a big improvement over just getting ghosted

[godwinson__4-8]

Doubtful you would still feel that way if it became the legally mandated norm. The reason ghosting is offensive is it feels so disrespectful and impersonal. How is some bland automated message triggered by a cron job any better? The automated message doesn't respect or care about you, no person would have put any thought into it. It would be entirely automated.

If that makes you feel better it is suggestive of a deeper problem. Getting ghosted is part of life. At least its an authentic representation that you aren't worth someone's time. It seems more spontaneous, less premeditated. That's life. You just have to learn to get over it.

[4MOAisgoodenuf]

The primary negative aspect of Ghost jobs (from the perspective of job applicants) is not simply that it "feels bad" but that it floods the usual channels of seeking work with garbage data.

Assuming a world where there is a set of employers that would actually like to hire someone and a set of workers who are desiring employment, the set of listings that are not seeking to hire (or are only floating a job listing in perpetuity on the off-chance that some overqualified sap will take up their offer for less than they would expect in the market) encourage bad behavior from the other two parties.

It becomes substantially more difficult to parse through a pile of job listings to find what is a real (or realistic) listing and encourage the "shotgun approach" for applicants.

The flood of competing fake listings and the resultant tidal wave of shotgunned-resumes requires employers to spend more time cross-posting openings to reach real applicants and sorting through a greater number of low-effort bad-fit applications

Mild legislation that requires expected hiring dates and requires employers to say if they are just collecting resumes or face fines does not totally fix the issue but it is a welcome change in the right direction.

[erikerikson]

In addition there are direct financial costs through increased unemployment insurance claim period duration.

[mullingitover]

> The reason ghosting is offensive is it feels so disrespectful and impersonal.

That part is annoying, but the open-ended nature of it is a true problem. Having a deadline on a thumbs up/down decision at least lets you move on with your life.

[ralferoo]

My sister once applied for her dream job and didn't hear anything back for 6 months. In the mean time, she'd applied for another job, been accepted, signed all the paperwork, and worked out the notice on her old job. A week before she was due to start, the dream job contacted her to offer the job.

She decided that it wasn't fair to leave the company she'd already accepted a job with in the lurch by pulling out so late in the process. Many people wouldn't have done that, and just switched jobs.

It's definitely an ethical dilemma either way, but in this case when the company hadn't given her any indication whatsoever that she was still being considered (most likely somebody else pulled out and she was their backup option), I think she made the right choice. Better to be a company's first choice than their backup choice.

[BanazirGalbasi]

Getting a rejection message, even an automated one, removes ambiguity. You're no longer wondering if you missed a call or an email went to spam, you have it right there in writing.

In college, I interviewed with two different local companies that had internships that would continue as part-time positions during the year. Both interviews went well and I felt that the interaction was positive overall. I was confident that I would at least have a good shot at each position after the interview. Both companies ghosted me.

For someone just developing their career and who was excited to work with actual professional companies (instead of the minimum-wage jobs offered to most students), that was kind of a big deal. Looking back, I'm pretty sure that's what really instilled a lot of the cynicism toward interviews I carried even after getting an internship and graduating into a full-time sysadmin position. I honestly got lucky getting the position I did, and I think without that success my cynical view would have spiraled downward.

> Getting ghosted is part of life.

The argument is that it shouldn't be. Responses like yours when people express hope that things can change is just digging your feet in because you think that other people have to deal with the same hardships you did. Everyone acknowledges that getting ghosted sucks, so maybe having a bit of empathy and sending something, even an automated message, should be encouraged more.

[ufmace]

It's not like job searches are the only context where you can get ghosted. It happens often enough in friendships, social activities, finding romantic partners, etc.

[bb88]

The more and more rude interactions like ghosting we have, the less human we become. Relationships become transactional instead of meaningful. On the other hand, talking to people as humans and leading with your humanity first makes you a better human.

[JumpCrisscross]

> It happens often enough in friendships, social activities, finding romantic partners, etc.

Yet as we get older we usually get the chance to curate our surroundings such that those people aren’t around us anymore.

