Halloween is months away, yet some candidates already feel haunted by prospective employers.

As job seekers navigate a cooling labor market where there are fewer opportunities yet competition aplenty, some report being ghosted by employers who disappear during the hiring process.

Around 45% of 1,000 workers surveyed by LiveCareer said they’ve been ghosted by an employer during the hiring process. Job seekers reported prospective employers going radio silent at every phase in the hiring process, including after initial outreach (19%) and being informed of an offer (13%), though the most common time to be ghosted was after at least one interview (22%).

Job seekers aren’t off-base: Around 80% of hiring managers surveyed by Résumé Genius in 2024 confessed to ghosting candidates. And 81% of recruiters surveyed by My Perfect Résumé (owned by the same parent company as LiveCareer) in 2024 said that they have posted ghost jobs.

Most job seekers believe employers ghost them because they chose another candidate, LiveCareer’s survey found. Others believe the company decided they weren’t the right fit, but didn’t want to formally reject them, or that the job opening was put on hold or canceled.

Some employers may post openings without intending to fill them as a way to gauge labor market demand and help improve their candidate pool, Isaac Hagen, SVP of emerging verticals and sales excellence at ManpowerGroup, previously told HR Brew.

“It can be frustrating for candidates in a highly selective market that just feel like they can’t find that right match,” he said.

Employers may ghost candidates for myriad reasons, said Jasmine Escalera, a career expert for LiveCareer. Some may be internal, such as budget changes, internal approval delays, and high application volume, while others may be external, like labor shortages and high turnover in industries such as healthcare, or compliance-related delays like in government.

Ghosting can have “a tremendous impact and an effect on job seekers,” Escalera said, but the phenomenon has “gotten this lens of: Organizations are doing this and they’re doing this out of malicious intent when that’s not really always the case.”

What’s the risk? That said, even if employers aren’t intending to upset job seekers, ghosting candidates can create long-term reputation risk for a company. Around 48% of individuals surveyed by LiveCareer said they wouldn’t give an employer a second chance after being ghosted, and 37% said they would tell others about their experience.

”It’s very easy for people to go onto Glassdoor and write reviews, to go on Reddit and talk about organizations, and so it’s really about reputation,” Escalera said, adding that both prospective candidates and current employees can see poor reviews. “Just a small mismanagement of communication can lead to a big impact.”

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