Issue 004: The silence nobody budgets for

Over half the candidates who make it to an interview this year will hear nothing back. Not a rejection. Not a form email. Nothing. Meanwhile 86% of them are checking your Glassdoor page before they even hit apply, and the ones who got ghosted last time are usually the ones writing the reviews the next candidate reads.

This week is about the moment most people leaders would rather not think about: the point where you tell someone no, or don't tell them anything at all. What a good rejection actually looks like mechanically, what a bad one costs you in pounds and reputation, and why the people getting left in the dark the most aren't the ones you'd expect.

Marisha Drayton is this week's Leader Spotlight. She's the founder of Respectful Rejections, a platform built entirely around fixing this exact problem, and she joins The Work Life Reporter Live this Tuesday to talk about it properly.

Welcome to Issue 004 of The Work Life Reporter. This week you get:

Let’s get into it.

A former Head of Resourcing at Virgin Media, Graeme Johnson, asked the company's customer insights team an uncomfortable question: how many rejected job candidates were also paying Virgin Media customers. The answer was 18%, and around two thirds of them counted as detractors, unlikely to recommend the company to anyone. Run through the maths on cancellations, and Virgin Media was losing an estimated £4.4 million a year from candidates who left the hiring process feeling badly treated and then left as customers too.

Years later, talent acquisition leaders still reach for this exact number when they need to build the internal case for fixing candidate experience. What made it land wasn't the emotional argument, it was the financial one. Johnson didn't ask the business to care about candidates out of principle. He handed finance a revenue figure attached to bad rejections, then used that number to get budget for retraining hundreds of hiring managers. If you want a rejection process fixed, a spreadsheet moves faster than a values statement.

Talend, a data integration software company, filled around three quarters of its open roles from people already in its existing pipeline, including a meaningful number of what recruiters call silver medalists: candidates who made the final round and didn't get the job the first time. Using LeverTRM to tag and track them, Talend turned its rejected finalists into a searchable, reusable talent pool instead of a one-time no.

The insight here isn't the software, it's the discipline behind it. Every recruiting team says they'll keep candidates warm, and almost none of them actually build the infrastructure to do it: a tag, a trigger, a reason to come back six months later with something real to offer. Talend's finalists had already proven they could do the job. Losing that proof and starting from zero on the next vacancy is the actual waste, not the rejection itself.

In 2022, HireVue published an AI Explainability Statement, reviewed by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office, setting out plainly how its AI is used in hiring decisions and giving candidates the option to opt out of AI evaluation while still remaining in the process. It has since expanded the statement to cover its newer platform. That was years before Illinois, Colorado, Ontario, and a growing list of jurisdictions started legally requiring exactly this kind of disclosure.

The lesson isn't really about HireVue as a vendor, it's about the sequencing. Most organisations are currently treating AI hiring disclosure as a compliance deadline to hit once the law forces their hand. HireVue built the explainability statement and the opt-out mechanism before anyone required it, which meant candidates encountering it experienced it as a choice rather than a legal notice bolted on after a lawsuit. Getting ahead of a disclosure law by even a year changes how it reads to the person on the other end of it.

CharityJob, a UK job board for the charity sector, ran a campaign asking every recruiter using its platform to commit to one specific standard: get back to every candidate, at every stage, regardless of outcome. Not a vague aspiration, a named pledge attached to the platform's brand, in a sector where the research shows 79% of candidates say they're less likely to apply to an organisation again if a previous application went unanswered.

What makes this a genuine culture play rather than a marketing campaign is that CharityJob put its own reputation behind other companies' hiring behaviour. Recruiters using the platform weren't just being asked nicely, they were being asked to live up to a public standard the platform itself was known for. That's a different mechanism to an internal HR policy nobody outside the building ever sees. When the pledge is public, "we forgot to follow up" stops being an internal miss and starts being a broken promise.

The 2025 Ghosting Index, a research report published in May 2026, found that historically underrepresented candidates are ghosted after interviews at a rate of 66%, compared with 59% for white candidates. A seven point gap that shows up specifically at the stage where candidates have already cleared screening bias and made it into a room or a call with someone. The same research put the total economic cost of ghosting, in wasted candidate time alone, at over $2.5 billion a year.

The uncomfortable part isn't that ghosting happens, most people leaders already know it does. It's that the silence itself isn't evenly distributed. If underrepresented candidates are more likely to clear the bar and then get less follow-through once they're through it, that's not a communication gap, it's a second, quieter filter operating after the official one closes. Most diversity dashboards track who gets interviewed. Almost none of them track who gets a real answer afterwards.

Recruiting platforms report that 72% of job seekers now receive a rejection within 24 hours of applying, many within minutes. That speed looks efficient on a dashboard. It doesn't feel efficient to the person on the other end. One recruiting platform executive put it plainly: candidates increasingly describe the experience as being processed rather than considered, and only around one in ten employers ever clearly tell candidates that AI was involved in the decision at all.

