7 ms·
When did the job market get so rude?
- nlawalker 10mo agoGift link: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025/12/job-ghosting-manners/685206/?gift=Ex_YT3j3w4bpWvzqHtkwO8B3OVVdCbkTjbuZhLqjnV8&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025/12/job-ghosting-man...
- lovich 10mo agoThank you
- billy99k 10mo ago[flagged]
- stalfosknight 10mo agoSo you don't ghost anyone you have no intention of hiring?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10mo agoThat's something you could brag about in a job posting. "We will always send you a rejection email if you get to the first phone screen"
- ok_dad 10mo agoIf they ghosted you they already blacklisted you. Your comment has the energy of, “you can’t quit, you’re fired!”
- billy99k 10mo agoNot really. They can easily try to apply for the same job (or a different position) Months later.
- hinkley 10mo agoAdvertisements and recruiter emails are pretty much the only thing in my inbox for the last, I'd say almost ten years. You'll forgive me if I miss one. Recruiting is turning into the business that still needs a paper check from you. Nobody else uses those grandpa.
- mikestew 10mo agoI'm in a hiring position, and I would blacklist any candidate that wasted my time like this. If you offered a position and, as described in TFA, they didn't show up then it seems obvious to me that this hypothetical candidate is not terribly bothered by your threats.
- AnimalMuppet 10mo agoTrue, but lives are long. It may come back to bite them next time they want a job, or the time after, or the time after that.
- cleaning 10mo agoPlenty of fish in the sea. The odds are low.
- billy99k 10mo agoWhen they apply a few years later, they will be. Burning bridges never works out in the long run.
- mikestew 10mo agoAnd how many times have you had that happen in your career? I ask because after 35 years in the industry, I've never seen it happen no matter which side of the hiring desk I've been on. And to be specific, by "it" I mean someone burns a bridge and then applies to the same company in the future.
- Nextgrid 10mo agoThe whole “blaming Gen Z” thing is getting old. You get what you pay for. You’re likely offering “market rate” roles. You’re getting “market rate” candidates and behavior. It’s like walking into a Fiat dealership and being mad you’re not getting Ferrari treatment. If you want better you are welcome to pay more and then maybe people will have less incentives to ghost you. The Ferrari treatment still exists, you just need to pay for it. The job market didn't get rude, it just regressed to the mean. "Rude" is the default; when one side shows respect it's likely for the other side to reciprocate. When one side doesn't, there is little reason for the other side to put in the effort.
- GarnetFloride 10mo agoGotta love how "market rate" is about 60% of what you need to qualify to rent an apartment these days.
- Nextgrid 10mo agoAnd of course the roles are hybrid specifically to prevent you from living in a location where you can actually afford rent.
- billy99k 10mo agoThe sad part is that over-regulation and taxes have put us in this situation, but the same politicans keep getting voted in, time and time again.
- 31337Logic 10mo agoIs rude really the default? I thought respect was, especially during the initial stages of a professional exchange like a god damned job interview.
- Nextgrid 10mo agoRude is the default if you optimise everything down to perfection to prioritise profit, which tech is really good at doing. After all, that extra second you’d spend being courteous could be used to make the line go up and create shareholder value instead.
- urda 10mo ago> I'm in a hiring position, and I would blacklist any candidate that wasted my time like this. > It's childish and just adds to the current state of Gen Z making it impossible to hire them (and then complaining they can never find a job). This is an unacceptable interviewing posture. As a Bar Raiser (or whatever your equivalent is) with authority over interview standards and interviewer eligibility, I’d pull you from loops for retraining. Repeat it, and you’re removed from interviewing.
- lovich 10mo agoHa. Spoken like a faang employee Training for interviewing? Nah let’s throw you in there and vibe it out
- billy99k 10mo agoI seriously doubt you have any say in hiring anywhere. Nobody actually hiring would respond like this. ..and retraining? Lol Candidates that are a no show after many interviews should definitely be blacklisted for a set amount of time. The USPS, for instance, will blacklist you for 5 years for this behavior.
- zardo 10mo agoI'm the context of hiring, "blacklisting" is collusion between employers sharing a "do not hire" list. Is that what you the mean?
- fallingfrog 10mo agoOne would imagine such a practice to be illegal. But yeah this was my question as well.
- AnimalMuppet 10mo agoI presume an internal (not shared with others) "do not hire" list. An internal one is perfectly legal.
- billy99k 10mo agoMost companies aren't going to help their competitor. Bad actions from candidates have consequences. It's telling when you jump to 'ilegal behavor' yet think acting like a total unprofessional asshole by wasting everyone's time with a company doing the right thing, is totally acceptable. I would never ghost a company or a candidate and expect other people to have the same courtesy. It also shows that bias is perfectly acceptable against groups you dislike (companies you think are all acting the same, so they all somehow deserve the same shitty behavior) yet unacceptable to a group you support.
- Ethee 10mo agoI can understand why you're saying this and my response here will be more of a general reply to your direct reply's as it seems like a lot of them are missing the key element of WHY you can act this way in the current market. The big 'L' word, Leverage. In the current market you have all the leverage in the world as the employer to find a perfect fit employee due to the overall supply of workers and declining job market. When the market swings back the other way eventually however, the shoe will be on the other foot so to speak, and you wont have such privilege. It's amazing how short our memories are for all the companies 10 years ago bending over backwards to give those employees anything and everything they wanted. A lot of my statement here is very generalizing but at the end of the day market forces really do dictate a lot of this. I keep seeing article after article from hiring managers about how they're FLOODED with applications. You can't be 'polite' to all those people, as most people don't have the attention span for all that. There are definitely 2 sides to this coin it just seems that from the side of the people wanting to be hired they just have no empathy for those doing the hiring.
