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Vague, Vetted, Vanished...

  • Writer: David Frank
    David Frank
  • Aug 18, 2025
  • 7 min read

The modern hiring journey unfolds in three distinct acts, each more troubling than the last. First comes the Vague: ambiguous job descriptions, unclear expectations, non-committal recruiter talk that leaves candidates guessing about what's truly valued. Next is the Vetted phase, where candidates endure intense scrutiny through interviews, assessments, and presentations, examined from every angle while receiving little substantive information in return.


Finally, the Vanished stage delivers the aftermath—total silence, ghosting, or a generic rejection email that wipes away weeks of interaction without explanation or closure. This pattern reveals how hiring processes typically operate: opaque up front, invasive in the middle, and evasive at the end. What follows is an examination of this cycle, its costs to both sides, and how clarity can transform what has become a theater of indirection into a process worthy of the human potential it claims to serve.


The Disappearing Point


"We're interested." Two words that feel like a lighthouse in the distance. Yet more often, they're just the flare before the shipwreck. The hiring process has become less a method of selection and more a theater of indirection—one that conceals discomfort, indecision, and, at times, negligence. This is the hiring fog: a manufactured opacity that leaves candidates stranded and employers exposed to deeper dysfunctions.


In this murky landscape, genuine connections between talent and opportunity dissolve into ritual and routine. What should be straightforward becomes labyrinthine. As recruitment trends shift toward automation and scale, the human element often evaporates first (1). The result is a system where neither side feels satisfied—candidates left wondering where they stand, and employers wondering why quality hires remain elusive despite increasingly sophisticated tools and techniques.


A System Built to Obfuscate


What looks like thoroughness is often a mask for indecision. Modern hiring is bloated: six, seven, even eight rounds of interviews for mid-level roles (1). Behind this lies not rigor, but organizational paralysis.

Managers delay decisions not out of care but out of fear—of hiring the wrong person, of internal backlash, of losing status. Add decision fatigue (2) to the mix, and what should be a weeklong sprint turns into a slow, grinding crawl.


The structural problems run deeper than inefficiency. Hiring committees diffuse responsibility to the point where no single person owns the outcome. The proliferation of stakeholders, each with veto power but none with clear accountability, creates a system designed to avoid blame rather than select talent.

This risk aversion masquerades as diligence, but it's closer to organizational cowardice (9).


  • For employers: clarity shortens time-to-hire, preserves candidate goodwill, and signals operational maturity. For candidates, recognize delays as diagnostic. A disorganized hiring process is a mirror of company dysfunction.

  • For candidates, recognize delays as diagnostic. A disorganized hiring process is a mirror of company dysfunction. 



The Illusion of Progress


"You're our top candidate" is rarely a guarantee. Often, it's a script—rehearsed to keep options open, not to honor a choice. Confirmation bias (3) shapes interviews into rituals of validation rather than true evaluation. Candidates are measured not on fit, but on how well they conform to the unspoken profile in someone's head.


This cognitive bias creates the illusion of thoroughness while actually undermining it. Interviewers often decide within minutes whether they like a candidate, then spend the remaining time collecting evidence to support their gut reaction. The problem compounds when hiring teams conflate confidence with competence, articulation with intelligence, or cultural fit with clone-like similarity.


  • Employers: Break the illusion. Build structured rubrics, rotate panel members, and confront biases directly. Candidates: Ask questions. How are decisions made? Who holds the final authority? Clarity is a right, not a luxury.



The Absurd Theater


Camus' absurdism feels right at home here. In the silence after a "great interview," candidates perform an emotional calculus, trying to interpret tone, pauses, or emoji usage in recruiter emails. This isn't professionalism—it's a manufactured ambiguity that benefits only one side.


The absurdity extends into the interview itself. Candidates face increasingly bizarre scenarios—brain teasers with no relation to job functions, hypothetical challenges divorced from daily work, or panel interviews where half the room remains silent. These performances have less to do with candidate evaluation and more to do with tribal signaling within the organization: "See how rigorously we test? See how high our standards are?"


  • Transparency is rebellion. Clarity is ethical. Anything less is cruelty by omission.



Internal Politics: The Silent Saboteur


Many rejections are not based on candidate merit but internal dynamics. Team leaders disagree.

Priorities shift. Budget disappears. Roles are redefined mid-process. And yet, candidates receive none of this context. The decision is sanitized: "We've gone in another direction."


