AI, Ghosting & the War for Talent

Something has changed in recruitment — and not just because of AI. The job market has become squeezed, processes have grown longer, and candidates are reaching the final stages of multi-round interviews only to hear nothing. Employers, meanwhile, are struggling to pull the trigger on decisions even when good people are in front of them.

In a recent conversation on The Responsibility Maze, Carl Lyon, Maria McCann and Stuart Bromley unpacked what's actually driving this — and why it matters beyond the hiring process itself.

The perfect storm nobody designed

There are currently around 2.4 unemployed people for every vacancy in the UK — the highest ratio in some time. Much of that is driven by structural factors in sectors like hospitality and leisure, where rising costs have reduced headcount. But whatever the cause, the result is a labour market that feels simultaneously flooded with applicants and starved of the right ones.

AI has made this worse in a specific way. Candidates are using it to upgrade CVs, prepare for interviews, and in some cases run chat assistants in real time during virtual assessments. The result is that early-stage processes are now filtering an unusually polished set of applications — without any corresponding increase in candidate quality. The CV has become a performance rather than a portrait.

For employers, this creates a strange paralysis. More candidates are clearing the early bar, which means more resource is required for human-led assessment stages. Decisions slow down. And because the external environment is itself uncertain — roles are shifting, AI is disrupting whole job categories — there's a genuine question about who the "right" candidate even is.

What ghosting is actually telling us

The term "ghosting" has become common in recruitment — candidates going silent after offers, or more often, employers failing to respond after interviews. But it's worth asking whether ghosting is new, or whether expectations have simply risen.

Twenty years ago, companies were largely faceless. You worked there; the culture came from the team around you. Now, organisations actively market their values, their candidate experience, their culture. They've made a promise. When the recruitment process doesn't reflect that promise, the disappointment lands harder than it used to.

There's also a question of catastrophisation. Is ghosting genuinely more prevalent, or are people quicker to name and share the experience? Probably both. But either way, the experience of effort without response — investing in six rounds of interviews and hearing nothing — is a direct hit to the EQUIP cycle that underpins resilience. It's stress without resolution. Effort without recovery.

The paradox of choice problem

When there are more candidates than ever, and roles are less certain than ever, decision-making stalls. Employers find themselves searching for a "perfect fit" while being unable to define what that means, because the companies around them — and the industries they operate in — are themselves in flux.

This is not new. Good leaders have always had to make imperfect hiring decisions. But the combination of external disruption, AI-driven volume, and heightened expectations on both sides has made the threshold for commitment feel higher. The result is delay — which compounds the candidate experience problem, which damages the employer brand, which makes hiring harder next time.

A different way to think about talent

Maria's suggestion in the conversation is a useful reframe: instead of hiring for a very specific, defined role, what if organisations thought about the long-term talent they want in the business? In a context where roles are changing fast and disruption is constant, hiring for values and adaptability may produce better decisions than hiring for exact specification.

It also changes how you manage the process. If you're thinking about long-term fit rather than immediate job match, you move faster on people who feel right and stop waiting for a perfect alignment that may never arrive.

The other shift worth making: candidates who navigate the process through personal networks consistently report a better experience. Not because of nepotism — but because a known quantity reduces the uncertainty that slows everything down. Organisations that invest in referral cultures and genuine alumni networks are quietly solving the ghosting problem before it starts.

What this reveals about the wider system

Recruitment is not where the resilience gap starts. But it is one of the most visible places where the gap becomes apparent. Candidates arrive carrying the accumulated effects of an education-to-work pipeline that increasingly leaves the EQUIP cycle incomplete — stress without interpretation, effort without recovery, ambiguity without context.

When they meet a hiring process that amplifies that uncertainty rather than reducing it, the result isn't just a bad candidate experience. It's an early signal of how the organisation will feel to work in.

Fixing recruitment isn't about better job descriptions or faster response times, though both help. It's about treating the hiring process as the first act of a working relationship — and designing it with the same intentionality you'd want people to experience once they're inside.