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Just Send The Email: What Hiring Transparency Actually Takes

Alex Feder, Founder of Ghosted.work

LinkedIn · Ghosted (ghosted.work/trace, free, public beta)


Desiree and Ashley flip the usual Talentless lens this week. Instead of coaching recruiters, they sit down with someone who just spent a year living on the other side of the desk. Alex Feder, founder of Ghosted.work, walks through the exact frustration that pushed him to start building: getting ghosted himself, realizing "we didn't design the system" but that AI and application volume have amplified every crack already in it, and eventually teaching himself to build software rather than just posting about it on LinkedIn.

He walks through Trace, his new tool that turns a candidate's own inbox into an organized Trello-style board of every application in flight, and makes a pointed case for why it's different from the "top ghosters" call-out sites already out there (his read: those sites are running on a handful of anonymous submissions, not real data).

The middle of the conversation is where it gets uncomfortable in a good way. Alex defines transparency as something close to plain communication, not full disclosure: "the answer is not silence." Ashley pushes further, naming what's actually happening when a company goes quiet, "the human is broken, the human doesn't want to have to say no," and tells her own recent ghosting story: a company sent her a rejection letter before she'd even interviewed, then called back days later asking to schedule the interview they'd already rejected her from. Desiree and Ashley also get into the fake-job problem (Alex has watched response rates on some listings sit under 1%), a company Ashley knew of that posted fake jobs on LinkedIn purely to farm followers, and the emerging mess of AI applying to jobs that were never real in the first place.

They close on the practical and the philosophical. Alex makes the case for homework assignments and live presentations over rapid-fire interview questions, because they're hard to fake even with AI help. Ashley pitches "Rate My Recruiter" and connects candidate experience directly to closing the wealth gap, arguing that hiring the long-term unemployed is one of the highest-leverage moves a company can make without waiting on any legislation. If you needed a reminder that the person on the other end of your ATS is a person, this is the episode.

In this episode:

  • Why Alex built Ghosted.work after his own brutal year of job searching, and why he built Trace as a second, narrower product instead of scaling the first

  • What "transparency in hiring" actually means in practice, from both the candidate side and the recruiter side

  • Ashley's own ghosting story: rejected before the interview, then invited back to interview for the role she'd already been rejected from

  • The fake-job problem, response rates under 1%, and a real (anonymized) story about a company posting fake listings just to farm LinkedIn followers

  • AI on both sides of the hiring table, and Alex's line: "these are two cars racing to a red light"

  • Why Alex is skeptical of the existing "call out the ghosters" sites and how Trace's approach differs

  • Homework assignments and live presentations as a harder-to-fake alternative to standard interview questions

  • Ashley's "Rate My Recruiter" pitch and the case for hiring the long-term unemployed as a wealth-gap lever

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