[BanazirGalbasi]

I didn't want to bring up ghosting in other contexts because the conversation has been more focused around the job market. The idea that everyone hates getting ghosted even if they do it themselves is one I picked up from articles about dating, so there is still shared relevance.

[LordDragonfang]

The main relevant difference between the former and all of the latter is that we're generally fine with regulating the labor market, but (liberals at least) are generally much less willing to regulate the interpersonal relationships market.

(The other relevant difference is that the labor market involves a significant unilateral power imbalance between the employer class and the employee class, which is the biggest contributing factor which leads to the above difference)

[markdown]

Those aren't usually time-sensitive.

[optionalsquid]

An automated message would be perfectly fine, since it would still allow me to cross off that application. The people behind the message are of little import. We are unlikely to have any further interactions anyway

[dccoolgai]

At least this would give you the leverage of seeing that the role is or is not still posted. It would give you a job to do as a candidate in enforcing honesty and seeing that the company wasn't stringing others along with fake postings to create the impression of growth. I would much prefer this to a "no consequences" system for people actively wasting my time.

[zem]

the reason ghosting is offensive is that it keeps you waiting to hear back, with the probability you have been ghosted gradually increasing over time, rather than just letting you close that mental channel.

[singleshot_]

> Getting ghosted is part of life

Only if you tolerate assholes in your life. Many don’t.

[idiotsecant]

Nobody cares about getting a bespoke hand crafted notification, it's just nice sometimes to check that one off in the list.

[shaftway]

Would it though? Thanks to CA Prop 65 every place I go has a warning that I'll get cancer if I take one more step. If I'm walking into a nuclear waste storage facility I'll never know because of warning fatigue.

[optionalsquid]

I honestly don’t see how the two compare. I’m merely asking for a response to a query that I sent myself.

What you describe is more like SPAM: Unsolicited bulk rejections to applications that were never sent

[RandallBrown]

A sensibly written law could close loopholes like the one you described.

I'm not sure an ATS would be required either. Simply having a law that requires a response when inquired about the status of an application after a certain amount of time would suffice.

I was ghosted by a Fortune 500 company after making it to the final round of an interview recently. It took me weeks of sending emails to get them to tell me they didn't want to hire me.

[wps]

This seems pretty accurate to me. But like other commenters, the psychological closure of any message at all is better than nothing.

Also, what company nowadays doesn’t use an ATS? I’ve seen a few startups that take applications via email or discord but those are few and far between. Most are using Workday/Indeed/Linkedin or what have you.

[idle_zealot]

> I know it's frustrating, but stacking laws like this doesn't get useful information out of companies but it does force the application process to revolve around demonstrating compliance with the regulations.

Eh, that's like saying taxing them is pointless because they'll just spend more on accountants to find loopholes. It's only true if you have the political will to pass the laws but not enough to fund the teeth needed to enforce them. Gather reports of boilerplate rejections, launch investigations, drag companies to discovery to find their deliberate efforts to end-run the spirit of the law, extract fines sufficient to fund investigations into the next 10 companies.

[ryandrake]

Exactly. I hate this mentality: "We can't possibly regulate companies, because they are so clever and they'll find loopholes and work around any law we make!" So write better laws! Add provisions for loopholes you anticipate. Add wording to remove ambiguity that the company will try to use to weasel their way out. Analyze the ways companies already get around laws and shore them up with a patch. Do something!

We've tried one thing, and it didn't work so we're all out of ideas! - The USA when it comes to regulating companies.

[JuniperMesos]

There are a lot of regulations I would like to get rid of because they are already being evaded, or otherwise have bad second order consequences; and those second-order consequences are themselves an annoying part of the fabric of daily life that I'm familiar with.

[idle_zealot]

There are definitely bad regulations. Sometimes the right answer is to get rid of them, but only if you can evaluate why they were put in place, what they were meant to stop/correct, and why/how they failed, then determine that it would be better to remove them than fix them. If you have a shitty module in your codebase it can be tempting to remove it, but if you need the feature it's meant to provide then removal isn't the right framing, or is only the right solution if you have a better design to replace it with.

