Exclusive: How Greenhouse is taking on job ghosting

• "Everything's gotten worse over the last year and a half," Jon Stross, president and co-founder of Greenhouse, tells Axios in an interview.

By the numbers: One out of every two U.S. job seekers (52%) this year report being ghosted during the interview process, according to a Greenhouse survey.

• That figure is a slight improvement over last year, when it stood at 67%.
• Candidates report hearing radio silence most typically after an initial conversation with a recruiter (24%) and interview with hiring manager (23%), followed by post-homework assignment (12%), on-site group interview (12%) and after final interview (12%).
• In Q2 2024, only 4% of roughly 6,500 companies that use Greenhouse contacted all rejected applicants, per the company's data.
• 13% of the employers on the platform ghosted more than 50% of applicants.

Driving the news: To help job seekers find companies with better manners, Greenhouse has been working on features that reward employers for prioritizing the worker experiences, Axios is first to report.

• For example, businesses that use Greenhouse to hire can now boast four designations or badges on their profile if their recruiting practices prove that they're 1) communicative (i.e. they don't ghost candidates), 2) fair, 3) prepared and 4) respectful.

What they're saying: "We can see who sends out rejection emails and who doesn't. And so we [thought] this is a great moment to kind of create a race to the top, if you will, to highlight the [companies] doing it well," Stross said.

• To win the "prepared" badge, interviewers ask relevant and distinct questions.
• To be considered "respectful," companies enable features that allow candidates to add their pronouns or the pronunciation of their names or setup automated responses.
• And to earn the "fair" distinction, companies turn on the ability to do things like anonymize resumes, which can mitigate biases that can influence the hiring process.

State of play: There are several reasons that companies leave applicants hanging, but none them are good excuses, Stross says. "Every [hiring] platform has some version of making it pretty easy to send rejection emails."

• It could be sloppiness: A recruiter finishes filling a job and closes it out in the system without activating rejection emails.
• It could be avoidance of a difficult conversation: Calling to reject someone is a "really painful thing" that some recruiters feel is not core to their main job of making hires, he says.

• Sometimes it's a stalling tactic: Recruiters may want to wait until their top candidate moves forward, so they keep the rest of their options warm.

Zoom in: Many candidates may also never hear back from a company because the job they applied for doesn't exist.

• A staffing agency may create job postings to generate a pool of candidates they can turn around to market as a bundle to companies looking to hire.
• Similarly, some companies have a "pipelining" process to "stockpile" potential workers before making a hire eventually, says Stross.
• Others list jobs to hide that they're in distress or about to go out of business.
• And sometimes businesses struggle and the job gets pulled, or the recruiter or hiring manager leaves.

Between the lines: Over time, about one in five listings qualifies as a ghost job in any given quarter since 2022, per Greenhouse.

• In Q2 2024, 18.9% of jobs posted were ghost jobs.
• 70% of employers on Greenhouse had listed at least one ghost job.

The bottom line: Stross' advice for workers who have been hunting for a role for over a year — "Open up your aperture."

• "You go into a job search thinking, I want this very specific job, and that job may be or may be hyper competitive, and so how can you open up the aperture and look for things that still utilize your skills, or what you're good at, or maybe don't look like what you used to be doing?"