Four rounds of interviews, six hours of prep, two months of silence: Netizens' verdict on companies that can't close the loop

A post on Reddit’s r/recruitinghell has talked about someone who applied for a marketing operations role in June, went through a phone screen, a panel interview with three people, a case study presentation, and a final call with the director that ran 20 minutes over schedule. Every round came with a promise of an update by the end of the week. None arrived. Two polite follow-up emails went unanswered. Eventually they stopped checking.

They found out what happened at a networking event two months later, when they ran into someone from the team and mentioned the role in passing. The position had been put on hold in July due to a budget freeze. Nobody had told the candidates still in the pipeline because, as the team member explained, “it wasn’t really anyone’s job to close that out.”

Four rounds. Six to seven hours of combined preparation and calls. The answer was a budget freeze from July that nobody got around to mentioning.

“Not even mad in a dramatic way at this point, just tired,” the original poster wrote. “It’s such a small thing to close a loop on, and somehow it never happens.”

What Reddit said

The thread expressed both the frustration and the explanation behind it.

One commenter offered a very insightful comment, likely from someone who was an insider in these kinds of situations: “This happens a lot when a role gets frozen; nobody actually closes it, it just sits there. Nobody feels responsible for the people still in the process.”

Another pointed out that the tools to handle exactly this situation already exist: “Most Applicant Tracking Systems have a candidate close-out option called ‘Position closed/Paused - no hire.’ You punch a button, and an automated message goes out to all candidates in process informing them the position is on hold.”

Unfortunately, these kinds of automations show that the failure is not technical. It is a choice.

One commenter offered a more sympathetic interpretation of the hiring side: “I think sometimes, especially when no one is responsible, the hiring manager is clinging to some hope that they will get unfrozen before anyone notices. It’s bad manners and poor communication, but they are like, well, if I don’t say it out loud it won’t be real.”

And one commenter was blunt: “How can people be so callous? Don’t they understand that some people’s lives depend on landing a job? This is just evil.”

Six hours of preparation, two months of uncertainty, and the answer discovered at a networking event—by accident.

The ATS button exists. The automated message is available. The effort required to close the loop is genuinely minimal. The fact that it consistently does not happen is not an oversight. It is a reflection of where candidates sit in the priority order of organisations that are busy, stressed, and have no mechanism to hold themselves accountable to people they have already stopped considering for the role.

The original poster is right that it is a small thing. That is precisely what makes it so frustrating.