The chaos of hiring is perpetually on most peoples minds these days, at least in my sampling of the conversations I engage in. One topic that comes up a lot is job post ghosting. No need to mention AI. Oops just did 😅.
👻 job post ghosting: an applicant does not hear back from an entity behind an application they submitted, for an extended period of time.
The entity where an application is submitted may as well be a coin in a fountain or a letter in an ocean bottle or some other kind of void.
A friend sent me a useful article1 recently on this topic, from 2023 actually, that I think captures many possible explanations.
According to the piece, companies will keep job postings perpetually alive, because they are, “always open to new people,” describing the nature of the hiring pipeline and the problem of turnover along with a job itself being a kind of trial period post hiring. That is, it is difficult to keep retain folks. You will only really know that they are leaving at the last minute, given the right to work in most of the US. And on the company side, interviewing candidates is not the same as actually working alongside them, so it may take a few months to know if you hired well. So this pipeline is kept open to help keep the head count stable, at the cost of putting candidates in a kind of limbo.
But the article went into a few more nefarious reasons too, such as keeping postings open, “to keep current employees motivated.” But the cudgel of capitalism itself is probably enough to keep us all ruminating–at least occasionally–on the (in)stability of all industries we work in–or work “through”.
Preregistering job postings like clinical trials
All that being said, this gave me a kind of idea that might help the situation.
A parallel in jobs should be like in clinical research , where it is required2, in most cases, to “preregister” your clinical trial with your study design, your hypothesis , analysis plan, before you begin your study.
That way you cant cherry pick only good studies or good data.
So there ought to be a website where you post jobs , with your intent to hire, and then show ultimately who filled it, and or whether it was actually filled. And you could get insight into how long this took. This transparency is a kind of green flag for entities/employers to opt-into to help answer the question candidates have, “is this a good place to work?”
This could help bring back the trust that has slipped away.
Or Linked In might build this in too.