Whaddaya hear, whaddya say? Welcome to episode 19 of the Career Consigliere podcast: your no frills, no BS forum for navigating the corporate job scene. Jimmy with you, once again for what we hope to be a highly informative and engaging half an hour, or so! Today, we’re going to dispel an age old myth about one of the most annoying and frustrating aspects of the job search quest: why companies ghost you during the interview process. We’ll cover how you can identify that you’re being ghosted, the primary reasons why it happens, and what to do when it inevitably happens to you. Prepare for an interesting one today, podcast land: letssssss get it!
The term “ghosting” is a relatively new term. It’s exploded in popularity over the last few years, and you hear it mainly in the dating context (the list of parallels between job searching and dating just continues to grow….). But just to make sure everyone’s on the same page: “ghosting” is when a person you’re communicating with suddenly stops communicating with you, and you never hear from them again. There’s often no warning: things are trucking along just fine, and all of a sudden poof….they’re gone, just as “ghosts”, according to folklore, are known for suddenly vanishing into thin air. Unfortunately this act of “ghosting” has become all too common in our world today. Technology, if you want my opinion, has really cheapened human communication. We hide behind screens, and sometimes we forget that there’s a living, breathing human on the other end. When you don’t know what else to say, the average person today just stops communicating, and there’s often no consequence for it. And if the other person reacts to it? Just block their number! Unfortunately stuff like this has made its way into the corporate world too. Call it unprofessional, call it unfair, call it what you will, and I agree with you, but unfortunately it happens ALL the time: just the way the world is now.
How do you know you’re soon to be ghosted during the interview process? Usually it starts with vague communication. Interviewers throughout your rounds will use phrasing like “well, we’re still meeting with other candidates, we’re in no rush to fill this position, we’re looking for the right fit”, all kinds of vague, noncommittal expressions like that. And as you’re talking with the various people that interview you, you can usually tell if they’re not serious about you. They’ll give you blank stares, they’ll be very mechanical and robotic throughout the conversation, and your interaction with them won’t feel like much of a conversation: it’ll feel like you’re talking to a wall. A successful interview feels like a conversation, not an interrogation. And if you feel like the interaction is a one-way street, usually it’s not heading in the right direction.
T tell-tale sign is that it takes TA, or whoever you’re dealing with, WAY too long to get back to you and coordinate. As we’ve said in the past, most communication throughout the interview process is done via email. If a company is serious about you, they’ll usually get back to you relatively quickly. But when it starts taking multiple days, or possibly even weeks between responses, you can safely assume that you’re not their first priority and you’ll likely wind up a corporate casualty. Not trying to sound negative here, but it’s just the reality of job hunting in 2024. A lot of people put interviews on a pedestal and treat them like they’re talking to God himself, but at the end of the day the interview process is nothing more than an interaction between people. Think about when you talk to good friends: the communication has a logical flow, the conversation makes sense, and there’s nothing confusing or cryptic about it. If a company is serious about you, the interview will feel like you’re talking to your friends: it’ll flow nicely, you’ll have a good back-and-forth, and you’ll already feel like you’re part of the crew. And if not, you’re probably not the one they want. A lot of people hang onto every word the interviewers say, and they mask their feelings of rejection by convincing themselves that the company is just trying to play “hard to get” with them. Not the case, folks: it really IS that simple: when the communication starts breaking down, keep looking elsewhere.
So WHY do companies ghost candidates during the process? I’ve broken it down into 5 main reasons, based on my own personal experiences during the process, and stories from clients and people I’ve dealt with directly. Reason #1, the most obvious one: there’s someone else. Just like in dating, people: if he or she isn’t giving you their full attention, usually someone else is getting it. LOTS of people apply for open job postings: usually at least a few hundred. And that’s just people from the outside: don’t forget about people WITHIN the organization that also have their eye on the job. You have a TON of competition from all angles, and in many cases, you’re not their first choice. You can definitely influence this based on how you perform during the interviews, but there are times when you’re interviewing your ass off for a job that the company already has someone in mind for.
This here is a very important point: most private sector corporations are under no legal requirement to post a job: it can be a different story in government and public service, but for the prototypical corporate gig that we talk about on this show, most of those positions have no legal posting requirement. Many of the postings we see come from COMPANY policy requiring them to post: sometimes internally, sometimes externally, sometimes both. And unfortunately, you have no way of telling whether they’re actually going to consider any of the applications they get. In a lot of cases, a company will interview outsiders just to have them “on reserve” in case their #1 choice backs out on them, or it otherwise somehow falls through. Companies might also be interviewing you just so that they can prove they interviewed multiple candidates if their decision or process is ever challenged. So for all you know, your interview could be a COMPLETE waste of time: you can give an A+ performance, and STILL not stand a snowball’s chance in hell of getting an offer. You’ll never be told this outright, but you can usually figure it out based on how you’re treated during the process. Remember, if it’s not making sense and you’re not gaining any traction during the process, usually you’re not the one they want.
