Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Have You Ever 'Ghosted' an Employer? (linkedin.com)
"Suddenly, calls and texts went unreturned," writes LinkedIn's editor at large, describing a recruiter who suddenly discovered the candidate she'd wanted to hire failed to respond to 12 messages, including emails like "Please let me know that you have not been kidnapped by aliens. I'm worried about you," and even a snail-mailed greeting card. Recruiters complain that prospective employees are now borrowing a practice from dating -- and "ghosting" recruiters and employers to let them know that they're not interested.
"Candidates agree to job interviews and fail to show up, never saying more. Some accept jobs, only to not appear for the first day of work, no reason given, of course. Instead of formally quitting, enduring a potentially awkward conversation with a manager, some employees leave and never return. Bosses realize they've quit only after a series of unsuccessful attempts to reach them.... Meredith Jones, an Indianapolis-based director of human resources for a national restaurant operator, now overbooks interviews, knowing up to 50 percent of candidates for entry-level roles likely won't show up."
Long-time Slashdot reader NormalVisual writes, "It'd be interesting to hear Slashdotters' experience with this." Have you ever ghosted a potential employer, or perhaps more relevant, have you ever been ghosted by a potential employer during the hiring process? Do you feel it's unprofessional, or simple justice for the behavior of some companies when the balance of power was more on their side?
Inc. magazine blames the low unemployment rate and "the effects technology have had on the communication style of younger generations." But leave your own thoughts in the comments.
Does ghosting show a lack of professionalism, or is it simple payback for the way corporations treated job-seekers in the past? And have you ever "ghosted" an employer?
"Candidates agree to job interviews and fail to show up, never saying more. Some accept jobs, only to not appear for the first day of work, no reason given, of course. Instead of formally quitting, enduring a potentially awkward conversation with a manager, some employees leave and never return. Bosses realize they've quit only after a series of unsuccessful attempts to reach them.... Meredith Jones, an Indianapolis-based director of human resources for a national restaurant operator, now overbooks interviews, knowing up to 50 percent of candidates for entry-level roles likely won't show up."
Long-time Slashdot reader NormalVisual writes, "It'd be interesting to hear Slashdotters' experience with this." Have you ever ghosted a potential employer, or perhaps more relevant, have you ever been ghosted by a potential employer during the hiring process? Do you feel it's unprofessional, or simple justice for the behavior of some companies when the balance of power was more on their side?
Inc. magazine blames the low unemployment rate and "the effects technology have had on the communication style of younger generations." But leave your own thoughts in the comments.
Does ghosting show a lack of professionalism, or is it simple payback for the way corporations treated job-seekers in the past? And have you ever "ghosted" an employer?
Ghosting tech employers, that would get around.
[crickets chirping]
worst first world problem ever
I don't condone this behavior at all. It's unprofessional and disrespectful. If you make a commitment to show up for an interview or accept a job, you should be there. But through the eyes of my child who is attempting to enter the workforce, being rejected with no feedback at all is frustrating. I don't expect every employer to spend hours coaching rejected applicants, but a simple statement of why would go a long way. I can understand the rational of a prospective employee that's been through application after application with no responses or rejections that just say, "no". Very few are giving the overwhelming number of applicants that courtesy, why should it be returned?
It's wrong on both sides. Everybody needs to step up and communicate better.
Sure, it would 'get around' if you live in South Fuck, Minnesota. Here in the big city, corporations don't call each other and say 'Here's a list of the employees that did us wrong, watch out for them!' Receuiters are a dime a dozen, and they're as notorious for ghosting on clients, recruiting for non-existent jobs, and pulling all kinds of shennanigans. Few will have sympathy for the recruiters or employers. Everyone is an asshole these days, and the moral high ground remains vacant.
And I was ghosted by potential employer a few times
definitely a symptom of excessive affluence, this is a sign of how decadent the privileged have become, normal working people are too busy for this kind of self indulgent crap
I was hired as replacement for a L2 NOC that ghosted on his first day of work. The only reason why I know is I had a snowboarding accident and had to ask to push back my first day, and HR almost had a heart attack thinking I was backing out
...and I could never even remotely consider this. Heck, I'd show up to a job interview even if I had already found a better job. During the job interview I would tell them the situation and who knows, maybe they suddenly have some better offer for me. Or even if they don't, I would like not to burn bridges in case things don't work out elsewhere...
This article is not about ghosting recruiters, it is about ghosting employers directly.
Everyone ghosts recruiters, fuck em.
- Is not having your access removed without prior notice by your employer ghosting? ...
- Is not posting fake jobs announcement ghosting?
- Is not sending "12 messages" harassment?
-
Treat people like shit and then, play dumb when you are.
It's only what you've been doing to your merchandise for ages.
My sent email box contains literally hundreds of emails to just about that many recruiters that at best completely ignored me. At best because they might also add me to their "database" and have their spambot send me things that are usually completely unrelated to what I'm interested in, every half year or so. That's how I know I'm at the bottom of their barrel and will never ever get a decent offer from them. So I report those emails as spam. Because, a little respect would be nice. But I've never had any from recruiters. Plenty of abuse, though. Down to spending time and effort on a phone interview only to learn that the advertised job didn't actually exist. They kept on advertising that nonexistent job of course.
No sympathy for recruiters finding the chickens are coming home to roost.
This about 20 years ago. The candidate would not return any calls or messages. He is now a politician frequently seen on television where I live.
Pushy recruiter started talking about interviews before he actually told me what the job was. All I said was I'd be interested in talking. That rude pushy approach drives away people from civilised society. Learn to communicate like a human being.
just like in programming. Nothing more annoying than shit-heads who choose the option of ignoring you as their first option of ending communication, and you have no idea what's going on and why.
Meredith Jones, an Indianapolis-based director of human resources for a national restaurant operator, now overbooks interviews, knowing up to 50 percent of candidates for entry-level roles likely won't show up."
Then workers wonder why employers tend to favor foreign employees.
It's the attitude folks;
it's the work ethic;
it's respect for authority or lack thereof.
I am an employer and since gravitating to foreign "brought up" employees, I have been saved a lot of headache. I am not alone.
Personal experience, yes, though not specifically in "tech" industry. Pre-college I found quite a few potential employers who gave me enough of a suspicious feel that I never called back. Even after setting a start date. They just seemed shady and most of them proved to be. The rest, I just don't know if the managers or businesses are still around.
Post-college, no, I am still working at the first firm where I landed a full-time regular professional position (Diagnostic/Medical). Not same position I started in, of course.
However, we have had people do this throughout my time here and it is striking that the author would find it new.
Home of The Suki Series
For a long time it's been perfectly professional and okay for a potential employer to just 'ghost' potential canidates. They'll never return a phone call or email if they're not interested in you or if they change their mind halfway through the interview process because they found a better canidate. You have to practically harass them to know what's going on. This is super common in the tech world. But when a potential employee does it? "That's unprofessional." - Bullshit i say. This isn't the '80s anymore where skilled laborers are interchangeable.
"Does ghosting show a lack of professionalism, or is it simple payback for the way corporations treated job-seekers in the past?"
Yes to both.
Next question?
The only time I've ever done it is with aggressive recruiters who don't take no for an answer.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
get yourself a secretary. worth every penny.
>"Does ghosting show a lack of professionalism, or is it simple payback for the way corporations treated job-seekers in the past?"
It is 100% the former. And not just lack of professionalism, but plain rude and childish. It happens where I work all the time. Often much worse- we even HIRE someone and then they don't show to orientation for their first day of work and we never hear from them. Burn those bridges!
>"or simple justice for the behavior of some companies when the balance of power was more on their side?"
Shall I barf now? What, label them as SJWs or something and that makes it OK? Or perhaps two wrongs make a right?
What goes around come around ....20% max of recruiters/ employers might be respectful with candidates, but the rest treat people in a disposable manner, would love to leave a trail of ??? With these, sure don't expect had written "thank you for coming to my party and bring a gift hand written notes" for every submission but to go anywhere beyond a phone call with out a thank you for your time is just plain rude!
Employers ghost potential employees during the interview process ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Why shouldn't employees do the same?
Respect and professionalism go both ways. Many businesses that rely on skilled professionals forgot this during the recession, and now that most of the desperation has settled back into baseline disgruntlement, they're in a bad fuckin' way.
The trend for the last decade and a half has been for employers, potential or actual, to disregard common courtesy to employees, potential or actual - even in what would be considered "professional" positions. Let's take a look at what the average person's job search looks like these days:
- A couple weeks or months of having to eat piles of shit in the process of submitting resumes by having to deal with the subcontracted, third-party resume ingestion services that everyone uses now. If you haven't yet had the pleasure of spending an 8 hour day getting your resume submitted to 10 or 12 total positions, you cannot begin to understand how much you begin to absolutely loathe every living being after doing this for weeks.
- Getting calls upon calls from (quick, call me a racist) Indian headhunters or HR drones whose job is to get you just far enough along that they can credibly reject you so they can put a fig leaf over the H1B they're going to hire anyway
- Never, ever getting anything more than a form email that explains absolutely nothing about why you were rejected for the position that you spent an hour tailoring a resume for because it looks like an ideal fit and you actually meet all of the inflated requirements
- Delay upon delay upon delay. Even if you get accepted, it might take them weeks to get around to finalizing your employment. If something comparable or better comes up in the mean time that will get you actually started sooner, who wouldn't take it?
Employers who actually have recurring problems with getting ghosted by recruits need to take a serious look at what they're doing wrong. Hint: It's probably acting like royalty and not paying wages that seriously motivate.
Employees are doing what Employers have been doing for decades?
From Personal Experience, I had an interview arranged by a Recruiter with an Engineering Company. However, it became apparent very quickly that the recruiter was incredibly dishonest.
After going to the interview, I was informed by the Recruiter that the Company in question wanted to make an offer in person and he quoted a very generous salary. When I went to the Company in person again, the contract they showed was a signifcantly lower salary! I did raise this with my Interviewer who said they hadn't agreed a Salary with the recruiter.
I had decided then that I did not want the Job and informed the Recruiter that I was declining the offer. However, he was adamant to try and get me to accept it in comically rediculous ways by telling me that the role was upgraded to a Project Manager role! I still told him directly that I declined the offer and decided that I would 'ghost' all Phone Calls from this crook.
About 1.5 Weeks later, I was getting texts from the Engineering Company in question asking for me to give them a call back. I did and was greeted with "Whats Going on! The Recruitment Consultant said he was unable to get in touch with you" to which I responded by telling him that I told the Consultant that I declined the offer over a week ago. This turned out to be news to him as he was never informed by the Recruiter about this.
Its hard to sympathize with Recruiters who post crappy articles on Linkedin about how great they are or Candidates are ghosting them when they take this piss like this!
I have been ghosted by more employers than I can count. And knowing someone inside HR, I have a better understanding of why. Many times it is because they don't respond unless they are clearly interested, but there are also times where they are waiting to see what else comes in. They might consider hiring you, but they want to see if anything better comes along.
Also, by simply ghosting you, they think there is less chance you'll have someone to include in a lawsuit, should you file one for discrimination. Something not said is harder to prove than interpreting what was said or written.
Do this and word *will* get around. People know each other, and even if you don't list someone as a reference, they may get asked anyway.
I had one employee ghost me. She just stopped coming into the office. Did outstanding work, been with us for a while. But she took a sudden three day unplanned/unannounced absence, then a few weeks later another few days sudden/unplanned absence. We talked, she said they were vacations, sorry, thought I'd told you. Then a month later, she didn't come into work. No reply to emails or voicemails. Ghosted.
We sent a letter to terminate her, saying we assumed by not showing up for a week and a half, she had resigned.
And six months later, I get a call from someone I used to work with, long ago, at a different org. He was somewhere new too. He had an applicant who listed my org on their resume, didn't list me as a reference but wanted to know what I knew about her. Same employee.
She didn't get the job.
Ah, yes, _those_. The last time I had that, I told them that my hourly rate was $200 plus expenses and travel time and I would be happy to interview if they paid that in advance. Got the message across.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
When an employer isn't interested in pursuing a candidate any further, often the employer "ghosts" the candidate or turns around and offers some canned, impersonal, generic rejection letter. Turnabout is fair play!
To be honest, I never even considered that people accepting jobs and not showing up would be an issue - (while I speak mostly from the perspective of the German labour law, I believe this is also the case for most other European countries) both parties have an obligation once the employment contract is signed, with the employer being in their right to seek damages for every day that you do not show up and do your job, as agreed. The flip side of this is that it's also quite difficult for the employer to refuse leave requests by the employee, with a far wider range of allowable absences than what would be tolerated on the US side. I am certainly guilty of having interviewed at companies that were competitors at the same time and playing them against each other to up the offer, but I would never have signed something and then try to weasel out of it when something better comes along. On the other hand, I have also seen people take jobs they didn't necessarily want while continuing to look for better ones, and then simply quit their other job during their probation period (typically a 6 month period in which either side is able to terminate the relationship without cause). Once someone has to begin paying damages for every day they don't show up for work (or obtains sufficient awareness of this potentiality), I would imagine people would be a bit more careful about when and what they sign, and the problem would gradually correct itself.
...they tell me (if they even call back at all)...
"it's not personal, just business".
Well... right back at ya, f*ckers.
I tried to hire a secretary. Never showed up.
an Indianapolis-based director of human resources for a national restaurant operator, now overbooks interviews, knowing up to 50 percent of candidates for entry-level roles likely won't show up."
