Candidate ghosting is at a record high, both ways

By SkavanderHR · 13 September 2026

Stepstone surveyed 8,100 people in Germany and found 64% of applicants get no feedback at all, while 70% of recruiters said candidates go quiet on them. Ghosting is not a manners problem on either side. It is what happens when a channel carries more volume than the people on it can answer.

Key takeaways

• In Stepstone’s German survey of 8,100 respondents, 64% of applicants received no feedback and 70% of recruiters reported being ghosted by candidates.
• Reported globally, 53% of job seekers were ghosted by an employer in the past year, up from 38% in 2024, and by some counts 65% of candidates go quiet mid process.
• Around half of employers say they lose good candidates to a poor interview experience.
• 83% of the youngest candidates expect a hiring process of two weeks or less, and 64% expect interview feedback within a week.
• The structural cause is volume: applications per posting roughly doubled while recruiting teams got smaller.

How bad is it, in numbers?

Bad enough that both sides now expect it. The clearest national data comes from Germany, where Stepstone surveyed 8,100 people: 64% of applicants said they received no feedback whatsoever on an application, and 70% of recruiters said candidates had gone silent on them. Those two findings are the same finding twice, from opposite ends of the same process.

The international figures tell the same story. Reporting across the recruiting trade press puts the share of job seekers ghosted by an employer in the past year at 53%, up from 38% in 2024, with some counts putting candidates going quiet mid process as high as 65%. Around half of employers say a poor interview experience costs them quality candidates.

Ghosting, as reported on both sides

What was measured	Figure	Published by
German applicants receiving no feedback at all	64%	Stepstone, survey of 8,100
German recruiters ghosted by candidates	70%	Stepstone, survey of 8,100
Job seekers ghosted by an employer in the past year	53%	Recruiting trade press
The same figure two years earlier	38%	Recruiting trade press
Candidates going quiet mid process, by some counts	65%	Recruiting trade press

Sources: Stepstone’s applicant and recruiter survey of 8,100 respondents, reported through German HR trade press. The international comparisons are aggregated across recruiting trade publications rather than one named study, so read them as directional; the German pair is the better sourced of the two sets.

Why do candidates go quiet?

Rarely out of rudeness. Four causes cover most of it, and three of them are process.

They are in several processes at once. Applications per posting roughly doubled in three years, and the same behaviour on the candidate’s side means each application carries less commitment. Someone holding six live threads drops the slowest one without ceremony.

The process outran their patience. 83% of the youngest candidates expect hiring to take two weeks or less, and 64% expect feedback within a week. A three week gap between a first conversation and a second reads as a decision already made.

They never got an answer themselves. When 64% of applicants report having received no feedback at all, silence stops feeling like a breach of anything. The behaviour is learnt, and we taught it.

And some had no real intent to move. That is the honest fourth cause, and it is a bigger share of an applicant pool than of a pool of people who were approached individually about one role.

Why do employers go quiet?

Arithmetic, not indifference. One person handling talent alongside HR operations, with 244 applications on a single posting, cannot write 244 replies. Something gets dropped, and what gets dropped is the group with no next step.

Which is worth naming plainly, because the fix is not a better intention. Nobody schedules time to ghost people. It happens when the volume arriving is larger than the hours available, every single time, and the only durable fixes either cut the volume or automate the answer.

What actually reduces it?

Five things, in rough order of how much they return for the effort.

Answer everyone, even in one line. A template rejection sent on the day beats a thoughtful one that never goes out, and in a market where most applicants get nothing it is remembered.

Name the next date, every time. “We will come back to you by Thursday” converts waiting into a promise you can be held to, and a missed date you own is far less damaging than silence.

Compress the process. Two conversations in one week beat four spread over a month, and the published expectation is now under two weeks. Long processes lose the strongest candidates first, because they are the ones with alternatives.

Let one person own the thread end to end. Handoffs are where threads die, and a candidate who knows who to write to does write.

Cut the volume you have to answer. This is the uncomfortable one, and it is the only fix that scales down rather than up. A shortlist of a few relevant conversations can be answered properly by a small team. A pool of hundreds cannot, whatever the intent.

What does this mean for a company of twenty to five hundred people?

Your candidate experience is your employer brand in this market, and it costs almost nothing to be the company that replies. That advantage exists precisely because most employers cannot keep up.

It also changes what a pipeline should look like. A small team is structurally unable to run a courteous process over a large anonymous applicant pool. It can run an excellent one over a handful of people who are genuinely in play.

That is the pipeline we build. Each person is found in the market and told about one specific role, so the conversation exists before any process does, and typically the whole relevant market is covered within two weeks. Someone who answered a specific message about their own work has chosen to be in the conversation, which is a different starting point from an application sent to thirty companies in an evening. It is not immunity: people take other offers and some still go quiet. It is a much smaller number of threads, each one worth answering on the day.

For how that compares with the alternatives, an agency and a monthly search side by side sets out who each one reaches and how each is paid, and security engineers is a market where candidates have the most alternatives, so the process that answers fastest tends to win.

Numbers from our own searches. Written and checked by SkavanderHR.