
This is a thread for people to share their ghosting stories whilst in the search of work. Please ensure to change names or to talk in third person if need be.
Were you applying for a job and you got ghosted by the recruiter/hiring manager?
Are you an employer / recruiter / hiring manager, you issued an offer and got ghosted by the candidate?
Are you a mentor and you got ghosted by a mentee?
Are you a mentee that got ghosted by a mentor?
What has been your experience?
I signed up as a volunteer to help a non-profit organization with certain technical workflows. My role was to help them find vendors and evaluate their technical capabilities for implementing the required workflows. I was told another volunteer had signed-up to help negotiate contracts with the vendors we short-list. The non-profit had signed a delivery contract which was coming up within a month. These technical workflows were necessary for their deliveries.
As we moved forward with our vendor evaluations, the other volunteer simply stopped responding to the nonprofit's client. Initially, they gave him time, guessing that he might be busy. They sent a couple of reminders spaced a couple of days apart, but they did not hear back from him. The non-profit client did not want to hurt the volunteer's feelings by moving on without talking to him, and so we ended-up waiting a whole week for him to respond. Eventually, they realized they had been ghosted!
The other volunteer's ghosting caused us to lose a whole week in a tight delivery schedule. We then had to scramble to find someone with contract negotiating expertise at short notice. The client who had wanted to wait for that volunteer to show-up also ended-up feeling hurt.
A simple email from the other volunteer letting us know he was busy and would not be available anymore, would have been greatly appreciated. We could have started looking for an alternative resource earlier, and not wasted a week in a tight delivery schedule.
Thank you so very much for stepping up sharing this experience, it's disheartening to see people acting this way, and impacting a non-profit organization so negatively. My assumption is this person thought they'll get paid, however later learned that this was a volunteer role or could have been an unwanted natural calamity / out of the blue family issue, if it were a calamity, they should have at least given a heads up. Where was this person located? Other than Covid, Wild Fires in California, haven't really heard of anything else going around. Stay strong, and regardless of this non-profit's function, please feel free to reach out for any help, we thrive to serve!
Adversity is opportunity, if we know how to react, if we know how to act.