Why Employees and Candidates Ghost
by Miki Saxon
One of the major reasons people ghost isn’t rocket science.
Nor is the major cause.
Candidates ghost because nothing connected — not the company, culture, job, people, and especially not the hiring manager.
Employees ghost because they aren’t engaged.
They feel that nobody — boss, company, colleagues — gives a damn so why should they.
And in many cases they are correct.
Companies don’t walk their cultural talk, low morale is obvious, as is a “me before thee” attitude, and
for a variety of reasons, bosses treat people as replaceable — even when they know it won’t be easy or could take months.
It’s nothing new.
Since the day people became hires, instead of slaves or indentured, bosses have used and abused them.
They still do, but on a more refined level.
Skipped promotions, demotions with little-to-no explanation, seriously brutal layoffs by email, with no warning (as Elon Musk just did), which is especially destructive to people when the company/job has been cast as some kind of “higher calling,” as is common in the tech world.
Candidates often fare no better.
Many managers consider hiring a necessary evil — resumes bore them, they hate wasting time interviewing — and they have more important things to do.
Strangely enough, HR often acts the same way, with preliminary interviews conducted by interviewers who look for word matches between resumes/candidates and job descriptions.
Obviously, it’s not all companies or all bosses — but likely the ones that get ghosted.
Image credit: Joe Le Merou