These hidden currents shape outcomes more than candidate qualifications. A hiring manager might champion someone, only to be overruled by an executive who never met the candidate. The budget allocated for a senior role might suddenly be split into two junior positions. A reorganization might eliminate entire departments while candidates are still actively interviewing. As Iris Marion Young wrote, structural injustice thrives not on malice but on systems that obscure accountability (10).


  • Employers hide behind the process to avoid accountability. But in doing so, they erode trust—internally and externally. Recommendation: Offer candidates an honest post-mortem. Not every door needs to stay open, but every interaction should leave integrity intact.



Psychological Sinkholes


Job seekers experience ambiguous loss (4)—a grief without event, a rejection without clarity. It's the erosion of dignity over time, not all at once. Emotional labor (5) in job seeking is real: the mask of optimism candidates must wear, the forced enthusiasm for roles they may never hear back about.


The psychological burden compounds with each "we'll be in touch" that never materializes. Candidates must balance hope with self-protection, investing enough to appear passionate while guarding against inevitable disappointment. They perform complex emotional management—suppressing anxiety during interviews, manufacturing enthusiasm on command, and projecting confidence despite mounting uncertainty. As Adam Grant notes, resilience falters not just from setbacks, but from lack of closure (11).


  • Employers: This is a reputational risk. Candidates talk. Platforms like Glassdoor and Blind are filled with fog survivors. 

  • Candidates: Name it. Log your emotional labor. Set psychological boundaries—disengage when the silence starts.



The Ghost in the Machine


ATS systems are sold as efficiency tools. But their black-box logic often hides responsibility. Rejections come without explanation. Filters exclude on criteria never disclosed. Hiring becomes less a dialogue and more an algorithmic auto-reply (6).


The technology exacerbates existing problems. Keywords replace nuance. Pattern-matching substitutes for human judgment. Systems trained on past hires perpetuate historical biases while creating the illusion of objectivity. The human cost is a generation of candidates forced to reverse-engineer their applications, optimizing for algorithms rather than authentic representation.


  • For hiring teams: Let tech assist, not replace. Communicate where tech intervenes. Explain rejections. For candidates: Ask about the systems in place. If tech screens you out, you deserve to know why.

  • For candidates: Ask about the systems in place. If tech screens you out, you deserve to know why. 



Clarity as Resistance 


Radical transparency isn't trendy—it's transformative. Firms that provide feedback, honest status updates, and clear timeframes distinguish themselves in a marketplace where silence is the default (7). 


These organizations recognize that clarity is a competitive advantage in talent acquisition. By treating candidates as stakeholders rather than supplicants, they build pipelines of engaged, informed talent. They recognize that every interaction, even rejections, shapes their reputation in the market.


  • Employers: This costs nothing. And it builds everything—trust, loyalty, and credibility. Candidates: Seek out employers who practice this. Their process reveals their culture.

  • Candidates: Seek out employers who practice this. Their process reveals their culture



Can Some Fog Be Useful?


Ambiguity has its uses—space to think, room for creativity. But in hiring, fog too often means cowardice dressed as caution. A process shouldn't be uncertain because people are afraid to be clear. If gut instinct plays a role, admit it. If data is weighted over intuition, disclose it (8).


There is legitimate uncertainty in hiring. No process perfectly predicts performance. No interview flawlessly reveals character. This inherent limitation means some ambiguity is unavoidable. However, acknowledging this uncertainty is different from manufacturing it. The former is honest; the latter is evasive. As Zygmunt Bauman noted, modern life often privileges liquidity over solidity, but at a cost to those trying to make stable decisions (12).


  • Recommendation: Build systems that include subjectivity without hiding behind it.



What We Owe Each Other


The hiring fog is a moral failure as much as an operational one. When we strip people of narrative, we deny them closure. When we pretend our silences are neutral, we pretend not to wound.


Hiring is not a transaction. It's a moment of human exposure on both sides. We owe each other more than fog. We owe honesty, even if it stings.


The path forward isn't complex: treat candidates with the transparency you'd want if roles were reversed.

Provide concrete timelines and honor them. Explain delays when they occur. Offer specific feedback, especially to final-round candidates who've invested significant time. Remember that behind every application is a person making decisions about their career, their finances, their future, often with incomplete information. The asymmetry of power in hiring doesn't absolve us of the responsibility to minimize unnecessary harm through manufactured ambiguity.


The Fundamental Truth: The hiring process reveals organizational character more honestly than any mission statement or values document. The Path Forward: Demand and deliver clarity at every stage—not as a courtesy, but as the foundation of any system that claims to value human potential.


Show me the way...



 
 
 

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