The author postulates a few ideas about manners and courtesy, and starts to recognise that business transactions (employment relationships) don't actually care about these things, even though the human beings who populate these systems hold these values.
The nash equilibrium in a buyer-seller market like the employer-employee relationship is for both sides to defect. Humans don't behave optimally, because they aren't pure rational creatures, they are imbued with some socialisation and cultural memory. So humans try to treat with these organisations as though they are other humans, and will respond to good-will with good-will, but this is not rewarded, and ultimately they change their behaviour in response to a poor environment.
Capital does behave short term optimally. Optimal economic behaviour is to betray the person opposite you, and violate and exploit the commons until the commons collapses entirely, like what we see today. At some points in the past, capital has been subdued by a human operator who will apply courtesy and social norms to prevent these ugly actions, but capital has now become too intelligent to bother with this, and the result is a sequence of increasingly insane and inhuman processes, such as what we see here with the job market.
I had a job interview and didn’t do well on the technical part (got nervous). Never heard back, even after a follow up. I was really surprised because they seemed really nice overall. I wasn’t even expecting an offer, just wanted to end things on a friendly note. I thought it was unnecessarily rude.
If you haven't gotten your answer, then you've gotten your answer. Fill in the likely blanks: they are busy with their day jobs and as you admit, they're assuming you already know the outcome because you bombed the technical assessment.
I get that no answer is an answer, but OPs post was about people being rude and this was an example of that. "busy with their day jobs" is not a good excuse for not sending an email that takes 30 seconds.
The whole “blaming Gen Z” thing is getting old. You get what you pay for.
You’re likely offering “market rate” roles. You’re getting “market rate” candidates and behavior. It’s like walking into a Fiat dealership and being mad you’re not getting Ferrari treatment.
If you want better you are welcome to pay more and then maybe people will have less incentives to ghost you. The Ferrari treatment still exists, you just need to pay for it.
The job market didn't get rude, it just regressed to the mean. "Rude" is the default; when one side shows respect it's likely for the other side to reciprocate. When one side doesn't, there is little reason for the other side to put in the effort.
Rude is the default if you optimise everything down to perfection to prioritise profit, which tech is really good at doing. After all, that extra second you’d spend being courteous could be used to make the line go up and create shareholder value instead.
You are still paying for the Ferrari treatment by hiring older workers in terms of better working conditions: those workers are wiser to the usual corporate bullshit, are unlikely to be doing unpaid overtime because they "believe" in the "mission", require better work/life balance and are financially-secure enough to afford to tell you off if you cross the line.
Not to say it's a bad thing, it's great if you managed to get your company to deliver a working environment that attracts and retains older workers, just pointing out from experience with techbros that the reason older/more experienced workers are avoided (or just don't apply in the first place) is precisely for this reason - techbros explicitly don't want someone who can afford to defend their boundaries, they'd rather take someone who's too naive or financially-insecure to say no.
> I'm in a hiring position, and I would blacklist any candidate that wasted my time like this.
> It's childish and just adds to the current state of Gen Z making it impossible to hire them (and then complaining they can never find a job).
This is an unacceptable interviewing posture. As a Bar Raiser (or whatever your equivalent is) with authority over interview standards and interviewer eligibility, I’d pull you from loops for retraining. Repeat it, and you’re removed from interviewing.
Just always remember which side started this battle. How much does it cost a business to send even a perfunctory automatic rejection? Approximately zero. How can you justify not doing that?
Whereas to a candidate sending their 400th application, sending a "thanks for rejecting me" represents a real and significant opportunity cost.
>Whereas to a candidate sending their 400th application, sending a "thanks for rejecting me" represents a real and significant opportunity cost.
That's not ghosting on the candidate's part, though; candidate ghosting is not responding to an acceptance (whether its for an interview or for the job itself) and simply no-showing.
FTA: Meanwhile, some applicants who make it through the onerous hiring process and accept jobs never show up for their first day. One California recruiter told me that some of the candidates who ditched had even signed offers for positions that paid six-figure salaries.
I'm in a hiring position, and I would blacklist any candidate that wasted my time like this.
If you offered a position and, as described in TFA, they didn't show up then it seems obvious to me that this hypothetical candidate is not terribly bothered by your threats.
And how many times have you had that happen in your career? I ask because after 35 years in the industry, I've never seen it happen no matter which side of the hiring desk I've been on. And to be specific, by "it" I mean someone burns a bridge and then applies to the same company in the future.
