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Rob Csernyik is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail
After finishing undergrad, I considered a real estate career. I spent several months taking prelicensing courses, and made a gentleman’s agreement with a broker that I would join his team once certified.
But I never took the exam. When the broker asked for a progress update, I felt embarrassed and never responded. Perhaps owing to karma, I’ve since encountered my share of career-related “ghosting,” where the person hiring abruptly stops communicating and doesn’t answer e-mails. I’m not alone.
Surveys suggest this happens to job seekers about half the time. One from Resume Genius, an online resume building site, reports that 80 per cent of 625 hiring managers ghost candidates at least sometimes. These numbers seem unusually high, but given how many e-mails, related to hiring or otherwise, start with apologies for delays or extended silences, it doesn’t stretch the imagination.
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It’s unsurprising then that Ontario recently enacted reform. Effective Jan. 1, Ontario companies with 25 employees or more must inform candidates whether they get a job within 45 days of their final interview.
To some, this may seem like the end of ghosting. But are we so naive? About a third of Ontario employees work at companies with fewer than 25 employees. And no doubt there will be loopholes to exploit as this regulation comes into effect.
Truly nipping ghosting in the bud requires nothing less than a reset in this corner of professional standards, where the practice has become so common it has led to policy intervention. But the most important recalibration is the expectation of job seekers. I’ve been applying for jobs since my teenage years and always considered that no postinterview or post-follow-up response was the answer. Somewhere along the way people started expecting more from these HR interactions than we once did.
Even Merriam-Webster’s dictionary ascribes the concept of ghosting to personal relationships. Generally, when people discuss ghosting, it’s a term heavy with emotional weight because the ghoster is a friend, a family member, a significant other or a potential romantic partner. Characterizing silence in this way after a job interview with a relative stranger seems inappropriate.
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Expectations of what job seekers think they will learn from these conversations may also be too high. The present concern with ghosting is predicated on missing out on knowledge, but there’s guarantee we’ll get it even with a reply. (In no small part because sharing too much detail can create legal risks for companies.) After a recent unsuccessful job interview, a friend got feedback vague enough to be useless. There was nothing he was told he couldn’t deduce on his own.
Because it takes two to ghost, I’d love to know how many job seekers follow up after interviews, rather than passively waiting to hear back. For some, this small display of interest in the position might get them the response they desire.
We don’t know how many job applicants follow up postinterview, but it’s established that hiring managers view this positively. One survey reports about 60 per cent of HR managers believed follow-up was necessary within 14 days.
Similarly, little is said about the flip side of ghosting once an offer has been extended and the candidate stops replying. Recent surveys diagnose this issue at similarly high rates. Indeed’s Ghosting in Hiring report found 77 per cent of Canadian job seekers surveyed “admit they have ghosted between one and four companies in the past 12 months.” One doesn’t excuse the other, but it suggests hypocrisy – that some people who decry being ghosted are happy to do it when it suits them. Reported excuses range from seizing better offers to discomfort having difficult conversations.
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When reflecting on my experiences being ghosted in the working world, it surprises me how faint the memories are. The annoyances didn’t affect me long-term, and I imagine that would be true for most workers. They won’t stay up at night in a decade’s time wondering why they never heard from Acme Inc. But we live in an economy where a lot feels outside our control, so trying to get some back when navigating the job market isn’t far fetched.
Ultimately, I don’t think we need to be reliant on employers. Yes, they can rethink the increased automation of hiring processes, which literally takes the human out of human resources, and make efforts to be more communicative. But it doesn’t change the answers.
It’s still worth making the job-hunting process less impersonal, not just because a legislature says to. But the simplest fix is finding peace in the silence.
Part of adult life is accepting that some interactions don’t tie up neatly; sometimes we have to understand the absence of an answer is a no, not a mystery.