New Episode
Just Send The Email
with Alex Feder, Founder of Ghosted.work
About This Episode
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
Resources & Links:
- Ghosted.work
- Trace
- Alex Feder on LinkedIn
- Desiree's book, Leadership is a Practice, Not a Personality, out October 2026
- Talentless at RecFest and HR Tech this fall
Episode Transcript
Full conversation — searchable and screen-reader friendly
Desiree: Today's guest spent 2026 living the thing he now builds software to fix. The hiring gauntlet. He lost a job, went through the modern hiring gauntlet himself, did some crazy things, and now he's built a company around it. Alex Feder is the founder of Ghosted.work, a candidate advocacy platform built to bring transparency and accountability to hiring.
Alex: I'll focus more on the last year 'cause I think the hiring environment is different than it has been in years past. I too became pretty frustrated with the candidate experience and lack of communication, lack of transparency. That frustration felt like I didn't have a good outlet for at first — you have to risk a lot to call out and name names on a professional network like LinkedIn when you're looking for jobs.
Desiree: Transparency in hiring has meant so many things to so many people over time. As a candidate you're like, I need to know these things. As a recruiter, I'm willing to tell these things. Where can we get that line a little closer?
Alex: It's synonymous with communication, frankly. It's not so much I need to know when you're making a decision. It's that there's occasional updates. The answer is not silence. An update with no new information means the world to a candidate, even if you have nothing new to share — because it says I'm still important in the process.