What's an entry-level role for a national restaurant operator? Hostess? Waiter/waitress? Where you'll make less than minimum wage and be expected to live on tips? Probably with no benefits? And whether you actually make 15% or not, you'll pay taxes as if you did?
And you're surprised when they get a real job and don't bother to call you?
Bwa ha ha ha ha.
I was going to come here to say something about recruiters.
I've come to the asusmption that the default state of recruiters is to waste my time. In fairness to some recruiters who I know and who are very good, it's the bad 90% giving the good 10% a bad name.
Mostly they are a pain in the arse who are very coy about important details and string you along as long as possible on the belief that once they've "sold" you the job, you'll happily take something at under half the market rate...
I'd say my coversations usually end with either me or the recruiter ghosting each other (i.e. not replying). Usually it happes when my opening reply is SHOW ME THE $$$: either they fail to reply or fail to answer the question in which I fail to reply.
I can't imaging ghosting an employer however, mostly this is because I'm currently at a stage where I don't think I'd take a job that would end that way.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Yours is the second post mentioning advertising non existent jobs? Wtf?
Can you explain why they would do this?
If theyâ(TM)re shit employers and you donâ(TM)t wanna talk to them then fuck âem
Jeez this is gonna look horrible on iOS with the apostrophes, for some reason slashdot canâ(TM)t fix basic escape issues. Itâ(TM)s going to lose users and then slowly die without constant innovation.
In "the big city", we use LinkedIn and Google and professional contacts from your last workplace. We see what you've posted, publicly, in technical mailing lists and sometimes even politically. If you applied to my workplace in a senior role, and I were unable to reach any of your former colleagues, I'd be concerned. I'd ask your permission before checking them for references. But the world can be surprisingly small at the senior level.
Non-responsiveness on the part of HR/recruiters isn't just common - after a while, I just assumed it was 'standard practice'.
I don't expect a detailed response from every resume I send in, but I do expect a response if I have gone thru an interview, especially if it included someone from the executive suite. It can be demoralizing to meet with a hiring manager and their boss (maybe a VP), have it go well (smiles all around), then radio silence. At least have the courtesy of an email stating 'We appreciate the time and energy you put into the process, but...'.
I have to agree with the other posters that the recruiters created the environment in which this developed.
Having said all that, I cannot condone an employee accepting a position, filling out some forms, then not showing up to the first day of work. That borders on a sort of fraud or breech: if you went thru the process of filling out onboarding docs, there is a very strongly implied and expressed intent, by both parties, to commit to each other. But then, I suppose some people don't show to their own weddings...
It boils down to standards of behavior - for all aspects of life. And respect. If we develop a society that says that a free-wheeling economy where anything goes is the norm, how to you expect job-seekers *not* to be influenced by that?
Over the years, I've heard of several people "ghosting" their employers. However, in these cases, it was because they had passed away at home, and they lived alone. Since the employer doesn't know why the employee has stopped coming in, they call the police for a wellness check. The police arrive and find the person has passed on.
Long story short, don't ghost, or you may be treated is if you might have become one.
I had a good communication process with the interviewer only to find out their auto testing software they used to filter out candidates was shit and didn't work.
They completely wasted my time.
I worked at a university and I've seen it happen twice in the group where I worked. One was a Russian guy who clearly didn't like his job, although he did his best trying to get good results. He disappeared one day, never to return. The other one was an Indian guy who seemed to be quite surprised that he had to do things for his money. He also didn't really like people criticising his work. He also disappeared, leaving us behind and happy, but he returned a few years later to ask for another job. That guy had balls of steel.
-- Cheers!
One of the rules I live by is that everyone deserves respect until they demonstrate otherwise.
If you're going to insult me with a shit contract that's guaranteed to screw me when we part ways, why would you expect anything from me but contempt?
The term 'ghosted' sounds like HR jargon.
It's disappointing to find HR jargon being tossed around on Slashdot. Almost like a leap back to the Dice days (Dice is a headhunter operation that owned Slashdot for awhile.)
Shouldn't you HR types be off somewhere collating resumes to feed into the shredder or something?
A few articles back I read about the huge burn-out problem in the US. That makes for a pretty good explanation. If you're burned out, your mind has pretty much shut down higher reasoning. Recovery usually takes months, so a vacation won't cut it. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people just go " ah, fuck it". Combine it with depression or other mental illnesses and you have somebody sitting in a true hellhole. One more reason for companies to actually give a shit about their employees. Here in the Netherlands the employer is also responsible for mental well-being. That's growing in the U.S. and other 1st world countries, but not nearly enough.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
We all know stories of people who show up to work and their badge wont let them in. They are told nothing, no warning, no anything.
People with 20 years experience show up one day, get taken into a room, told they are being escorted out of the building, that's it.
People come back from lunch, their coworkers desk is empty, no explanation is ever given. You dont even know if they were fired or quit or layed off, they are just "not at the company".
Why do corporate executives expect employees to treat them better than they treat employees?
for this fucking linked-in advertisement?
it's a joke.. if a candidate doesn't show or return a call? after 12 messages? that's borderline harassment. stop at 2, with the second being your own 'thanks but no thanks', then that's it. why the fuck are you still trying to contact them? they don't want you, they obviously aren't a good, responsible candidate.. so leave them the fuck alone.
We use a number of useless recruiters for my company. I hate doing it (almost as much as I hate paying them 20% of the candidate's salary), but it reduces the hiring pain, especially when the market is tight.
Aside from admin positions, the only times we have been treated this way are people who are pretty full of themselves... or just clueless little shits. The absolute worst though is having someone in the office for a day or week, and they just decide to stop doing it. (Two people out of ~50 employees this past year, maybe one or in the prior 15.). Well, maybe not quite as bad as the little shit that milked us for two months until he could find another job...
Stop contributing to the idiocracy. Psychopathy is a specific set of personality traits, not a catch-all phrase for narcissistic assholes. Your mentioning of the ICD may confuse people into thinking your know something about that.
Also let's contribute to a positive development in language even online: replace pussy (which is what you were born out of) with coward which is apparently what you meant.
Not so much for companies, although I have had one company do this to me about 15 years ago. It's unprofessional but it also told me I'd never have wanted to work for them anyway so it was obviously for the best.
Agents though, or as an ex-colleague used to call them 'weasels', have been doing this for a very long time. If it's at the beginning of a conversation I usually ignore it, if we've gone down the road a bit then they normally get the lifetime ban. There's plenty of other people out there recruiting.
I had a job offer on the table, and didn't want to sign any paperwork until another interview process was completed. I did inform BOTH of the companies that I was interviewing with that there were other items in the works, and the company I was interviewing with knew that I had an offer on the table from another company. But... the company that had given me the offer was anxious to get me on board and sent me messages at least every other day reminding me about the paperwork not being signed yet. I ignored those until I made up my mind which job to take once the second offer came through. Then, I informed them BOTH. It's just polite. Very sad if that part of the process is just ignored. and.. of course.. those candidates will never be taken seriously by the companies they "ghosted" if they apply in the future. Never burn bridges without a damned good reason.
Employees are treated as disposable.
Minimum wage jobs are many and varied, and people are likely to jump on the first one thy can get just to pay the bills.
There are too many employers that treat their staff as little more than an inconvenience on top of everything.
Who gets a Christmas Bonus anymore? What employers even offer them?
It's little wonder why people ghost recruiters (vampires) and employers down here at the lowest end of the pay scale. They have nothing to loose. Any employer that checks references on every minimum wage new hire is wasting their time as the vast majority are job-hopping to get enough income for the bare basics and looking to score something that actually pays more. Not that there are any real opportunities for such employees in many areas.
In a nutshell: there is no respect among the minimum wage employer/employee jobscape.
However in the city theee is a lot of employee turn around. That employing manager at company X in 6 months can be a hiring manager at company Y.
He may have left X for Y for the same reasons why you didn’t like X. However he may remember your name and link it to the lack of professionalism, then portray his story to others.
I work in an average size city, when I switch jobs I tend to run into people who I have worked with in the past.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Get the mark into a position where they're eager to jump at anything, then go, "Damn, the company hired someone else, but I do have THIS job lined up!" which is about half the pay, but if you've already made moves that require you to have SOME kind of employment it'll suddenly sound much more attractive.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Recruiting on the low end is a fairly cutthroat business (think making 20k-30k a year). So *when* a job shows up you want to have a list you can draw from. You do that by creating fake listings and getting that list. You are expected to make that list and curate it. You are expect to reach out to so many per day. When you have nothing to show you make something up.
Has anyone ever received a rejection call from an employer? Cause I sure haven't. If employers want people to tell them they are not accepting a job offer, then those employers damn well better be calling everyone who did NOT get the job.
If you haven't been paid, you don't owe them shit.
I'm guessing what they're talking about is the job is real, however the position is effectively already filled. They wrote up the job with a specific person in mind for it but due to various policies they're required to post the job. The chance of anyone applying for it and actually getting it instead of the person they want are effectively 0.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
The one and only time I "ghosted" an employer was when I was in college. I had accepted a job as a clerk at a regional grocery chain. It was shit work, nearly as bad as working at a national restaurant chain, but it was work.
Before my first day of work, I wound up being able to return to school, and thus was able to get my student assistant position back. There was no way I was going to report to work as a grocery worker when my paid internship paid twice as much and was on campus.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
But my very first job out of university in the late nineties, the guy that hired me failed to show up my first day. Fortunately there was still hr at that office at the time, so i at least could fill out the paperwork.
Ended up working for a completely different manager and cleaning up the first guy's mess when looking back with this article, I'll bet that he and his pal ghosted the company back then given the mess and lack of information that I had dumped on me.
True. Unfortunately, finding someone that will stick around for 5-10 years to the point that they are truly an executive assistant is hard, and longevity is what provides the value.
Fuck either of them if they don't treats you properly. They don't own you and you don't owe them shit. If you want to disconnect yourself from them, that is your right.
That said, I've backed out on interviews, but never totally "ghosted". I simply called them up and said I was no longer interested in their company, with no reason given beyond that. Every job I have ever quit, I quit over the phone or email.
They always responded quickly and pushed on the employer and even helped me get a higher salary than they were offering. Of course they were based locally. These recruiters calling from across the pacific that I can barely understand, those companies should be run out of business.
#1: Blizzard flew me down for a day of interviews. Recruiter called the next day to say things went great, they wanted to get an offer out next week.... silence.
#2: Series of calls with an eBay VP and her staff, said she was getting HR involved for "formal" interviews.... silence.
What I find weird is that it happened after companies had spent a fair amount of resources. I get it when its just a random HR drone, but when you've gone that deep...
Yes well I think the problem is that if it becomes clear that a prospective employer selects a different candidate the in between recruiter often just 'drops' you without notice. Not a very nice thing to do. However this can be remedied by making contact yourself every now-and-again. And building a good relationship with recruiters can be an advantage if you want to score the next project.
Not showing up for a job or just leaving one without notice is plain rude. And plain stupid. People tend to notice and remember.
Company recruiters "ghost" candidates all the time. They do this because they have a candidate in the process of ahiring but if that candidate does not accept they want to be able to offer the job to one of the other candidates. So recruiters never want to tell any candidate they did not get the job. The result is recruiters just avoid talking to candidates. Candidates "ghosting" seem to be a thing now because it is making recruitment difficult, especially in hot industries where candidates have multiple offers going. Perhaps this will cause recruiters to be more open in their conversations with candidates.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
Once, back in the late 90's, I left a company without giving them much in the way of notice, literally an email saying I am off just before i left the building, and then did not answer any emails, phone calls or text messages from them..
The company was a start-up that was facing financial issues, administrators were called in, eventually after months of negotiations another company agreed to buy the start-up and take on some of the staff, during the negotiating phase the new company was making promises about paying money that was owed to employees at branch offices in other countries, but only if those engineering teams continued to work on the software until the sale of the business to them was complete. The engineering teams continued to work, once the sale was complete, and the engineering teams handed over the code, the new owner decided they were not going to honour their promises to those teams, meaning that the people in the remote branches had worked several months for nothing. When I heard about that I immediately left the company.
Not particularly professional, but neither were the company's actions.
If you have time to deal with the jobs you're not getting, you are wasting your time.
Ever since the humble Personnel Office was changed to Human Remains and HR managers got paid more than engineering managers, things have been going down hill ever so slightly in the employee/employer relationship.
Some accept jobs, only to not appear for the first day of work, no reason given, of course. Instead of formally quitting, enduring a potentially awkward conversation with a manager, some employees leave and never return. Bosses realize they've quit only after a series of unsuccessful attempts to reach them...
Not only is that completely unprofessional, that sounds like a blatant breach of contract and/or violation of employment law (depending on your local laws).
Ghosting is a disturbing behaviour. The more often people do it, the more normal it becomes for people to stop checking in on each other when something goes wrong. If I suddenly "fell off the map", I would like society to look into it, and people not to default to "oh, he probably just ghosted us". As a human, you don't owe people an extended explanation for ceasing an online discussion or exchange, but I do think it one should end with at least a "No thank you", if only to maintain the social norm that we all should be concerned about each other's well-being.
Literally the first sentence is about a recruiter being ghosted.
A couple of things:
- recruiters often approach you unsolicited with jobs that you don't care about or when you may not be looking. There's no onus n you to get back to them.
- employers and recruiters have been ghosting candidates for decades. In fact, it's the norm when they aren't interested or are no longer interested in a candidate.
