When Did the Job Market Get So Rude?
Posted26 days agoActive22 days ago
theatlantic.comNewsstory
skepticalnegative
Debate
40/100
EconomyProfessional EtiquetteEmployee Well-Being
Key topics
Economy
Professional Etiquette
Employee Well-Being
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
31s
Peak period
38
0-6h
Avg / period
5.5
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Dec 12, 2025 at 3:15 PM EST
26 days ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Dec 12, 2025 at 3:16 PM EST
31s after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
38 comments in 0-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Dec 16, 2025 at 3:54 PM EST
22 days ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 46248321Type: storyLast synced: 12/12/2025, 8:20:15 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
What they are saying is that when you get abused (being ghosted by lots of companies), it's fair play to then become the abuser (ghosting an employer after they didn't ghost you and tried to play fair).
I'm in a hiring position, and I would blacklist any candidate that wasted my time like this.
It's childish and just adds to the current state of Gen Z making it impossible to hire them (and then complaining they can never find a job).
If you offered a position and, as described in TFA, they didn't show up then it seems obvious to me that this hypothetical candidate is not terribly bothered by your threats.
You’re likely offering “market rate” roles. You’re getting “market rate” candidates and behavior. It’s like walking into a Fiat dealership and being mad you’re not getting Ferrari treatment.
If you want better you are welcome to pay more and then maybe people will have less incentives to ghost you. The Ferrari treatment still exists, you just need to pay for it.
No need. I just find more capable and reliable older workers.
Most people I know in different industries are doing the same
Not to say it's a bad thing, it's great if you managed to get your company to deliver a working environment that attracts and retains older workers, just pointing out from experience with techbros that the reason older/more experienced workers are avoided (or just don't apply in the first place) is precisely for this reason - techbros explicitly don't want someone who can afford to defend their boundaries, they'd rather take someone who's too naive or financially-insecure to say no.
> It's childish and just adds to the current state of Gen Z making it impossible to hire them (and then complaining they can never find a job).
This is an unacceptable interviewing posture. As a Bar Raiser (or whatever your equivalent is) with authority over interview standards and interviewer eligibility, I’d pull you from loops for retraining. Repeat it, and you’re removed from interviewing.
..and retraining? Lol
Candidates that are a no show after many interviews should definitely be blacklisted for a set amount of time.
The USPS, for instance, will blacklist you for 5 years for this behavior.
Training for interviewing? Nah let’s throw you in there and vibe it out
Is that what you the mean?
It's telling when you jump to 'ilegal behavor' yet think acting like a total unprofessional asshole by wasting everyone's time with a company doing the right thing, is totally acceptable.
I would never ghost a company or a candidate and expect other people to have the same courtesy.
It also shows that bias is perfectly acceptable against groups you dislike (companies you think are all acting the same, so they all somehow deserve the same shitty behavior) yet unacceptable to a group you support.
It's amazing how short our memories are for all the companies 10 years ago bending over backwards to give those employees anything and everything they wanted.
A lot of my statement here is very generalizing but at the end of the day market forces really do dictate a lot of this. I keep seeing article after article from hiring managers about how they're FLOODED with applications. You can't be 'polite' to all those people, as most people don't have the attention span for all that. There are definitely 2 sides to this coin it just seems that from the side of the people wanting to be hired they just have no empathy for those doing the hiring.
I dunno. Being polite in the context of a job application is pretty basic: if the applicant didn’t make it to a phone screen, send them a polite form letter telling them that.
It doesn’t require much attention, just a little automation and caring enough to actually respond.
For those that made it to a phone screen but not past it, a polite rejection email is also sufficient.
This doesn’t seem like a lot to me.
The reason for the lack of those is that employers want to hedge their bets - emailing a rejection will make the candidate move on and potentially take another offer which would make them unavailable.
Letting them stew means the candidate may remain available if you suddenly change your mind or your top pick flakes out and you need a replacement on short notice.
It's understandable - what's less understandable is being butthurt about it when candidates start playing the exact same game and flake out because they too hedged their bets, picked another option and need to let you down.
At any stage, if you take more than a couple of weeks to a month, the applicant has probably moved on anyway.
And for early stages applicants, almost no one is going to wait and not taking an offer in the hopes that they’ll hear back from a company that hasn’t given them feedback from a phone screen.
