It's important to maintain professional correspondence when speaking with a recruiter. Even if you don't feel great about the prospective job, you might as well save face over email, even if you're cursing them out on the other side of the computer. Like all things, this notion of maintaining professionalism has exceptions. If a job posting seems like a scam, you should not try to sever ties with the recruiter gracefully. There's no harm in simply stopping responding to a recruiter for a clearly bogus job. If you're going back and forth with a recruiter and they reveal that they're offering an hourly position instead of a full-time position, I would understand if you decided to ghost them. Purposefully obfuscating the type of job you're recruiting for is shady behavior, and it won't help you get qualified candidates; it will only make said candidates angry. One qualified Redditor got an insulting job offer from a foolish recruiter, and their reaction to her ghosting them was so much more unprofessional than the ghosting itself.
