In short
- 64.6% of candidates have been ghosted during an application at some point, and 34% even more than once.
- Of the ghosted candidates, 55.3% then did something that hits the employer. They talked about it, decided never to apply again or stopped buying from that company.
- 37% told friends, family or people online about it, and 22.3% say they will never apply to that company again.
- Only 4.2% shared the experience online, which means the damage to employers stays largely invisible.
- Candidates who were ghosted more than once act more often. Of that group, 61.2% did something that hits the employer, against 48.7% of the candidates who experienced it once.
Ghosting is no longer an incident
Ask a recruiter about ghosting and the conversation almost always turns to candidates who fail to show up. Ask candidates and you get a different story.
In July 2026 we put two questions to applicants who were in the middle of a real application process at 120 different employers. Have you ever been ghosted, meaning you never heard anything again after applying, not even a rejection? And what did you do next? More than a thousand candidates answered that first question.
30.6% experienced it once and 34.0% more than once. Only 35.4% say it has never happened to them. That makes it more likely than not that the candidate who opens your vacancy today has already been ignored by an employer.
No drama, but consequences
The first answer is surprisingly mild. 46.7% of ghosted candidates say it had little impact on them.
Look at what those same candidates did next and that picture collapses. 34.1% told friends or family, 4.2% shared it online, 22.3% say they will never apply to that company again and 2.6% stopped buying products or using services from that employer.
Count the candidates who did at least one of those things and you arrive at 55.3% of ghosted candidates who did something that hits the employer. Only 44.7% really did nothing.
That is the same pattern we saw with the cover letter. What candidates say about an experience and what they then do with it are two different things. For part of the group ghosting does not feel like a drama, and still more than half of them change their behaviour towards that employer.
Translated to the full group we surveyed, this means that almost one in four applicants has been ghosted and has talked about it with the people around them afterwards.
The damage never ends up on a review site
Of all ghosted candidates, only 4.2% shared the experience online. At the same time 34.1% simply told friends or family, and among women that was 38.4% against 30.1% among men.
For employers that is the most uncomfortable finding in this research. The reputational damage of ghosting travels almost entirely by word of mouth and not through review sites or social media. There is no dashboard where you watch it happen, no review you can respond to, no spike in negative sentiment scores. There are only people telling the people around them that they applied to you and never heard anything again.
Anyone who measures their employer branding by what is said about them online misses exactly the part that does the most harm.
The second time is the most expensive
The sharpest break is not between being ghosted and not being ghosted, but between once and more than once.
Of the candidates who experienced it once, 48.7% did something that hits the employer. Among candidates who were ghosted more than once that rose to 61.2%. The individual actions show the same thing. Never applying to that company again goes from 18.2% to 25.9%, stopping buying from that company from 1.0% to 4.1% and telling friends or family from 30.2% to 37.6%. These differences are statistically significant.
Not hearing back once can still be waved away as bad luck, a full inbox or a vacancy that was filled internally. The second time, that benefit of the doubt disappears and it turns into a conclusion about how employers treat applicants.
That makes ghosting a problem that accumulates across the whole labour market. You can be the first employer who sends nothing back, or the third, and that difference decides whether a candidate still forgives you.
The bill lands with the employer who let it happen
One finding is hopeful for employers. Candidates who had been ghosted before were about as positive, after finishing an assessment, about the employer they were applying to at that moment as candidates who had never experienced it. That difference is not significant.
Earlier ghosting does not leave candidates permanently cynical about application processes in general. The damage stays with the employer who let it happen and does not travel along to the next one. That also means a good process is still appreciated, including by candidates who have been ignored before.
What this means for you as a recruiter
Sending a rejection takes a few minutes. Sending nothing costs you candidates, their network and sometimes even their business.
Most organisations do not ghost out of unwillingness, but because the process allows it. Applications that stay sitting in a folder, candidates who disappear from view after the first screening, a recruiter with three hundred applicants in the system who simply cannot get to everyone.
Ghosting is almost never a choice and almost always the result of a process without a closing step.
That is also why it is solvable. Automatic status updates, a rejection that goes out as standard with every decision and a screening that gives candidates clarity within days instead of weeks take away the largest part of the problem without anyone spending extra time on it.
The return on that is higher than on a campaign. Your employer branding is ultimately not determined by what you say about yourself on your careers site, but by what the candidate you reject says about you afterwards to the people around them. For more than a third of ghosted candidates that conversation happens, whether you know about it or not.