Most companies aren't going to help their competitor. Bad actions from candidates have consequences.
It's telling when you jump to 'ilegal behavor' yet think acting like a total unprofessional asshole by wasting everyone's time with a company doing the right thing, is totally acceptable.
I would never ghost a company or a candidate and expect other people to have the same courtesy.
It also shows that bias is perfectly acceptable against groups you dislike (companies you think are all acting the same, so they all somehow deserve the same shitty behavior) yet unacceptable to a group you support.
What does that mean, I have been on hiring committees before but don't even know what it would mean to "blacklist" someone. If you just mean not hire them at your company in the future I think the candidate will be fine with that. If you mean across many orgs then... Do recruiters and HR people have some secret club I don't know about?
I've also been hiring before and if my colleague told me he had a list of people he didn't want hired because they didn't write him back, I'd laugh my ass off and continue on with my day.
I can understand why you're saying this and my response here will be more of a general reply to your direct reply's as it seems like a lot of them are missing the key element of WHY you can act this way in the current market. The big 'L' word, Leverage. In the current market you have all the leverage in the world as the employer to find a perfect fit employee due to the overall supply of workers and declining job market. When the market swings back the other way eventually however, the shoe will be on the other foot so to speak, and you wont have such privilege.
It's amazing how short our memories are for all the companies 10 years ago bending over backwards to give those employees anything and everything they wanted.
A lot of my statement here is very generalizing but at the end of the day market forces really do dictate a lot of this. I keep seeing article after article from hiring managers about how they're FLOODED with applications. You can't be 'polite' to all those people, as most people don't have the attention span for all that. There are definitely 2 sides to this coin it just seems that from the side of the people wanting to be hired they just have no empathy for those doing the hiring.
> I keep seeing article after article from hiring managers about how they're FLOODED with applications. You can't be 'polite' to all those people, as most people don't have the attention span for all that.
I dunno. Being polite in the context of a job application is pretty basic: if the applicant didn’t make it to a phone screen, send them a polite form letter telling them that.
It doesn’t require much attention, just a little automation and caring enough to actually respond.
For those that made it to a phone screen but not past it, a polite rejection email is also sufficient.
Well sure then let's break it down. Assume I have an open role for a small business and I get 500 applications to sort through. The first step is most businesses will use at least some sort of filtering for the basic requirements to determine good fit. So those are pretty easy to sort through. Let's assume I cut those applications down to 50 that actually fit my requirements.
Now am I supposed to bundle up all those 450 initial applications that got filtered out just to send them a nice polite email that their resumes didn't even fit the position they applied for? From a pure business perspective this is a straight waste of time. Especially as most businesses aren't going to have an automatic way to do this easily, and building that automation doesn't make my company money. But if I already happened to have some automation setup for it, then maybe sure. This part is the majority 'ghosted' applications. For the rest of the 50 I'd probably be more likely to actually send them a personalized email about the role because at least they actually fit what they applied for.
>Now am I supposed to bundle up all those 450 initial applications that got filtered out just to send them a nice polite email that their resumes didn't even fit the position they applied for?
Yes.
>Especially as most businesses aren't going to have an automatic way to do this easily, and building that automation doesn't make my company money.
If you have the automation in place to receive and process 500 applications in the first place, and filtering that automatically cuts them down, I think it's reasonable to expect that you'd have automation that can email the people who were cut to tell them that they weren't selected and not to expect any further communication.
> Especially as most businesses aren't going to have an automatic way to do this easily...
I find myself surprised by the idea that, in most cases, any business is not used some form of automated solution for resume filtering. In that case, it seems like automated rejection responses should be a capability provided by that solution. I can't recall the last time I went through an application process that wasn't clearly provided to the company I was applying for by a third-party company, though I'll grant that the companies to which I might apply are likely not those to which you are referring.
From a straight business perspective it's not a waste of time, since the candidates you reject may be candidates you want in the future.
It's always good to be polite. It would be an advantage to send a form letter nowadays, since job seekers will remember it.
And come on. You have a list of emails. Do you really think it's insurmountable for a business to send an email to a list of emails? My "promotions" inbox begs to differ.
> Now am I supposed to bundle up all those 450 initial applications that got filtered out just to send them a nice polite email that their resumes didn't even fit the position they applied for? From a pure business perspective this is a straight waste of time.
