Job seekers say employers are ghosting them after interviews vanish

Karyna Lohvynenko applied for 400 jobs and got only three interviews, a jarring sign of how hard entry-level hiring has become even for candidates with strong credentials. The 21-year-old is completing a master’s degree in governance, has worked at the United Nations and for councils around the UK and US, and applied for roles in politics, business and even as an entry-level barista. She had once hoped to become president of her native Ukraine, but the job hunt became so difficult that she hired a career mentor.

Her experience fits a wider pattern that has made ghosting one of the defining complaints in recruitment. Indeed’s 2023 ghosting report, based on surveys of 4,516 job seekers and 4,517 employers across the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, said the practice had become one of the biggest challenges in recruiting after the pandemic. In one earlier survey, 28% of job seekers said they had ghosted employers in the past year, up from 18% in 2019, while 76% of employers said they had been ghosted.

The problem has not eased in the United States. In Indeed’s March 2026 update, 61% of U.S. job seekers said they had ghosted two to four employers in the previous 12 months, and 70% said they felt it was fair to do so. Indeed defines employer ghosting broadly, from failing to respond to applications and skipping even an automated acknowledgement to leaving candidates without follow-up after interviews, a pattern often described as the resume blackhole.

The strain is especially visible for young workers trying to break in. The House of Commons Library said there were 957,000 people aged 16 to 24 in the UK who were not in education, employment or training in October to December 2025, equal to 12.8% of that age group. The Social Mobility Commission said 16% of economically active 16 to 24-year-olds were unemployed in 2024, up from 13% in 2023 and the highest youth unemployment rate since 2020. Universities UK has argued that graduate degrees still matter, but in a labour market that is clearly working against new entrants.

Greenhouse’s 2024 State of Job Hunting report found that 61% of job seekers had been ghosted after a job interview, nine percentage points higher than in April 2024. It also said recruiter workload had risen 26% in the previous quarter, a sign that the bottlenecks are not only about candidate behavior but about stretched hiring systems that leave applicants waiting, refreshing inboxes and often never hearing back. BBC Worklife noted as early as 2019 that ghosting had moved from dating into hiring, and the practice now looks less like an exception than a structural feature of the entry-level market.