Ghosted jobseekers become tomorrow’s critics once the market turns

Employers have found a way to cope with the AI-driven flood of job applications. They have stopped replying. New Employment Hero data shows almost half of New Zealand jobseekers say they have been ghosted by a prospective employer. That is an efficiency win on the recruiter’s side of the desk. It is also a brand liability that most firms are not putting on the balance sheet.

The soft labour market makes it easy to shrug off. With unemployment at its highest level since 2015, there is no shortage of candidates. But the people being ignored today are tomorrow’s hires, customers and online reviewers, and they keep notes.

Volume broke the old process

The problem starts with arithmetic. Candidates applying for 20 to 30 roles now use AI to draft cover letters and tweak CVs at scale, a point Employment Hero’s Neil Webster makes in the NZ Herald’s coverage. Fewer jobs compound it. Back in 2025, MBIE’s Jobs Online series showed online job ads fell 21.7% in the year to March 2025, the tenth straight quarterly decline. Fewer vacancies, more applicants per vacancy, each able to apply in minutes.

Squirrel chief executive David Cunningham describes a tsunami. “We’ve had numerous roles where we have received hundreds of applications, and in one case, over 1000,” he told RNZ in September, adding that cover letters are now “a waste of time” because AI can make anyone sound like a perfect fit. Squirrel now uses AI to filter in return.

The result is what Victoria University AI professor Alistair Knott called the loop where “my AI is talking to your AI”, and the human quietly falls out of it. Candidates describe the same thing from the other end, fighting to get past automated gatekeepers just to reach a person.

Silence has a measurable price

This is not a fairness lecture. It is a pipeline problem. Ghosting runs both ways: 23% of hiring managers call candidate ghosting their biggest recruitment nightmare, while 20% of jobseekers lose interest waiting to hear back and 17% abandon applications that drag on. Employers who train candidates to expect silence should not be surprised when candidates return the favour.

The longer-run cost was already visible before the AI surge. A 2024 Robert Half survey of 501 office workers found 57% would lose interest if not contacted within 10 business days. When ghosted, 18% said they would blacklist the employer, 10% would post negative reviews and another 10% would ghost back. Only 9% would wait indefinitely.

Those numbers predate the current flood, which means the reputational exposure today is likely larger, not smaller. For any business that sells to the public, a rejected applicant is often also a customer.

The legal exposure nobody budgeted for

The second risk sits in the screening tool itself. Writing in BusinessDesk in April, columnist Rachael Judge warned that “consistency is not the same thing as fairness”, and a model trained on past hiring decisions that favoured certain schools or demographics will “replicate that at scale”. Her sharper point is liability: if candidates are screened out on a protected characteristic, “an employer may ultimately be held liable for the actions of their discriminatory AI bot.”

There is no bespoke AI-hiring law in New Zealand, and that is no bad thing. Existing employment and human rights law already puts the onus on the employer, not the software vendor. Firms do not need a new regulator to tell them that outsourcing judgment to a black box does not outsource accountability.

A blended process is the cheap fix

The answer is not to ditch the tools. Recruiters and commentators converge on the same model: let automation handle high-volume triage, then keep human-led interviews for communication, judgment and problem-solving. Do not treat an AI score as the final word.

Add response discipline. If AI saves a hiring manager 20 hours on a single role, spending one of those hours on a clear, timely outcome message to every applicant is not generosity. It is cheap brand insurance. Set a 10-day acknowledgement standard, tell shortlisted candidates where they stand, and close the loop with everyone else.

The employers ignoring candidates now are betting the buyer’s market lasts. It will not. When the labour market tightens, the firms that treated applicants as data exhaust will find out exactly how many people remember their silence.

Sources

• RNZ: Applicants ‘ghosted’ as AI floods job market (2026-10-28)
• NZ Herald: Are you being ghosted by a potential employer? Why almost half of Kiwis think they are (2026-10-28)
• RNZ: One job ad, 1000 applicants: How do you stand out in a world of AI job hunters? (2026-09-02)
• RNZ: AI causing headaches for both job hunters and recruiters (2026-05-06)
• The Post: Jobhunters face the frustration of AI gatekeepers (2026-09-11)
• Robert Half: How to lose a job candidate in 10 (business) days (2024-10-31)
• BusinessDesk: AI-assisted hiring: where businesses win – and where they get caught out (2026-04-02)