Anecdotal, I know, but I was ghosted by Google back in 2004-2005 or thereabouts. Back and forth with a recruiter, who promised me that she would book phone screens. Then heard nothing. Pinged her repeatedly. Nothing.

A few years later got another Google recruiter after me. Ended up getting hired in 2008.

Looked up the previous recruiter. Her last day at the company was the day she promised she would book phone screens, or the day after (can't remember exactly, this is quite a few years ago). I can only assume she was suddenly let go.

Ever since, I keep wondering how many ghostings happen because the person holding the strings disappears for some reason, and there's a lack of system to follow up on that.

Had this happen at the beginning of the pandemic. Did well on the full loop. The Friday of that week the recruiter reaches out to get references. A week goes by, I hear nothing. I contact one of my references, they heard nothing.

A month later another recruiter from the company reaches out and explains the recruiter I was talking to was let go that day. Told me in the system that I was approved to hire, but unfortunately along with the layoff came a 6 month hiring freeze for engineering.

To be fair if employees are being fired that abruptly with so little consideration to operational continuity it might be a worse red flag than a recruiter ghosting you.

A few years ago I was "between roles" and applied for a developer position at Roku. For a short time they seemed moderately interested, and I exchanged a few emails with a senior in-house recruiter. And then they went completely quiet - no response to my follow-up emails. So I just put it behine me and got on with looking for a job.

Just over a year later I received an email from another in-house recruiter at Roku, thanking me for my application but regretting that they wouldn't be going forward with it (or some such corporate-speak). Which was kind of surprising.

I did a few searches and discovered that the date they went quiet roughly coincided with a sizeable round of redundancies. I also looked up the new recruiter and found that they were new to the company and quite junior. So, presumably, their first task had been to clear-up the backlog. That year was by far the longest I've ever waited for a response to a job application.

I once had an interview loop where after the final round I didn't hear back from the recruiter point-of-contact for awhile. After 1.5 weeks, I sent an email following up: the recruiter replied "I was on vacation dammit, btw you didn't get the job."

This happened at my old company. My manager went away for a holiday and never came back. We never found out why, but it was a Finance company so people suddenly not coming in the next day was a thing.

This completely broke the interview pipeline, and in the disorder no one realised. The company got some bad reviews in that period for just stopping a bunch of processes mid-way.

> Ever since, I keep wondering how many ghostings happen because the person holding the strings disappears for some reason, and there's a lack of system to follow up on that.

This has happened to be more than once. At various points in time Microsoft has used external vendors for its recruiting/hiring pipeline (which, IMHO, is a bad idea, you want people with a vested interest in the company doing all of the recruiting and hiring...).

So yeah, working with a recruiter, wait awhile, nothing, message "oh sorry she left, but the company wants to go forward."

Ugh.

It wasn't any better when I was a hiring manager at Microsoft trying to hire people. :(

Flip side of this is I stopped giving honest feedback after I interviewed a candidate who, on paper, was a stretch for the role. They generally interviewed well but had obvious gaps in their knowledge from being self taught. At the end of the interview they asked me if I had any recommendations for what they could study up on, I emailed some suggested reading (popular tech blogs, probably something by Petzold as well) and got an angry letter back accusing me of being sexist and some other stuff.