At the same time, as long as you move along the process, your recruiter is your best friend. Your incentives, quite surprisingly, are aligned. You want to get the maximum compensation possible, and they want to make sure that you accept the offer. So they will fight for you, of course, within their limits, and as long as there is some common ground between the offer and your expectations.

So how often do you get ghosted? Across all of my applications over the years, I get ghosted roughly 34% of the time.

For the applications that I did receive a response, on average it took 10 days, with a 95% confidence interval between 7 and 13 days! For successful applications (i.e., those that resulted in a recruiter screen), response time is about the same, on average 10 days, with 95% CI between 5 and 15 days (fewer observations). Below I show the distributions of each group: