SINGAPORE: A local reader who had been treated discourteously and unprofessionally by a company he had applied to wanted to seek a consensus on basic etiquette in the job market– or lack thereof.
U/CeeZack explained in an Oct 17 post on r/askSingapore that they had applied for a graduate program from a local firm.
He received a call from the company’s HR about a full-time position. He and the member of the firm’s talent acquisition team agreed to speak on the phone the following day.
However, he never received a call, and when he followed up by sending a message after an hour to ask whether the call would still push through, the company ghosted him, not bothering to send even one reply.
At the time that the call had been scheduled, he instead received an email saying his application had been rejected.
“This made me believe that I was automatically disqualified for consideration for the full-time role when I didn’t make the cut for the grad program,” he wrote.
He went on to ask if ghosting is a common practice nowadays and whether companies no longer practice basic courtesy and etiquette in today’s hiring market.
He received a number of comments on his post, with one Reddit user reminding him that an interview is a two-way street, and that the company’s behavior spoke a lot about it.
U/CeeZack thanked him for pointing this out and acknowledged that he may have, indeed, dodged a bullet.
Another wrote that, unfortunately, ghosting is common these days but added that the behavior from the firm “says more about the recruiter/company than you.”
They also wrote that encountering such behaviour is inevitable, and urged the post author to move on.
Another pointed out that ghosting is “as common as grass” these days because it’s easier for HR professionals to do so rather than respond to applicants.
A Reddit user chimed in with a reminder that ghosting is not personal and happens to both applicants and recruiters.
A recruiter likely does not bother to respond to applicants as this would eat into the time he needs to use to find more job candidates.
One pointed out that there are “rude and unprofessional” HR recruiters who act enthusiastically at the beginning but end up ghosting applicants or leaving their messages at “read.”
A Reddit user opined that “the role of an HR person is to ‘pierce through’ the corporate veil, and to empathize that it is a fellow human being at the other end,” but many fail to do this. /TISG