It's not paper, dude. It's a Select-All operation and then a matter of removing the one person who you did choose to hire. It doesn't have to be personalized. That straw-man is a pure invention of your imagination. A rejection email that says, "You didn't get the job. We hired someone else." as coarse as it is, would be infinitely less insulting, stressful, discourteous, etc. than just flat-out ghosting.
There's no complex "automation" to set up. This is something that programs since the 90s have been able to do.
You could argue that this doesn't align with the software/workflow that you're using, but that's on you (and if this is your actual dayjob, you have no excuse, and the article's and other commenters' remarks about basic lack of respect and human decency are spot-on).
The reason for the lack of those is that employers want to hedge their bets - emailing a rejection will make the candidate move on and potentially take another offer which would make them unavailable.
Letting them stew means the candidate may remain available if you suddenly change your mind or your top pick flakes out and you need a replacement on short notice.
It's understandable - what's less understandable is being butthurt about it when candidates start playing the exact same game and flake out because they too hedged their bets, picked another option and need to let you down.
This might make sense in the late stages of a hiring process (where it can veer into kind of unethical), but for early stages, it’s just not very compelling.
At any stage, if you take more than a couple of weeks to a month, the applicant has probably moved on anyway.
And for early stages applicants, almost no one is going to wait and not taking an offer in the hopes that they’ll hear back from a company that hasn’t given them feedback from a phone screen.
I have multiple open roles right now and am finding that I can’t afford to hire the top applicants. I honestly did not expect to have so little leverage.
And that should be expected. Leverage in this situation doesn't mean you get the cream of the crop for nothing. In this sense it means that you get applications that fit your role. When the market was flipped you were hard pressed to find people that actually matched at least half of your role requirements. Now even your statement gives away how much that has changed that you're only looking at the 'top applicants'. Now, you have so many people that fit you're struggling because you want the perfect ones.
I did expect there to be more strong applicants, but that hardly means I expect "perfect" applicants or "cream of the crop for nothing." With one role, for example, there are basically unqualified people, and qualified people who won't accept the top of our range (~$120K).
There's no equivalence, as outlined in the article. Discourtesy in a wildly unbalanced power relationship is significantly different depending on which side is displaying it. Further, wasting your time that you are being remunerated for is vastly different to wasting somebody's time when you are not remunerating them, but merely dangling the carrot of possible future remuneration. Your use of the word "abuser" is patently absurd.
If I ghosted an employer it’s because I got a better opportunity already.
About half of my jobs would refuse to rehire anyone who quit out of spite, whether or not they gave notice.
No employee gives a shit about those threats anymore because, as this article points out, employers are already nearing the bottom of treating employees like disposable pieces of trash already.
Threats don’t have any power when you’ve already done them
Hah, you should see some of the bullshit your compatriots are trying to pull.
Start-up, competing with Duolingo, wanted me to "sign up for our service, go through the introductory levels, come up with five specific areas we could improve and how you'd go about them and in what order", as part of your application.
So, "Pump our metrics, give us specific business advice and then we'll see if maybe we'd grant you the courtesy of a conversation". The only way that could be more toxic is if you had to supply a credit card to sign up...
The author postulates a few ideas about manners and courtesy, and starts to recognise that business transactions (employment relationships) don't actually care about these things, even though the human beings who populate these systems hold these values.
The nash equilibrium in a buyer-seller market like the employer-employee relationship is for both sides to defect. Humans don't behave optimally, because they aren't pure rational creatures, they are imbued with some socialisation and cultural memory. So humans try to treat with these organisations as though they are other humans, and will respond to good-will with good-will, but this is not rewarded, and ultimately they change their behaviour in response to a poor environment.
Capital does behave short term optimally. Optimal economic behaviour is to betray the person opposite you, and violate and exploit the commons until the commons collapses entirely, like what we see today. At some points in the past, capital has been subdued by a human operator who will apply courtesy and social norms to prevent these ugly actions, but capital has now become too intelligent to bother with this, and the result is a sequence of increasingly insane and inhuman processes, such as what we see here with the job market.
Gift link: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025/12/job-ghosting-man...
Thank you
I had a job interview and didn’t do well on the technical part (got nervous). Never heard back, even after a follow up. I was really surprised because they seemed really nice overall. I wasn’t even expecting an offer, just wanted to end things on a friendly note. I thought it was unnecessarily rude.
