Uber interviewed him, hired him, shipped a MacBook. Then he vanished

An Uber recruiter has shared a bizarre account of a job candidate who allegedly disappeared after accepting an offer and receiving a company laptop. Raghu Tenneti, Principal Recruiter at Uber, recounted the unusual hiring experience, where the candidate “vanished from existence.” 

“Candidate ghosting on joining day is not something new today. But this guy didn’t ghost us. He vanished from existence,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post.

According to Tenneti, attempts to contact the candidate proved unsuccessful. “Called his number. ‘This number does not exist.’ Not switched off. Not unreachable. Does not exist,” he said.

He added that the candidate’s LinkedIn profile had also disappeared. “Checked LinkedIn. ‘Page not found.’ He didn’t deactivate his account. He dissolved.”

The recruiter further claimed that the laptop delivery address provided by the candidate turned out to be a vacant plot behind an abandoned building.

“Traced the laptop delivery address. A vacant plot. Behind an abandoned building. He gave us a dead-drop location for a MacBook,” Tenneti wrote.

He also said the company’s IT team attempted to track the device remotely. “Our IT team pinged the laptop remotely. Factory reset. Encrypted proxy. Pinging from coordinates that should not exist on this planet.”

Tenneti alleged that the candidate had “faked his entire identity and vanished without a single digital footprint,” adding, “That’s not ghosting. That’s a heist.”

In a follow-up post, he continued the tongue-in-cheek account, writing that the candidate “didn’t drop from the funnel” but instead “exited the timeline.”

“Recruiter thought they were casting an employee. Turns out they accidentally auditioned a spy thriller protagonist,” he wrote, joking that the episode had prompted a new addition to the company’s onboarding process: “confirm candidate physically exists.”

The posts did not identify the candidate, and Tenneti did not provide further details about the hiring process or the circumstances surrounding the alleged disappearance.