Looking for a Job but Being Ghosted by the HR? Here’s What to Do.

It’s anxiety on steroids when you enthusiastically invest in your application for your dream job and keep waiting to hear back from the hiring manager. If you don’t get an answer for a few days or weeks, you can say hello to that familiar spate of self-questioning coupled with debilitating attacks on your self-esteem. It’s anything but healthy and certainly not productive. 

According to a survey done by job aggregation site Indeed, employers have been ghosting their candidates more after the pandemic struck. Nearly 77 percent of  job seekers reported that they have been ghosted at various stages of the recruitment process. 

In some cases, it might just be a case of the hiring manager being swamped with a deluge of applications. “In my company, I am the only one acquiring talent,” Krunal, a hiring manager for a nonprofit, told VICE. “On most days, we might see 300 applicants vying for a single position. It all comes down to me to effectively sift through it. So, it’s just a systemic issue of manpower sometimes.” 

At other times, it may be a case of sketchy ethics and complacency on the part of the employer. A number of stories online talk about jobseekers being ghosted even after several rounds of interviews and promises of having bagged the position. 

So, what then? Is there something you can do as a job seeker so that the HR doesn’t dangle you in agony?

We spoke to hiring managers and talent acquisition specialists to help us jazz up our applications and to give us tips on attracting attention from the right people. 

Chances are, you have a lot to say about yourself – the awards, the work experience, the terrific things you might have done in your illustrious career, that popular college festival you helped put together. But the lengthier the resumé, the higher the chances of you getting ghosted. 

“Ideally, no resumé must be more than two pages long at best,” said Krunal. “That is, unless you have work experience spanning three decades or so.”

He added that brevity in resumés also demonstrates your skills to say more in less words and make an impact without eating too much into someone’s time. 

Ashish Chopra, a hiring manager who works for a Silicon Valley-based global IT firm, said that the resumés must also “look appealing” and have some colour and personality in them without being tacky. “Opening a sad, black-and-white resumé will bore me even before I can begin to read it. Your resumé doesn’t have to be flashy of course, and the content does matter more. But it doesn’t hurt to have some colour and character.”

According to a study, 90 percent of job applicants don’t even bother reading the job description on LinkedIn or other job portals. While it’s the bare minimum to know what you’re signing up for, it’s also advisable to slightly tweak your application, cover letter or resumé according to the description stated in the job profile. 

Hiring and talent acquisition managers frequently use a software or AI that filters out applicants that don’t have any of the keywords mentioned in their job description. 

“There will always be certain keywords mentioned in the job description that you can use in your resumé,” said Chopra. “You can also use similar adjectives but be careful to not insert them randomly. You need to have certain proven skills or experience to back those keywords too.”

Recently, Chopra had recruited a cloud computing engineer for his company. He explained how mentioning keywords related to the diverse world of cloud computing in the application helped the candidate land the job. 

“So, in this case, keywords such as ‘machine learning,’ skills and experience with artificial intelligence, or work with Amazon cloud services or Google computing really helped them,” he said. “If you want your expertise in (coding language) Python to be noticed, then mention what you did with it in all your previous jobs. If you have worked in four companies, then you will have at least four or five Python mentions in your resumé.” 

Many recruiting managers will usually stumble upon your profile on a professional job networking site like LinkedIn during the process of scouting. A professional headshot without any distracting background, lots of connections, and an active profile can help you stand out in this crowded market. 

Chopra said that having a detailed and updated profile usually helps to get noticed. So, if the last time you updated your profile was in 2019, it doesn’t fly with hiring managers. 

Kartik Rao, the chief people officer for a content-to-commerce firm, said that an “engaging social media presence” with a professional profile online is usually a plus. This also gives your prospective employer a brief glimpse into your people skills and to judge if you’re a motormouth with problematic opinions on issues. 

After a job opening, hiring managers usually rely on in-house referrals, said Rao. In this case, it becomes all the more important to build on your networking skills. But, as Rao explained, “networking” doesn’t mean randomly shooting emails to employers. 

“Focus on value creation and building a brand for yourself as this will actually make people reach out to you, thus bolstering your network,” he said. 

While some of these connections might not have immediate returns, they might just prove to be useful when unexpected job openings come your way, particularly for senior positions that are rarely advertised online and often hunted exclusively through such connections and in-house referrals. 

For many, their current job profile might be in stark contrast to their skill set or educational background. In some cases, one might even have multiple skills that may be applied to a wide array of jobs. 

This was true in Krunal the nonprofit HR guy’s own experience, too. He leveraged his engineering background to work as a project manager for years before deciding to switch gears and move to HR to capitalise on his people skills. “So, I had two resumés – one that was highly technical for any prospective job openings in the engineering domain and one for the application for an HR post,” he said. 

Even though Krunal did not have any HR experience, he crafted a new resumé where he highlighted the people skills he learned during his project management days. “So, in such cases, where you might have radically different career choices, you can’t paste the same application everywhere. But this doesn’t mean you need to make, like, five resumés either.”

In the rush and desperation to find a new job, many of us end up applying for over a dozen jobs almost on a daily basis. Rao said that while some candidates might genuinely be desperate, particularly if they have been unemployed for a long time, applying frantically for jobs does more harm than good. 

For starters, applying for 20 jobs a day might just mean going through the stress of getting ghosted 20 times too. 

“Many times, people don’t even apply for relevant job profiles and only want to get noticed by their dream company,” he said. “Be authentic to yourself and always know your self-worth. Censor yourself and rein it in. Be judicious about your applications and do due research about the kind of roles you want.”

Getting ghosted on a daily basis, particularly because of applying for irrelevant jobs, can impact your self-esteem – something none of us need more of. “Also, if you magically do get to the interview stage for a job that’s irrelevant to your profile, it will be a fluke and you will be rejected eventually,” cautioned Rao.

At a time when skill development programmes and initiatives are at an all-time high, getting professional certification is really not that hard. Krunal said that simply mentioning all your skills in the resumé doesn’t make your application stand out because other applicants might have those skills listed too. 

“So, it’s important that you explain how those skills benefitted your previous organisations,” Krunal said. “For example, if you’ve mentioned that you can professionally code in Java, add a line or two about how this skill actually had a tangible impact on your previous or current company. Did you solve a critical problem? Or helped further the revenue generation of the company? Prove that you can actually apply these skills in a tangible manner.”

With job interviews, we can often be on parallel tracks with our prospective employers. In our heads, everything seemed perfect, until we were ghosted. There is no clear rejection or approval either. How does one navigate this ambiguous, awkward space?

Caroline Castrillon for Forbes wrote that it’s usually advisable to ask the potential employer an approximate timeline by when an answer can be expected. After the said timeline has passed, the follow-up can begin by first thanking the organisation for considering you and then asking for an update, referring to a specific detail or two from your meeting. If it’s appropriate, you can consider calling the person too or maybe someone else from their team. Do this without hounding the recruiter.

But if nothing has worked, chances are that there is nothing more you can do. Make sure you leave a review about your experience on an anonymous company review website like Glassdoor, Indeed or ZipRecruiter. Maybe someone from the organisation will read it and make sure no one else gets ghosted the way you did.

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