Who hasn’t experienced ghosting in our day and age? Make yourself known; we would love to have a talk on how you have managed to escape it. A feat in itself.
If you are not sure what ghosting is, it’s when an online conversation dies, without any notice from the party doing the ghosting.
Ghosting used to be reserved to dating apps. Imagine a nice conversation with someone, and out of nowhere, they ghost you. No more answers. No nothing. Out of the blue. No warning signs. A good old nothing.
Not very pleasant, right?
Well, here is the bad news (if you haven’t encountered it yet): ghosting has reached the job sphere. And in different capacities.
Jobseekers and the never coming answer.
If you are a jobseeker, you probably have experienced it already. Very often (too often), companies will not follow up with your application and will just leave you hanging. After a few weeks, you get the hint that this company will not pursue your application any further. It's always a kick in your confidence. And, while a rejection email doesn’t feel great either, at least you know they looked at your profile and you just were not a match. That's fine, you move on and accept it. But when you don’t hear anything, it can truly be a difficult time. You do remain hopeful that one day you will receive an email, a phone call to let you know something, anything. But it doesn’t come. And there is still a part of you that keeps on hoping.
Invisible employee.
Employers, you also probably have experienced ghosting. While jobseekers are on the receiving end of it on a regular, you also are. Whether it is from a candidate, with whom you have had extensive contact and exchanges and were ready to make an offer to, or from one of your employees--
yes, employees can ghost their employers. And usually that leads to quiet quitting. This is when a previously very enthusiastic employee starts doing the bare minimum, and while this is not full out ghosting, it can feel like it. Different reasons can lead to this, such as sexism and misogyny that wasn’t taken seriously, and the employee just couldn’t deal with it anymore.
Where does this come from?
Like many a thing in recent years, this tendency of ghosting has risen significantly since … you guessed it, the pandemic. Whether employers or jobseekers, more than 70% of either group, according to Indeed, have experienced ghosting.
With the pandemic, everyone and all companies had to adapt and make, for some, a drastic transition to digitalization. This has led to being able to hide behind our screens and not need to directly confront people, especially for employees.
And we can all agree that being ghosted isn’t pleasant. So how about we all work towards bettering our communication skills and stop ghosting (and if you are on dating apps, that applies there as well!)?
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