You’re not crazy, and some of you are owed an explanation that you’ll never get from the company that ghosted you, so I’m going to try.

I was Head of People at a Berlin-based scaleup from 2021 to early 2024. Series B when I joined, Series C by the time I left. Over those 3 years we scaled from 40 people in 2 countries to about 190 across 14, and I was the person sitting between hiring managers, legal, and finance making the calls on who we could hire and where.

I left a year and a bit ago because I burned out, partly from the work and partly from the guilt of what the work required me to do.

I’m building something small now in the hiring ops space and I figured it’s time to get this out of my chest.

Here’s what actually happens when you apply to a role that says remote, worldwide.

We had a secret shortlist of 8 countries we could operationally hire in at any given time (Germany, Netherlands, Spain, UK, Portugal, Poland, and a couple others that rotated depending on whether legal had finished setting up the entity or signed a local partner).

Everyone else, and I mean everyone, was applying into a void. We knew it, and we posted the roles as remote, worldwide anyway because our talent acquisition lead argued it maximized the top of funnel, and legal said we couldn’t publicly list excluded countries without opening ourselves to discrimination claims in certain jurisdictions.

So we just said nothing and let people apply.

Candidates from countries where we didn’t have a legal entity got slow-walked and nobody told them why. If a hiring manager loved someone in Colombia or Kenya or the Philippines, their application went into a holding pattern while I spent weeks going back and forth with finance about whether it was worth the cost and complexity of hiring there.

Some of these candidates waited 6 or 7 weeks after their final interview for a contract that was never coming. They’d get a polite rejection from our recruiter who genuinely didn’t know the real reason, and they’d spend months wondering what they did wrong in that last round.

They did nothing wrong, we just couldn’t figure out how to employ them legally and could’t admit it.

The contractor workaround was the thing I’m least proud of, we had people in 5 countries on contractor agreements who were clearly employees by any reasonable definition. Mandatory hours, company laptops, standing syncs, performance reviews, the whole thing.

I flagged it twice, the first time our CFO said that everyone does it this way, it’s fine, and the second time our external counsel said it wasn’t fine but that enforcement was unlikely, which somehow made it fine again.

Then a developer in Brazil got reclassified by their local tax authority and we had to terminate the relationship in 48 hours with basically no notice.

That person had been with us for nearly a year and had done absolutely nothing wrong.

(I wrote the separation email and I still think about it).

After a while the hiring managers just stopped considering candidates from countries that weren’t on the shortlist. Nobody made that an official policy, it just happened organically.

I left in early 2024, I’m working on something small now and honestly most of my time goes into figuring out the operational side of things, between Claude, Notion, Workmotion, Slack, and whatever new tool I’m testing that week the stack keeps growing faster than the actual product lol.

It’s early and I’m mostly just trying to build something that doesn’t recreate the problems I spent 3 years participating in.

Anyway if you’ve ever applied to a European company that advertised a role as remote worldwide and then got ghosted with no explanation after weeks of silence, it probably wasn’t your resume and it probably wasn’t your interview performance.

The real answer is almost certainly that they couldn’t hire in your country and didn’t have the balls or the infrastructure to tell you that upfront.

You deserved to know that and I’m sorry I was part of a system that didn’t tell you.