So I find it kind of strange that recruiters would be confused by this at all...
As I read the article that's people not showing up at their first day of work, before the actual paperwork filling starts. OTOH (at least here, nw yurp) the paperwork is getting a little silly.
Last company I interviewed at I couldn't even get a draft contract unless I first filled in their crappy webforms at some crappy third-party company full of commercial bureaucrats with very big electronic [DENIED] stamps on hair triggers. I didn't have quite the right "docs"*, so the verbal say-so turned out to be so much vapour. But, you know, seriously going for employment then having pointless hurdle after pointless hurdle thrown at you is mighty tiring. Having to tell them my everything first and them never even tell me anything whatsoever is a deal-breaker.
If I signed a contract I'll be happy to keep my part of the deal as long as my faith they'll keep their end of the deal still lives. Demanding lots of details then not giving anything back, that's just wrong. First you get me the draft contract, then we'll talk about the details of employment, then I'll make clear I intend to sign and fill in the blanks for the paperwork. Not the other way around.
* Despite being a local, born and bred, supposedly a citizen with full rights, I didn't (and still don't) have a still-valid piece of plastic saying so ("id card") and the local government saw fit to refuse to issue me a valid one. I'm required by law to have such a thing but they're not required by law to issue it to everyone who has a right to it. That's a problem with the government, sure, not a company issue. But the way the company deals with such problems, by blaming the citizen instead of helping, is certainly a company issue. I will never again offer to work for that outfit, nor for any outfit using that payroll company, nor for any outfit using any like commercial bureaucratic shitshow company.
I haven't been job hunting in recent years, but definitely have found employers to be very inconsiderate on this matter. I've never ghosted..
Also have been surprised to hear people with hourly retail or food service jobs walked out immediately after giving two weeks notice. Puts people in a bind who are depending on steady pay. I advise college age workers to pay attention to how their employer operates and act accordingly..
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
So first of all how often do you even get told why they didn't hire you after the interview. Pretty much never. If you're lucky they'll tell you that you weren't the right fit. However most likely they'll either tell you nothing or bald faced lie to you. (Yes, I'm sure you didn't hire me because you found the absolute perfect candidate, that's why you reposted the exact same job with the exact same job number 2 days later.) I get that they might not want to tell me for legal reasons but just making up excuses why they didn't hire me is just horseshit.
Then of course unprofessionalism on the actual interview itself. I've had interviewers be late(20+ minutes) when I'd show up or they even had to run around to find someone to do the interview. Hey here's a good one, I did a lunch interview with someone that didn't get you can't talk and eat at the same time. Of course she tried her damnedest to do just that. The food would constantly fall out of her mouth on to her plate because she wouldn't stop talking and then, I shit you not, she would scoop back up into her mouth.(Completely nauseating) At the end she literally licked her hand from wrist to finger tip.(I wish I was making that one up.)
Of course beyond that there are the games revolving around the interview. Sometimes they'll suddenly remember that they need you to do another interview or a Skype call. Really this is them wanting you to go away but for some stupid reason they just don't want to say not interested so they try to exhaust you. Or how about them asking you to do some version of FizzBuzz during a phone screen and of course you find out how few actually know the point of that test so they screw it up.(I wonder how many of them even know what the test is called.)
Of course I shouldn't forget fake jobs. The ones where they already know whom they're going to hire and it's a formality but there's some rule that says they have to post it. Of course they have to bring in a few people to make it look good but they're just wasting people's time since only their intended candidate is getting that job.
Last but not least is just generally screw ups during application process. Things like doing the initial phone screen twice because they forgot they had already done it and then trying to set up the tech screen on a holiday.(I kept asking her, are you sure she can do it then? Monday is a holiday. She set up the phone screen and got back to me a few days later saying that the tech manager can't do it that day.) Or how about asking if you can come in the day after tomorrow for an on site after telling them repeatedly I need a week since I'm currently working and have to ask for a day off to do an interview?(Which is apparently very hard for them to understand.)
Suffice it to say, if you act like spoiled 5 year old expect the same behavior in kind when the tables have turned.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
2 different stories.
1) I took a contract position, 6 months. At this place, the guy responsible for ensuring contracts were renewed was a flake. 1st time, I asked the day my contract ended and he didn't know anything about it. I said, no contract, no work. Left at the end of the day. Monday rolled around and I didn't show up. He was panicked, working to get the extension pushed through, but it would be 2-3 more days. ... we need you today." he said. "I"m across the country, skiing, can't be back until the following Monday." I said. That happened 3 more times over the 9 yrs I worked there.
6 months later, I didn't mention the contract was expiring and planned a week vacation without telling anyone. Skiing. Contract expired on Friday and I flew off to SLC for a week of epic skiing. Monday morning, got a cell phone call asking where I was. "Contract ended Friday", I said. "Oh
The last time, they decided that a contractor should be an employee if they worked there more than 2 yrs. Smart, but not for me. My contract ended in early November, so I planned to travel about 6 months in Asia after the Holidays spent with family in different states. I didn't mention this to anyone at work. 3 days prior to the contract end, the boss texts that he'd gotten the "employee paperwork" approved so I could switch over on Monday. That was the first I'd heard about that idea. I didn't want to be an employee. They'd asked a few times over the years, but I always turned them down. I said no thanks and wished him luck. Turned out that 80% of the people in my group who were contractors had decided the same thing. He was desperate.
2) Interviewed for a position at a major DoD company where I'd fill 2 positions they had opened due to my skills. It was clear that I was a perfect fit, because I'd already had a clearance and my degree would directly support flight testing of a new aircraft (deployed now and kicking ass). Nobody I spoke with was qualified to interview me on anything technical. This was quickly known. I'd loose more knowledge in computing if I worked there than I ever gained.
The boss finally came in and told me all the ways I'd be fired for about 10 minutes. He was an old, gruff, ex-military type, who felt he needed to control start, lunch, end times. 5 minutes late 3 times would mean I was fired. No thanks.
I left the interview and never contacted them again. A week later, the boss called asking where I was on the job. I told him I'd accepted a position at a less hostile workplace where they respected employees. His response,"oh."
Poor communications, in both directions, is where the failure happens. At hiring time, the prospective employees have all the power. It is the last time any employee has much real power, often.
When I did hiring, I was looking for a "good fit" for both sides. We needed smart people who would be able to fit into the culture and do great work. If the applicant doesn't like us, they won't enjoy work, which is bad too. 2-way street. We were pretty relaxed, but about 3 days a month, we'd have customers and needed to dress up a little more and keep the spitballs to a minimum. It was a software development house.
I knew one case where a newly hired manager didn't show on the Monday morning he was supposed to start. This was somebody hired to edit a computer industry magazine that was big at the time, filling the job that my new boss had held before the publishing company had transferred him to be publisher of the magazine I worked for. I was an editorial manager at the time, so I got called into the drama. The two magazines were at different locations, and by about 10 a.m. my boss started getting calls saying the new guy had not arrived yet. Before long, my boss called me in and started asking me what could be going on. All we could think of was that something might have happened to him, maybe a car accident or heart attack. He hadn't called or anything/ This was back in the early 80s, and my boss was around 55-60 then, and he had never heard of anything like it. I was a lot younger, and neither had I. We spent quite a while talking -- he was anxious because he had been a founder of that magazine, and knew he would have to deal with that issue as well as try to run the magazine I worked for. The guy never showed up, and never called in. He had been working for another industry magazine in another state, and I wondered if his family had balked at moving. I could have understood that, but at 30 then, I couldn't imagine not calling to say he had a change of heart. Looking back and reading other posts, I wonder if there may have been a problem with a recruiter. The recruiter hired to replace me when I left several months later failed to spot a serious potential issue with my replacement, although he did work out eventually.
And it's to put him or her in a shell.
#DeleteFacebook
My wife has spent many years as a homemaker, raising our children, while I went to "work". Now that our kids are all grown up, she decided to re-enter the outside-the-home workforce. She posted her resume on a few sites and got a response from one claiming that they are trying to wrap up hiring and that she looked like a good candidate. They asked her some questions over email and said that they would contact her to schedule an interview for last Friday. This was on last Wednesday. Friday comes and goes with no contact from said potential employer. My immediate response was "that's so unprofessional" and "of course, you wouldn't want to work there!". Unfortunately that didn't help my wife's self esteem very much. I'm a firm believer in communication with your employer (or potential employer). It just saves everyone's time. This person could have saved my wife some time and anxiety, by merely saying, "Sorry we don't have any opening right now that we feel you would be a good fit for. Check back at a later time."
I was doing contract work for a small website development and hosting company. They had a breach they couldn't track down, so they just used a cron job to restore the compromised file every 5 minutes. They also stored plaintext passwords in a mysql database on their front-end web server and said they'd 'eventually' get around to making it more secure. Finally, they asked me to start faking pci compliance checks so they could start taking credit cards. I walked away from that shit.
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
Don't burn your bridges, especially if you're the troll.
I've done it twice. I'm mentally ill with bouts of severe depression. Once I left a second job I had been in for three months. Was so stressed out and I was too ashamed to tell my employer. Self-loathing can be a bitch. Another time I had a written job offer that I had a verbally agreed to. But the offer came in for less money and smaller bonus then previously discussed. The HR person lectured me that it was their one and only offer, they would not negotiate and that I was to tell the third party recruiter who connected us that their would be no negotiation. It was really disappointing because I wanted the job I ghosted them at that point. Why didn't I just say no thanks? I just didn't want to face that this job I had really wanted fell apart. Stupid, but again my brain don't work right.
I'm not a total loser. I work past the dark days and I've been employed in IT for the last year doing great work. I wouldn't blame any future employer for not hiring me because of these actions.
What have I learned? Whenever I deal with problem people I remember there is probably more going on then I know. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. I forgive mistakes. I try to de-escalate situations. It works. I just came in as a contractor on a team and the meetings were insane - unfocused, people yelling, anger, so-on. I took hold of the meetings by steering the conversation well (I wasn't the meeting leader) and got the emotion out the meeting without tearing anyone down. Suddenly we are getting shit down.
Actually, they do: https://www.cnet.com/g00/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti-poaching-lawsuit-for-415-million
In fairness to some recruiters who I know and who are very good, it's the bad 90% giving the good 10% a bad name.
10% good? I think you're being generous!
I won't ghost a recruiter or company with whom I've positively responded. Especially not if I have an interview scheduled. I'll call to cancel. That said, I will absolutely avoid calls from recruiters who call me once a month when I'm not looking. If they leave a voice mail I wont' respond. If they email I'll ignore it. Etc. But that's ignoring initial contact, not suddenly going silent once a conversation has begun.
It's also worth noting companies will sometimes (often?) ghost candidates. I've had multiple on-site interviews where the company never even bothered to call or email to tell me they'd decided to pass. Just...nothing. Even had a company make me an offer (by voice mail I think), then go dark when I tried to contact them to accept it. Emails and voicemails weren't returned, the whole nine yards. Guess they found a stronger candidate?
$200? I ask $300 with a minimum number of hours along with a nondisclosure agreement as part of a binding contract with forfeiture terms if they bail.
This isn't something that happens around industry, this is specifically something that primarily happens at entry level....as the article noted as well, but there is significantly more corroborating evidence outside of this discussions.
Like the old adage, you get what you pay for. Entry level applicants are the lowest common denominator, and you should expect the pool of candidates to reflect that.
This. A recruiter these days acts like the temp to perm placement agencies back in the 90s and early 00s. A list of candidate that can walk in the door monday morning and get going. But, people have responsibilities and commitments that they can't just quit their job for the potential of another. Any recruiter that does this should be sued hard.
A worker who does not keep time? What role would a fictional movie consider that for?
On the workers considered for that first day of work.
What was their university education like? Do well in the given time for study? Pass exams? Do all the work needed on time?
Friends and politics at university?
Past work? Did they show up for past jobs? Work well with others? Had the skills to keep time each day?
Social media use? Look too new? Look altered? Do the social media images have a new quality as the text goes back many years?
Does the presented lifestyle look like it was written by a committee, a person with a different skill set?
In debt? Holidays? Wealth?
Lifestyle patterns around the ability to keep time and work usually show up over the years.
When all that looks too perfect and almost like it was created the following could have happened:
Industrial espionage, government spying.
Police investigation.
Undercover journalist.
Political activist.
Cult.
Pen-test to get into a location. Data collection from a secure area.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Between 70%-85% of job openings in private sector are never listed at all. Rather, when an opening happens, someone at the company knows somebody who would be a fit, typically someone they used to work with. That's how MOST jobs are filled.
My first salaried job in a big company was like that. I had worked with a guy doing "side gigs" and he knew I was passively looking for a new job - I would be interested if the right position came along. When the right position opened up in the agency he worked for, he called me, and recommend me to the hiring manager. Policy required interviewing three people, but the job was mine because he recommended me bases on knowing I had acted professionally and done a good job before.
From that company, I have a few contacts. My old boss was good, so I've told her to let me know if she's ever in the market for a new job, and she's told me the same. Her and her boss have told me more than once they'll have a spot for me if I ever want to come back.
There are a few other people from the job who I've communicated with the same way - if either of us ever needs a job, or has the right position open, we'll contact each other. We wouldn't do that with unprofessional people who ghosted.
So it's not so much that a stranger will call around (though that happens to), but rather people WON'T call the unprofessional people, they WILL call the people they've worked with who were highly professional.
