Employer ghosts job candidate for 3 weeks after a successful final-round interview, accuses the candidate of "putting them in a bad position" when they accept another offer

Job interviews and the hiring process are all about optics. How something appears is, quite literally, everything on both sides. A single bad answer or misplaced word can be enough to disqualify a candidate, and if the interviewing party can't show that the organization doesn't have its stuff together and isn't going to be a chaotic or toxic place to work, then it's not going to be desirable to those candidates who you really want on your team.

If you leave a candidate hanging for longer than a week or two after an interview, that's not going to go over well. Three weeks might not seem like a long time for the slow-moving bureaucratic process of a corporation or mid-sized company. But when your life is literally teetering on the brink as a candidate who is out of work and has already invested a load of time and energy into the hiring process while bills and rent chip away at savings, 3 weeks feels like a lifetime. 

This candidate was lucky enough to land another job after another employer ghosted them for weeks following a final interview in a long interview process. When the employer called back, they were surprised to be accused of putting them in a bad position for declining their offer when surely it was the other way around.

"A week goes by, and I hear nothing, so I reach out. They say there is one other candidate they want to interview, and they will make their decision."