Two in Three Belgian Job Seekers Ignored by Employers

Roughly two out of every three job seekers in Belgium receive no response at all when they apply for a job — not even a rejection. A new survey by HR services company Acerta and job site Stepstone Belgie, the annual Talent Pulse study, found that 65.5% of applicants are left waiting in silence, according to VRT NWS. The findings expose a long-standing weakness in Belgian recruitment practice, one that hits young people and workers over 50 hardest.

The silence is not evenly shared. According to ZigZagHR, the most detailed account of the data, 75.3% of job seekers under 30 regularly get no further answer, and the figure for over-50s stands at 70.9%. Among those aged 31-50, it is 55.9%. Of the 65.2% who report an application going unanswered, 21.5% say they almost never hear back and 43.7% say they are regularly ignored. Job seekers who are unemployed fare worse still: 71.5% receive no response, compared with 50.2% of those already in work elsewhere but seeking to move.

A Separate Problem: Never Reaching an Interview

The non-response figures describe one failure of communication. A second, related measure looks at how rarely applicants reach a first interview. Some 68.5% of job seekers rarely or almost never make it to a first interview — a figure that rises to 72.7% for applicants under 30 and 73.6% among those over 50, while the 30-50 age group stands at 62.5%. These interview-stage numbers are distinct from the response rates above, but point in the same direction: the youngest and oldest applicants are the most likely to be shut out.

The pattern continues after the application stage. Roughly 30.6% of candidates who complete assessments or tests never receive the results — up 4.2 percentage points from the previous year’s 26.4%. That deterioration suggests the communication gap is widening in the later stages of hiring, not just at first contact.

A Structural Problem, Not a New One

The problem is not new. Stepstone’s earlier large-scale research, covering 53,770 Belgian job seekers between 2016 and 2019, found that 75.9% received no response within the first 45 days, with candidates needing an average of 16 applications to land a single interview. A 2020 Stepstone press release summarised the finding bluntly: more than three in four Belgian job seekers got no answer at all.

The 2025 Talent Pulse edition, covered by ZigZagHR, focused on age discrimination, finding that 62% of over-50s reported being ignored compared with 46% of under-30s. The 2026 results show the silence problem persisting at a similarly severe level despite years of public awareness.

Why Employers Stay Silent

Acerta recruitment expert Naomi Ruelens attributes the silence partly to a cooling labour market. “We see that employers today again receive more applications per vacancy. That is positive in itself, but it also increases the administrative burden of the selection process,” she said. “As a result, it becomes more challenging to follow up each candidate individually.”

Ruelens stressed the human cost. “For applicants, that radio silence is often demotivating, because they naturally invest in their application,” she said. “Not every candidate expects an extensive personal follow-up. But our figures show that transparent communication about the status of an application is highly valued.”

Small and medium-sized enterprises bear much of the responsibility — and much of the difficulty. Bart Buysse, managing director of the employer organisation Unizo, told VRT NWS that at many SMEs, recruitment falls to a business owner juggling customers, staff and administration. “We see fewer vacancies and more job seekers. That means there are more applicants per vacancy, which increases the administrative burden,” he said. “Often a lot of attention goes to the recruitment of the candidate who was selected, and less time to the people who did not make it. I am not excusing it, it should not be like that, but it is an explanation.”

Buysse added that the poor treatment of rejected candidates carries a reputational cost, and said the figures are “a signal for us to step up a gear” by advising SMEs on clearer job profiles and expectations. He also advised applicants to apply only for roles for which they are genuinely eligible.

Analysis: A Cooling Market Meets Weak Communication

The figures sit against a mixed Belgian labour backdrop. The Flemish employment rate for 20-64-year-olds stood at a historically high 77.2%-77.3% in the first quarter of 2026, yet unemployment had edged up to around 4.3% by the end of 2025, with economists describing a cooling market. Fewer vacancies and more candidates per opening intensify the pressure on recruiters — but they also make clear communication more valuable, not less, since every applicant is competing in a tighter field.

The burden falls unevenly. Young people entering the workforce face a double bind: Acerta notes that first jobs are harder to obtain partly because AI is absorbing some entry-level tasks and because more experienced profiles are competing for the same roles. Older applicants, meanwhile, still face stubborn age-related biases. As Acerta career expert David Decouche has argued, workers in their fifties still have roughly 17 years of working life ahead of them — a group the market can ill afford to write off.

Job seekers themselves are responding to the silence. Nearly 28% proactively contact employers for feedback, and 12.2% regularly report on job platforms that they received no response. When given a choice, 63% prefer feedback by email — rising to 75.7% among young people.

What to Watch

The Talent Pulse findings raise an obvious question: whether Acerta, Stepstone or Belgian policymakers will push for concrete measures such as automated acknowledgement requirements or a recruitment code of conduct. Unizo’s stated intent to do more for SMEs will be one test. Another open question is how the figures compare across Belgium’s language communities, since the survey spans both Flanders and Wallonia.

For now, the message from the data is consistent with a decade of evidence: in Belgium, the most common answer to a job application is still no answer at all.