A Halloween tale: The ghosts of hiring past
Sarah, the recruiter, sat alone at her desk on Halloween Eve, desperate to fill a senior analyst position open for three months. That’s when she saw it — the perfect resume. Eight years of experience, every skill, even the niche certification. She scheduled an interview for the next morning, feeling a strange chill.
The phantom interview
The candidate’s answers were flawless — articulate, detailed, perfectly structured. But something felt wrong. No pauses. No “umms.” No thinking time. It was as if every answer was being read from an invisible script.
“Tell me about a challenge you faced,” Sarah asked, going off-script.
The candidate’s eyes flickered to the side — just for a second — before launching into another perfect response. Sarah’s blood ran cold: they were reading from a hidden screen. AI was feeding them answers. In real-time.
The ghost application invasion
Later that week, Sarah discovered that 240 of her 300 applications were likely AI-generated. Mass-produced phantoms flooding her inbox, burying real candidates — qualified, genuine, human candidates — under an avalanche of perfectly customized mediocrity.
The haunting she created
But Sarah’s company was guilty too. Her job board showed positions “open” for over a year. Ghost jobs. Phantom roles never meant to be filled, posted to appear like the company was growing or to collect resumes for “future opportunities.”
She thought of candidates who had spent hours on applications for opportunities that were never real. The guilt haunted her.
The disappearing act
Then there were the candidates who had gone through multiple rounds, spent hours on assignments, been told they were “top candidates” and then... silence. No rejection email. No call. No closure. Ghosted by the very company that had courted them.
These ghosts haunted the company’s Glassdoor page, their vengeful reviews warning others away.
The exorcism
Sarah knew something had to change. She began banishing the ghosts:
Real-time problem-solving interviews to separate genuine candidates from AI puppets
Removed ghost jobs, keeping only positions they were honestly trying to fill
Automated closure system, every candidate gets an answer, never silence
AI guidelines for both candidates and her company for transparency about technology use
The moral
As Halloween night fell, Sarah looked at her cleaned-up process with relief. But she knew these ghosts lurked in many other companies, waiting to haunt recruiters and torment candidates. The scariest part? None of this was supernatural. These horrors were created by humans using technology without ethics, cutting corners, forgetting that behind every application is a real person.
Don’t let your hiring process become a ghost story.
Happy Halloween from Sunflower Talent Strategies!