I got the silent treatment twice when trying to interview at Yahoo and once with Google. In all cases it was at the stage between initial recruiter contact and agreeing on a date for the first phone screen. I later found out (by looking up the recruiters on LinkedIn) that both of the Yahoo recruiters had left Yahoo and now worked at Apple. Ever since then I started wondering how big the impact of recruiters turnover is on candidates getting stalled.
I had a similar experience at TomTom. I applied for a position, got a positive reply, tried to schedule for an interview. After that I did not hear anything for quite a while, so I e-mailed again and, in case they had e-mail problems, called the recruiter. He promised to call me back, which he obviously did not. Later I learned (also from LinkedIn) that the recruiter had moved to another company around that time.
Funny enough, until this day (months later) the position is still open and it gets reposted every now and then.