Now am I supposed to bundle up all those 450 initial applications that got filtered out just to send them a nice polite email that their resumes didn't even fit the position they applied for? From a pure business perspective this is a straight waste of time. Especially as most businesses aren't going to have an automatic way to do this easily, and building that automation doesn't make my company money. But if I already happened to have some automation setup for it, then maybe sure. This part is the majority 'ghosted' applications. For the rest of the 50 I'd probably be more likely to actually send them a personalized email about the role because at least they actually fit what they applied for.
Yes.
>Especially as most businesses aren't going to have an automatic way to do this easily, and building that automation doesn't make my company money.
If you have the automation in place to receive and process 500 applications in the first place, and filtering that automatically cuts them down, I think it's reasonable to expect that you'd have automation that can email the people who were cut to tell them that they weren't selected and not to expect any further communication.
I find myself surprised by the idea that, in most cases, any business is not used some form of automated solution for resume filtering. In that case, it seems like automated rejection responses should be a capability provided by that solution. I can't recall the last time I went through an application process that wasn't clearly provided to the company I was applying for by a third-party company, though I'll grant that the companies to which I might apply are likely not those to which you are referring.
It's always good to be polite. It would be an advantage to send a form letter nowadays, since job seekers will remember it.
And come on. You have a list of emails. Do you really think it's insurmountable for a business to send an email to a list of emails? My "promotions" inbox begs to differ.
It's not paper, dude. It's a Select-All operation and then a matter of removing the one person who you did choose to hire. It doesn't have to be personalized. That straw-man is a pure invention of your imagination. A rejection email that says, "You didn't get the job. We hired someone else." as coarse as it is, would be infinitely less insulting, stressful, discourteous, etc. than just flat-out ghosting.
There's no complex "automation" to set up. This is something that programs since the 90s have been able to do.
You could argue that this doesn't align with the software/workflow that you're using, but that's on you (and if this is your actual dayjob, you have no excuse, and the article's observations about respect are spot-on).
Whereas to a candidate sending their 400th application, sending a "thanks for rejecting me" represents a real and significant opportunity cost.
That's not ghosting on the candidate's part, though; candidate ghosting is not responding to an acceptance (whether its for an interview or for the job itself) and simply no-showing.
FTA: Meanwhile, some applicants who make it through the onerous hiring process and accept jobs never show up for their first day. One California recruiter told me that some of the candidates who ditched had even signed offers for positions that paid six-figure salaries.
Start-up, competing with Duolingo, wanted me to "sign up for our service, go through the introductory levels, come up with five specific areas we could improve and how you'd go about them and in what order", as part of your application.
So, "Pump our metrics, give us specific business advice and then we'll see if maybe we'd grant you the courtesy of a conversation". The only way that could be more toxic is if you had to supply a credit card to sign up...
About half of my jobs would refuse to rehire anyone who quit out of spite, whether or not they gave notice.
No employee gives a shit about those threats anymore because, as this article points out, employers are already nearing the bottom of treating employees like disposable pieces of trash already.
Threats don’t have any power when you’ve already done them
You'll forgive me if I miss one.
Recruiting is turning into the business that still needs a paper check from you. Nobody else uses those grandpa.
If you haven't gotten your answer, then you've gotten your answer. Fill in the likely blanks: they are busy with their day jobs and as you admit, they're assuming you already know the outcome because you bombed the technical assessment.
On to the next one.
There's no contract that someone owes you a followup email. Many times, it's better to end things instead of fakeness or platitudes.
Also, "basic manners" is ambiguous because there's no universal definition.
Regardless, there is a cost. Saying otherwise is dishonest.
To prove this, think about it:
there are so many MORE far worse outcomes that could've happened that would universally qualify as "rude." This isn't that.
The nash equilibrium in a buyer-seller market like the employer-employee relationship is for both sides to defect. Humans don't behave optimally, because they aren't pure rational creatures, they are imbued with some socialisation and cultural memory. So humans try to treat with these organisations as though they are other humans, and will respond to good-will with good-will, but this is not rewarded, and ultimately they change their behaviour in response to a poor environment.
Capital does behave short term optimally. Optimal economic behaviour is to betray the person opposite you, and violate and exploit the commons until the commons collapses entirely, like what we see today. At some points in the past, capital has been subdued by a human operator who will apply courtesy and social norms to prevent these ugly actions, but capital has now become too intelligent to bother with this, and the result is a sequence of increasingly insane and inhuman processes, such as what we see here with the job market.