Jobs in the shell…

Can’t see the forest, nor the trees sometimes…

Part 13 in this series.

On the topic of being ghosted, the silence of the job market is awful.

Most applications are met with no response at all. You take the time to personalize your materials, market yourself to their specific needs, and scrub your copy is clean. Then you pitch it into the void, left simply to assume it got swallowed.

Did human eyes even see it? Who knows, really?

Some companies use systems that are supposed to track status and update applicants. One such system at a major health care provider I applied to has had the same job status “Active – Accepting Applications” for four months. It offers no other way to check the status of your app beyond that phrase.

Awesome.

In other cases, the only notification given is the position disappearing from the job board you found it on. Not even an automatically generated form email to break the news.

Who needs closure?

Still others have responded asking for more info. I take the time to answer their questions as carefully as possible. And then they go dark.   

After that, there’s silence. Long periods where your applications are active, or so you think. Is your contact at the company really following through on that internal recommendation? Will your description of yourself code in the language of an industry that considers itself so different from the one you’re leaving?

Sometimes, these questions get answered. But the number of times this happens is shockingly small, even in the most perfunctory ways.

Evaporation is easier work than cutting a new channel after all.