Ghosted after five interviews, a jobseeker asks: Is this now normal in Singapore’s hiring culture?

The viral complaint is familiar. A jobseeker invests hours across five interviews, sends a thank you note, then hears nothing. No rejection, no timeline, no closure. The question lands with frustration and curiosity. Is this normal in Singapore hiring culture now. The short answer is yes, it is common. The more useful answer is why. What looks like etiquette failure is usually a byproduct of model and incentive failure inside the hiring stack.

Start with the funnel logic. Most companies run recruiting like a growth engine. Fill the top with applicants. Move qualified candidates through screens. Run panels. Close. The math looks efficient on a dashboard. In practice, headcount approvals, compensation bands, and cross border sign offs move slower than the interviews. When interview velocity outpaces approval velocity, silence expands to fill the gap. Recruiters cannot confirm a no if the role might re open next quarter. Hiring managers stall because they are waiting on budget or on a transfer decision. Legal and compliance teams ask for one more check. None of this shows up on the candidate experience slide. It shows up in your inbox as nothing.

Singapore adds a few structural twists that make ghosting more likely, not less. Regional hubs concentrate decision rights in a small set of executives who sit across markets and business lines. That creates longer queues for sign off. Many teams depend on contingent budget that comes from a regional reforecast cycle. Roles freeze and unfreeze without a public signal. Work pass considerations add another layer. Even if a team loves a candidate, they may pause to test an alternate profile that avoids relocation or reduces approval friction. The recruiter cannot say that directly. Silence becomes the default hedge.

Risk management culture amplifies the effect. Firms in regulated industries standardize hiring steps to reduce bias and audit risk. That is good policy. It is also slow. A structured panel with calibrated rubrics is fairer than a quick gut call. It also takes weeks to schedule for hybrid teams across time zones. During that time, people leave for personal reasons, a reorg reshapes reporting lines, or an internal candidate becomes available. The easiest communication choice under uncertainty is to communicate nothing.

Platform behavior plays a part. Applicant tracking systems and calendaring tools make it easy to move people and schedule panels. They do not make it easy to close the loop with context. Many teams rely on template rejections that feel cold, so they avoid sending them until a decision is final. Internal chat threads capture nuance. Candidates never see that nuance. What they see is an empty status field on a portal that promised transparency and delivered a black box with better UX.

There is a cost story that rarely gets told. Interview slots are cheap. Offer approvals are expensive. You can open calendars and collect more signal at low marginal cost. You cannot fabricate headcount. When teams optimize for optionality, they over interview and under decide. This is not malice. It is defensive operations. In a flat or uncertain budget cycle, the safest move is to keep your options open and your written commitments scarce. Ghosting is the shadow price of that choice.

The etiquette narrative is attractive because it has villains and victims. The system narrative is harder because it asks everyone to change behavior that currently protects them. For hiring managers, that means committing to decision deadlines before scheduling panels. For finance partners, that means aligning budget gates with recruiting gates so that approvals do not lag interviews by a month. For recruiters, that means publishing communication service levels and meeting them even when the message is not fun. None of that is glamorous. All of it is measurable.

So is this unique to Singapore hiring culture. Not really. You will find versions of it in New York, London, and Dubai. The Singapore context simply compresses the variables into a tighter market. Regional hub structures, lean teams with high internal mobility, and a strong compliance posture make the silence more noticeable. Talent is global and impatient. A week without an update can feel like a decision. From the inside, a week is one round in a multi step approval loop that is not designed for speed.

The common defense is bandwidth. Recruiters handle dozens of roles and hundreds of candidates. True, but bandwidth is an input problem. The output problem is incentives. If leadership rewards time to fill and offer acceptance rate, teams will avoid hard declines until late in the process. If leadership also punishes wrongful rejections or compliance missteps, teams will escalate slow decisions instead of fast noes. The result is a long quiet middle. Metrics shape behavior. Behavior shapes culture. Culture is what candidates feel.

There is a better way that does not require a new playbook, just different sequencing. Treat candidates like users, not leads. That means setting and honoring a communication SLA. A simple rule works. Every candidate who completes a panel receives a dated update within five business days even if the update is a hold. Tie this to a dashboard that leaders actually review. Visibility changes behavior. Next, align approvals before velocity. Do not open a search until the headcount is documented and sign off owners agree on a decision window. It will slow the first week and speed up the last week. Lastly, decouple feedback from liability fear. You can be specific without being unsafe. Share one skill gap and one systems gap. You will not win every candidate back. You will win back trust.

For candidates, personal strategies can reduce the pain but cannot fix the system. Ask for a decision window when you accept a panel invitation. Confirm the post panel communication owner by name. If you get silence, send one short check in at the agreed time and then move on. Your calendar and attention are assets. Do not let a slow system borrow them for free. None of this is about pride. It is portfolio management for your time.

Founders and product leaders should take notes too. Hiring is a product funnel with a brand on top. If your process produces silence, your brand pays for it in the market. The best teams I have seen borrow habits from customer support. They publish SLAs. They instrument communication. They hold weekly reviews that treat candidate experience as a KPI, not a sentiment. They still reject most applicants. They just do not outsource rejection to the void.

Ghosting after five interviews is common. It is not inevitable. Singapore hiring culture does not require it. The current stack rewards optionality and punishes clarity, so silence wins. Flip the incentives and the behavior will change. My take is simple. Ghosting is a lagging metric of system design. Fix the design and the culture will follow.