I must admit that I’ve been out of the dating game for a long time. However, I do surf the internet and I’ve heard of the term “ghosting.”
It’s not a new concept but it’s a relatively new term in the dating world. It means that the person you’ve been dating or talking to has cut off all communications with you – no calls, texts, emails, Facebook messages, Twitter updates – you get the point. The emergence of dating apps and the ability to meet someone virtually without ever actually meeting them IRL, have given birth to this phenomenon.
As other aspects of our culture develop virtually they to start to include ghosting as a regular practice. Perhaps nothing is as similar to dating as searching for employment.
Twenty or thirty years ago a person joined a company and that was where they stayed for the majority if not the entirety of their career. However, millennials have completely overhauled that notion. In today’s job market a person has an average of four jobs by the time they’re 32. That means that throughout a person’s career they’ll have applied to hundreds, if not thousands of jobs.
I left my full-time job in advertising after giving birth to my twins in January 2015. They were three months premature. Due to their prematurity, and my near positivity that these would be my only children, my husband and I decided I should stay home to raise them. Eight months later I had an opportunity to go back to work on a freelance basis and that put me back in the job-hunting market.
I decided to apply to join The Second Shift to open up job opportunities after having seen first-hand how companies that take the time to post a job then go silent, sometimes for weeks, sometimes indefinitely. It can be maddening!
Although rejection can feel like a lonely space, when I came across the Fast Company article entitled, “How To Avoid Being Professionally Ghosted,” I was encouraged to find out that I wasn’t the only one. Again, like in dating, not moving forward with a candidate is not a new phenomenon, but as the article demonstrates it has become much more prevalent since most employment communication is virtual.
Understandably it’s hard to be the bad guy and hiring managers have to be the bad guy a lot. They have to tell hundreds of people that they’re not qualified or not a good fit for the job. That’s probably why most large companies send a reply email as soon as you apply on their website stating that they’ve received your application and will contact you if your skills and experience match what they’re looking for. This absolves them of the obligation to reply to every candidate that doesn’t make it through to the interview stage.
However, shouldn’t a hiring manager let you know you’re not getting the job after conducting one, two or three rounds of interviews with you? Maybe I’m old fashioned, but doesn’t a girl who’s gone on one, two or three dates with a guy – who seemed really into her – deserve to be told they’re no longer dating?