Why Your Best Candidates Ghost You (And How to Fix It)
Across the recruiting industry, approximately 40-50% of candidates who enter a hiring pipeline will stop responding at some point before a decision is made. Just vanish.
Ghosting isn't random. It's a symptom. And the disease is almost always one of five things.
The Speed Problem
The single biggest predictor of candidate ghosting is how long your process takes.
- Process under 2 weeks: ~12% ghost rate
- Process 2-3 weeks: ~22% ghost rate
- Process 3-4 weeks: ~38% ghost rate
- Process over 4 weeks: ~55% ghost rate
Senior engineers are the most likely to ghost long processes. They have options. Compress your process to 14 calendar days from first contact to offer.
The Compensation Transparency Problem
When you don't share compensation range upfront, candidates assume the worst. Companies that share comp range on the first interaction have a 40% lower ghost rate than companies that delay until the offer stage.
Put the salary range in the job post. Share it in the first recruiter call. Make it a real range.
The Personalization Problem
Personalized outreach gets 3-4x the response rate of template messages. You need exactly two specific things: one sentence about something specific from their background, and one sentence about why this role might interest them specifically.
The Black Hole Problem
Set a maximum response time for every stage transition. 48 hours is the target. The candidate should never go more than 2 business days without hearing something from you.
The "Process As Hazing" Problem
Engineers who changed jobs in the last 12 months went through an average of 2.8 interview rounds at the company they accepted. Not 5. Not 4. Less than 3.
The Uncomfortable Truth
When candidates ghost, it's almost always the company's fault. They don't ghost companies they're excited about. They don't ghost processes that move fast and communicate clearly.
The fix isn't more follow-up emails. The fix is to build a process candidates don't want to leave.