Your Candidates Are Ghosting You Back: How to Fix Your Hiring Experience
Candidates are disappearing—and they're telling their networks why. A good survey can show you where your funnel is breaking.
Candidates ghost employers. Employers ghost candidates. It's a two-way street now—and the data is ugly. One recent report found 61% of candidates experience post-interview ghosting, up 9 points in a year. Small companies ghost twice as often as large ones. Tech is among the worst, with response rates as low as 5%. The average candidate spends 47 hours on processes that go nowhere.
You can't fix what you don't measure. Candidate experience surveys are how you find out where things break. Response rates hover around 18% on average—so keep it short. One to ten questions gets the best completion. Send it a few days after the interview, after you've communicated the outcome. Mid-morning tends to work. And consider non-anonymous: personalized feedback often gets more responses and gives you something you can act on.
What to ask? How clear was the process? How would you rate the communication? Would you refer others? Where did you feel friction? The goal isn't to make everyone happy—it's to find the drop-off points. Maybe it's the long application. Maybe it's the silence after the final round. Maybe it's the interview itself.
Fix those, and you stop the ghosting—both ways.