You have to remember that profit-motivated companies are completely amoral actors that have and will hire militias to manage slave workers or dump known-poisonous waste into people's drinking water or spend unfathomable amounts on convincing hundreds of millions of people that climate change is a hoax if it's the most self-enriching course of action. They will literally cause extinction if not regulated.

[georgemcbay]

> We've tried one thing, and it didn't work so we're all out of ideas!

(I'm sure you're fully aware of this, but just to add on to what you're saying that I agree with...)

This is all an intentional messaging strategy for kicking the can down the road indefinitely done by people who stand to lose if things are changed for the better of the masses.

Same exact strategy is used (often by the same people) to dismiss the idea of more fair taxation and lots of other things we supposedly can't ever make any progress on because our first attempt to address an obvious problem might not be perfect.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> I hate this mentality: "We can't possibly regulate companies, because they are so clever and they'll find loopholes and work around any law we make!" So write better laws! Add provisions for loopholes you anticipate. Add wording to remove ambiguity that the company will try to use to weasel their way out.

Unfortunately, that is exactly how you end up with legalese and laws that are hard for normal people to understand: because bad-faith actors will invent ambiguity, litigate definitions, and argue over the exact meaning of every word.

It's like trying to tell a child "No jumping on the bed!" and they keep doing it while insisting they're not jumping, they're hopping, and then go into a diatribe about the difference between jumping and hopping until you say something like "Do not jump, hop, bounce, spring, leap, vault, stomp, rebound, or otherwise employ your feet, legs, knees, or body weight to produce repeated or excessive vertical motion upon, across, or within the boundaries of the bed."

And then they remove the mattress from the bed, put it on the floor, and start jumping on it, and say that wasn't against the rules because you only specified the bed, and declare that a mattress on its own does not constitute a bed.

[happymellon]

> declare that a mattress on its own does not constitute a bed.

And so you remove the mattress from their possession, because they obviously don't need the mattress to sleep.

Make it painful for those companies that want to fight the rules.

[ryandrake]

That's right. We have to assume that companies are always going to do whatever they can to get around regulation. The regulatory system needs to think of companies as nimble attackers in its threat model, and the system needs to be capable of responding with the same nimbleness.

[Sohcahtoa82]

The problem right now of course is that the enforcers are paid off by the corporations.

[birdsongs]

> The ATS would have some default timeout where candidates who aren't hired get the e-mail to comply with the law.

The sibling concept of this already exists in Europe with GDPR. Companies have to ask you to keep your data (resume, application, etc) beyond a certain timeout, otherwise they must delete it. Because of this, almost everyone uses a talent system.

It seems to work fine? I appreciate knowing they're going to nuke my info, or keep it.

[weakened_malloc]

Or just allow what happens in the EU. Every time I've applied for a job and been rejected, I put through a GDPR request and find out the reasons I was rejected.

[probably_wrong]

Which right exactly are you invoking?

[weakened_malloc]

Have a read here!

https://github.com/Leader-board/OA-and-Interviews/blob/main/...

Once they take in your job application, they're processing your data. You've then got a right, wherever you're from, to see what information they hold on you. That includes interview feedback, test scores and so on.

[chaosharmonic]

This does apply to third party background checks, and backdoor references in particular are just one giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Eightfold AI is getting sued right now for acting as a credit reporting agency -- not just by scoring people, but by gathering data on them in the first place for the sake of reporting to employers.

If you ask a third party business to do run a background check, there are a bunch of responsibilities that triggers -- a right to view what's in the report, a right to know if it's being used against you, a right to dispute what's in it, and even to consent to it being pulled in the first place.

But if some recruiter or hiring manager goes directly to your former or current boss, behind your back, this is somehow not even taken seriously as a problem.

[toomuchtodo]

https://www.hrdive.com/news/eightfold-ai-lawsuit-job-candida...

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/business/ai-hiring-tools-...

[autoexec]

Companies have been using data brokers to get info on potential employees for ages in violation of the law. The law has almost zero enforcement and when something is done nobody does to prison. It's almost always just the government wanting a cut of the action. For example:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2012/06/...

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2014/04/...

