The Office Blueprint: Why ghosting applicants is on the rise
Monday, 2 March 2026
The Office Blueprint looks at workplace issues of both the serious and the mundane, including office politics, toxicity and anything else that might keep the HR department up at night.
Maree Robinson is a mid-senior-level marketer who was made redundant a month ago.
Since then, she has applied for as many as 50 jobs, so far unsuccessfully. She reckons that in at least half the cases, after submitting her application, she’s never heard from the company again. She’s been, to use the phrase that started in the dating world, ghosted.
Once upon a time, most people being declined for a job could expect a politely-worded rejection letter. No longer. An unpleasant, modern phenomenon that is an increasingly common part of the job search, ghosting appears from a raft of anecdotal data to be no longer mainly the domain of those seeking easy entry, low-paid jobs attracting thousands.
Robinson, who is an experienced professional, finds the frequency of ghosting frustrating and worrying.
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“It's worrying from a financial perspective, and from the ‘way you feel about yourself’ perspective - your confidence to get back out there sort of erodes away, CV by CV,” Robinson said.
“I'm applying for a lot, obviously, at the moment - I don’t enjoy the thought of starving or not paying the mortgage, so in the last month, I would have applied for 40 or 50 jobs, and in at least half you never hear a thing from them. Or you get a cut-and-paste email three months later, with the standard line ‘We’ve moved with people that have more …’
“That’s almost worse than ghosting really - to wait three months and come back with that!”
Reasons, but not excuses
Why do employers ghost applicants? Obviously, few would want to cop to it on the record, but a handful of inquiries by The Post to HR people working within companies (admittedly larger ones) squarely places the blame on automation, which has had to be employed as numbers of applicants have swelled.
“We have multiple vacancies going on at the same time, and from dozens to hundreds of people applying, and a finite amount of resources in our department,” one told The Post. “We only have time to deal with those that have passed through the system after AI has weeded out the obviously inappropriate.”
“It’s just time,” said another.
“We don’t want to open the process up to endless back and forth,” said yet another. “The decision is final.”
But not everyone is convinced the process has to be quite so cold, even if automation is employed. Vanja Dukic is founder and lead consultant at her own human resources (HR) consultancy Dear Team, and is still niggled by her own ghosting experience.
“I received confirmation of an interview, and everything was set up, and then at the last minute, maybe a day in advance [of the interview] I received an email that said ‘we've actually filled a role and we will not be proceeding with the interview’… it did feel dismissive at the time. I called the company to try and get more information and heard nothing more.
“Working in HR I do understand what can go wrong, but I don’t think it excuses the behaviour.”
Dukic said ghosting was becoming more common, “but I don’t think it’s about bad intentions on the part of the employers … it’s really more about the market today”.
Not only can there be a problem on the input end, with thousands of CVs combed and rejected by AI programmes before they ever get before human eyes. But even within a company, managers can be quite slow to provide feedback, or roles change, “and there can be all sorts of internal shifts and operational things that happen”, she said.
But, she added, these were reasons for ghosting, rather than excuses.
Clamping down
While the world was only becoming more automated, and using more AI tools, and it seemed likely the automation of tasks like sifting candidates and hiring might only accelerate in that direction rather than become more personable, Duckic said people in HR networks were talking about the issue of ghosting.
“People are talking about AI a lot, about the challenges the technology is presenting, as well as the high volume of candidates and how much pressure HR practitioners are under - and I think as long as we’re talking about it and the topic is getting this kind of attention, we can learn from it and progress and evolve.”
Evolving is one thing - and then there is changing the law. According to US media, state lawmakers in New Jersey, Kentucky and California have presented proposals to prevent ghosting in the hiring process. CNBC says the New Jersey proposal would require businesses to give interviewed candidates a clear decision of their timeline, remove job listings within two weeks of filling the role, or face a fine of up to $5,000.
In Ontario, Canada, from January 1 this year, companies with more than 25 workers were subject to something similar - having to inform job applicants about the status of their candidacy within 45 days of a job interview, whether a decision has been made or not. The new rule also banned the posting of “ghost jobs” - posting jobs ads for positions they are not actively hiring for but are often holding open for internal candidates.
And, taking it a step further, in 2023 New York City became the first place to put very strict rules around using AI for decision making in hiring, ensuring that the tools comply with specific, rigorous transparency requirements and have been audited for bias.
Feelings
In a 2025 article in the US Journal of Social Philosophy, author Niels de Haan from the University of Vienna argued that where decision making is automatic or done (in the first instance at least) by machines, the cessation of human contact may mean that recruiters feel that ghosting is less like a personal slight, and more like a system default.
But for many employees, whether ghosting is the symptom of system overload, or too much AI decision-making, or poor HR systems, they still feel slighted when their time, effort and cost in tailoring their CVs and writing covering letters and the whole nine yards of applying is not returned in kind.
The process of finding a job is bruising enough at the best of times, but in the current environment, it’s downright brutal. Maree Robinson knows all about that, as AI often reads CVs like hers, with a 15-year gap between jobs, as something instantly disqualifying.
What AI doesn’t realise is that she had to take the time out to raise her profoundly autistic son.
“AI doesn’t do HR any favours,” she told The Post. “Although it sort of speeds up the process, I think HR at its core is supposed to be about people. I was talking to a very good friend of mine who's in HR, and she said, they get a lot of people who put the correct keywords in so AI will pick them up, but they don't even necessarily have those skills.
“So, companies are missing out on some really good people just because they're using a system that isn't human and doesn't pick up nuance. As an applicant, you know you can do the job in your sleep, but you’re fighting an algorithm.”
She understands HR people get an avalanche of CVs, and feels for them: “But I think it's just become a sad kind of excuse to not treat people with dignity any more. And they really just should.”