Ghosting in hiring has a location problem. A new survey from onboarding technology provider Click Boarding, covering 2,000 U.S. adults who changed jobs in the past two years, found that 53 percent admitted to ghosting a prospective employer at some point, and that 45 percent of that ghosting happened in the narrowest and most expensive window in the hiring funnel: between accepting an offer and showing up for day one.
That timing matters more than the headline number. Recruiters have spent years building screening and outreach tools to catch disengaged candidates earlier, at the application or interview stage. Click Boarding’s data suggests the leak has moved downstream, past the point where most hiring technology stacks are still paying attention. A candidate can clear sourcing, interviews, and an accepted offer, representing the bulk of the cost and time a company sinks into a hire, and still never appear on day one.
“Ghosting is often less about the individual being irresponsible and more about disengagement occurring before the employment relationship ever truly begins,” said Christine Marino, Click Boarding’s chief strategy and transformation officer, in the company’s writeup of the findings. That framing points recruiting and HR technology teams toward a specific gap: most applicant tracking and recruiting platforms treat an accepted offer as the finish line, when the data says it is closer to the midpoint.
The original insight for HR leaders is where to intervene. If disengagement is building during the offer-to-start gap rather than appearing suddenly on day one, the fix is not a better applicant tracking system. It is structured, tracked touchpoints, preboarding portals, manager check-ins, benefits enrollment nudges, during a stretch of the funnel most HRIS and ATS platforms currently treat as a handoff rather than a phase to manage. Employers who instrument that gap the way they already instrument sourcing and interviewing are the ones most likely to close it. HRTech has previously covered how AI is quietly breaking the signals hiring depends on, and the offer-to-start gap is emerging as another blind spot recruiting technology has yet to fully instrument.
Source: Click Boarding