[_DeadFred_]

Prison is a limitation of freedom of movement. The equivalent for a company should be the limiting of movement of shares (no shares bought/sold/traded) for the duration of an imposed sentence. Since corporations are people and all, there needs to be an equivalent punishment.

[happymellon]

They literally hire someone to be the head of the company, and pay them obscene amounts to set the company culture and policies but somehow they mostly avoid being responsible for bad company behaviour.

Prison for illegal behaviour should be applied to the C suite.

[jex_the_ape]

That just leads to the classic scheme of hiring a scrapegoat CEO, while in reality the company is being run by a person who technically holds a lesser title.

[happymellon]

Once your company is known for hiring patsies the cost of hiring a CEO will naturally increase until it becomes unaffordable to continue its ways.

[CasualSuperman]

Distribute the jail time among the shareholders. That will get them to incentivize legality over profits REAL quick

[inigyou]

You got a 401(k)? Then you have to serve jail time

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Frankly, I'd just prefer really huge fines, preferably scaled as a percentage of either gross or net revenue or profit.

[_DeadFred_]

Going that route instead of fines it should be a percentage of ownership made public. That:

1. Dilutes that shares, punishing the people who can effect the most change (shareholders) 2. Puts the government on the inside. With ownership, the government can then demand access/knowledge that they can't from a purely private company. And no company is going to want to deal with that headache if they don't have to.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

That assumes that the state is punishing companies for criminalitythat it would also be a good idea to own. While that might sometimes be the case, it certainly isn't always the case.

[autoexec]

Unless that percentage was over 100% of the profit they'd still be making money from doing illegal things and the fines just become a cost of doing business.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Who said the fines had to be under 100% ?

[woah]

Wait... are you saying that talking about an ex-colleague with anyone (without filing a bunch of paperwork or something) is a "giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act"?

[chaosharmonic]

Yes. But to be clear, since "anyone" is vague: I specifically mean talking to hiring teams, about ex-colleagues who haven't given them permission to ask around in the first place.

Because the Fair Credit Reporting Act governs background checks. It isn't limited to money, or to scoring -- it covers any third party that reports data about you, for the sake of determining if you're eligible for anything from a loan to an apartment to a job. The language of it is broad enough that it doesn't just cover your spending and payment habits, but extends to your general habits, criminal history, personal character, and "mode of living."

I'm saying the behavior normalized by recruiters is a giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Because when they proactively reach out to random individuals you worked with, to ask you for your views on them as a reference, without your consent, that is an exploit. It is a workaround. It is skirting the actual intentions of the thing, because its scope is limited to "agencies" -- which, no matter how broad that term might be, still ultimately means third party data collectors.

If something your boss said about you came up on a background check, you would have a right to know about it. But if someone on a hiring team goes behind your back to that same boss, for those same comments, that is widely accepted as fine and normal.

That's the part that's a real problem.

[pseudalopex]

Part of the law was broad. Part of the law was narrow. How did you establish the broad part was intended broad and the narrow part was not intended narrow?

[chaosharmonic]

I mean, I'm more than willing to take the reductive approach and just say that the purpose of a system is what it does.

But if we assume that it wasn't designed maliciously, we can look at this through another lens: FICO already existed at the time, so banks in particular would simply have no reason to bother calling around to all of your former creditors in the first place.

They would also probably need a third party agency just to find your former creditors.

[OkayPhysicist]

If you're making hiring decisions based on someone else's statements about the applicant, that someone's statements, if false, are pretty much the definition of defamation in the US.

It's perfectly just that the applicant get to know if the reason they didn't get a job is because their bitter former boss defamed them.

[FireBeyond]

I mean, agreed. I'd go even further and say the whole "Eligible for rehire?" question is an effort to backdoor this into employment verification. Employment verification should be "First date of employment? Last date of employment? Thank you."

"Are they eligible for rehire?" is the nudge nudge wink wink around "well, most of you have policies around providing formal references about performance, so here's one way we can try to gauge".

[mxkopy]

You’re conflating being ghosted with ghost jobs, which are positions that are posted but are never intended to be filled (usually cited as for data collection purposes). These waste people’s precious time while they apply for jobs.