Being ghosted by a candidate is not the worst part. Not knowing why is.

This week it happened to me in the middle of an interview.

What Happened

During the introduction, I noticed that the candidate's experience was impressive. But it was quite different from the skills the job needed, and from the brief the employer gave us. We give every candidate an equal chance, so I carried on with the interview.

In our interviews, the technical Q&A comes after the live challenge. He told me he didn't hear my first question well. I switched my microphone, just in case, and asked again.

I saw his eyebrows come together. Then he dropped from the call, and he never came back.

I sent him an email, assuming it was a bad internet connection. Then I waited 15 more minutes.

It isn't the first time. In May, I wrote here about another candidate who disconnected without a word while setting up their work laptop for the live challenge. I wrote to them too. They never replied.

Maybe the question surprised him. Maybe he realised, right there, that this wasn't the job for him. Maybe it really was his connection. I don't know. If he had said "I don't think this role is for me", I would have thanked him, and we would both have had our afternoon back.

Who Ghosts Whom?

So I went looking for numbers. They don't agree with each other, and that's worth sitting with.

Three in four candidates have ghosted an employer. In a 2024 Indeed survey of 1,500 workers and 1,500 businesses in the UK, 75% of workers said they had ghosted an employer in the past year.

Three in four candidates never have. In LiveCareer's Vanishing Candidate Report, a 2026 survey of more than 1,000 US workers, 75% said they had never ghosted a potential employer. Only 13% had stopped responding after a screening call or interview.

Same number, opposite story. Different countries, different questions, different people asked. Which one you quote says more about you than about candidates.

People regret it and plan to do it again. In 2023, Indeed surveyed about 1,500 US job seekers who had ghosted an employer. 59% regretted it. 62% planned to do it again. And 70% said ghosting employers was "fair".

Employers do it more. Greenhouse found that 61% of job seekers in the US, UK and Germany had been ghosted after a job interview, up 9 percentage points since April 2024. In Indeed's UK survey, 55% of workers said being ghosted by employers made it OK to ghost them back.

Why Candidates Walk Away

LiveCareer also asked why people stopped responding. The top answer, by far, was that they took another job (51%). Then 32% lost interest, 23% had a bad interview experience or poor communication, and 23% said the pay wasn't good enough.

And 19% said the job was different from how it was described. A mismatch between the person and the role is one of the reasons people disappear. My candidate's CV and the job didn't match. Maybe he saw it in that question too.

So when a candidate disappears, it may not be about you. It may be about every company that disappeared on them first.

The Honest Trade-Off

None of this makes ghosting OK. A candidate who leaves without a word costs the interviewer's time, and another candidate's slot. Hiring teams are right to be annoyed.

But you can't control whether a candidate ghosts you. You can control how easy it is for them not to.

Three Things to Do This Week

Say the plan for a dropped call at the start. "If we get cut off, I'll email you and wait 15 minutes." A real connection problem now has a clear way back, and a candidate who left on purpose knows you noticed.

Make leaving easy to say out loud. Tell candidates it's fine to say the role isn't for them. A clear "no, thank you" in minute 20 is better for everyone than silence.

Close the loop yourself, and never ghost back. Write down what happened, the facts only, without guessing why. Then send one last short message. Every candidate I interview gets written feedback within 24 hours. That's the one part of ghosting fully in your control.

Have you ever had a candidate disappear in the middle of an interview? What did you do next?

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Sources

This post first appeared in Shortlisted by Kat. Photo by Kari Shea on Unsplash.