- staticautomatic 10mo agoI have multiple open roles right now and am finding that I can’t afford to hire the top applicants. I honestly did not expect to have so little leverage.
- Ethee 10mo agoAnd that should be expected. Leverage in this situation doesn't mean you get the cream of the crop for nothing. In this sense it means that you get applications that fit your role. When the market was flipped you were hard pressed to find people that actually matched at least half of your role requirements. Now even your statement gives away how much that has changed that you're only looking at the 'top applicants'. Now, you have so many people that fit you're struggling because you want the perfect ones.
- staticautomatic 10mo agoI did expect there to be more strong applicants, but that hardly means I expect "perfect" applicants or "cream of the crop for nothing." With one role, for example, there are basically unqualified people, and qualified people who won't accept the top of our range (~$120K).
- ericmcer 10mo agoWhat does that mean, I have been on hiring committees before but don't even know what it would mean to "blacklist" someone. If you just mean not hire them at your company in the future I think the candidate will be fine with that. If you mean across many orgs then... Do recruiters and HR people have some secret club I don't know about?
- carlmr 10mo agoI've also been hiring before and if my colleague told me he had a list of people he didn't want hired because they didn't write him back, I'd laugh my ass off and continue on with my day.
- SuperNinKenDo 10mo agoThere's no equivalence, as outlined in the article. Discourtesy in a wildly unbalanced power relationship is significantly different depending on which side is displaying it. Further, wasting your time that you are being remunerated for is vastly different to wasting somebody's time when you are not remunerating them, but merely dangling the carrot of possible future remuneration. Your use of the word "abuser" is patently absurd.
- fallingfrog 10mo ago"Blacklist" in what sense? Is there a master list somewhere of people not to hire?
- FireBeyond 10mo agoHah, you should see some of the bullshit your compatriots are trying to pull. Start-up, competing with Duolingo, wanted me to "sign up for our service, go through the introductory levels, come up with five specific areas we could improve and how you'd go about them and in what order", as part of your application. So, "Pump our metrics, give us specific business advice and then we'll see if maybe we'd grant you the courtesy of a conversation". The only way that could be more toxic is if you had to supply a credit card to sign up...
- estimator7292 10mo agoJust always remember which side started this battle. How much does it cost a business to send even a perfunctory automatic rejection? Approximately zero. How can you justify not doing that? Whereas to a candidate sending their 400th application, sending a "thanks for rejecting me" represents a real and significant opportunity cost.
- nlawalker 10mo ago>Whereas to a candidate sending their 400th application, sending a "thanks for rejecting me" represents a real and significant opportunity cost. That's not ghosting on the candidate's part, though; candidate ghosting is not responding to an acceptance (whether its for an interview or for the job itself) and simply no-showing. FTA: Meanwhile, some applicants who make it through the onerous hiring process and accept jobs never show up for their first day. One California recruiter told me that some of the candidates who ditched had even signed offers for positions that paid six-figure salaries.
- lovich 10mo agoIf I ghosted an employer it’s because I got a better opportunity already. About half of my jobs would refuse to rehire anyone who quit out of spite, whether or not they gave notice. No employee gives a shit about those threats anymore because, as this article points out, employers are already nearing the bottom of treating employees like disposable pieces of trash already. Threats don’t have any power when you’ve already done them
- elliotto 10mo agoThe author postulates a few ideas about manners and courtesy, and starts to recognise that business transactions (employment relationships) don't actually care about these things, even though the human beings who populate these systems hold these values. The nash equilibrium in a buyer-seller market like the employer-employee relationship is for both sides to defect. Humans don't behave optimally, because they aren't pure rational creatures, they are imbued with some socialisation and cultural memory. So humans try to treat with these organisations as though they are other humans, and will respond to good-will with good-will, but this is not rewarded, and ultimately they change their behaviour in response to a poor environment. Capital does behave short term optimally. Optimal economic behaviour is to betray the person opposite you, and violate and exploit the commons until the commons collapses entirely, like what we see today. At some points in the past, capital has been subdued by a human operator who will apply courtesy and social norms to prevent these ugly actions, but capital has now become too intelligent to bother with this, and the result is a sequence of increasingly insane and inhuman processes, such as what we see here with the job market.
- recroad 10mo agoI had a job interview and didn’t do well on the technical part (got nervous). Never heard back, even after a follow up. I was really surprised because they seemed really nice overall. I wasn’t even expecting an offer, just wanted to end things on a friendly note. I thought it was unnecessarily rude.
- caminante 10mo agoLooking for closure? If you haven't gotten your answer, then you've gotten your answer. Fill in the likely blanks: they are busy with their day jobs and as you admit, they're assuming you already know the outcome because you bombed the technical assessment. On to the next one.
- integralid 10mo agoSo, as GP said, unnecessarily rude. This tiny gesture wouldn't cost them much, just like basic manners don't cost much.
- caminante 10mo agoSee my response to your sibling, below. There's no contract that someone owes you a followup email. Many times, it's better to end things instead of fakeness or platitudes. Also, "basic manners" is ambiguous because there's no universal definition. Regardless, there is a cost. Saying otherwise is dishonest.
- recroad 10mo agoI get that no answer is an answer, but OPs post was about people being rude and this was an example of that. "busy with their day jobs" is not a good excuse for not sending an email that takes 30 seconds.
- caminante 10mo agoI reject your implied definition of "rude." To prove this, think about it: there are so many MORE far worse outcomes that could've happened that would universally qualify as "rude." This isn't that.