Survey evidence on candidates ghosting employers and employers ghosting candidates: how common each is, the year-over-year trend, and what the data does and doesn't establish.
"Ghosting" — vanishing without a reply — was once a dating-app term. It is now a routine feature of hiring on both sides of the table. Candidates abandon processes mid-stream and skip first days; employers go silent after interviews they initiated. The recurring industry surveys are not academic, but they are large and repeated, which lets us read a trend rather than a single snapshot.
Indeed's 2023 ghosting survey found about 78 percent of job seekers said they had ghosted a prospective employer. The survey polled 4,516 job seekers who admitted to ghosting and 4,517 employers who had been ghosted, across the US, UK, and Canada.
The share of job seekers saying they planned to ghost employers in future searches rose from 37 percent in 2019 to 56 percent in 2022 to 62 percent in 2023, per Indeed's tracked surveys. The trend, not any single year, is the story — candidate ghosting is normalizing, not spiking once.
In Indeed's data, the share of job seekers who said an employer ghosted them after a second- or third-round interview rose from 30 percent in 2022 to 40 percent in 2023. Ghosting is not a one-sided candidate behavior problem; it cuts in both directions.
Greenhouse's December 2024 State of Job Hunting report found 61 percent of job seekers had been ghosted after a job interview — a nine-point increase from its April 2024 survey of the same kind. The two surveys use different wording and samples, so the levels are not directly comparable to Indeed's, but both point upward.
Greenhouse reported that historically underrepresented job seekers were more likely to be ghosted after interviews — 66 percent versus 59 percent of white candidates. Silence in hiring is not evenly distributed.
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In Indeed's survey, nearly 9 in 10 employers (about 89 percent) said candidate drop-off and no-shows were a problem, and a majority said it had never happened to them before the prior year. Volume-driven applying and low-cost mass outreach on both sides feed the cycle.
These are vendor and job-board surveys, not peer-reviewed studies, so we treat them as directional and report sample sizes and dates rather than implying precision. Where two sources disagree on level (Indeed vs. Greenhouse), we attribute each separately and decline to average them, because question wording and samples differ. We report the year-over-year trend because the same instrument repeated over time is more trustworthy than any single percentage.
For job seekers, two practical reads follow. First, employer silence after an interview is now statistically normal — closer to a coin flip than an insult — so do not read rejection into non-response, and keep your pipeline full rather than waiting on any one process. Second, your own ghosting has reputational cost in an industry where recruiters share notes and ATS records persist; a one-line withdrawal email is cheap insurance. The mutual breakdown of basic follow-through is the backdrop to every modern job search.
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