I recently joined Desiree and Ashley on the Talentless Podcast for a candid conversation about what the modern hiring process feels like from the candidate side—and what recruiters and employers can do differently.
The episode begins with a familiar statistic: more than half of candidates report being ghosted after an interview. But the conversation quickly moves beyond the number. Ghosting is not merely an inconvenient end to an application. It is the point where a process built around people stops acknowledging the person on the other side.
Transparency does not require having every answer
When people hear “transparency in hiring,” they often think about salary ranges, interview stages, selection criteria, or the reasons behind a decision. Those things matter. But the most immediate form of transparency is simpler: communication.
A recruiter does not need a final decision to send a useful update. “We are still waiting,” “the timeline has changed,” or “I do not have anything new yet” can be enough to tell a candidate that their time still matters. As I said during the conversation, “The answer is not silence.”
Desiree and Ashley brought the recruiter’s perspective to the same point. Transparency is not only disclosure. It is effort, care, and the willingness to communicate even when the message is uncomfortable or incomplete. It is also reciprocal: candidates owe recruiters honesty about their needs and constraints, just as employers owe candidates clarity about the process.
Technology amplified the cracks in hiring
Hiring was never frictionless, but the scale has changed. One-click applications, automated screening, job-ad distribution, and AI-generated résumés have dramatically increased volume on both sides. Employers respond with more automation; candidates respond with more automation of their own.
The result can feel like two systems escalating against each other rather than helping people make better decisions. In the episode, I described it as “two cars racing to a red light.”
That escalation becomes especially damaging when some of the advertised opportunities are not genuine openings. A candidate may spend time, disclose personal information, and absorb another apparent rejection for a role that was already earmarked for an internal hire, posted only to build a pipeline, or never intended to be filled at all. AI tools that spray applications across the internet do not solve that problem; they often make the underlying signal even harder to find.
Candidate experience is part of the brand
A hiring process is often a person’s first sustained interaction with a company. Candidates remember whether the organization communicated, respected their time, and closed the loop. Those experiences do not disappear when the requisition closes.
People who are treated poorly as candidates may become customers who choose another product, professionals who recommend another vendor, or future applicants who never return. Employer brand and customer brand are not separate worlds. They meet inside the same person.
This is one reason communication should not be treated as a courtesy that can be dropped when recruiting teams are busy. It is part of how an organization behaves in public.
Why I built Trace
Ghosted.work began as a way to document real candidate experiences with evidence rather than simply create another place to vent. Trace is the next step in that mission.
Job seekers apply across company career sites, LinkedIn, job boards, referrals, and a growing collection of applicant-tracking systems. No single platform owns the whole journey. Email is the one place where acknowledgments, interview invitations, updates, and rejections reliably converge.
Trace uses those communications to organize a job search from the candidate’s point of view. Forwarding recruiting emails creates and updates opportunity cards, preserves a timeline of what happened, and gives the user one place for notes, reminders, status, and follow-up. It is not another job board, recruiting marketplace, or mass-application tool. It is a private workspace for understanding the opportunities a person is already pursuing.
At an individual level, that organization helps restore a measure of control during a process that often feels opaque. At a community level, it can eventually produce something hiring conversations frequently lack: objective evidence about how long processes take, where communication breaks down, and which patterns are widespread rather than anecdotal.
What better hiring can look like now
The conversation also explored practical improvements that do not require waiting for a new platform or a new law:
- Send an update even when the update is that nothing has changed.
- Close the loop promptly when a role is filled, paused, or cancelled.
- Be clear about where AI is used and what decisions it influences.
- Assess candidates through work that resembles the actual job, not only rapid-fire interview theater.
- Remember that sustained unemployment can reflect the market—not a lack of ability, effort, or value.
- Treat every application as an interaction with a real person and a future customer, colleague, or advocate.
None of these practices eliminates the operational realities recruiters face. They do, however, keep those realities from being transferred entirely onto candidates through silence.
Watch the full conversation
The full episode covers the origin of Ghosted.work, the development of Trace, fake-job listings, AI on both sides of hiring, practical assessments, employer brand, and the role talent teams can play in economic mobility.
Watch “Why Companies Ghost Job Candidates (And How One Founder Is Fixing It)” on YouTube.
Thank you to Desiree, Ashley, and the Talentless Podcast for making room for a thoughtful, honest discussion—and for approaching candidate experience as something worth examining from both sides of the hiring table.