Originally published: SMBtech, 28 October 2026
Three quarters of Australia’s workforce have experienced a negative recruitment episode, from being ghosted by employers and left without feedback to applying for positions that were never genuinely available, according to research from Employment Hero.
The findings point to a recruitment system that is frustrating both candidates and employers in roughly equal measure, with job seekers routinely ignored and businesses hamstrung by slow, administration-heavy hiring processes.
Employment Hero’s research, which surveyed 1,518 Australian workers, found that the most common complaint among job seekers is receiving little or no feedback after missing out on a role, with 41 per cent reporting this experience. A third (33 per cent) reported spending hours on an application without ever hearing back, while 23 per cent had been ghosted altogether.
On the employer side, more than half (51 per cent) acknowledged they have lost strong candidates because their hiring process was too slow, while 59 per cent reported being weighed down by manual administration.
The research was conducted by Pureprofile on behalf of Employment Hero, surveying 1,518 Australian workers nationwide.
