A data engineer walked into what seemed like a standard tech interview loop. Eight rounds later, the recruiter delivered the news: they had passed. An offer was on its way. Then nothing arrived. Days passed. Weeks. When the candidate followed up, a different recruiter delivered an improbable explanation: the candidate had apparently declined an offer they had never seen.
Rather than walking away, the candidate agreed to four more interview rounds. They passed again. And then the headcount closed. Twelve rounds total. Zero offers. Not even a rejection letter.
The account appears in DataDriven's 2026 analysis of data-engineer hiring, which found that 53 percent of candidates now get ghosted, the average time-to-hire in tech has doubled to 68.5 days, and 48 percent of tech job listings never result in a hire. The article calculates the runway burned per single interview loop at over twenty-seven thousand dollars.
"Silence scales," the analysis notes. "Feedback doesn't."