DONT BE A GHOST!
In considering your costume for this Halloween, you may not be planning to be a ghost. Unsurprisingly, the ghost was not in the top ten Halloween costumes for 2022 (Witch was #1). This advice also pertains to your business practices, and particularly your efforts to secure new employment. Abel Personnel suggests you avoid the following “spooky” practices when interacting with an employer or with a staffing firm:
1) Not responding to a request for an interview prompted by your resume. If a better job opportunity emerged while your resume was being considered, just let the caller know. Don’t waste their time trying repeatedly to be in touch with you. That better opportunity may be too good to be true, and you’ll have lost this interview, too.
2) Not completing your job application. Even if you or they decide that the job is not right for you now, that application will stay in their files and may result in their interest in you in the future.
3) Blowing off a first (or second) interview. Such behavior will render you “dead” to the interested company, whose long memory will assure you are never asked in again for an interview.
4) Not responding to a job offer. Many people were involved in preparing and approving that offer, so you will have created a team of detractors that may “haunt” you for your career, as you and they move between companies in your industry.
5) Failing to show up on your first day of work. Maybe you determined that the required commute time was too long, you were better off staying in your current job, or you took another job. Your no-show will be long remembered, and possibly shared among staffing recruiters in your industry in their efforts to lessen their embarrassment by retelling your “horror story.”
6) Abandoning your job. After your employer gets over their worry that you had become too ill to be in contact or “met with foul play,” the stigma of your actions could result in their later refusal to deal with you in your new capacity or to work at all with your new company.
Such ghosting may have a more serious implication: stoking prejudices about whatever minority (race, religion, generation, etc.) that the angered potential employer may attribute to you. While you may not be responsible for their generalizing your behavior, the result is a reinforcement of stereotypes and lost opportunities for others to overcome vague prejudices.