My last boss is now a high-ranking VP for a major bank. He's hired me before, and I think I did a good job for him, so whenever I need a new job I can always get a job at his bank. I expect he WILL call people he still knows at my current company, confirming that I haven't become an unprofessional asshole since he and I last worked together.
Yours is the second post mentioning advertising non existent jobs? Wtf?
Can you explain why they would do this?
There are lots of reasons:
1) The job is already filled internally but they are legally required to post it.
2) They have a new or existing employee and they are wanting to know what they employee is worth compared to other people.
3) There is a potential position and they do want to hire someone but they need to know what's out there and what it will cost
before getting approval for a salary range.
4) The job did really exist but they quickly found someone they liked but left the job "open" just in case the first person falls thru.
5) It's a position that frequently has openings and they want to be able to fill it quickly when an opening does happen.
There are likely a bunch of other similar reasons too but most probably fall into the two categories of
either "market research" and/or "job technically exists but is currently unavailable to be filled"
I would understand if you acted like that to someone that was behaving to you or someone close to you. But you are doing this to people that offered you jobs, offering interviews? The next thing that will happen if this continues is recruiters will start sending their black list around and you will loose almost any chance at finding any job. No, in most of the industries I have worked in word of that gets around.
I just ask for their firstborn.
On an unrelated note, is anybody interested in adopting a bunch of small children?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Do this and word *will* get around. People know each other, and even if you don't list someone as a reference, they may get asked anyway.
In 20 years working in the same large city at 4 different places and multiple interviews I've never seen the same person twice. There's hundreds of thousands of tech workers in a good size city, sometimes millions. Odds are you'll never encounter the same person twice unless your field is exceedingly small.
I have a recruiter that calls me every 6 months like clockwork. Asking for my updated resume because they have "opportunities" in my area. The recruiter is half way across the country in AZ.
And every time, I tell whoever calls me (it's ALWAYS a different person) that I'm out of the field.
Six months later a call from another person. I asked them point blank, "are you new?"
Because I think I'm at the bottom of their list and they give me and others to the new guys to call to "build their clientele" and they never take me off - even after repeated requests to do so. Their number is blocked.
And then there are the garbage recruiters on LinkedIN who want your latest resume for an immediate opening. And when you send it to them, you hear nothing back. And when I call I hear this all the time, "Uh, the job req was closed."
Recruiters are ex used car salesmen who were fired from their jobs for ethics violations
get yourself a secretary. worth every penny.
Except if they send the contract to the wrong guy! I didn't realise until the Monday morning when the -worst- of the bunch turned up. I almost died. Fortunately he at least had a brain, so by lunchtime told me the job wasn't for him.. phew.
I won't bother to reply to a recruiter who sends something out of the blue.
If I start a conversation however, I will make clear that I'm not interested explicitly once I figure that out.
I have never had a situation where the other party failed to notify me of the situation if they had previously actually replied to my message.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Funny thing happened to me once, I was actually interested in a very short term contract position, and the client asked me an hourly rate to open negotiations. I was young and I thought "I'll open realy crazy to force them to coutner" and said "$80/hr" and they so quickly said yes without a counter offer and they expressed how relieved they were...
Oh well, was a nice bonus at a rough time in my life anyway.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The lesson you learned from this is that once the recruiter has introduced you to the company, there is no reason to continue to filter communications through the recruiter. Just deal directly with the company.
in high school, in the early 1990s, i somehow got a job as telephone solicitor for the Fairfax County Police Association. it was sketchy as hell. there were no computers or automation. there were about 15 of us, including the boss. we sat in a trailer somwhere off of Popes Head Road, and were handed huge piles of paper, which were basically printouts from some kind of phone book. lists of names, phone numbers, and addresses. the bulk of our pay was earned through commission -- meaning the more money we convinced people to give, the more we made. also, we didn't take credit cards or anything like that. after getting a verbal agreement to a certain amount, we mailed them a "bill" in an envelope, and hoped like hell they paid it. we didn't get our commission until we got that envelope back in the mail and the checks cleared. only a small percentage of what people agreed to donate over the phone ever came back as commission.
it was basically a room full of high school kids desperately trying to sound like cops without actually coming out and saying they were cops at any point, and trying to make the FCPA sound like a charity without actually calling it a charity. also, some of the vets had figured out spiels that they would use on non-Fairfax residents. they'd call up some of the richer/older neighborhoods in neighboring counties of Arlington and Loudoun, and get them to donate through an exceptionally sketchy cocktail of never quite saying where exactly what county's police they were representing. the FCPA did not care where the money came from.
the best marks, by far, were easily-confused old people. some of the guys knew exactly what to say to them to make it seem like this was a regular payment they made, like they were just renewing an obligation. the amount of arm-twisting these young dudes were willing to exert on destitute and lonely old women was really sad, but that's what happens inevitably when you hire a bunch of 17 and 18 year olds, and an older authority figure acts like it's what you're supposed to do, and literally the only incentive provided is cash in direct proportion to the money you bring in.
i didn't have a very convincingly authoritative voice at 17, so i wasn't particularly good at it anyway, but the main reason i disappeared was the job was absolutely soul-crushing. i did not take the job seriously at all -- my dad made me do it. i did not blame anyone one even a little bit for not donating money -- i knew it was complete bullshit. i didn't stake my ego on my salesmanship skills -- i took pride in a lot of other skills and aspects of my personality. i didn't feel bad after any particular negative call. i certainly didn't take it personally. i knew they were rejecting giving money to a bullshit cause, not rejecting me personally. but the reality is 95% of the calls you made were negative. almost always semi-polite no's, as well. nothing too harsh. you would think it'd be easy to brush off, especially if you had a healthy sense of perspective. and each individual call was easy to brush off. but there is something cumulative there. something subconscious. when a person is told "no" thousands of times, even if each individual "no" is meaningless in the moment, it ends up snowballing into an invisible mountain of depression. i've commiserated with other former telephone solicitors who have brought up the exact same effect without prompting. i was DYING from thousands of individual rejections that i absolutely didn't even care about at all, and never took personally. but one day i got to the point where i physically could not make my body take me to that place.
the level of anxiety and fear that accompanied me driving there just became so blindly overwhelming that i'd instead drive down Braddock to the Beltway, and just do a fucking loop all the way around the thing, and tell my dad i went to work. it cost me like $20 in gas every time i did this, but the alternative felt worse than death.
so yeah, sorry, sleazy FCPA phone bank manager, for that one mediocre employee who disappeared on you. i'm sure you were worried sick about me. i'm feeling much better, for the record!
i could live a little longer in this prison
Thee are many reasons. The most malicious is to steal your identity: many people are less careful of their personal details with a recruiter who is "running a background check". Or they may "bait and switch", offer you a less lucrative or less skilled role when you've already invested time and effort in making a good impression with them. There is also an infamous practice of advertising roles in the market and accepting only the intended, much cheaper, H1B candidate with spurious requirements. There is also an infamous bureaucratic practice of getting approved to hire various personnel, expanding the department headcount, but never actually hiring the personnel. That last is used to justify overtime and more office space or benefits for the staff onsite "until we can fill those slots".
There are many other reasons to present an opening that does not really exist. The penalty for withdrawing an advertised role is usually quite low, and the benefits can be quite high. So I'm afraid that some fraud there is inevitable.
what are the side dishes?
First, let's be clear: It's recruiters, not employers who are whining that they're not receiving the attention they desire from prospects.
As far as you anecdote, "...Did outstanding work, been with us for a while. But she took a sudden three day unplanned/unannounced absence..." is not a "ghost". That's called "No-Call, No-Show". Completely different animal.
Employees and employers have certain duties to one another; in most cases, the most basic ones are "showing up ready for work" and "paying the employee".
Engaging a recruiter in a conversation does NOT imply a duty to continue the conversation. Same thing works the other way around--the recruiter doesn't have a duty to follow up with you about the job you applied for.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
You seem nice.
I interviewed for a job position, and a whole 4 months after my last interview with them, they called me back and offered the position.
By that time I had been working for 2 months at another company that I applied to after I gave up on that position.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Recruiters are often independent agencies who act as a middleman, earning a commission equal to a few months' salary if a company decides to hire an applicant that the recruiter puts them in contact with. No affiliation with the company, they're just willing to make cold calls which employers/applicants are often uncomfortable doing. I've seen all sorts of scummy behavior from recruiters. If you're trying to punish employers for the had behavior of recruiters, you're targeting the wrong people.
no excuse for this behavior - it hurts everybody. It makes jobseekers look like assholes and frustrates honest people just trying to do their job for the company.
Yeah there's lots of bad behavior out there. Welcome to the Real World where nothing runs as ideally as you'd like and people are not always nice.
don't ever get back to you once they lose interest in you. That shows a complete lack of manners. The worse set are the ones that recruit for the Indian consulting firms and the Indian Consulting firms. They absolutely will not get back to you. They are super aggressive initially but they never keep you informed. It doesn't dawn on them that their behavior is leaving a bad taste in people's mouth.
Yes, yes it does. This is 'merkuh where there are no employee protections, corporations rule the nest, and you can be fired for no reason. So how does that benefit people again?
It feels like you're incorrectly using the term "ghost". You actually told them no. And you actually started replying. To ghost means not even tell them no, and never reply.
Posting AC because I used mod points.
Years ago, I left a job on good terms (gave notice, tried to do handoff to a peer, and so forth). For months afterward my former manager sent me e-mails that read only "CALL ME" (in caps).
I ignored them and never did learn what that manager wanted, because the e-mails never provided enough detail to entice me to call.
you are a selfish coward, straight-up.
Some recruiters have been "ghosting" candidates for a good 20 years or more. Why wouldn't the talent return the "favor"?
I've been ghosted so many times that I thank anyone who calls to let me know I didn't get the job, just to encourage them to continue the practice.
what? all of them? what goes around comes around. why should i should courtesy of any sort when they show none at all, ever?
And it's often overlooked everywhere in situations where people ask "why aren't responding in the way I want them to!?"
#MeToo results in fewer women hired?
Draconian alimony and child support laws lead to fewer marriages?
Employees show zero respect to current and potential employers?
All of them...rational responses to incentives.
why should i show any courtesy*
This term only exists because of stupid Millennials (of which I am one). Millennials are the worst. Stop being a coward and communicate straight with people, you losers.
But it was coming from a place of social anxiety, not treating people like shit shit. I felt bad about it, but the feeling of dread around communicating felt even worse.
I wish there was a better way. I might try speculative approaches to companies that I'd like to work for.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Best known animal on the planet to ghost prospective candidates. Never call back. No status updates. A lot are quite young with very little to no experience. A shame. This is particularly true in the IT world.
Yours is the second post mentioning advertising non existent jobs? Wtf?
Can you explain why they would do this?
A lot of companies are recruiting people in fishing expeditions. If a really excellent canditate interviews, they'll try to figure out a position for them. But basically, no, there isn't an actual job opening.
Where I worked, that was SOP.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That's why I make up companies and have three burner phones so you can contact me and do your sneaky shit directly to my face without realizing it.
Most of the time, people will not say anything other than dates of employment because it could result in being sued.
Ghosting potential employees has been the de facto standard behavior by employers and especially recruiting firms for decades. So it's pretty funny that they're now complaining about getting the same treatment they've been passing out.
... who, after some back-and-forth, hired me for some systems work at his insurance company.
I was in his office, a glass-enclosed cubicle surrounded by female administrative assistants.
He told me that he'd walk me around to make introductions to the stupid women help, conspiratorially, like we'd be the ruling good ole' boys.
They could hear.
I was polite to the staff, of course, and I could tell that, because jobs were tight back then, these women were suffering this sorry motherfucker because they needed the goddam job.
They looked like whipped dogs.
Goddam motherfucking son of a bitching sorry ass yellow belly blue balled bastard.
I looked each lady in the eye and strolled out the door as he said, "Blah, blah, blah, blah ..."
I got voicemails offering more pay and asking me why I walked out ...
I told my wife that this guy was useless as tits on a boar and he wasn't going to get one molecule of respect from me.
He went away after a few months.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
tl;dr - Ghosting before accepting an offer seems rude but not out of line with how candidates are treated. Ghosting after an offer and not giving notice are unfathomable to me.
I'd be curious to find out what the age breakdown is for the study. My instinct tells me it's a younger crowd that would accept a job offer then not show up or ever contact the employer again. That's something they do socially so doing it professionally would seem to fit right in.
Now leaving without giving notice or even saying you're leaving is entirely different. Zero day resignation is telling them you're leaving NOW and while companies frown on it they're the same people who will escort you out the door when you give two week notice. The double standard is painfully ironic. Having said that I can't think of a time when simply not showing up any more would be considered acceptable behavior.
When I'm job hunting I generally submit my resume, save a copy of the job description and company (if provided), and pretty much forget about it. I only keep the job description because the same job can be listed by multiple recruiters and applying for a job more than once kills your chances. If I hear back from them - great! Otherwise I've come to expect the dead silence after submission.
After an interview? Same thing. I don't send thank you notes because the interviews have been panel interviews, panel with people on the phone, multiple people, and people who are smart enough not to give their contact information. All communication has been through the recruiter or HR. I stopped trying to do that little politeness years ago when I found I simply couldn't get the contact information. So like job submission I let it go unless they have stated a specific timeframe for a response and I have a way to contact the HR person or the recruiter.
The only time I've gotten timely responses has been for a job with the US federal government. They're required to acknowledge all job submissions (other places do that too) and they're required to tell you if you haven't been selected to move forward. I think that should be required by all companies. They don't have to give a reason but it would be nice to put a check mark next to that job and say it's gone.
