WiggleGuy

I've been job hunting lately, which means, naturally, I've been dealing with recruiters who ghost.

When I look online for discussions regarding this, folks sometimes hypothesize that ghosting could reduce if the recruiters and companies experienced reputational consequences.

I want to build a quick MVP browser extension to test this hypothesis, and I'd like people's thoughts on whether it will actually do anything to solve the problem (when it scales).

The ideal tool will warn job hunters about the ghosting patterns of companies/recruiters as they visit websites, job postings, LinkedIn pages, etc.

There are 3 main things I this MVP to have:

1) Being able to aggregate user-provided ghosting instances (proof has to be provided) on a per-recruiter basis. Then, when users encounter this recruiter online (email, LinkedIn, etc), they get a banner at the top of their page summarizing the aggregation. For example: "X has 100 instances of ghosting people in the last 2 months." Clicking on this banner allows you to see all the instances, along with their proof (like email threads or something).

2) Having some notion of ghosting severity: being ghosted after a face-to-face video call is worse than being ghosted after initial email contact.

3) Being able to aggregate the ghosting behavior of recruiters on a company wide level: if someone goes to a company careers page or a job posting, they get a similar banner showing the aggregation summary across their recruiters. For the sake of discussion, let's disregard the caveat that recruiters change jobs often: assume this is handled.

As mentioned above, before I even think about the technical nuances of how some tricky aspects would work, I'd like thoughts on whether people think this would even move the needle to reduce ghosting or not. Looking for the thoughts of devs and recruiters alike. Comments suggesting devs to just move on since ghosting is ubiquitous won't really be helpful here :)

For me, I have a couple hypotheses on how this could make the experience better for devs:

1) Curbs their expectations

2) Gives them better insight into which recruiters to prioritize when handling multiple at once. This, in turn, may change recruiter behavior once they start to know this is happening. This may also affect which recruiters get hired by employers (I am not totally convinced about this last one).

EDIT: I want to clarify something: If someone applies to a role via a portal or something and the company doesn't respond, that's not ghosting (or, rather, that's not the ghosting I'm talking about). This is more tackling the case where there's been some communication between you and the recruiter, and then they just drop it. That's the rude case I'm focusing on. The recruiter is perfectly in the right to want to move on at any point. But a quick 5 work message or email vs ghosting makes a big difference for the recipient. Even outside of being less rude, it makes things easier because you know which doors are actually still open or not.