In today’s job market, ghosting (the act of disappearing without a trace) can have lasting effects that go beyond the moment. Dr. Russ Riendeau, Senior Partner and Principal Behavioral Scientist at New Frontier Search Company, emphasizes the importance of maintaining professional etiquette during your job search.
September 13, 2024 – According to Dr. Russ Liendeau, senior partner and principal behavioral scientist at New Frontier Search Company, every decision you make to not do the right thing when searching for a new job or trying to change careers can come back to bite you. “Trace evidence of self-awareness, common courtesy, maturity, arrogance, ignorance, and even parentage will remain behind you for years to come,” he says. “Job seekers complain all the time that they barely get the message from employers that they received their resume but decided to decline,” Dr. Liendeau said.
“This is not a reason to follow the same pattern of ghosting that some companies are engaging in. Companies are under no obligation to respond to you, so don’t expect a response,” he said. “If you simply search for a job posting, click/apply and expect an interview without doing much research to identify the recruiter, then you haven’t proven yourself a viable candidate.”
True story examples
Recently, a client of mine made the mistake of thinking he knew how to play the game, when just two weeks prior he received a termination notice and today was his last day of work due to poor performance.
Dr. Liendeau explains that he also began calling headhunters, friends, and colleagues to ask if they had any information on new sales roles. “One of his calls was to a headhunter who gave him perspective and advice on not only upgrading his resume, but also improving his LinkedIn profile to highlight his past successes and professional growth,” Dr. Liendeau says. “He also gave him advice on how to better communicate why he left his previous company, as this candidate’s presentation wasn’t very compelling.”
The job seeker was grateful for the headhunter’s timely advice, and started sending resumes to job ads, securing interviews with companies recruiting for sales positions, and even receiving calls from the headhunter who provided advice and set up interviews with sales clients.
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Dr. Riendeau points out that this was the moment he made his first mistake: ignoring the interview that the headhunter had arranged for him. “I never called the company to cancel the interview,” he says. “I never called the headhunter to say I’d changed my mind, and I never responded to any phone calls or text messages the headhunter sent me to ask why I was canceling. I simply made a conscious decision that the candidate wasn’t important enough to show basic courtesy or sound business practices in responding. Maybe he thought, “I have another interview that looks promising, but I’m too busy.”
Dr. Russ Riendeau is a Senior Partner and Principal Behavioral Scientist at New Frontier Search Company, a retention search practice specializing in senior executive, sales, and sales management. He has worked on over 6,000 searches across over 1,000 companies and industries placing senior talent. The author/co-author of 11 books, numerous TEDx talks, and an acclaimed keynote speaker, he also consults and writes on behavioral science topics and peak performance.
The second mistake Riendeau points out is job seekers assuming that everything in life is disconnected. “This is a false assumption,” she advises. “It turns out that the headhunter who ghosted on an interview also worked as a consultant for the very other company he’d found on a job board. The hiring manager asked the headhunter/consultant about this person, the headhunter told the manager that he’d ghosted, and the manager decided to write him off as a viable candidate.”
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The third mistake Dr. Riendeau points out is to fast forward 15 years. “Reputations never die,” he says. “Further along in his career, he was laid off after a company merger. He was married with two kids and living in a standard three-bedroom home, but he’d exhausted his savings and needed to find work in a tough labor market to stop the bleeding. He looked on job boards and also found the name of the headhunter who ghosted him 15 years earlier.”
Future impacts
“The headhunter answered the phone, and the name sounded familiar,” Dr. Riendeau recalls. “Within a minute of the conversation, the headhunter was reminded of an incident from over a decade ago. He thanked the candidate for calling and reminded him of their interaction from years ago. He said he was sorry, but he was not willing to risk introducing this person to a client again.”
Right or wrong, the headhunter had to make a decision, Dr. Liendeau explains. Based on the evidence of ghosting behavior in job seekers, research shows that this behavior and decision-making also impacts other parts of a person’s life, including their interactions, communication, and level of self-awareness. So the headhunter took the safe route and passed.
“You see the moral of the story,” says Dr. Liendeau. “The definition of ghosting encompasses many different forms of behavior that go beyond just job hunting. It lets people know who you are. It’s a form of self-sabotage. It encourages poor decision-making and lazy effort. It reinforces the false belief that you’re intelligent enough to know how to play the game. “It makes you think, ‘I got this,’ when in reality, it’s, ‘You never got this.'”
“Recruiters, headhunters, and anyone who’s been ghosted have long memories,” says Dr. Liendeau. “And remember that there may be six degrees of separation in how you interact with people, which can lead to poor decisions about how you interact with others that you may later regret. This isn’t just about hurting someone’s feelings or being rude. This is about making mature decisions that could cost you tens of thousands of dollars in lost income, lost work, missed opportunities to secure a better job, better referrals, better friends, better partners.”
Finally, Dr. Riendeau says, wonder if these risks will come back to haunt you for not making a simple call and saying, “Sorry, I’ve changed my mind.”
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Contributing Authors: Scott A. Scanlon (Editor in Chief) and Dale M. Zupsanski (Editor in Chief) – Hunt Scanlon Media
