‘Did they ghost you?’ Website takes aim at employers who go radio silent on candidates

Job-seekers are “mad as hell and they’re not going to take this anymore.”

Half of job seekers report being ghosted by prospective employers, and the frustration has given rise to a new website, Did they ghost you?, where job applicants call out employers who became unresponsive during the hiring process.

Ghost busting. Gary Meyer, a fractional marketing executive based in Toronto, created the website in mid-July, (in what he said was partly a joke) after hearing repeated stories of prospective employers ghosting his friends. For the website’s purposes, Meyer defines ghosting as a company that stops responding after interviewing a candidate and does not ever clearly reject or update the candidate (unanswered applications don’t count).

Meyer’s site blew up quickly: More than 2,000 companies have appeared on Did they ghost you? so far, including tech titans Apple and Microsoft, finance firms Capital One and JPMorgan, and legacy media businesses Condé Nast and CNN.

“There’s a lot of people who are super angry about getting ghosted, and it just sort of snowballed, and it kind of got a bit out of control at one point,” Meyer told HR Brew. At one time, the website received as many as six reports per minute, according to Meyer, who reviews every submission in his spare time before adding them.

The website requests information including the company, which date the candidate applied and which date were ghosted, what stage within the interview process they were ghosted, and a description of what happened after the interview, sans any identifying details such as names or private messages. They also have to actually be ghosted—getting an impersonalized email, while perhaps callous, doesn’t count. (The website also allows individuals to platform “good communicators” who keep applicants in the loop through all stages, even if they ultimately didn’t get the job.)

Meyer acknowledged that recruiters face high applicant volumes, and it can be difficult to sort through and respond to everyone. At the same time, though, he said it’s “unacceptable” to see submissions from candidates who have gone through interviews, in some cases going as far as completing assessments or visiting the employer on-site, just to hear nothing from employers.

“Even if you do a terrible job in your final interview, I think you’re owed something,” he said.

Same can of worms. For employers, Did they ghost you? is another flavor of the same headache created by websites like Glassdoor, Fairygodboss, and Blind. These sites have given workers a platform to candidly share their experiences and opinions of employers they worked for or interviewed with.

“Companies should assume that employees and job seekers are going to talk about their experience—good, bad, or indifferent. They have various mechanisms to do it online now,” Vicki Salemi, a career expert at Monster who previously worked in corporate recruiting, told HR Brew.

Negative reviews do affect companies, Salemi said. Prospective applicants read reviews to get a gauge on what it’s like to work for a company and decide whether they want to apply there. In some cases, a negative review could also change that individual’s perception as a customer. How employers respond to negative reviews depends on many specifics, including the feedback shared and how many reviewers shared that sentiment, and how the company wants to respond, she noted.

Broadly, Salemi recommends employers appoint someone on a team like HR or PR to routinely scan reviews and analyze what’s said about the company. If issues are brought up frequently, that presents an opportunity for employers to look at and address whatever reviewers take issue with. With ghosting, for example, HR leaders may find that they need to update their ATS, or that their TA teams are overburdened and need to appoint a coordinator to solely focus on sending candidates rejection emails. If employers choose to publicly respond to online reviews, Salemi said they should consider appointing one person (like an executive) to respond, and implement a strategy for deciding what exactly to say, as well as an approval process before publishing that response.

“Be aware of what’s being said, identify if it’s actually true, and if it is, dive deeper to fix the problems,” Salemi said.

Meyer, for his part, hopes that his website will encourage some employers, especially small businesses where a ghosting allegation could affect them disproportionately, to examine and address what’s causing them to ghost candidates. Additionally, he thinks that the “good communications” portion of the website will help show examples of companies that are taking the right approach and making the hiring process transparent for all candidates.

“There’s a problem in recruitment, somebody needs to fix it. How you fix that, I don’t know,” he said. Until then, he’s focused on putting “a little bit of sunlight and disinfect the process with a website like Did they ghost you?”