Holding a combined 40 years in Leadership Consulting, Kasey Harboe Guentert and Mollie Berke are seasoned leadership assessment consultants and co-authors of The Hiring Handbook. They collaborate with executives and HR leaders to design assessment, development, and hiring processes that improve retention, increase engagement, boost efficiency, and align talent with business strategy.

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A recruiter expresses frustration with a job that has been posted for the last 18 months. The company had already brought more than twenty candidates to the final stage, but none ever made it to the final round. Many candidates were rejected, but the team also saw their strongest candidates drop out quickly. What was the problem?

If this sounds familiar, you have experienced Ghost Hiring, either as a candidate or as a recruiter. Ghost Hiring happens when organizations launch a search before fully defining the role. Hiring teams may believe the job profile will write itself once the right candidate appears, or they fast-track interviews to keep the requisition active without gaining alignment from stakeholders. In other cases, a hiring manager repeatedly resets expectations for the role during the interview process.

When a hiring team cannot agree on, commit to, or clearly articulate the requirements and purpose of the role, they default to vague statements. Once interviews begin, the profile starts to drift as each conversation introduces new, unofficial preferences that were never part of the original criteria. Leaders communicate inconsistent versions of the job based on their own mental models. Candidates notice the fuzziness immediately.

When the role appears to shift depending on who interviewed last, trust and confidence decline. Decision-making becomes muddled, strong candidates disengage, and recruiters are left trying to drive alignment that was never established. The cost goes beyond delays, as communication becomes unclear, leveling and salary expectations fluctuate, internal credibility erodes, the employer brand weakens, and candidates quickly see when the job description does not match what they hear in interviews. Ghost Hiring is not a sourcing problem; it is a clarity problem that undermines speed, trust, and the ability to make a strong hire.

Many hiring teams jump straight into listing tasks and responsibilities, often reusing an outdated job description to save time. This can backfire, because the information may not reflect the full scope of the role or may even be misleading. The result is a hiring process that fails to produce useful insight, making it difficult to make a confident decision.

When the job profile is not aligned across the hiring team, shadow expectations emerge. Shadow expectations are unspoken performance standards that influence how a hiring manager or interviewer evaluates a candidate but are not formally documented or shared. They sit beneath the official success profile and often shape hiring behavior more than the written responsibilities. For example, a job description may list building a team, but a hiring manager might secretly expect experience managing large global teams, even if that requirement never appears in the posting.

These shadow expectations often surface when alignment on success criteria is incomplete or when not all the right stakeholders are involved. Even when a success profile exists, if the team launches the process without the right expertise, misalignment is guaranteed from the start. Interviews move forward, only for the team to later realize the foundation was never solid. By then, differing mental models make it nearly impossible to agree on a hire, and decisions become slower and more difficult. In some cases, new qualifications appear suddenly and late in the cycle.

The solution to Ghost Hiring is simple but requires discipline. Before a single candidate is sourced, the hiring team must align on the Job Profile.

A Job Profile defines:

• Organizational Context: The realities the new hire will navigate, including team dynamics, priorities, and constraints.
• Role Purpose and Key Outcomes: Why the role exists, what it should achieve, and how success will be measured over the next 12 to 18 months.
• Job Responsibilities: The activities needed to deliver the expected outcomes.
• Critical Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, and Experiences: The competencies and qualifications required, along with clear behavioral markers for evaluation.
• Minimum and Preferred Qualifications: Agreed upon criteria that allow for consistent and fair candidate assessment.

Once the job profile is set and the posting is created, it is essential to assemble and calibrate the hiring team. When decision-makers are aligned before the job goes live, the process becomes far more efficient for both the team and the candidate. A 60-minute alignment discussion can prevent months of resets and wasted interviews. As a wise HR mentor once said, an extra hour now will save you ten hours later.

The biggest myth in hiring is that weak candidate pools cause the problem. In reality, most issues stem from misalignment and a lack of clarity early in the process. If the role definition is vague, interviews will produce vague outcomes, and making a decision feels risky. Structured, evidence-based selection only works when the role itself is anchored in clear expectations. The truth is simple. Candidates are drawn to organizations that know what they want.

The information contained in this site is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as legal advice on any subject matter.