Ghosting in the Job Market: The Principle of Communicative Reciprocity and the Duty of Transparency

Jenny: Jenny is an early career scholar and is searching for her next academic job in her field, as her current contract ends soon. She sees an interesting job advertisement for an assistant professorship with tenure-track at a reputable university and decides to apply. After doing some research on the department, their faculty and their curriculum, Jenny prepares her cover letter, CV, research proposal, teaching dossier, diversity statement, and recommendation letters. Jenny is ecstatic when she receives the news that she is invited for an on-campus interview. The search committee asks Jenny to prepare an hour-long presentation showcasing her research and to give an hour-long test lecture on a topic outside her direct expertise. Jenny spends more than two weeks preparing for her on-campus visit, which involves multiple interviews. Everything seems to have gone well, and Jenny has a good feeling about how it went. Weeks pass by, and Jenny hears nothing. From a colleague, she hears someone else has been offered and accepted the position. The recruitment process has ended, but Jenny never hears back from the search committee about her application. The search committee has ghosted Jenny. Jenny now feels humiliated, disvalued, and disillusioned about the profession in general. This is an instance of ghosting. Ghosting is the phenomenon where one party abruptly ceases communication with another party for a long period of time without explanation or prior warning. Ghosting can be done purposefully to end a relationship, but this is not necessary. The duration of the stop of communication must be unreasonable, though it needn't always be indefinite. Perhaps the most publicly discussed variant of ghosting involves (potential) romantic relationships. For example, your match on a dating app may suddenly cease communicating with you after a 2-month-long intense exchange of messages. Within academia or other workplace environments, ghosting can occur between supervisor and supervisee, between student and teacher, between employees and their boss, between colleagues, and so on. Here, I am concerned with ghosting in the job market. Ghosting in the hiring process can happen at different stages. Jenny's case is rather extreme, as Jenny is ghosted at the very end of the hiring process after considerable effort on her part. In other cases, the ghosting of the job seeker occurs at an earlier stage of the hiring process where the job seeker has put in less time and effort. The roles may also be reversed, where the applicant ghosts the prospective employer after receiving an invitation for an interview or a job offer. Ghosting is a common phenomenon in the job market. In 2021, a survey by Indeed reports that 77% of job seekers in the US have been ghosted by a prospective employer since the onset of the pandemic, where 10% of those job seekers report having been ghosted even after a verbal job offer was made (Threlkeld 2021). A survey by Greenhouse (2022) reports that 75% of job seekers worldwide have been ghosted by an employer after an interview. A recent survey by the Thriving Center of Psych (2023) indicates that 42% of the respondents had been ghosted by a prospective employer, 35% of whom were ghosted during the interview process. According to the same survey, 1 in 6 of the respondents report having ghosted a prospective employer during the interview process. 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