The instinct to automate the fastest, earliest-stage rejections isn't the problem. Application-stage rejections can and probably should be quick. The problem is when the same instant, undisclosed pattern gets applied to candidates who invested real time: a screening call, a task, a second interview. Speed and effort aren't the same axis. A rejection can be fast and still feel considered, but only if the method matches how much the candidate actually put in.

Match your response speed and format to candidate investment, not to what's easiest to automate. And if AI is involved in the decision, say so. The candidates who find out later that it wasn't disclosed are the ones who write the review.

Rejection delivered by phone call produces roughly 32% higher positive candidate ratings than an automated email, according to recruiting research. Only around one in ten rejections actually happens this way. Most of the guidance now converging on this, including SHRM's own 2025 recommendations, is simple: automated email is fine for application-stage rejections, a personalised email works after a phone screen, and a phone call is the right call for anyone who made it through a full interview.

The resistance to phone calls is usually about discomfort, not time. A two-minute call feels harder to deliver than a two-line email, so it gets automated away along with everything else, even though it's the one moment where a candidate who invested real hours in your process gets treated like it mattered.

Set the rule explicitly: final round means a phone call, no exceptions, follow up in writing after for the record. It costs a recruiter ten minutes. It's the difference between a candidate who reapplies next year and one who never does.

94% of professionals say they want feedback when they're turned down. Only around 17% of employers in North America actually provide it. That gap alone is worth sitting with, but the business case underneath it is sharper: candidates who receive specific, honest feedback after an interview show roughly 50% higher willingness to refer others, and around 70% report walking away with a positive impression of the company even though they didn't get the job.

Meanwhile 86% of candidates check employer reviews before applying, and 55% will not apply at all after reading a negative one. The candidates you ghost today are, statistically, the reviews the next round of applicants reads before they hit apply. Feedback isn't a courtesy cost, it's the input to your own future pipeline and your own public reputation, and right now most organisations are treating it as optional admin instead of the retention and referral tool it actually is.

Pick one stage of your process, just one, and add a real, specific feedback line to the rejection at that stage this quarter. Measure reapplication and referral rate for that group against everyone else.

Marisha Drayton spent close to two decades running high-volume recruitment inside organisations where the stakes for getting it wrong were real: Head of Recruitment at London Fire Brigade, managing over 1,600 annual trainee firefighter hires alongside executive recruitment, and Head of Recruitment at London South Bank University, where she took the institution's LinkedIn visibility from 30% to 80% and cut its largest school's vacancy rate from 40% to 5%. She's also spent years inside NHS trusts building and running resourcing functions at scale.

Four months ago, she founded Respectful Rejections, a platform built entirely around one idea: every rejection deserves a response. She's also Co-Advocacy Director at Outvertising, where her work sits at the intersection of employer brand and who actually gets seen, heard, and followed up with fairly.

"I fix broken hiring," is how she puts it in her own bio, and it's not a slogan, it's close to a job description at this point.

Marisha joins The Work Life Reporter Live this Tuesday, her first appearance with us. Ahead of that conversation, here's where she's coming from and what she's built her case on. A note on these: they're drawn from the themes she's confirmed for Tuesday's live conversation and her documented work, not a transcript, since the conversation itself hasn't happened yet as this issue goes out. Come back after Tuesday for her actual words.

Marisha's starting position going into Tuesday is that most organisations treat candidate silence as a workflow gap, something an ATS automation or a better email template fixes. Her argument is that it's a values question first. If a company will let a person who invested hours of their time simply never hear back, that's a decision about whose time counts, not a broken workflow.

Respectful Rejections isn't built around getting companies to send an email where they previously sent nothing. It's built around what happens after that baseline is met: real reasons, real tone, a real door left open where appropriate. Marisha's point for Tuesday is that most people leaders think they've solved this the moment an automated email goes out, when that's actually the minimum bar, not the fix.

Having run recruitment at the volume of London Fire Brigade’s 1,600+ annual hires, Marisha’s practical case is aimed squarely at the objection every TA leader raises first: that a better process costs time they don’t have. Her counter, built from running high-volume pipelines herself, is that the real time sink is the reapplications, complaints, and reputational cleanup that come from not doing it.

This is where her Outvertising work and her recruitment career meet directly. Tuesday's conversation is set to dig into the equity question most diversity dashboards don't track: not who gets interviewed, but who gets a real answer once they're in the process. Expect her to push people leaders to check their own data before assuming their rejection process treats everyone the same.

True to the practical, not abstract framing of Tuesday’s session, Marisha’s closing ask isn’t a full process overhaul. It’s one specific, doable change: choose a single stage where candidates currently go quiet, and fix the follow-through there first. Small, checkable, done this week, not planned for next quarter.

Thank you in advance, Marisha, we'll see you Tuesday!

Connect with Marisha on LinkedIn or find out more about Respectful Rejections.

And that's a wrap for Issue 004. Something land? Hit reply and tell us which section you're taking back to your team.

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