4 Reasons Why You Haven't Heard Back About Your Interview and How to Finally Hear Back

One of the worst parts about job searching is interviewing for a company, and then experiencing the deafening silence of not hearing back from the company for days or weeks. This is often called “ghosting” and it’s confusing to know why it happened to you and what steps to take next.

I have grouped the possible reasons as to why the recruiter ghosted you, into 4 categories. Here is what’s happening behind the scenes when you don’t hear back from a company, and what to do about it when this happens to you!

Reason #1: Other candidates

You’re early.

You may have interviewed early in the company’s hiring process, so while you whirled through the first two rounds, they may slow down your interviews so that they can evaluate other candidates before making a later-round decision.?

Referrals & internal candidates.

When a referral or internal candidate is introduced to the interview process, sometimes companies will slow down their interviewing of other candidates to allow these folks to catch up and be evaluated.?

Referrals are often not friends or family, you can get referrals without ever knowing anyone in the company (you can learn how to do that here).

There’s an offer out for the role.

Another scenario is the company may already have an offer out to another candidate. Let’s not jump to conclusions here, but that is the unfortunate truth sometimes.

Reason #2: Busy Internally.

One of the reasons why it bites to be a job seeker is the interview process is full of people who are overworked.?

Think about it.

You only hire someone to a team if there is more work than there are people. Then we have these overworked people spend hours reading resumes and interviewing people, further exacerbating their inability to make a decision, communicate, and close the process.

Therefore recruiters are constantly chasing hiring managers who:

• Have an urgent deadline coming up and aren’t as focused on hiring right now
• Interviewed the person but hasn’t entered in their decision about them because they have been so busy
• Forget to get back about a candidate because they got distracted

Most recruiters are waiting to hear back from the interviewer or hiring manager before they move on to reviewing new applicants. The recruiter might have pinged the hiring manager about a candidate, the hiring manager was too busy to respond, and the recruiter moves on to focusing on so many other roles.

However, you can kindly remind them by sending follow-up emails that will make you stand out from the other candidates. Use our follow-up email templates to help you determine the perfect email to send whether you are speaking to the recruiter or the hiring manager.?

Reason #3: Key people need to get involved.

Sometimes the major decision makers are out of town, on vacation or out for the holidays.?

There can also be an extensive approval process, generally at larger companies where multiple people need to approve of a candidate.

Reason #4: Decision Paralysis.

Companies are terrified of making the wrong hiring decision. Have you ever heard of the term “Slow to hire, quick to fire”? Well companies sometimes take the “slow” part a bit too far because they really don’t want to make a hiring mistake since mistakes are so expensive and detrimental.

What leads to this analysis paralysis? One reason is there is internal confusion about the role itself. Sometimes they need to get a clearer understanding of what the role is, maybe they need to adjust the role, or completely pause the search because something changed in quarterly planning making this random other role more important than this one.?

One thing that stood out to me when I first started my career in HR is deciding which roles are more important and how they should function in the organization, it is such an imperfect science. Especially the more cerebral the work gets, the more unclear it can be to determine which roles are more important.?

Additionally, there can be large changes internally. Sometimes it can be a funding situation, restructuring of the team, a change in revenue, or someone leaving the company. These things change the scope and priority of the role you are interviewing for, and may even lead them to pause or cancel the search.

All these situations can leave the recruiter confused on how to articulate why the candidates were rejected. So they drop the ball, because they don’t have the time, clarity, or manners to get back to you.

What to do if you have been ghosted.

Here are 5 things to do if you haven’t heard back from a company:

1. Assume good intent. These recruiters are corresponding with you but the tough part can sometimes be corralling internal folks to move the process along - everyone with good intentions but just attention pulled in many directions. So don’t think of them as an evil ghost, think of them as Casper the friendly ghost.?
2. Don’t assume it is going to be a yes and you’ll still land the job, continue with your job search!?
3. At the same time don’t assume it is a no. They haven’t rejected you yet, so keep your eye on the prize and continue with your killer job search strategy to get you that job.
4. Do the friendly follow up. This is huge, master the art of the follow up. Use these free follow-up email templates to hear back quickly from hiring teams.?
5. If this does not work, send the “I’m almost off the market” email. This email is ridiculously powerful at getting a company who has been ghosting you to rise from the dead within 20 min of sending it like it’s Easter Sunday. That email is in Fill in the Blank Job Hunt ebook (this is a paid resource that supports the creation of free YouTube content, thank you!).

There is so much more to say about how to follow-up with the recruiter and land the offer. Come to the free 5 day masterclass “Upgrade Your Career” to learn advanced, bleeding edge strategies on how to be an irresistible candidate (even if you’re changing careers).

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Madeline Mann is an HR & Recruiting leader who is known for her award-winning job search YouTube Channel, Self Made Millennial, and her acclaimed coaching program, Standout Job Search. Mann’s career coaching programs have led to thousands of success stories, and her work has been featured in Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and more.