Looking for closure?
If you haven't gotten your answer, then you've gotten your answer. Fill in the likely blanks: they are busy with their day jobs and as you admit, they're assuming you already know the outcome because you bombed the technical assessment.
On to the next one.
So, as GP said, unnecessarily rude. This tiny gesture wouldn't cost them much, just like basic manners don't cost much.
I get that no answer is an answer, but OPs post was about people being rude and this was an example of that. "busy with their day jobs" is not a good excuse for not sending an email that takes 30 seconds.
[flagged]
The whole “blaming Gen Z” thing is getting old. You get what you pay for.
You’re likely offering “market rate” roles. You’re getting “market rate” candidates and behavior. It’s like walking into a Fiat dealership and being mad you’re not getting Ferrari treatment.
If you want better you are welcome to pay more and then maybe people will have less incentives to ghost you. The Ferrari treatment still exists, you just need to pay for it.
The job market didn't get rude, it just regressed to the mean. "Rude" is the default; when one side shows respect it's likely for the other side to reciprocate. When one side doesn't, there is little reason for the other side to put in the effort.
Gotta love how "market rate" is about 60% of what you need to qualify to rent an apartment these days.
And of course the roles are hybrid specifically to prevent you from living in a location where you can actually afford rent.
The sad part is that over-regulation and taxes have put us in this situation, but the same politicans keep getting voted in, time and time again.
Is rude really the default? I thought respect was, especially during the initial stages of a professional exchange like a god damned job interview.
Rude is the default if you optimise everything down to perfection to prioritise profit, which tech is really good at doing. After all, that extra second you’d spend being courteous could be used to make the line go up and create shareholder value instead.
"maybe people will have less incentives to ghost you. The Ferrari treatment still exists, you just need to pay for it."
No need. I just find more capable and reliable older workers.
Most people I know in different industries are doing the same
You are still paying for the Ferrari treatment by hiring older workers in terms of better working conditions: those workers are wiser to the usual corporate bullshit, are unlikely to be doing unpaid overtime because they "believe" in the "mission", require better work/life balance and are financially-secure enough to afford to tell you off if you cross the line.
Not to say it's a bad thing, it's great if you managed to get your company to deliver a working environment that attracts and retains older workers, just pointing out from experience with techbros that the reason older/more experienced workers are avoided (or just don't apply in the first place) is precisely for this reason - techbros explicitly don't want someone who can afford to defend their boundaries, they'd rather take someone who's too naive or financially-insecure to say no.
> I'm in a hiring position, and I would blacklist any candidate that wasted my time like this.
> It's childish and just adds to the current state of Gen Z making it impossible to hire them (and then complaining they can never find a job).
This is an unacceptable interviewing posture. As a Bar Raiser (or whatever your equivalent is) with authority over interview standards and interviewer eligibility, I’d pull you from loops for retraining. Repeat it, and you’re removed from interviewing.
Ha. Spoken like a faang employee
Training for interviewing? Nah let’s throw you in there and vibe it out
I seriously doubt you have any say in hiring anywhere. Nobody actually hiring would respond like this.
..and retraining? Lol
Candidates that are a no show after many interviews should definitely be blacklisted for a set amount of time.
The USPS, for instance, will blacklist you for 5 years for this behavior.
If they ghosted you they already blacklisted you. Your comment has the energy of, “you can’t quit, you’re fired!”
Not really. They can easily try to apply for the same job (or a different position) Months later.
Just always remember which side started this battle. How much does it cost a business to send even a perfunctory automatic rejection? Approximately zero. How can you justify not doing that?
Whereas to a candidate sending their 400th application, sending a "thanks for rejecting me" represents a real and significant opportunity cost.
>Whereas to a candidate sending their 400th application, sending a "thanks for rejecting me" represents a real and significant opportunity cost.
That's not ghosting on the candidate's part, though; candidate ghosting is not responding to an acceptance (whether its for an interview or for the job itself) and simply no-showing.
FTA: Meanwhile, some applicants who make it through the onerous hiring process and accept jobs never show up for their first day. One California recruiter told me that some of the candidates who ditched had even signed offers for positions that paid six-figure salaries.
I'm in a hiring position, and I would blacklist any candidate that wasted my time like this.
If you offered a position and, as described in TFA, they didn't show up then it seems obvious to me that this hypothetical candidate is not terribly bothered by your threats.
