Job Candidates "Ghosting" Employers Is Becoming More Common Despite Tight Job Market

There's a lot that's been said about the state of job-seeking, job-hopping, hiring, firing, and layoffs, in 2023, and depending on the industry you're working in, you may be clinging to your job for dear life, pounding the proverbial pavement in search of a new job, or leaving your current gig for greener employment pastures.

Take the tech industry for instance: according to Crunchbase there have been a whopping 188,000+ layoffs in this sector in 2023 alone across major companies like Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google.

And while there are a lot of reports about folks who ditched their jobs in 2022 as part of the "great resignation" who soon experienced the "great regret" and there are plenty of employment analysts urging folks to stick to their current roles, someone clearly didn't tell the people this Indeed report on employee ghosting is referring to.

According to the popular job search website, there are a multitude of different job candidates who, throughout different steps of the onboarding process, have simply vanished. Whether it's disappearing the day of the interview or going Spider-Man at the end of Infinity War right before the first day of work, employees are purportedly still dealing with this issue, which first started to occur right around before all of the pandemic insanity hit.

According to the "Ghosting in Hiring" report published by Indeed, it would appear that more and more prospective workers are engaging in this practice: 57% of the 4,500 people surveyed as part of the analysis stated that they've never once been "ghosted" by an employee until this past year.

Perhaps job hunters feel as if it's only fair that employers are being ghosted as a form of "payback" — after all, with the advent of artificial intelligence systems and screening software filtering job applications, there are swarms of workers looking for gigs who never hear back from the businesses they apply to.

In fact, around 35% of all people surveyed as part of Indeed's study said that they've never heard back from an employer on a job application. It seems as if ghosting is on the rise in every aspect of the hiring process as well: more applicants reported getting the cold shoulder after their 2nd and 3rd round of interviews for a position than opposed to last year.

Weirdly enough, if you tried to get a job through a hiring manager, you're 1.4 times more likely to be ghosted, according to the Indeed survey. Raj Mukherjee, Indeed's Vice President, said in an interview it with Yahoo Finance: "The spike in ghosting is quite surprising. It sparks curiosity about what's changing in the job market and how candidates are approaching their job searches these days."

But why is there such a spike in ghosting occurring? Perhaps it could have to do with the fact that there are more and more companies staffing remote positions. With minimal human and face-to-face interactions on a daily basis, folks probably don't feel as much of a connection to the businesses they're employed by or the people they're working with.

Ultimately, this means that pulling the plug on any type of relationship, especially one that's in its early stages of onboarding a worker, is a much easier sell than, let's say, deciding to call it quits at a place you've physically walked into and met people in person at.

Dan Schawbel, a managing partner at Workplace Intelligence told Yahoo that there's been marked shifts in decorum/communication when it comes to fielding job offers: "Workplace norms and expectations regarding communication have evolved over time. Individuals may feel that traditional etiquette around formally declining offers has relaxed, especially in industries or sectors where job mobility is high."

The real question is: can job seekers afford to simply ghost an employer because the job that they're offering didn't really tickle their fancy all that much? And the answer is that this must be the case, and there's data to prove that even though there are layoffs in certain business sectors, that job seekers still have a bit of leverage to pick and choose.

Again, it depends on what field you're working in, don't go and quit your job and then shout to the heavens, "but I thought I had leverage?!" You probably will, depending on how in-demand the gig you're pursuing is: here's a list of some vocations that are supposed to be highly desirable in 2023, just in case you were thinking of shaking things up a bit or want to know if you could potentially earn more coin in your line of work.