Quick story on that for you: I interviewed one time for a big telecommunications company: big service area spanning multiple states, lots of different service packages offered, pretty significant operation. I was contacted for an interview by TA – standard practice for an organization like that. But my first interview appointment was with the hiring manager: VERY unusual. Typically TA does a phone screening first in an organization of that size, but not this time: it was a 30-minute virtual meeting directly with the hiring manager. I found this a bit peculiar, and it became very obvious what was happening once the meeting actually happened. The call was scheduled for 1:30-2pm, a suspiciously short time. The hiring manager joined the call almost 10 minutes late, which was the first red flag.
Then, once she finally joined, all she did was ask me these lofty, esoteric questions like “what do you look for in a leader? What challenges you? What is your ideal job?”. Nothing about my background, nothing about my salary expectations, none of the nuts-and-bolts stuff typical in a first-round interview. So right away, I knew there was no way I was being seriously considered for this role. A hiring manager doesn’t usually get involved unless it’s a candidate legitimate candidate, so the fact that they skipped the TA screening and set me up directly with the hiring manager for a total BS interview like this tells me that they interviewed me simply to check some kind of a box: don’t know what that box is, and I’ll never know, but something like this is very typical of a company who has someone else in mind for a role and just wants to be able to say that they “interviewed other qualified candidates”.
Reason #2: your performance during the interview. You guys know me, you know I’m your advocate and I’m 100% on the candidate’s side. But sometimes candidates just don’t do a good job. Employers will give you some leeway: they’ll expect you to be a bit nervous and to do standard nervous stuff like talking too much, tripping over words here and there, regular things that show you’re human. But many times candidates fail to answer questions: they give bad, or irrelevant examples. Sometimes they’re caught in a lie: they can’t defend the claims they made on their resume, and this throws up very valid red flags on the company’s end. Sometimes, candidates look great on paper, they have every credential and qualification in the world, but they’re terrible communicators. If you struggle with communication, it’s very hard to hide this during the interview process. Most corporate jobs require a high degree of collaboration and teamwork, and if you’re giving off signs that you’re a bad communicator, expect to see an empty inbox after the interview is over.
Lots of candidates also tend to act arrogant and abrasive during interviews. It’s not always meant in a malicious way: many times it comes from a desire to prove to the company that their confident and worthy. But if you try too hard at this, you’ll come off like an overbearing jackass, which is NEVER a good impression to make on a stranger. A lot of the interview process is aimed at assessing “cultural fit”, which really has nothing to do with your experience and qualifications. Your resume lists all your achievements: the company has this on file, and they know where you’ve been and what you’ve done. They’ll rehash some of it with you during the interview, but the ultimate purpose of these conversations is to see how well you’d fit with the team you’d be working with. Be it your attitude, your communication habits, your way of presenting yourself, whatever the case, if you don’t strike them as the kind of person they’d like to work with, you probably won’t hear from them again.
Reason # 3: Disagreement amongst the parties involved. As we’ve covered, once you make it deep into the interview process, you’ll be meeting with multiple people, who are usually all part of the same collective function within the company. Some of them might like you, and some of them might not. And depending on who it is that votes nay, that person can tip the scales if they have enough influence. As we’ve said many times in the past, the hiring manager is usually the hardest one to win over. And that is still absolutely true: once you have their blessing, the interviews themselves usually get easier the further in the process you go. But as you advance through the process, you’ll also be meeting with people higher and higher up the ladder, who have more influence in the organization. And if one of them doesn’t like you, for whatever reason, they can get in the hiring manager’s ear and encourage them to pursue other candidates. When you have multiple people involved in any endeavor, you’re always going to have differing opinions. Unfortunately, there will ALWAYS be personal bias too. Good companies have safeguards in place to control for bias in the interview process. But even the most robust interview processes can’t overcome the fact that people are people, and they will like (and dislike) certain things about another person they meet. The interview process will never be completely free of this: unfortunately, the one rogue opinion of a very influential person can be enough on its own to derail someone’s candidacy: I’ve seen it happen, and it could very well be the reason that you as the applicant have been left in the dark.
Reason 4: They’re not all that serious about the role to begin with. Lots of times, a job will get posted, and a company will start interviewing people, but there’s no clear direction of action plan. In some cases, there’s no defined timeline, the exact scope of the role may still be under discussion, and, this one is ALL too common, the position might not even be approved yet. Yes, many of the job postings you see out there on the job boards and company websites don’t “truly” even exist because they haven’t been approved yet. Companies often like to jump the gun and have people in the pipelines, even though the position hasn’t been fully authorized yet. And even if it has, funding for the role can be pulled at any time, and anybody with enough clout can put the kibosh on it basically whenever they feel like it. There are a LOT of politics at play when it comes to hiring: a job posting may start with the best of intentions, but things can change on a DIME in corporatopia.