True, but lives are long. It may come back to bite them next time they want a job, or the time after, or the time after that.
Plenty of fish in the sea. The odds are low.
When they apply a few years later, they will be. Burning bridges never works out in the long run.
And how many times have you had that happen in your career? I ask because after 35 years in the industry, I've never seen it happen no matter which side of the hiring desk I've been on. And to be specific, by "it" I mean someone burns a bridge and then applies to the same company in the future.
I'm the context of hiring, "blacklisting" is collusion between employers sharing a "do not hire" list.
Is that what you the mean?
One would imagine such a practice to be illegal. But yeah this was my question as well.
I presume an internal (not shared with others) "do not hire" list. An internal one is perfectly legal.
Most companies aren't going to help their competitor. Bad actions from candidates have consequences.
It's telling when you jump to 'ilegal behavor' yet think acting like a total unprofessional asshole by wasting everyone's time with a company doing the right thing, is totally acceptable.
I would never ghost a company or a candidate and expect other people to have the same courtesy.
It also shows that bias is perfectly acceptable against groups you dislike (companies you think are all acting the same, so they all somehow deserve the same shitty behavior) yet unacceptable to a group you support.
What does that mean, I have been on hiring committees before but don't even know what it would mean to "blacklist" someone. If you just mean not hire them at your company in the future I think the candidate will be fine with that. If you mean across many orgs then... Do recruiters and HR people have some secret club I don't know about?
I've also been hiring before and if my colleague told me he had a list of people he didn't want hired because they didn't write him back, I'd laugh my ass off and continue on with my day.
Advertisements and recruiter emails are pretty much the only thing in my inbox for the last, I'd say almost ten years.
You'll forgive me if I miss one.
Recruiting is turning into the business that still needs a paper check from you. Nobody else uses those grandpa.
I can understand why you're saying this and my response here will be more of a general reply to your direct reply's as it seems like a lot of them are missing the key element of WHY you can act this way in the current market. The big 'L' word, Leverage. In the current market you have all the leverage in the world as the employer to find a perfect fit employee due to the overall supply of workers and declining job market. When the market swings back the other way eventually however, the shoe will be on the other foot so to speak, and you wont have such privilege.
It's amazing how short our memories are for all the companies 10 years ago bending over backwards to give those employees anything and everything they wanted.
A lot of my statement here is very generalizing but at the end of the day market forces really do dictate a lot of this. I keep seeing article after article from hiring managers about how they're FLOODED with applications. You can't be 'polite' to all those people, as most people don't have the attention span for all that. There are definitely 2 sides to this coin it just seems that from the side of the people wanting to be hired they just have no empathy for those doing the hiring.
> I keep seeing article after article from hiring managers about how they're FLOODED with applications. You can't be 'polite' to all those people, as most people don't have the attention span for all that.
I dunno. Being polite in the context of a job application is pretty basic: if the applicant didn’t make it to a phone screen, send them a polite form letter telling them that.
It doesn’t require much attention, just a little automation and caring enough to actually respond.
For those that made it to a phone screen but not past it, a polite rejection email is also sufficient.
This doesn’t seem like a lot to me.
Well sure then let's break it down. Assume I have an open role for a small business and I get 500 applications to sort through. The first step is most businesses will use at least some sort of filtering for the basic requirements to determine good fit. So those are pretty easy to sort through. Let's assume I cut those applications down to 50 that actually fit my requirements.
Now am I supposed to bundle up all those 450 initial applications that got filtered out just to send them a nice polite email that their resumes didn't even fit the position they applied for? From a pure business perspective this is a straight waste of time. Especially as most businesses aren't going to have an automatic way to do this easily, and building that automation doesn't make my company money. But if I already happened to have some automation setup for it, then maybe sure. This part is the majority 'ghosted' applications. For the rest of the 50 I'd probably be more likely to actually send them a personalized email about the role because at least they actually fit what they applied for.
>Now am I supposed to bundle up all those 450 initial applications that got filtered out just to send them a nice polite email that their resumes didn't even fit the position they applied for?
Yes.
>Especially as most businesses aren't going to have an automatic way to do this easily, and building that automation doesn't make my company money.
If you have the automation in place to receive and process 500 applications in the first place, and filtering that automatically cuts them down, I think it's reasonable to expect that you'd have automation that can email the people who were cut to tell them that they weren't selected and not to expect any further communication.
