More than half of job changers admit to ghosting an employer at some point, according to one new survey. A separate national survey finds candidates reporting the opposite. It found that employers are going quiet on them, sometimes after a signed contract. So, where does the silent treatment originate?
Both surveys suggest that the offer-to-start window has become the riskiest, least-monitored stretch of hiring, and silence from either side is common enough to shape how candidates approach every future job search.
The scale of the hiring problem
A survey of 2,000 U.S. adults who changed jobs in the past two years, commissioned by onboarding platform Click Boarding and conducted through OnePoll, found 53% have ghosted a potential new employer. Nearly half of respondents said ghosting has become an accepted part of hiring, and 45% of ghosting happens between offer acceptance and first day, more than twice the rate of any other stage.
Christine Marino, Click Boarding’s chief strategy and transformation officer, said the disengagement often starts well before a candidate goes quiet. “Ghosting is often less about the individual being irresponsible and more about disengagement occurring before the employment relationship ever truly begins,” Marino said.
A Gartner survey of nearly 3,500 candidates, which HR Executive first covered in 2023, found that 51% of new hires either declined an accepted offer late or ghosted the employer entirely within 12 months, up from 44% in 2022 and 36% in 2019. Jamie Kohn, senior director in Gartner’s HR practice, tied the increase to candidates keeping “one foot in the job market” even after saying yes, and later linked it to a deeper cause: growing doubt that employers are being honest with them during hiring.
Click Boarding estimates a company has typically sunk 75% to 90% of its full cost-per-hire by the time an offer is accepted, and 100% once a start date passes. According to SHRM’s 2025 Benchmarking Report, the average cost per hire for non-executive roles is $5,475, and external sourcing costs such as agency fees can push that figure materially higher.
Read more: Ghost job postings are now in lawmakers’ crosshairs
The counterweight
Click Boarding’s data centers candidates as the ones disappearing. Two other surveys complicate that framing. Employ’s 2026 Job Seeker Nation Report, based on a Zogby Analytics survey of more than 1,500 U.S. adults, found employer-side ghosting climbing faster than candidate ghosting: Thirty-two percent of candidates said they were ghosted by an employer this year, up from 30% in 2025, while only 14% admitted ghosting an employer themselves.
Stephanie Manzelli, Employ’s chief people officer, ties the pattern to shrinking candidate confidence rather than bad faith on either side. “When the job search feels harder to navigate, less predictable and riskier than it used to, confidence drops, and so does the willingness to try,” Manzelli says.
LiveCareer’s Vanishing Candidate Report, based on a Pollfish survey of 1,008 employed adults, lands in between the two other reports, finding that 25% of job seekers say they’ve ghosted an employer. It also traces most candidate ghosting to accepting a competing offer (51%) rather than to the post-offer period, according to Click Boarding highlights.
If this is confusing, there might be good reason for that. Click Boarding, Employ and LiveCareer each sell products that benefit from the problem they describe. Plus, the data spread makes any single figure hard to trust. However, each study seems to identify a similar list of ghosting triggers, including slow or inconsistent communication, vague information about the role and a process that feels automated or impersonal.
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