Remember, a company posts a job because it fits the agenda of a specific department within the organization. Many times, especially in big companies, the different arms and legs of the organization do a less-than-perfect job of communicating with one another. I’ve seen jobs get posted when there were existing employees elsewhere in the organization doing essentially the exact same thing, but the communication got lost in the matrix. In other cases, the job posting is really just a “wish list”. Companies will very frequently post a job hoping that the “perfect” person comes along, and will waste applicants’ time by interviewing people that will never measure up to the unrealistic expectations they have. In cases like this, the jobs sometimes never get filled at all: the whole idea of this position was really just a “nice to have”, but never actually comes to fruition. These things happen all the time: just because it’s a big sexy household name, the job posting is coming from a person, and you’d be AMAZED at how ass-backwards some of what goes on behind the scenes can really be. Sometimes you get ghosted simply because the organization just doesn’t have their act together.
And finally, reason #5: the company just….plain….sucks. A well-run, professional organization will be deliberate about their hiring practices. They’ll only post positions when they’re serious about recruiting talent, and have already cleared away all the hurdles and red tape. When they’re interviewing you, they’ll keep you in the loop, and will tell you, for better or worse, whether or not they plan to keep moving forward with you. Even if you don’t get the job, you’ll still be left with a positive impression of the organization, and who knows, maybe things will work out for another role somewhere down the road. I interviewed for a company once and the hiring manager actually called me just to tell me that I didn’t get the job, but that I was the runner up, that I was absolutely qualified and probably would have worked out just fine. Still disappointing, but I had a TON of respect for how he handled this, real class act, and I always kept that company in the back of my mind whenever I was playing the field on the job market.
But unfortunately, this almost never happens. Many companies, to put it bluntly, have their heads up their asses. Many of them have no idea what they’re looking for in a candidate, if they’re even looking for anything at all. As we’ve covered in the past, they’ll sometimes use interviews as a way of gaining free information and outside perspectives on the industry or the competition, for their own benefit. But even if they’re not up to anything unethical, a lot of companies just lack professionalism. The culture might be toxic, employees might be stressed or burnt out, performance expectations might be unrealistic, whatever the case. And unfortunately, these are exactly the kinds of companies that are capital offenders of ghosting candidates. Ghosting, regardless of the reason why it happens, is a HUGE red flag. If it happens, in most cases, you’re not missing a damn thing. And NOT receiving an offer from that kind of a company is probably the best thing that never happened to you. Do you want to work for a place that’s giving off signs of bad communication? That’s showing symptoms of an unprofessional, hostile work environment? Or one that’s willing to waste strangers’ valuable time all in the name of fitting their own agenda? You see what I’m getting at: your career, and your life, are WAY too short to be wasted by working for a less-than-reputable company.
So if you suspect you’re being ghosted by a company you’ve been talking to, what’s the best way to handle it? Let’s answer that with today’s……consigliere call to action. Not really a whole lot to say here, guys. If you notice the communication going quiet, you should be very concerned. But if you REALLY want the job, and if you REALLY believe in that particular organization for whatever reason, then take the same advice I’ve given you in the past: follow-up once. I won’t go into detail here, you can find my recommended process for interview follow-up in episode 14. But make this your one and only follow-up. If that doesn’t light the fire under the hiring team, then, as much as I hate to tell you, it’s probably not going to happen.
Also, don’t get hung up on this one job, or even this one organization. A lot of people out there have visions of working for these big sexy companies: I won’t name names, but you know the ones I’m talking about. Some of them seem like pretty awesome places to work: ping pong tables, gourmet chefs in the cafeterias, segways for you to ride around campus, not bad perks. A lot of them also have fantastic employee development programs in place, tons of exciting and innovative projects for you work on, a lot of TREMENDOUS reasons why you’d want to work for that particular company. But guys: if YOU want to work there that bad, so do 58,469 other people. And if you get all hung up on this one organization, your job search probably isn’t going to get you very far.
My advice? Cast a wide net: apply for everything you’re interested in, that you’re also reasonably qualified for. Even if a certain job seems like it’s a bit above your level, don’t be intimidated. Remember what we said earlier? In many cases, the job posting is just a wish list. And unless this company will stop at nothing to hire their “perfect” person, there’s a halfway decent chance they’d be willing to loosen the reigns a bit and talk to someone like YOU. You’d be surprised: even early in my career, I’d sometimes fire off applications for jobs that wanted 7-10 years of experience, and I actually got some interviews with them. I promise, the job application police aren’t going to show up at your house for applying for a position that’s over your head: the worst case outcome? You don’t hear anything. Wayne Gretzky is known for this famous quote, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”. So take your shot – if you give it your absolute best, who knows, maybe it actually goes in.
Sadly folks, that’s all the time we have for today. But have no fears, and shed no tears, because I’ll be back with a new episode every week. As they say in the industry: no listeners, no show, so do me a favor, and stay loyal! If you find value in my content, please leave me a nice review, tell all your friends, and don’t forget to like, subscribe, and follow on whatever platform you use to get your podcasts. Beyond the confines of your headphones, speakers, TV screen, or any other crazy contraption with the ability to stream audio, I also provide one-on-one career assistance, so visit my website at career-consigliere.net to learn more about me, book me for one-on-one coaching, join my email list, or explore some of the other career services I offer. And to all of you out there in podcast land, remember this: Who’s the boss in your career? You, nobody else.