I manage properties. It's a business I know well. Rental applicants have been "ghosting" forever. Until now we just called it blowing us off. It's so common in this arena that I'll occasionally tell the clearly ambivalent to do it if they decide to pass on the space. "You don't have to tell me no or let me down easy," I'll say, "I only need to know if you're going to take the place. Otherwise good luck." But tell them or not, almost all do it anyway. Now I say go ahead and ghost me, which generally earns a wry smirk. That's not so bad but when they blow off reserved showings and typically around half do, it's a little irritating when you've set aside valuable time just for them. I imagine it's commonplace in sales.
I can definitely understand why someone would be tempted to do this, but if you think there's even the slightest chance you may want to apply for a job with that company/recruiter again, it's probably not a good idea. It shows a lack of maturity and professionalism, imo.
This has happened to me from recruiters so much from multiple companies I considered it normal procedure.
To take a job and then simply not show up without responding, however, seems horribly short-sighted. It would seem to me to be a great way to get yourself blacklisted.
Are we really so afraid of awkward conversations to shoot ourselves in the foot to that extent? Just lie and say you found a better offer, or use corporate-speak (This opportunity won't work for me as well as I thought at this time.)
Fuck yes like 90% of the place I've applied never respond back even once. As for the other way around, yes, I ghosted on Radio Shack (Canada.) They scheduled me to come in at 6am the day after Christmas, and this was just after the lost the lease on the name, so I was supposed to spend the next week going through the store and re-labeling everything with a Radio Shack logo on it, using stickers. I was like "fuck this" and slept in and never went back. When working for Toronto Computes! Magazine in the 90's, there was another guy in the test lab who worked for a different magazine. He just stopped coming in one day, and they kept paying him for 6 months before someone from management finally called me to ask why he wasn't submitting completed work and I was like "I thought he was fired he hasn't been here for 6 months..."
I work in midtown Atlanta and run into the same people constantly. I work with people now, four companies later, that I was working with in 1999. I probably know at least a person or two at most tech companies with at least a few employees. The community here is surprisingly small and you never know who you'll run into.
An employer? No ... a recruiter? Maybe.
And six months later, I get a call from someone I used to work with, long ago, at a different org. He was somewhere new too. He had an applicant who listed my org on their resume, didn't list me as a reference but wanted to know what I knew about her. Same employee.
She didn't get the job.
You admit to breaking the law. You can't give negative reviews about past employees to potential employers.
Why should anyone believe to you?
Have been ghosted in the past, by employers, but something tells me this is a risky trick to pull if you're looking for a job. People do notice and being a dick occasionally backfires.
Bait-and-switch is absolutely the worst. One big divide is between device driver programmers in embedded C/assembly language and application developers using C++ and STL/Boost algorithms. The majority of local industry does the C++ side of things and offers the highest salaries, so that's where everyone tried to head to. If an employer is looking to fill both sets of roles, interviews someone and perceives that the candidate has the slightest whiff of the embedded/C side of things that's where they will try and push them at the interview, simply because they just can't find anyone else.
I've ghosted various recruiters simply due to this practise. Sometimes they have auto-mailers that just send out a single vacancy to everyone on their candidate list regardless of interests. Due to the fact that they use macro personalisation, it looks like they are personally sending the message to you , even though they have been told that you are not interested in that type of work. So it just grinds on and on. They won't listen, so disconnection is the only option.
6) It's what I call a cannon fodder position. A merger is planned and if it goes through the job will be eliminated to meet quota.
The EEO-1 Report listing racial breakdown of current employees of required under OEC regulations promulgated under Section VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
As far as any requirement to publicly list job openings - citation sorely needed, because it's common knowledge, supported by many surveys, that the majority of openings are never listed.
Candidates are borrowing ghosting it from recruiters, not dating.
You can when they mention you as a reference.
When they contact you, tell then "$2000 a day plus expenses." They go away pretty quickly after that.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Just after I graduated from high school, I got a job at Montgomery Wards to work in their nursery department. Over the weekend before I was to start on Monday, I decided that working in dirt wasn't for me, so I didn't show up. The personal woman was so angry that she called my mother and expressed her disgust. My mother gave me a tongue lashing that was about as effective as eating ice cream.
There was a job I wish I had handled differently upon quitting. I dutifully turned in a two week notice, only to be immediately taken to a higher up for an exit interview and then summarily escorted to the door. I wish I had known that was the way they treated people who resigned. I would have simply called in on the phone and resigned, saying that they would have no need or oppurtunity to summarily dismiss me.
And then she went next door to one of the literally thousands of conpanies you don’t happen to have a close personal contact at, and got a job? Cool story.
'Can't' is not the same as 'most don't, by company policy, because they're afraid of shysters'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"Millions" of tech workers in any city in the world? I think maybe you live in a bubble if you genuinely think this.
When employers have failed to follow through with terms agreed to and attempts to correct are brushed off or rebuffed. See ya.
More often that that I have been some managers plan B, and I have been strung along (sometimes for weeks) and then ghosted by them.
Rick B.
Better to be a genuine asshole than a manipulative disingenuous fake nice person.
I'm not in the tech industry and I've witnessed this quite a few times. Mostly, I've seen it as retribution for employer behavior. For example, one place I've worked suddenly decided to switch everybody from salary to a day rate, and additionally, take away all paid time off. Result: nearly 50% attrition over the next few months (about 100 people) of people simply not coming to work any more. Prior to that company-wide change in policy, gaining employment there was extremely difficult. Today, attrition continues at a rate of losing just less than 2 persons for every single new-hire. Talent depth of experience is very shallow, only in a few cases now does anyone have more than a couple years industry experience. The place has become an 'academy'.
Read the whole post.
Then again, I was never afraid to tell anyone why I was leaving, good or bad.
The only recruiters I'm remotely concerned about work for the company they're recruiting for. I might respond politely to those. The rest can go hang themselves. The more they're ghosted the better I feel. Their job is parasitic by nature, as is the likes of LinkedIn. Anything that devalues and frustrates their existence is fine by me.
Don't even respond to requests out of the blue, at least on LinkedIn. It costs them an InMail point to send one, but they get it back if you reply. Just ignore them and they lose their point. Let them stew.
yup been doing that for nigh in fifty years now.
1 search for job
2 receive shitty job offer
3 accept job on the spot
4 don't bother with them and move on
5 find a better offer
6 take it
7 report for work
8 repeat as necessary
#Qanon
#WWG1WGA
Every time a recruiter told me that they had an "URGENT" position to fill, I told them that the hiring manager went on a six-week vacation to India. Recruiters are shocked — SHOCKED! — to discover that the hiring manager was on vacation.
Goodbye, Slashdot!
Here are quite a few for you to choose from.
https://www.google.com/search?...
3) There is a potential position and they do want to hire someone but they need to know what's out there and what it will cost before getting approval for a salary range.
My old boss had to do something the reverse of this, there was someone that he wanted to hire for the field position who was qualified and already live in that area but upper management was insisting on getting someone already within the company to accept the assignment so he offered it to me and several others whom he pretty well knew would reject it so that he could again make his case for the new hire.
That may have been illegal. The US has very few labor protection laws, but most states have requirements on what you can and cannot disclose about a previous employee, generally last position held, dates of employment, salary, and in some places if the employee is eligible for re-hire.
And that last is a problem, many HR drones assume a yes means the employee was terminated for cause. They can ask if the business has a "no re-hire" policy, but they never do, because its not an HR drone's place to have independent or original thoughts.
Never ghosted, but it depends what you do. I went for one job years ago because I specifically wanted experience in field X.
I enquired specifically about this at the interview and they promised me oodles of experience in field X.
Couple'a weeks later I realised that I was never gonna get any experience in field X because they outsourced all field X stuff.
Interviewed for a different job that really had lots of field X work and explained my situation, which didn't faze 'em.
Went back to the original business and gave them the mandatory six weeks notice.
The CEO went ballistic and promised that he would make sure I never get another job in my profession.
"Just wait until I tell them!, he raged.
"I just did, and they're totally OK with it", says I.
But it was a chilly six-weeks, I can tell you.....
Mac
Many companies don't let you know if you've been turned down and why.
Shoe is just on the other foot now. "Hi, I've applied to many jobs, due to the amount of jobs I've applied to only those I've chosen to proceed forward with will be contacted"
Just like you decide if you'll call someone back based on the quality of your other applicants, now people are doing it to employers. Not so nice is it?
I was on the tech job market recently and here are the responses I received from 14 job applications.
The bad:
- Submit application, and they never responded: 6
- Submit application, then 3 months of silence, then a form-letter rejection: 1
- On-site interview, then 3 weeks of silence, not responding to any of my emails, then a rejection: 1
- A 2-month interview process, including two rounds of on-site interviews, and finally they said, "We decided not to fill the position after all": 1
The good:
- Submit application, then a quick rejection: 3
- Phone screen, then quick rejection: 1
- Job offers: 2
As I final year student I applied to the UK's Air Traffic Control (NATS) for a position as a programmer. Then in the middle of my Finals they decided that they wanted to interview me - could I come down for a weekend - could I prepare a 4000 word disertation and presentation on "Why NATS would be dream job and what I could contribute to the company"? [or some such similar pish].
They sent me tickets to fly to London.
I just never bothered going [because I really did have more pressing things to do with my time].
They phoned up and asked for their tickets back [which they got].
Years later I got contacted by a freelance agency about a contract job working at NATS. They set up the [telephone] interview. It went something like this:
NATS: Do you know about Pascal?
Me: Yup.
NATS: Do you know about Delphi?
Me: Yup.
NATS: Have your heard of Real-Time Operating Systems?
Me: Yup. Any specific one in particular?
[...]
NATS: Can you explain how Interrupts work?
Me: Yup
NATS: Have you ever worked with Source Code Control Systems?
Me: I swear by them.
NATS: When can you start?
It's the companies that hire the recruiters. They get to complain to the recruiters, too. Besides, plenty of companies do the same thing. Literally everyone does it, so why complain about just the candidates? Let the specialists set the example and show how it's done.
More than once I have had an employer cancel immediately before starting (citing some get out clause) - so why exactly should I give a fuck about turning up on day-one unless it absolutely suits me!!!???
Unfortunately, you might have created a lawsuit by telling your story.
You're in the only fairly normal city in a very large multi-state backwater area, so duh.
It doesn't mean it is normal.
It isn't about shysters, it is about burden of proof; the burden of proving that the statements are true falls on the employer when the words are intended to reduce their chances at employment. Employers don't want to have to pay for that many hours of legal work, even when they have good documentation. That is why so many refuse to say anything at all other than verifying employment dates; it leaves it implied that if they had anything good to say, it would be by a supervisor listed as a reference.
Only if you get sued, by a god damn shyster.
They 'can' say bad things, just most employers tell them not to, because shysters. Even when the employee signed a write up. Nothing in it for them.
Personally, I love to trick headhunters and competitors into hiring air thieves. The best way to fire someone, is to trick your competition into hiring them.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
??? which post? the one that starts with "I had one employee..."
"read the whole post" doesn't really contribute much to the conversation, Ollie.
Yeah, that's pretty bad. I mean, disappearing for greener pastures after a short period of time can be considered a little mercenary too, but doing so without a word is just bad. In addition, some places like my employer have outside compensation clauses in the employment contract so ghosting for a new job isn't just bad but could open you up to lawsuits.
I don't know anyone who'd respond to the kidnapped by aliens email. Unprofessional shit like that would likely have been eaten up by spam/uce filters anyway.
Old people are going to be bent out of shape about this, but it's just part of the younger generation's social contract.
As an employee, I would like to keep my options open should I find myself looking for work later. But the kids will be alright, in their own way.
The worst ghostings I've experienced all occurred in companies large enough to have a hive of HR drones. And they're usually at fault for either side.
In one case, the applicant's cell-number had been inexplicably "corrected" before the file had been passed on to us. I only discovered this months down the line when I inadvertently ran into the person I thought we had hired. She'd offhandedly mentioned having applied but never having gotten an answer after a second interview, eventually finding someplace else. Meanwhile, the hole left in our team was used as an example of why HR needed more people 'to cover every department'. Sure she could've called us, but given it's usually "we'll call you if you're selected", only the youngest fresh-out-of-uni kids do that.
Another time, another place, HR had completely skipped steps 1 and 2, and gone straight to hiring H1Bs. This I only discovered when my cousin asked me if we'd hired anyone, as he and several of his colleagues had applied, with none ever getting anything but canned "you don't fit our requirements" responses despite matching perfectly to them in quite a few cases (would that we could've just transferred his whole team over). We got a bunch of non-english speakers (also non-french, non-spanish, and non-german, my coworkers are way smarter than I am and we could've done *something* with anyone who spoke any of those) who seemed to know how to make java games, which is very useful when even the website is probably somehow C++. As far as America and Canada go though? despite having passed them around to something like six different recruiting agencies. Each position was available slightly-differently-written about ten times on any site, and none of them existed for anyone going through those.
about to. Long, exhausting interview process including long haul flights in economy (during full working time in my current job). Finally, they offer me and offer me significantly less than I am currently making - despite me giving them my package upfront.
And now the best: only an offer in e-mail, final work contract only showed up 2 days before official start, no time to review.
So - I moved out the start date and now will give them short notice, almost ghosting them. Unpleasant, but a reaction to their strange and non respectful behavior. Silicon valley based already 20 years old almost giant.
