Have you ever ghosted/blown-off employer?
The article today talks about how employees are turning tables on employers and sometimes ghosting them -- just not getting back to them, or actually blowing off interviews or not showing up for the first day of work (that just sounds weird).
Have you ever done this? Also, in a related question, if you ever turn down an employer one year, will a rejected suitor ever consider hiring you if you apply there again down the road?
When I was younger I didn't get back to employers when the 1st interview went horrible (interviewer/line manager messed up or had no clue). There was a time I had loads of interviews and simply had to cut my costs/time at some point. In most cases the horrible interviews were ironically the ones where they asked me in for the 2nd round.
Nowadays I do get back to the HR person/recruiter with a thank you but reject further interviews (if there is no match). It does get more difficult to find “great" roles if you get more senior (culture, fit, responsibilities, .. and at times employers will simply not tell you the truth in interviews about the state of their department).
Got it. But has ghosting an interviewer ever come back to haunt you (damn, that'd make a good headline)?
Yeah — after I got an internship I never got around to responding to 1st round invites that were extended to by some other companies: CapitalOne, L’Oreal, The Home Depot, KraftHeinz, Anheuser Busch and Newell Brands I think. Probably wasn’t my best choice but if they hadn’t selected me for an interview they probably would have ghosted me
No, because I fucking hated it when companies did that to me. Even if it doesn't change anything, it's good to take the high road.
Absolutely. Worth the 60 seconds it takes to write the email.
I think its somewhat ok for employers to do this to candidates. They are constantly going through applications and sifting through resumes. If they have a brief phone screen and think you're flawed for the job, why do they have to write a long note about why it didn't work out for you?
Depending on how far the candidate comes in the process determines if a note should be written by the employer. If you're in the final interviews for a major/prestigious position that you flew there 3 times on site to meet the team and CEO and other executives, yeah you better get a damn note if they reject you. Even if it doesn't display why you were not a good fit, it should at least have a cordial FYI.
For candidates to not show up to the offer they have agreed upon is unacceptable. This is completely unprofessional and a 100% lack of communication. This is not what the spirit of Ghosting is about. Ghosting is more along the lines of being ... a ghost. Barely seen at first, no impact when leaving, but a nice thought possibly.
To not show up for work on the first day without any communication may have an impact on the business of that company depending on its size. Human resource management is serious in times of growth and if you do not have the right amount of people and the right skills to accomplish your strategy, a serious loss of revenues and profits may occur.
Because the company was planning on this person to show up ... because they "said" they were going to show up. Always do what you say you are going to do. Its not like the employer said they would give an offer and yanked it, because that would be the rescinding of an offer rather than just taking the candidate out of candidacy without a note.
Typically, when I was growing up, 'ghosting' an employer by not showing up, or leaving and not saying anything was just called 'quitting' or 'quitting without notice'. The latter is what assholes typically do and a millennial to accept a job and not show up would probably make me very irate.
Because think about what a company has to do the first day for new candidates/new hires. They are like babies. They need to be held, they need to be trained. You have to train them and do all of your own work/responsibilities/deadlines on top of that, so you map out some sort of schedule to train them, have them on tasks, do your work when they are on tasks and so-on. I think for a lot of positions on Wall Street, it takes 6 months to a 1 year to really get the position and be a 'producing' member of the team. The new hire said they understood day 1, day 10, and day 30, but they really didn't get the full picture. After all the stubbed toes and small little teaching sessions by their peers and associates and managers, they go from crawling to walking, in their discipline.
Communication is key. The lack of it is just simply unprofessional at times. In some instances like the ones stated above, it is highly unprofessional.
I smell an HR pigeon
I wasn't aware one needs to be in HR to appropriately manage human resources.
In fact, most HR functions do not "manage" human resources. They assist in the hiring/firing/workplace issues processes and provide support as needed, rather than making the strategic decisions regarding human asset allocation.
M&A uses Human Capital Management to fulfill strategic needs. It has to. If your company needs to fulfill a strategic need, it can just buy everyone. Look at IBM when they bought PwC consulting for $3.5 billion and its 30,000 employees.
"This union creates a new category in the consulting field. We've combined two organizations with complementary skills and cultures, and which share a vision of fusing business insight and technology in a way that can significantly benefit a client's bottom line," said Ginni Rometty, General Manager, IBM Business Consulting Services. "Together, we can offer the world's most complete range of consulting services. Combine that with the full range of IBM services, infrastructure, technology and financing resources, and you have the integrated business technology solutions that many of our clients are now demanding."
https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/491.wss
I have never, nor would I ever.
However - I have a good friend who was offered a job out of college at one of the whitest-shoe law firms firms in the world as a paralegal, which he accepted as a fallback in case his bigger plans fell through. Turns out his other plans did not fall through.
One summer morning, he awoke to his companion from the night before saying "your phone is ringing" - bleary-eyed, he picked up and said "hello?"
"Hi x, it's y, the paralegal coordinator [like an IB staffer] from [firm that people kill to get into]. We didn't see you at orientation this morning - is everything okay?"
click
Gathers composure, calls coordinator back
"Hello?"
"...I'm so sorry but I won't be taking the job".
Ridiculous.
You'd think that -- like my dentist does -- someone in HR would send out an email a day or two before the first day: "This is just a reminder that orientation will be Monday..."
I don't know about that. You get an offer letter stating the terms of your employment, and the day you ought to show up, and that's that. These people are paying you to work on billion dollar deals for blue-chip clients - a certain kind of hand-holding is to be expected at the beginning of that type of assignment, but they generally expect you to have your shit together enough to make it to orientation.
I forgot about an interview one time and over the years was never able to secure another interview with that company--I assumed I was blackballed in the HR system.
Shit, I had a similar experience after that one interview I kept rescheduling but they changed their minds with an internal candidate anyway. Does HR really blackmail people like that? I mean I would understand if you like decided to rescind an offer but sometimes they just get way too emotional about the small stuff. It really urkes me..
My rule is that you shouldn't ghost someone that you've met in person, whether it be professional or personal relationships. If they've taken the time to meet you it's just the right thing to do.
Made the mistake of doing this for my first job out of school. I basically did the full internship and accepted the offer for the following year and 4 months later. I was expecting to join, but over the course of that year i decided it wasn't the route I wanted to go and totally ghosted them. Got a call day 1 of work from one of my intern buddies asking if I'm going to make it in the office and I flat out said that I told HR that I wasn't going to work there (total lie).
Extremely immature of me to do so, but it worked out well since I got a job in a field that I actually enjoy. I would absolutely not do that again and regret burning that bridge. Life is weird, man.
Out of curiosity, why do you think you ghosted them? Was it fear of letting them down (similar to that of breaking up with a significant other)?
Exactly right in the sense that it was like a break up and I didn't know how to do it. Ghosting was an easy way out and at the time I had no cajones to go and communicate my direction.
Minus sint hic provident. Facilis nobis eum hic cupiditate. Est mollitia non enim eveniet. Necessitatibus corrupti veritatis quos ab.
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