> Especially as most businesses aren't going to have an automatic way to do this easily...
I find myself surprised by the idea that, in most cases, any business is not used some form of automated solution for resume filtering. In that case, it seems like automated rejection responses should be a capability provided by that solution. I can't recall the last time I went through an application process that wasn't clearly provided to the company I was applying for by a third-party company, though I'll grant that the companies to which I might apply are likely not those to which you are referring.
From a straight business perspective it's not a waste of time, since the candidates you reject may be candidates you want in the future.
It's always good to be polite. It would be an advantage to send a form letter nowadays, since job seekers will remember it.
And come on. You have a list of emails. Do you really think it's insurmountable for a business to send an email to a list of emails? My "promotions" inbox begs to differ.
> Now am I supposed to bundle up all those 450 initial applications that got filtered out just to send them a nice polite email that their resumes didn't even fit the position they applied for? From a pure business perspective this is a straight waste of time.
It's not paper, dude. It's a Select-All operation and then a matter of removing the one person who you did choose to hire. It doesn't have to be personalized. That straw-man is a pure invention of your imagination. A rejection email that says, "You didn't get the job. We hired someone else." as coarse as it is, would be infinitely less insulting, stressful, discourteous, etc. than just flat-out ghosting.
There's no complex "automation" to set up. This is something that programs since the 90s have been able to do.
You could argue that this doesn't align with the software/workflow that you're using, but that's on you (and if this is your actual dayjob, you have no excuse, and the article's and other commenters' remarks about basic lack of respect and human decency are spot-on).
> a polite rejection email is also sufficient
The reason for the lack of those is that employers want to hedge their bets - emailing a rejection will make the candidate move on and potentially take another offer which would make them unavailable.
Letting them stew means the candidate may remain available if you suddenly change your mind or your top pick flakes out and you need a replacement on short notice.
It's understandable - what's less understandable is being butthurt about it when candidates start playing the exact same game and flake out because they too hedged their bets, picked another option and need to let you down.
This might make sense in the late stages of a hiring process (where it can veer into kind of unethical), but for early stages, it’s just not very compelling.
At any stage, if you take more than a couple of weeks to a month, the applicant has probably moved on anyway.
And for early stages applicants, almost no one is going to wait and not taking an offer in the hopes that they’ll hear back from a company that hasn’t given them feedback from a phone screen.
I have multiple open roles right now and am finding that I can’t afford to hire the top applicants. I honestly did not expect to have so little leverage.
And that should be expected. Leverage in this situation doesn't mean you get the cream of the crop for nothing. In this sense it means that you get applications that fit your role. When the market was flipped you were hard pressed to find people that actually matched at least half of your role requirements. Now even your statement gives away how much that has changed that you're only looking at the 'top applicants'. Now, you have so many people that fit you're struggling because you want the perfect ones.
I did expect there to be more strong applicants, but that hardly means I expect "perfect" applicants or "cream of the crop for nothing." With one role, for example, there are basically unqualified people, and qualified people who won't accept the top of our range (~$120K).
There's no equivalence, as outlined in the article. Discourtesy in a wildly unbalanced power relationship is significantly different depending on which side is displaying it. Further, wasting your time that you are being remunerated for is vastly different to wasting somebody's time when you are not remunerating them, but merely dangling the carrot of possible future remuneration. Your use of the word "abuser" is patently absurd.
So you don't ghost anyone you have no intention of hiring?
That's something you could brag about in a job posting. "We will always send you a rejection email if you get to the first phone screen"
"Blacklist" in what sense? Is there a master list somewhere of people not to hire?
If I ghosted an employer it’s because I got a better opportunity already.
About half of my jobs would refuse to rehire anyone who quit out of spite, whether or not they gave notice.
No employee gives a shit about those threats anymore because, as this article points out, employers are already nearing the bottom of treating employees like disposable pieces of trash already.
Threats don’t have any power when you’ve already done them
Hah, you should see some of the bullshit your compatriots are trying to pull.
Start-up, competing with Duolingo, wanted me to "sign up for our service, go through the introductory levels, come up with five specific areas we could improve and how you'd go about them and in what order", as part of your application.
So, "Pump our metrics, give us specific business advice and then we'll see if maybe we'd grant you the courtesy of a conversation". The only way that could be more toxic is if you had to supply a credit card to sign up...