For the past 20 years, ANYBODY younger than 40 today has been dealing with a completely one sided job market, and it's been known for decades that that's just the way it goes. There's always somebody else.... be happy for a job, and my personal favorite "Dammit, I gotta get something to pay this $3500 rent bill, and still be able to eat. I guess I'll have suck it up and take this terribly underpaid faceless corporate drone position three cities over."
Now the labor pool is mostly made up of us. We're the ones that spent a fortune on so much unnecessary education that we suddenly find ourselves qualified for higher end positions that the ones we've been training for, and we know it. We also know that we're the ones that have spent our lives being lesser beings under some sneering boomer pulling twice our rate. We know we're the ones that have been getting the shaft from every direction since greed killed the economy AND the safety net.
You want a sysadmin, but your job requirements state you're looking for a contracting bachelors in computer science and 10+ years experience managing databases and sorting big data. You also expect 5-10 industry certs that are marginally related to the advertised role, at best, and offer no health insurance or bennies of any kind.
"Your" candidate may have accepted your sysadmin job, only to be offered the DBA position on the other side of town with full bennies and twice the salary, that has the same requirements. Sorry, maybe next time you aught to be a little more realistic with your job requirements, or pay appropriately.
We've been eating shit for so long now that we all just assume your going to screw us anyway. It's not the '00s anymore, suddenly there are actually jobs. Some of us have grown QUITE good at our own little lanes over a few decades of shit eating, and we're now discovering that you need us as much as we need you.
Time to come back to reality. In the words of my least favorite douche-manager ever, "This is just business, it's not personal. What are you so worried about?You've got a lot to offer, and I'm sure you will find something." (Fuck you Mike, I hope you choked on the bonus I earned you)
Sorry, not sorry.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
DO NOT do this if in the USA.
If it's that important to know what happened, there's always an intern, gofer or low level employee who'd be happy to go take a look while on the clock and maybe stop at McD while he's got the chance.
Calling down a "wellness check" on someone through police has already resulted in several deaths this year - including one naked old guy who was tazed multiple times while in his shower until he died.
I'm a conventional machinist (read: manual instead of CNC). In my line of work there seems to always be one more job opening than there are ever machinists, and it's a field where experience is more important than education. Any shop that has a machinist usually wants a better one, and the ones they have generally won't be promoted away from a machine, so their only incentive to stay is either more challenging work, better managers, or more pay and those are ranked in order of likelihood behind flying pigs. More often we have our pay cut or our bonuses postponed, or raises denied because in manufacturing (or contract repair in my case) labor is the highest cost.
So I've been told by older machinists that the company won't give me two weeks notice of firing me or laying me off, so I shouldn't see much need in notifying them either if I find a better job. Places I have interviewed at who were aware that I currently had a job frequently asked me to start sooner than two weeks, sometimes even the next day.
Personally however I won't leave without giving notice, if you think your industry is small, I promise it's a galaxy compared to aviation repair!
You're forgetting what is probably the most common that started years ago:
0. To fulfill the legal requirement that no qualified American could be found thereby allowing them to legally hire the foreigner they already decided to hire even before the position was advertised:
Most job interviews these days are no so much to determine whether you're qualified for the position or not, but rather to determine a legally valid reason to disqualify you for the position so that they can legally hire the foreigner they already decided to hire long ago!
Today's job market sucks. :(
"Fish" (David B. Trout)
As one of the many victims of the '08 crash, the bills were piling up, and I was rather desperate for a new job, fast. As luck would have it, I'd managed to get a good first and second interview at a prospective employer, and actually got called in to arrange my training schedule and sign the relevant contracts.
So I head there one fine Tuesday morning and someone in the parking-lot asks me if I'm with the company, to which I of course respond "yup, just started out". Half an hour of sitting in a container-box later, I'm finally interrogated for about 30 seconds and told I'd probably have to reschedule. By the time I got back to the car, the FBI people were walking out of there with computers.
I did not reschedule.
If read the GPP, it states "Then a month later, she didn't come into work. No reply to emails or voicemails. Ghosted."
That is Ghosted.
True. Unfortunately, finding someone that will stick around for 5-10 years to the point that they are truly an executive assistant is hard, and longevity is what provides the value.
That's not a bug, that's a feature. If you pay your employees shit, work them long hours without little promotion potential, why would they stay? Someone else is willing to treat them better than you are. If you want a 5-10 year employee TREAT THEM THAT WAY, don't treat them like a "resource" that you can just dig up more of anytime.
So you've never heard of Beijing?
The article is already halfway down the front page. Lots of reactions, but few funny mods and they weren't justified. Quite disappointing, even by today's Slashdot standards.
So then I went looking for insight. Disappointed again.
My typically combined perversion would be to have considered the opposite side, where employers ghost the applicants. I think that's rather more common these years, especially for older "pre-owned" technical people.
The fresher the wage slave, the better. Most important that they have no idea of their actual monetary value to their employers.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
No manners, no respect, no grooming. "Do your own thing". It's how kids are raised. Our office has had one or two people that failed to show up after being hired, because they got a better offer. A few years later, one came back to apply again. They were told NO!
Apple ghosted me once. A family member worked there and submitted me for a job, so I came with references. HR called to set up a phone interview, but the day of I waited for about an hour, and they never called. After all that time I got online and realized they'd emailed me 3 minutes before the interview, postponing the call. I emailed back, asking when was good, but they didn't reply. I sent two more polite inquiries, after maybe 3 days and then 2 weeks, just trying to follow up, but never heard a thing. No idea what happened, or why I didn't get a bare minimum of "this position has been filled" or any other generic no thanks.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Depending on your area of the industry it's a small world and this only hurts future chances to get a job.
Hiring managers frequently reach out to their network to ask about candidates that look good on paper before interviews. If you're applying for a job elsewhere and the hiring manager finds out you ghosted someone else why would they waste their time on you.
I've watched this scenario play out several times over the years.
> Down to spending time and effort on a phone interview only to learn that the advertised job didn't actually exist. They kept on advertising that nonexistent job of course.
Oh asshole recruiters, Karma is a bitch, isn't it? Yes. I've had years of being treated like shit by recruiters. Does LinkedIn really not understand that? I reckon they do. Their article is just a massive troll, and yes, it worked. Because it's got us talking about it. Well fuck recruiters anyway.
Yours is the second post mentioning advertising non existent jobs? Wtf?
Can you explain why they would do this?
There are lots of reasons:
All of which make no sense. Do you think hiring managers or HR people have nothing better to do than screen applications for jobs that don't exist? It's a quiet day in the office, let's post some job adverts then read lots of boring fucking resumes all day....
You're forgetting what is probably the most common that started years ago:
0. To fulfill the legal requirement that no qualified American could be found thereby allowing them to legally hire the foreigner they already decided to hire even before the position was advertised:
Take off the tin foil hat. Reality is nothing like this....
I once didn't expect second interview cause I thought the first one went badly, to my surprise I was invited to a second one but never checked my email, they could've called tho.
Absolutely true. Absolutely. Certain company 90 percent of job postings.
$500/hour with a minimum of 10 hours per incident and I retain all rights to whatever I produce and can rescind their license at any time.
That's not ghosting! You turned down the offer and asked not to be contacted again. That's ending the relationship and ignoring attempts to restart it.
Ghosting is what you were accused of.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I've ghosted an employer before but because they were a piece of shit and didn't even deserve an explanation as they knew full well why. If an employer treats me good, I will treat them the same and give them proper 2 weeks notice before leaving. Otherwise, they can piss off and contemplate what they did wrong while they wonder where the hell I went.
I have worked with companies where if you're officially and legally on the books and you ghost, there can be recourse. Some of the successful recourse's I have seen 1st hand, are.
1. Suing the employee for recruiting fee's during the initial booking of the candidate up to 1st day of hire.
2. Blacklisting the candidate thru a 3rd party candidate screening service.
Weel, do they?
Every day.
"You're fired. Don't come to work." Like that.
I had a employer promise to reimburse me for a flight from NY to CA if I would interview. I went on my dime. Things went very well. HR basically told me I should be prepared to move. i went back. Then nothing. I mena, no answering emails, no response to anything. They're still in business years later, so they're a real company.
Needless to say I was out 1000 bucks all told. Why? They didn't feel any need to even tell me.
Many recruiters have dsone the same thing. I have also had recruiters ask me if I was a "married kind of guy".
So now they all are getting what they've been dishing out without consequence. Well, tough fucking shit.
I always figured that headhunters maintained their narcissism despite knowing that most people feel about as much empathy for them as for Daesh. But from this article I get the distinct impression that the scum-sucking bottom-feeding middlemen - of a sector that is already not well liked, even - are genuinely surprised that nobody gives a flying fuck at a rolling donut about their poor attempt at simulating feelings. Is this true? Jesus fucking Christ, do those things think they're human?
And are employers in a competitive capitalist economy really crying because someone whose labor they wanted to exploit for profit wasn't super nice to them?
Have you applied for jobs recently? Years ago, I would get a response to every job I applied for. Most would be some kind of form letter like "Sorry, but we found some other candidate who more closely matched our needs." But in the past 10 years or so, most companies never, ever reply when they don't hire you. No phone call. No email. They simply go silent.
Turn-about is fair play.
I've ghosted a n external recruiter once. I was looking for a new job because the company I worked for closed down. Get a call from this recruiter, standard "We want to be your only source to get your next position" spiel. And I didn't hear from them after that one call for two months. Had plenty of interviews I got on my own. Low and behold, one company I had interviewed with was also using the external recruiter that had called me. The external recruiter called me about the position, and I knew it was that position because it was word for word the same description for that position. Left me 3 or 4 messages a day for a week. I called the internal recruiter with the company on the second day letting them know that I had nothing to do with this external recruiter and if they send you my resume please ignore it. The recruiter thanked me, she was happy I had done it since it could cause issues if they did offer me the position. The company ended up offering me a different position, which I took, and the internal recruiter said on the first day the only reason I didn't get the other position was because of my "relationship" with the external recruiter.
Companies don't show employees respect anymore - a gazillion interviews, testing, privacy invasion of social accounts, etc. and if you're not the candidate they're going to choose, they ghost you in a heartbeat.
Why should sought after employees treat companies any better than they treat employees who are seeking to work for them?
I donâ(TM)t think itâ(TM)s just the economy. This has gone on for decades.
My dad worked for Sears 15 years ago at age 80 until he was 85, to keep busy and pick up some extra money. He said that these behaviors happened so frequently, he couldnâ(TM)t believe it. People would work for a week, a month, a year even, and just walk away. My dad was one of their best employees because he developed his work ethic in the 1930â(TM)s as a teenager.
I suppose youâ(TM)d want more information about employee behavior. If you ran afoul of a supervisor and would never mention that job on a resume, maybe youâ(TM)d just walk away.
i ghosted an employer after they made me redundant at 3pm on New Years eve, one day before they had to pay me my outstanding holiday leave. F*** them
The company is trying to fill at least two positions; project manager and engineer. The company may have said to the recruiter "we are looking for a project manager and engineer with salaries between $projectmanagersalary and $engineersalary", Agency picks that up literally and assumes that the engineer will get paid the same as project manager. Now there is confusion. The company wants you but can only offer you the salary if you become project manager.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
A lot of the comments above are expressing the notion that employers often don't respond the candidates so therefore this sort of behavior is fine.
I'd like to say I strongly disagree. In my experience especially when I was more junior and making applications for jobs in the middle of a recession, I've never had expectations that an employer will personally respond to me.
Normally when employers advertise for work, very often they get a lot of applications, as a candidate I've always expected this and never had any expectation that the employer would personally respond to let me know that I hadn't been selected. Occasionally they did and I always thought it exceedingly polite, but when they it never occurred to me to be slighted by the act. Furthermore, I've expected that when I'm applying for a position, if I haven't heard from the employer within a few days that I need to touch base with them and confirm that they actually have received my application, then if they have ask them if they're still interested in my candidacy and if not ask for feedback on why.
Very often I believe being proactive and periodically contacting the employer whilst they're in the middle of their recruitment process is actually quite influential and often be the deciding factor on the success of a job application.
Considering the reverse... being offered a position or job interview and then simply not responding or turning up is extremely unprofessional. There's a major difference between these two things that most in this discussion don't seem to understand. An employer advertising a position and requesting applications for a job is very different to you making a personal commitment or signing contract with an employer. These are two completely different things and come with totally different etiquette, obligations and responsibilities, I don't see how they're interchangeable in any way at all. Such behaviour is disrespectful to the other candidates for the job as well as towards all the people who would have been put out at the company when you didn't show.
Company I worked for for 8 years, after being bought, developed a habit of firing people who put in their notices. Guy I worked with put in a 2month notice, got fired 2 weeks later. Another put in a 2 week notice, fired 2 days later. I basically waited til my stock options vested, had a new job lined up the same day, let my immediate team know I what the deal was, and then put in my 'notice' after I was at the desk of my new job. They called me a bunch and just never answered or signed any papers. Fuck em.
