61% of job seekers are ghosted after interviews with no rejection notification, and the rate increased 9 percentage points in a single year (2024), disproportionately affecting minority candidates at 66%

Post-interview employer ghosting (receiving no response whatsoever after completing an interview) reached 61% in 2025, a 9-percentage-point increase from early 2024 alone. The problem disproportionately affects historically underrepresented job seekers, who experience ghosting at 66% versus 59% for white candidates. Meanwhile, 75% of all job applications receive zero response of any kind. Why it matters: candidates who invested hours in interviews receive no closure and cannot distinguish between 'still under consideration' and 'rejected,' so they delay pursuing other opportunities while waiting, so their job search extends by weeks or months, so they experience documented negative mental health effects (anxiety, reduced self-worth), so they develop distrust of employers that makes them more likely to ghost employers in return (44% of candidates now admit to ghosting), creating a destructive cycle that degrades the entire hiring ecosystem. The structural root cause is that ATS platforms default to silence (no automated rejection email after a configurable period), recruiters face no professional consequences for ghosting, and the power asymmetry between employer and candidate means candidates cannot retaliate, so there is no market mechanism to punish the behavior.