When Ghosting Reappears to Haunt Your Career Opportunities
September 13, 2024 – Every time a person makes a decision to not do the right thing regarding the search for a new job or trying to change careers, it will come back to haunt them, according to Russ Riendeau, Ph.D., senior partner and chief behavioral scientist with New Frontier Search Company. “The trail of evidence around a lack of self-awareness, common courtesy, maturity, arrogance, or ignorance, even naivety, will linger on the ground behind you for years to follow,” he says. “Job seekers constantly complain that they rarely receive a message back from employers saying they received their resume but have decided to take a pass,” Dr. Riendeau said.
“This is not a reason to follow the same pattern of ghosting some companies engage in. Companies don’t owe you a response, so don’t expect a response,” he said. “If all you do is surf for jobs, hit click/apply and hope for an interview, while having done little research to identify the hiring manager, you haven’t demonstrated you’re a viable candidate.”
True Story Example
A recent client made a bad assumption and thought he knew how the game was played. Just two weeks before, he was handed a termination letter and based on poor performance today was his last day.
Dr. Riendeau explains that he started to call headhunters, called friends, and associates as well to ask for any leads on new sales jobs. “One of his calls was to a headhunter that gave him perspectives and advice on upgrading the content in his resume, as well as improving his LinkedIn profile to showcase past successes and professional development,” Dr. Riendeau says. “She also offered some advice on how this candidate would better present his departure from his previous company, as his presentation was not very compelling.”
The jobseeker thanked the headhunter for the timely advice and started sending his resume to posted jobs and secured an interview with a company looking for a salesperson. He also got a call from the headhunter that gave him some advice and she set him up with another interview with one of her clients for a sales position as well.
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Dr. Riendeau notes that this is the moment he made his first mistake, he ghosted the headhunter’s arranged interview. “Never called the company to cancel the interview,” he says. “Never called the headhunter to say he’d changed his mind. Never even returned calls or texts the headhunter sent him to find out why he canceled. The candidate had simply made a conscious decision that it wasn’t important enough to show basic courtesy or even sound business practices in responding. I’ve got another interview that looks promising, I’m too busy, perhaps he thought.”
Russ Riendeau, Ph.D., is senior partner and chief behavioral scientist with New Frontier Search Company, a retained search practice specializing in senior leadership, sales and sales management. He has been involved in over 6,000 searches with 1,000s of companies and verticals placing senior talent. The author/co-author of 11 books, numerous TEDx Talks, and a highly regarded keynote speaker, he also consults and writes about behavioral science topics and peak performance.
The second mistake that Dr. Riendeau points to is that the jobseeker assumed things in life are not all connected. “Bad assumption,” he advises. “It turns out that the headhunter that he ghosted by never showing for the interview was also a consultant working for the very other company that he was interviewing with that he’d found on a job board. The hiring manager asked the headhunter/consultant about this person and the headhunter informed the manager of his ghosting her and thus the manager decided to cancel him as a viable candidate.”
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The third mistake Dr. Riendeau points to is fast forward 15 years. “Reputations never vanish,” he says. “Now, deeper into his career, he was laid off after a company merger. Married, now with two kids, a standard issue three bedroom, he needed to find a job in a tight labor market to stop the bleeding of burning through savings. He looked at job boards and also found the name of the headhunter that he’d ghosted 15 years ago.”
Future Ramifications
“The headhunter took his call; the name sounded familiar,” Dr. Riendeau recalls. “Within a minute of the conversation, the headhunter flashed back to over a decade ago and remembered the experience. He thanked the candidate for calling and reminded him of their interaction so many years ago. Sorry, not willing to take the risk again in presenting this person to any of his clients.”
What do Russ Riendeau, Richard Branson, President Obama, Bill Gates, Oprah, Deepak Chopra, Simon Sinek, Adam Grant, Arianna Huffington, Mike Bloomberg, and Mellody Hobson all have in common? They are all, via invitation only, designated as Top Voices by LinkedIn’s editorial team.
This elite group of thought leaders includes just 4,000 out of one billion LinkedIn users worldwide. They hold a Top Voice Badge on the platform, signifying consistent contributions in content creation and expertise in their respective fields. Read more…
Right or wrong, the headhunter had to decide, Dr. Riendeau explains. Based on evidence of ghosting behavior in job candidates, research shows this behavior and decision-making invades other parts of a person’s life in how they interact, communicate and level of self-awareness. So, the headhunter took the safe path and passed.
“You know the morals of this story,” Dr. Riendeau says. “Ghosting as a definition, holds many forms of behavior beyond just job hunting. It tells people who you are. It is a form of self-sabotage. It enables poor decision-making and lazy effort. It reinforces the mistaken belief that we have enough intelligence to know how the game is played.” Dr. Riendeau says that it tricks you into thinking “I got this,” when, in reality, “you never had this.”
“Hiring managers, headhunters, and anyone on the receiving end of being ghosted have long memories,” Dr. Riendeau said. “And remember that there may just be six degrees of separation in knowing people that can come back to haunt your bad decisions of how you interacted with others. This is not about simply hurting someone’s feelings or being rude. This is about making mature decisions that can cost you tens of thousands of dollars in lost income, lost jobs, lost opportunities to secure better jobs, better referrals, better friends, better partners.
Dr. Riendeau concludes by saying that is all this risk going to haunt you by not making that simple phone call to say: “Sorry, I’ve changed my mind.”?
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Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief and Dale M. Zupsansky, Executive Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