Went to an interview and enjoyed it a lot, everyone said I was a great fit and I should hear something back. Never did. Got a call one Monday morning around 11AM asking where I was. Huh? Manager I had interviewed with wanted to know why I wasn't there for the onboarding. I asked him what onboarding because I hadn't heard shit about the job after I left that, and those were my exact words. Turns out they had sent out letters to everyone they hired but me and that I got lost in the shuffle and somehow they had me marked down as having accepted the offer though. Told the hiring manager and the HR director that I needed to give two weeks before I could start, I didn't want to screw over the company I worked for. They agreed and same day courier the paperwork to me and had it to me by 3PM. I signed everything and handed in my two weeks notice that day. To me it was a giggle. Specially when I started and the HR director and hiring manager both called me while I was parking the day I was to start asking me if I was going to show up. I said straight out "I'm in the parking lot now." and they both laughed.
So when did the pay negotiation become the bad thing to do? Previously it was that we got the shitty pay because we agreed it and we should ask for a better payrise if we think we deserve it. And that shitty pay was NOT wage slavery because we agreed to the pay. And now, all of a sudden, we are NOT supposed to negotiate a salary and that we are NOT allowed to reject a job for the shitty pay.
How long was I asleep?
Whose idea was it, this global legal code thing?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There's plenty of incentive for recruiters, though.
Get the resume of someone who specialises in building interfaces between ERP systems and coffee machines using QT and perl and you get a list of companies that ... do all that kind of shit.
You've now got a set of sales leads you can use to try and place other people on your books who DATKOS.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
One time I had an interview, seemed to go OK but heard nothing for about two weeks. Perhaps I should have chased them, but I was too busy getting ready for the other gig I went for the day after who basically said "yes" at the end of the interview.
I suspect I was the mousy girl with glasses and the blonde gave him a slap in the face.
Ironically the first one seemed more interesting on the face of it, and if they'd been honest about me being the understudy I might have hung or at least tried to stall the other.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I work in the tech industry in NY Metro area and consistently run into the same crowd over and over.
Canâ(TM)t tell you how many times my paths have crossed ways with the same people in different roles/capacities/positions.
A burned bridge here can absolutely sink you ....
We use a number of useless recruiters for my company. I hate doing it (almost as much as I hate paying them 20% of the candidate's salary), but it reduces the hiring pain, especially when the market is tight.
Aside from admin positions, the only times we have been treated this way are people who are pretty full of themselves... or just clueless little shits. The absolute worst though is having someone in the office for a day or week, and they just decide to stop doing it. (Two people out of ~50 employees this past year, maybe one or in the prior 15.). Well, maybe not quite as bad as the little shit that milked us for two months until he could find another job...
Surely if you made the effort to recruit properly rather than outsourcing it you might be able to get yourself some better quality people. Getting other people to do the job you don't want to do will usually result if a minimum effort at best.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
You seem nice.
It's a valid point though.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Last time I switched jobs I had to create accounts to submit most of my resumes or even enter all the information into a shitty web form.
These kinds of companies will not receive any further communication once I made my decision.
Can't be bothered to do your job and read/process my resume, well fuck you too!
I have the skills, you need me. I don't need you as there are plenty of companies to choose from.
Companies & recruiters have been doing this for decades to people NOW, only when the tables are turned, and the recruiters and companies are on the receiving end of this tactic, does it make the news and create some kind of news. Screw 'em
Pfft. Recruiters are ghosting too. So what are they complaining about?
Actually that's a trend started by the employers. A lot of them never respond. Not even to acknowledge the application has been received, let alone if they are not interested. It's only fair game that candidates use the same. I don't use this and I usually reject the offer or quit but I can understand why some people would do it.
Quite possibly. For government compliance reasons, my company requires us to interview several applicants for every opening, even if we already have the "perfect" person identified.
Just another day in Paradise
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is what its come to now, a bunch of weak willed morally outraged positively reinforced morons.
from the article "Does ghosting show a lack of professionalism, or is it simple payback for the way corporations treated job-seekers in the past? And have you ever "ghosted" an employer?"
Are you freaking serious. Just what aforementioned morons need - an excuse to latch onto to make it nothing to do with their own lack of responsibility. And what a great one, the evil corporations are certainly a favourite.
If you feel outraged at my comments, go cry on twitter so that the world can see. Its REALLY good for you to do that.
Guy was hired for a networking-related position, "worked" for the better part of the week before the termination/resignation on a Friday. The party line was he had started, been given some small-scale assignments which got botched badly, and then went radio silent for 2 days before resigning via email when they were trying to get ahold of him to fire him.
My interpretation was that the position was talked up as "networking" (switching, firewall, some small-scale routing) during job interviews. When the guy was hired, the supervisor was so busy doing billable work the guy had no actual work to do and was just slammed into small-client crises (which are the worst, since the small clients operate as semi-broken on a good day, and little substantial documentation exists).
I think the guy genuinely screwed up, but for reasons that are beyond his control and just decided that he wasn't going to take ownership of a 10 gallon bucket of shit beyond redemption. Some of these clients *are* badly broken but because the checks keep rolling in, nobody is willing to dump the clients as huge risks or call them to heel for their own good.
Generally speaking I think there are a lot of small businesses like this that operate at the margins of sanity and organization. If you've worked there long enough and/or are lucky when you're hired, it has the aura of organization. But if you walk in the door on the wrong week, it's like an asylum run by the lunatics. The owners/principals live "the vision", perhaps by necessity, but its often quite disconnected from reality. Trouble is, they sell the vision to new employees, and not the reality because no one would take the job for the reality.
We had a high level manager hired with a similar outcome. It went on for months with him, though. There was no ghosting, but he basically kept holding management to the job description until they canned him for being ineffective because he was basically doing "the job" and not what they wanted him too (which was all the shit work a principal didn't want to do, minus the management authority the principal didn't want to give up).
IMHO, the big picture lesson is to get a written description of day to day job responsibilities and activities, not just an HR job title/description, in the written offer letter. Any company that refuses to do this is either badly managed and looking for triage or outright lying about the position. If the work assignments deviate greatly from the work description, you've got a leg to stand on.
I am 62 years old. In every job interview I have participated in, where I did not get the job, I was ghosted. Every one. The only exception was an interview I had with Merrill Lynch. I did not get the job but they did send a very nice letter telling I did not get the job. I was impressed by their professionalism and courtesy. That was 30+ years ago and I have never forgotten it.
Every other organization I have dealt with, just cowardly silence.
This is no excuse, so they deserve what they get. "Policy" require them to post the job that is 'effectively filled'? Well, then they have an asshole policy and deserves the treatment.
I have never ghosted an employer or potential employer. I have been ghosted by companies before, but I refuse to do the same as I think it is completely unprofessional. I do not always respond to unsolicited job offers from recruiters, but I see that as spam/junkmail. My profile does not say that I am seeking employment currently, so if you email me about a job offer, you should know right away, I'm not your target.
Brad,
Quit bothering these people. They have better things to do. Yes, from the basement!
Angelina
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Far too many recruiters send me job offers completely outside my field that shows they didn't even bother to read my profile and are spamming me with whatever crap jobs they have to fill. I liken it to the underlying story of Glengarry Glen Ross where the characters are cold calling people trying to sell them terrible land investment deals. I just had another on Friday where someone offered me a job as a home care provider to an 86 year old person. Don't even get me started on the countless Indian recruiters trying to fill spots in sweat shop IT service providers.
Also data collection.
You'd be surprised the details some people leave on their resumes. Addresses, previous employers. All of this (especially the previous employers bit) is useful for future marketing campaigns and cold calling.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Employers ghost employees all the time. You show up at work and find out your job is gone. No explanation. No warning. No attempt at making it right. Meanwhile executives get their bonuses because they made their nut for the quarter. It's a free market. If an employer wants better candidates and more professional candidates then pay for them and build your company's reputation. Otherwise, you'll just keep getting what you serve out.
How beautiful. It is very biblical - they rip what they sow. Most of the companies have absolutely no right to complain about ghosting. They taught everybody that when you are not needed it is not worth an effort to even tell 'go away' to you. Apparently, this lecture was very efficient and now everybody uses this method. The only companies that refused me and still treated like a human being are some Japanese companies. When they said that by the date they will inform about the result of the hiring process, they always did. I was never left not knowing, what is the status. As for Europe, I never got any feedback, even if they promised to give one. Some British agencies went to the ridiculous level. I understand, that if you send somewhere your offer, you are subhuman enough not to deserve answer. I can even understand, that when they talk "We will contact you later", it actually means "f-off". However, if the recruiter tells you "I will call you in two hours", so you rearrange your agenda to make it possible talk to them in a quiet environment, and then when the time comes the only thing you get is silence, no phone, no mail, nothing - well, this is ridiculous. And then the same recruiter calls to you three weeks later saying about another offer... I still talk/write to them politely, because you never know, the Chinese proverb says "never spit into the well, you might drink water from it later", but frankly - now I do not believe a single word they say, and consequently, I treat them the same level as the guys selling the new best models of vacuum cleaners. How can I treat them more seriously. I write replies to them, sometime the next day, sometimes after 2-3 weeks, that I am sorry, but their offer was not really interesting. I still keep my word. I was discussing an offer. They refused me, told me they had better candidate - I was getting through insider reference, this is the only way to get any feedback. I said OK, no hard feelings, and then I accepted another contract. After a week they told me they actually want me, and "the better candidate" was apparently not as good - o perhaps, ghosted them.. I said "No, two hours ago I signed another contract". You know, the potential contract was closer to my dream job, so I had really hard time - but I decided I must keep my word. Actually, almost all people around told me I did wrong, and I should follow the dream and not the actual contract. So maybe I was wrong. But still this market tendency is not enough;-). Recently I wrote to a quite big software company, that is entering Japanese market. I wrote to them them, asking if they need a software engineer with 15 years of experience, and working knowledge of Japanese, including reading and some experience in the trenches on the local Japanese market - well, never heard of them, even no "no, thank you" note. So, I guess it is still surplus of people with my skills, but anyway - I have a job, so I really did not need them, just thought it could be fun to work between a European company and its Japanese clients. How should I respond in the unlikely event they ever call me?
Job seekers are spending many, many hours sending out resumes, writing custom cover letters and doing multiple rounds of interviews for no money. One must wonder how many times they failed to received a response back. Just sounds like turn-about is fair play.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Oh I certainly have had some coworkers that got glowing recommendations just to get them out the door ASAP!
It's funny how expressions of contempt and superiority so often go hand in hand with ignorance of a subject.
Does it come down to what feels like confrontation? Saying you're not hired, you know it can be upsetting. So you just... don't? Same for saying that you aren't interested in a role. It's probably more that once people are hired that Linkedin, Monster, Dice, everything is deactivated. Happy couples shouldn't have Tinder on their phone. And employed people don't want to be reminded of what job hunting is like.
Employers have been treating candidates like crap forever. Interviews, waiting for callbacks, competing with other applicants, it can be stressful. The amount of times I've seen people (myself included) wait weeks to hear back with a "sorry we went with someone else" is disgraceful. If they respond at all. It's also usually followed with "We'd like to consider you in the future". What's more outrageous is that if you're given the job and say no, that's it. All ties are cut. If you were to say "I'm not interested but I'd like to consider it in the future" they'd tell you to never show your face again.
(Also, to note. Not showing up for work ever again without warning isn't quitting, it's abandoning the job and more or less breaching a contract. That's real bad).
this seemed like a haiku
you fuckers! Decades of wage theft, surprise layoffs, ghosting interviewees, multiple shifts, no raises, shit health insurance, and other shenanigans are coming to bite employers in the arse. You reap what you sow.
My direct supervisor told me to do something that violated safety regulations. I refused. He said do it or don't come back tomorrow. So I didn't go back the next day and thought nothing of it assuming that was the correct action. A week later they were calling, looking for me wondering what happened. I already had another job...
They donâ(TM)t call, they talk over beer in various groups. It would get around in my city for sure and has. (350k people)
I got ghosted by a hiring manager after my second interview about a month ago. Was told they'd let me know their decision a couple of days after the second interview. Called after 7 days and got told "in the next 2 days." Called after another 10 days and the manager screened my call "oh sorry she just got off the phone but when I went to talk to her someone else pulled her away." Called again and left a message then got an email several days later saying "Sorry you didn't get it." That person was in Customer Service. Can't imagine the run around their customers get when there's bad news and they're too scared to come out and say it.
At my first office job about 15 years ago the Customer Service dept hired a lady for data entry who went to lunch her first day and never came back. They couldn't get in touch with her until someone called from their personal phone and then she hung up on them when they said who they were.
My girlfriend's workplace (charity call centre) hired someone last week. They sent to her an orientation session 2 blocks away and she never turned up or answered her phone. When the boss called from a personal mobile she said she didn't like any of the managers she met and didn't want to work there.
It's pretty common here in Australia to see job ads for generic low level jobs which don't exist because the recruiters are just fishing for clients. If they like your resume they bring you in for an interview with the recruiter (not an employer) and put you on file so they have more results for their clients filters.
Frequently. Sometimes, I'll get a call a month later, and a phone interview where they ask my why I ghosted the last offer, and I struggle to remember. Shit happens. Just the way it goes.
You're incredibly brave.
HR would have my head if they thought I made a statement about an ex-employee to someone from another organization. Their standard reply to someone checking up on an ex-employee yes they worked her from XXXX to XXXX. Fulls stop. Policy is that no information on employee performance will be released for any reason.
This is the result of crappy employees suing previous employers because they told the truth about their performance and caused them to lose a future job.
Remember the job of HR is to protect the company from the employees.
Whatever happened to the good old Obama days?
Is also my right to not give a crap. We had a few people do this to us when we opened a new location. That was a wake up call for HR to start offering somewhat competitive salaries as we found out we were underpaying by 20-30% in the new locations.
