Prateek Tanmay
3 min readNew DelhiJun 2, 2026 05:36 PM IST
A recruiter at Uber has shared an unusual hiring experience involving a candidate who allegedly disappeared after receiving a company-issued Apple MacBook, even before officially joining the firm. In a LinkedIn post, Hyderabad-based Uber principal recruiter Raghu Tenneti described the episode humorously, saying the candidate did not merely ghost the company but seemed to “vanish from existence.”
“But this guy didn’t ghost us. He vanished from existence,” Tenneti wrote. According to him, the candidate failed to report on his scheduled joining day, prompting the recruitment team to try reaching out. However, every attempt reportedly hit a dead end. “Called his number. ‘This number does not exist.’ Not switched off. Not unreachable. Does not exist. Bro didn’t block us. He erased himself from the telecom grid,” he said.
Things became even stranger when the team checked the candidate’s LinkedIn profile. “Checked LinkedIn. ‘Page not found.’ He didn’t deactivate his account. He dissolved,” Tenneti wrote. The recruiter further claimed that the address provided for the laptop delivery was not a residence at all. “Traced the laptop delivery address. A vacant plot. Behind an abandoned building. He gave us a dead-drop location for a MacBook,” he said.
Tenneti added that Uber’s IT department tried to trace the device remotely but discovered it had already been wiped clean. “Our IT team pinged the laptop remotely. Factory reset. Encrypted proxy. Pinging from coordinates that should not exist on this planet,” he wrote, before joking, “This man didn’t skip Day 1. He faked his entire identity and vanished without a single digital footprint. That’s not ghosting. That’s a heist. And honestly? Ethan Hunt— genuinely, respect the craft. Bro we want our laptop back.”
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Reflecting on the bizarre incident, Tenneti joked that he would now include “confirm candidate physically exists” in the company’s pre-onboarding checklist. “Every hiring process has a leakage point. Mine apparently opened into another dimension. The candidate didn’t drop from the funnel. He exited the timeline,” he added.
The post quickly went viral, drawing a flood of amused reactions from LinkedIn users. One person quipped, “The 007 producers are looking for the next Bond? I think we’ve already solved the problem. Just share his profile with them. Who knows he might save the franchise and while he’s at it, finally fix your Mac issue too.”
Another user linked the incident to the growing use of artificial intelligence in hiring, writing, “Doesn’t this show how recruiters today rely on AI for resume filtration and AI for the whole recruitment process to get selected and AI again to cheat those recruiters who hired them in the first place. That’s the reason system is broken.”
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A third commenter summed up the drama with a movie-style comparison: “Recruiter thought they were casting an employee. Turns out they accidentally auditioned a spy thriller protagonist.”
