70% of Employers Say Candidates Have Ghosted Them. Only 19% Admit They've Ever Ghosted a Candidate.

Most people who have looked for work recently have a ghosting story. Usually it involves a final-round interview, a recruiter who promised to follow up by Friday, and a silence that lasted until the candidate stopped checking their inbox.

Employers have ghosting stories too. In a survey of 1,027 US hiring professionals conducted this summer by hiring-assessment company Criteria, 70% said a candidate had ghosted them. When asked whether they had ever ghosted a candidate, only 19% said yes.

Job seekers will read that 19% and laugh. Criteria's 2026–2027 Hiring Benchmark Report only surveyed employers, so there's no candidate number to set beside it, and the people who answered may be telling the truth about themselves. Plenty of the silence candidates experience comes from applicant tracking systems that never send a rejection, or from a hiring manager somewhere else in the building who stopped replying. Few recruiters would count that as their own ghosting. Candidates count all of it.

Employers ranked their brand last

The more revealing number in the report has nothing to do with ghosting directly.

Criteria asked hiring professionals to name their top priorities for next year. Improving employer brand came in last of ten, chosen by 12%. Improving the candidate experience landed at 31%, a point behind reducing costs. Upskilling current staff and making hiring more efficient led the list at 41% each.

At The State of Brand, we think that ranking explains the ghosting gap better than anything else in the survey. Companies mostly treat employer brand as a marketing asset, something that lives on the careers page and in the recruiting video. The people answering this survey run hiring, and they told Criteria that brand is the least of their concerns. To them it sounds like somebody else's department.

Candidates experience it differently. To a job seeker, a company's brand is the follow-up email that arrived or the one that didn't. It's whether the recruiter remembered their name in the second interview. Someone who spent three afternoons interviewing and then heard nothing has formed an opinion of that company, and they'll share it in group chats, on Glassdoor, and in public posts where hundreds of strangers reply that the same thing happened to them. No careers page is going to outrank that.

The market is moving against employers

Treating brand as an afterthought might work in a market where employers can pick from a long line of eager applicants. The report suggests that market is gone.

Fifty-two percent of hiring professionals say hiring is harder than it was a year ago. Fifty-five percent say finding high-quality candidates with the right skills is their biggest challenge. Sixty-four percent expect to hire more next year, so the competition for good people is about to get stiffer. The candidates employers want most are the ones with options, and those candidates remember how they were treated last time.

AI is raising the stakes. More than half of the employers surveyed now use AI somewhere in hiring, and 31% say they're dealing with extremely high applicant volume. As more of the process gets automated on both sides, a reply from an actual person gets rarer. We expect it to become one of the few things that makes a company stand out to a strong candidate.

Candidates learned it from someone

Criteria's own report describes ghosting as circular. Candidates who feel ignored after applying tend to return the favor, and the report suggests that better communication could give a company an edge.

We'd go further. Much of the ghosting employers complain about is behavior they taught. Someone who sent forty applications and heard back from four has stopped assuming that every employer deserves a prompt reply. Someone whose last interviewer never told them they didn't get the job feels no obligation to send the next company a polite withdrawal. Nobody should call that good manners, though nobody should be surprised by it either.

The report's own skills data makes the point sharper. Asked what they look for in candidates, 73% of hiring professionals put work ethic first. They want people who follow through and keep their commitments. Plenty of candidates would like the same from employers.

Our take

Ghosting shrinks when candidates come to expect a reply, and they only come to expect one when companies send them. Complaining about it in a survey doesn't change anyone's expectations.

Sending that reply is cheap. A short, honest rejection takes a recruiter a minute, and an automated one costs nothing. Telling a finalist that a decision is delayed keeps a relationship the company may want in a year. Most candidates will never watch a company's culture video, but nearly all of them will find out whether it wrote back.

We'd also like to see brand teams take an interest. If employer brand is how people outside a company perceive what it's like to work there, then the rejection email is brand work, and it reaches far more people than any campaign. Leaving it to whoever has time in recruiting is how a company ends up as the example in someone's ghosting post.

Job seekers, the data supports what you've been saying for years. Employers want professionalism and follow-through, and they ranked how they treat applicants near the bottom of their list. Say that in reviews and in public, and give credit to the companies that get it right.

Employers who want candidates to stop ghosting them can start by writing back.

Data: Criteria, 2026–2027 Hiring Benchmark Report, survey of 1,027 US hiring professionals conducted in summer 2026. Criteria sells hiring assessment software, and its report argues for more assessment-based hiring.