I shrug at this honestly, as hostile as the US is towards the working class, I think this is just the natural end game. When you don't give a crap about your workforce, why do you think they'd care about their employers?
Or, does a term already exist for this sort of behavior: passive-aggression.
Seriously you pretentious douches, just because you start creating hipstery names for existing concepts, it doesn't mean you 'disrupted' it. It just means you've been sniffing your own assholes for too long. Get over yourselves!
Oh, and grow some huevos, too.
What country do YOU live in, Amerika? You can anything you fucking want to in America. There is NO fucking law that prohibits ANY fucking employer from telling the truth about a former employee. None. Even so-called hate speech is protected. Ever hear of the 1st Amendment? Afraid of the truth much?
-- "I'm not in a hurry; I'm in Hawaii." The Homeless Guy
I've been ghosted by a couple of companies after interviewing. The first required several attempts to contact the HR recruiter over a couple of weeks to finally get him on the line to confirm that they were not interested. By that time I had already decided I wasn't interested if that is how they treated people. The second I found out through back channels a month later. I consider it extremely disrespectful and am glad they didn't make me an offer.
Employers have been doing it to potential employees for decades. Now the boot's on the other foot.
Ah yes, had an interview with a company, review went very well. A month later I called and asked where the expense reimbursement check was. They were clueless, Well, here we are 10 YEARS after the interview and I finally got a sorry but letter from them. I won't mention them by name but they make kitchen and clothes washing/drying equipment. All I can say about my email response is that it was truly priceless.
Life is in a state of dynamic equilibrium, it both blows and sucks
I literally have had to put my phone on Do Not Disturb 24 hours a day almost Monday through Friday because of the literally insane and obscene amount of calls from recruiters coming in at all hours of the day starting at 7am and lasting until 10 at night sometimes.
This and also the fact that 99.9% of recruiters that call about Dev Ops positions have such a horrible command of the English language that it would be better for them to have a seven year old call you.
It is also funny how accusations of ignorance sometimes omit knowledge. I wonder why they would do that?
Also, it is funny how accusations of ignorance spring up even no details have been discussed. Must have got your knowledge about my knowledge from the crystal ball, or was it a talking mirror?
You're an idiot.
You don't even get a say.
What happens is, the person's lawyer sends you a letter, your type up your stupid shit about how you can do whatever you want, and then they file the lawsuit. Then your insurance company's lawyers inform you that you're not allowed to say anything, and they settle the case, and then they raise your insurance rates.
You can whine and cry all you like and feel important and Virtuous because you called people shysters, but it doesn't imply that you did any research into the realities of the situation. If you say something that causes somebody to be denied work, the burden of proof falls on you because you're not allowed to harm people financially. Them being denied work is harm. I'd say "ask your lawyer" first, but you're just a worker so you have no need to ever actually find out the truth about this. ;)
Believe it or not, I was asked to apply to the Skunk Works.
They contact me not the opposite.
At first, I was excited and responded, but then I realized I was going to indirectly work for the Viertes Reich, so I dropped it. Needless to say, I had grave ethical concerns about whatever they wanted me to work on.
They eventually asked me why I didn't follow through with the process. I politely and respectfully responded that although I recognize them as a legendary group, I have ethical concerns about working there.
Not a day goes by that I am simultaneously deeply regret that decision and I am thankful I made that decision.
Even if I never did any other work again, at least I wasn't a direct participant here.
I am currently in the job hunt, and I have been ghosted by several recruiters. I speak to them on the phone, have phone interviews with the hiring company, and even have had an in-person interview. None of the recruiters have gotten back to me even after several emails and phone messages. 99% of recruiters are completely worthless.
I wouldnâ(TM)t call those tech workers
I've done this to buy time when the job the I REALLY want won't confirm I have it or not for a few more days..... But I already have one or more offers I don't want to pass up if the preferred one doesn't come through.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Done it :-)
well meaning though they purported to be i was effectively gaslit on top of what was almost certainly an episode of burnout. they were unable to come to terms with a nother health issue i was having and weren't meeting their professional obligations. they used one incident in particular to deny me a raise increase to the point where i was definitely earning below market for my skills. i understand why they made this decision but in this legal scope it was not legal.
i shouldve left then, but i believed them when they said they thought it could still work out. i continued as best i could but between the lack of support from work and being told to 'just deal with it' w.r.t my issue i started to not feel super welcome and a little gaslit.
when i accepted an offer elsewhere there was no chance of a break between gigs unless i triggered the automatic resignation. i elected to do so. i do regret how things ended, but i had no more energy for that situation. that said, i don't think i owe anything to anyone who tries to buffalo me out of asserting my rights.
That's why I prefer SoCal to NoCal. In Northern California, everybody is fake nice to your face, but talk shit behind your back. In Southern California, if someone doesn't like you, they'll say it to your face.
They _signed_ the writeup and action plan. Their lawyer is on contingency, he will bail as soon as he sees that he's got a loser on his hands.
In the USA you have to treat people that can afford to pay lawyers differently. Those that get contingency shysters, can't do the 'beat you up with lawyers' thing.
Also not England. Truth remains a defense.
Now go read the rest of my post, you're just a moron BTW.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There's plenty of incentive for recruiters, though.
Get the resume of someone who specialises in building interfaces between ERP systems and coffee machines using QT and perl and you get a list of companies that ... do all that kind of shit.
You've now got a set of sales leads you can use to try and place other people on your books who DATKOS.
That sounds like a hard way to get a simple job done. I know a few recruiters and it's a lot simpler than that. When you get a role, you advertise for that role, then you screen the hundreds of retards that apply for a 3 shortlisted candidates to submit to the employer. That's it.
There's no convoluted James-Bond-villain type scheme in place to oppress job seekers. Recruitment is just sales. The more tin you move, the more commission you get.
One small anecdote.
I was listening to the radio. It was an ad for a job placement service, and the pitch was, "when you don't have time to recruit employees."
Don't have time? Don't have time?? WTF, that's core to running a business! If you don't have time, then make some g-d time! And if you don't make time then you are turning your back on what it takes to be successful. Good luck with that, you're going to need it.
Every decent, professional recruiting advice I've ever heard and respected says this. An owner/manager needs to spend roughly 15% of their time, on an ongoing basis, on employee recruitment and development. If you spend less than this then you are neglecting your business. And that's regardless of what you think your business "is".
"Don't have time" is simply code for one of:
1). Limited interests or skill set by the owner/manager. The implication being that they are doing the wrong thing with their life. At the very least, hire someone who can fill those roles competently, don't muddle along;
2). Someone took on too many roles or responsibilities. Maybe too much ambition, too eager, an inability to say No, there are lots of possible reasons. You're going to suck, so maybe start doing something to stop the suckage;
"Don't have time" for employee recruitment sends the message that labour is a fungible commodity, you don't care about the people you hire, and you're going to be a terrible boss for those you do hire. None of that leads to happy, productive workplaces. Either get on the path to success or get out!
I've never 'ghosted' an employer, but I have 'ghosted' plenty of unsolicited recruiters and potential employers - often for sending obviously mass dispatched offers.
If someone is looking to hire me, they can contact me directly - properly addressing me by name, and offering employment actually relevant to my career.
The most recent recruiters I've ignored were trying to get me to move to China to teach English. Considering I'm a software engineer, there was no particular appeal to such a job beyond possibly being near enough to Shenzhen to indulge my interest in electronics.
And if they can cold-call prospects they can be in there before all the others, Einstein. It's also why they ask for references in advance. It's probably more prevalent in contracting because there's more churn.
I know for a fact they do it because it's happened to me. Backfired on one occasion because the guy thought it was pretty shady and didn't like being messed around so he blacklisted them.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Especially when recruiters seem to think you will take any job they throw at you, even more so when you tell them your preferences for what type of company you want to work for and the general location in the city. Then they keep phoning you to go for interviews with the EXACT type of company you were not interested in, on the WRONG side of the city, then when you turn them down they act like they are a friend doing you a favor and you just kicked them in the teeth. I am NOT your friend, I am someone who is going to land you a very nice commission when I get placed. You are working for me, I am not jumping through hoops for you. I know entry level candidates etc. don't have much of a choice, but I do. Some of them couldn't give a crap about what you want, they are only interested in the commission. We were moving form one city to another, and my wife insisted I at least try get a job while still in the other city (I was thinking yay! holiday, first in 10 years, but alas it was not to happen). After the first couple of recruiters I simply stopped answering calls from recruiters who kept trying to place me incorrectly, winnowed it down to one and everything went through her. There is a very big shortage of skilled people in IT, worldwide, I might be getting close to the age discrimination barrier, but while I can be picky I am damn well going to be picky.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
No it's not. Doing the entire recruitment process yourself would require a LOT of effort from your own staff, probably starting with HR. Effort from your OWN staff costs you money. Time = Money, plus phone calls etc. Contract that out to a recruitment firm that only gets commission for a successful placement greatly reduces that cost. The problem there is that the recruiters tend to be non technical, have no real clue about what you are asking for in a candidate and if they are desperate tend to throw any odd thing at you with enough acronyms on their C.V. and hope that it sticks.
We used to interview and then do a technical test and then a final interview with upper cheese.
A lot of the candidates were passing the interview and failing horribly on the test (it was not a hard test, when people kept failing it they wanted to check and made us all redo the test, we all passed, even the juniors).
The test we had to pay for, so it was initially considered cheaper this way around, but after a large amount of people failing the test (after taking up an hour of at least three senior staff for the interview) it was decided it was WAY cheaper to test first, and then do the interview. Perhaps we sucked at interviewing, I don't know, it was not always me on the panel so...
We cut a LOT of the people out during CV reviews, all senior developers had to give feedback.
Job hopping, don't do it, it looks REALLY bad on your CV. It takes time to train new people, and no one wants to spend time (money) training you if you look like it's a waste of time. One or two short stints is fine, but constant job hopping is going to shoot you in the foot.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
A couple of jobs ago, I was interviewed for a position. The interview went well, I was a good fit, so I was optimistic. Not needy, just optimistic.
A month goes by and no word. Two months pass and I give up; that employer has ghosted me right? Three months go by and suddenly the employer calls me; they are making a formal offer. It was still a good match and I wound up accepting the offer, but it sure seemed strange to ghost me like that.
Well several years later and I can see why that employer ghosted me. They had all sorts of internal issues, poor management, hamstrung by bureaucracy, crippled by cost-cutting. In retrospect ghosting me was a symptom of larger workplace issues. It's why I no longer work there.
Well good luck with that, perhaps I am in the minority as a tech worker, but I don't like splashing my personal life on the interwebs so everyone can see when I took a shit. I do use social media sites, but for private things, not public things. You want to know where I worked? It's on my C.V. along with my references. If you still feel the need to dig through my personal stuff? Well then I feel a strong need not to work for your company. And yes, where I am currently working IS personal information. Would you like to tell everyone where you live? Splash your home address out on facebook et al? No, didn't think so. I spend a third of my life at work - normally more, you now know where I LIVE for 1/3 of my day. By updating linkedin I have just given away 1/3 of my location on any given workday to EVERYONE on the planet. Why would I want to do that?
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
And if they can cold-call prospects they can be in there before all the others, Einstein.
So let's see, spend time on roles I actually have available now and make money now, or spend time/effort on imaginary jobs that may or may not ever eventuate and when they do, all the candidates I was grooming are no longer available because that was last month and have no money. Only Einstein could ever figure this conundrum out...
I've never ghosted an employer. I have sometimes withdrawn from consideration, sometimes just a few days before the interview. But I've never left them completely hanging.
Well, St. Louis is a bit bigger than South Fuck, Minnesota, but maybe not as big a place as where you live. (Sorry.) But there are some big companies here.
Regardless, it has been said more than once that the IT community in St. Louis is like a small town. Word does get around. Just not by passing lists back and forth between HR departments, or by talking with Floyd the barber as he sits and whittles at the town square.
A few people who used to work at Aerospace Firm might now work together at Pharmacy Benefit Manger Firm or Electronic Medical Claim Company One, or a bunch of people who used to work at Electronic Medical Claim Company Two now work for Running Shoe Firm. People talk.
If Mr. B.O.F. Hell is being considered for a position at Agribusiness Giant, his former co-workers from his Megabrewery days might advise against it. But they might be eager to work again with A.J. Bitwrangler, who they saw do wonderful things at Gobblin' Bancorporation before it was bought by Gobblingest Bank. And if they don't happen to know Mr. Hell or Ms. Wrangler, they may talk to their former co-workers, now at Car Rental Company, who do.
(All employer names changed. I have worked at some of them, and know at least one person who has worked at each of them.)
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to learn that the same sort of thing happens in a lot of cities, big and small, where bits are wrangled, sliced, diced, reconstituted, concentrated, matched, filtered, shipped, and trans-shipped. Even in Smug Valley and The Big Smug, or wherever CoolDiscoRex lives.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
You haven't seen fake nice, until you've seen southern and midwestern fake nice. It gives you the diabetes.
Ghost them until they get a job worthy of their degree. All of them are dying in student debt unable to get real jobs because they haven't been EDUCATED for real jobs! The programmer is the champion, not the recruiters living in large crystal palaces in the nice side of town!
And they should both know better, and do better. Hell, technically, I am 2 years going on a position I was flown out to the West Coast to interview for, followed by a phone interview with one manager who was absent the day I was there, and I still have not been told that the position is not available. And this was from one of the biggies, too