Kēhua wants to end ghosting in recruitment, and it is very NZ that it exists

Kēhua is the Māori word for ghost. So when a New Zealand built platform launches under that name with the tagline “Ghosting ends here”, you know exactly which corner of the hiring world it has come for.

The habit in question is the one every job seeker knows and nobody defends: applications that vanish into silence. Interviews that go well, then nothing. Kēhua’s own homepage puts the emotional truth of it better than any statistic: “It’s not the rejection that stings. It’s the silence. The not knowing.”

The statistics are grim all the same. Greenhouse research has found that well over half of job seekers report being ghosted during a recruitment process, and candidate surveys consistently show poor communication alone is enough to make strong applicants walk away. Kēhua’s site cites a global figure of 78 percent of applicants receiving no reply at all. Whatever the precise number on any given day, everyone who has looked for work recently recognises the experience.

What Kēhua does about it

The platform works both sides of the street. Job seekers get a tracker: log every application, record every silence, and watch the pattern become the story. Employers get the mirror image: visibility into where their own hiring process loses candidate trust, and the tools to close the loop before silence does the damage. Deliberately, it tracks company-level communication patterns rather than publicising individual complaints. The aim is not a wall of shame. It is a feedback loop.

The thinking behind it is spelled out in three words on the About page: transparency, accountability, empathy. Application statuses should be visible. Honest updates beat silence, even when the update is a no. And behind every application is a person with real circumstances, waiting. The founding story matches the mission: it was built by people from both sides of hiring, one who watched roles freeze and candidates get abandoned from inside the machine, and one who lived the silence as a job seeker.

The person behind it

The name attached to Kēhua is a familiar one in this community: PJ Heta. Around the Auckland tech scene, and around AFQY, PJ is known as one of the good ones. Generous with his time, straight with people, and a long-time advocate for the simple idea that candidates are people first and CVs second. That is precisely the sort of person you want building this. Plenty of platforms have tried to fix recruitment from a spreadsheet. This one comes from someone who has sat across the table from candidates for years and hated what the industry’s worst habits do to them.

It is also, in the best way, a very AFQY sort of project. This community was built on the idea that you meet the person, not the suit, and that how you treat people when there is nothing in it for you is the whole game. Ghosting is what happens when an industry forgets that. A tool that makes follow-through visible, measurable and expected is a bet that most recruiters and employers would rather be good at this, and just need the system to make good behaviour the default.

Why tech leaders should care

For hiring organisations, the warning inside Kēhua’s pitch is worth sitting with: candidates talk, and now they have data. Employer brand used to be what your careers page said. Increasingly it is what your process does, recorded. For NZ tech leaders competing for scarce senior skills in a market where every good candidate has options, the organisations that answer every applicant may find that basic decency has quietly become a competitive advantage.

The platform is young, built here, and aimed at a problem everyone agrees is real. Worth a look, and worth a yarn.