Towards the end of 2015 the buzz term “ghosting” was used mostly in regard to romantic relationships and the ending of these through the ceasing of all contact abruptly rather than through communication and mutual decision. However it’s now a term being coined more and more by the corporate world as people, quite simply, stop turning up for work instead of handing in their notice.
CV Library Research
CV Library, a well known leader in the recruitment space did some research of its own to ascertain whether was they were hearing was really happening. Short answer? It was.
Millions Ghost Their Employers
Of the 3,000 workers surveyed 8.9%, or 3,000 admitted to having ghosted an employer in the past. The most popular reasons for taking such drastic action to leave a place of work were as follows:
Management Mistreatment: This was cited as the top reason for leaving a job.
Lack of Flexibility: This and unrealistic workloads also scored highly in the research as reasons for ghosting an employer.
Ghosting and Recruitment
Perhaps more worrying to come out of the results was that far higher numbers of recruiters (52.8%) had ghosted a candidate, not responding to their contact at all.
What We Think
We can imagine current talent shortages are only exacerbated by issues such as this, and with stress levels in the workplace high and on the increase, we can perhaps see why people reach their limit and feel unable return to a place of work that’s causing them intense struggle.
However, for the employer – managing workloads, staffing, recruitment and well-being effectively will be crucial in stopping this trend growing more than it is already.
And as for recruiters, we’ve seen posts about candidates who have put their all into an application only to never hear back about it again. Our back-end candidate tracking system enables a clear view of which candidates recruiters are in touch with so they can keep in contact, and in our mind, there’s little to no excuse for ghosting a candidate in today’s market.
Castle Hill House