Among young Gen Z people, a trend seems to be particularly popular: job ghosting. Survey data from a platform that interviewed applicants and companies shows that: 78% of all applicants intentionally ignored the employer.
What is job ghosting? In a job offer, both the employer and the applicant must be interested. If either party loses interest during the application process, ghosting occurs: the applicant promises to call back but never does.
According to survey data from a job application platform, ghosting in jobs is becoming more and more common. According to our colleagues from Xataka.com, this is a trend that is particularly popular among young people: among Gen Z.
Generation Z includes individuals born between 1997 and 2012.
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Ghosting among applicants is increasingly widespread
What data is that? The employment platform Indeed surveyed 4,500 companies and 4,500 applicants for its “Hiring Ghosting Report 2023”: 1,507 in the USA, 1,506 in the UK, and another 1,503 in Canada (via cloudfront.net). The results from the survey are surprising. Because the data shows what applicants and employers think of each other.
The Indeed platform has been conducting surveys since 2019 and sees clear trends toward “job ghosting.”
What do the data say?
- 78% of applicants report that they intentionally ignored employers in the past year.
- Of those, 59% regret this step. However, 62% of applicants believe they would ignore an employer again in the future.
- 14% of applicants get a job, sign the contract, only to quit without notice on the first working day after receiving information about poor experiences from former employees.
- 70% of surveyed applicants believe that it is right not to follow up with an employer.
- 50% of employers also believe that the behavior of “ghosting” is justified.
- However, 54% of recruiters also think that they bear some responsibility for the negative behavior of applicants, as they provide inadequate communication and transparency or put them through unnecessarily long selection processes.
“The job is too boring” is the main reason for job ghosting
Why do people suddenly quit? Many people in the survey cite the main reason for not showing up: the job is too boring or does not align with their interests. Insufficient salary or another job offer come as reasons only afterward.
Interestingly, the same questions were also posed to the companies. And the companies indicated that they assumed that people had received a better offer and then did not show up for the position they applied for.
But there is another danger on the horizon for many jobs: chatbots like ChatGPT that are increasingly replacing jobs. A former employee of a company recently explained how she lost her job to an AI and what that means for her future:
A woman loses her job thanks to ChatGPT, as the AI costs less: “I became redundant”
