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Are 'Career Catfishers' Justified In Not Showing Up for Work? (fortune.com) 118

Posted by EditorDavid from the career-catfishing dept.
Fortune reports 18% of workers have engaged in "career catfishing" — getting a job offer, but then refusing to show up on the first day of work.

And when someone posted Fortune's article to Reddit's antiwork subreddit, it drew 2,100 upvotes -- and another 84 comments. ("I love doing this...! This feels really great to do after a company has jerked you around, and basically said that several other people were in line ahead of you... after five interviews.")

But Fortune reports there's other sources of frustration: At the moment, Gen Z is contending with an onerous battle to land an entry-level, full-time role. The class of 2025 is set to apply to more jobs than the graduating class prior, already submitting 24% more applications on average this past summer than seniors did last year. Furthermore, the class of 2024 applied to 64% more jobs than the cohort before them, according to job platform Handshake. To make matters all the more bleak, the number of job listings has dwindled from 2023 levels, generating deeper frenzy and more intense competition for the roles listed.

That adds up to a hiring managers' market and senior executives are playing hardball; only 12% of mid-level executives think entry-level workers are prepared to join the workforce, per a report from technology education provider General Assembly. About one in four say they wouldn't hire today's entry-level employees. Yet, that's not really the point of entry-level roles, points out Jourdan Hathaway, General Assembly's chief business officer. By definition, it's a position that requires investment in a young adult, she explained. "The entry-level employee pipeline is broken," Hathaway wrote in a statement. "Companies must rethink how they source, train, and onboard employees."

The especially competitive hiring landscape could be forcing Gen Zers to accept the first gig they can get because the job market is so dire — only to later regret it and not show up the first day.
The article also acknowledges that "employers themselves have a role in the two-way communication — or lack thereof — between hire and hirer." Almost 80% of hiring managers admitted they've stopped responding to candidates during the application process, according to a survey of 625 hiring managers from Resume Genius.

Gen Zers say that their ghosting is in reaction to the company's behavior. More than a third of applicants who have purposefully dropped the ball say it was because a recruiter was rude to them or misled them about a position, according to Monster... In part, it's likely AI that's fueling said ghosting. AI has become more integrated into the hiring process, becoming a screener that rejects resumes without ever reaching a human person's eyes. That phenomenon possibly fuels both sides' tendency to be non-responsive...

Are 'Career Catfishers' Justified In Not Showing Up for Work? More | Reply

Are 'Career Catfishers' Justified In Not Showing Up for Work?

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  • Why not link to the near Dupe? (Score:3)

    by Vlad_the_Inhaler ( 32958 ) on Sunday January 19, 2025 @07:44AM (#65100659)

    This story has a lot in common with Career Catfishing' - 34% of Gen Z Workers Didn't Show Up for a New Job [slashdot.org] 21 hours ago, although that one claimed 34% and this one just 18%.

  • 2 Wrongs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wierd_w ( 1375923 ) on Sunday January 19, 2025 @07:51AM (#65100669)

    This isn't hard.

    No. Wasting an employer's time like this is wrong.

    Additionally, trying to 'weed out' potential hires in ways that basically *force* job hunters to apply to hundreds of openings to have even just the 'statistically guaranteed' prospect of a callback, because of how paranoid you are that 'a bad one might slip through!', is ALSO wrong.

    (So is creating job postings for openings that dont actually exist, or that you have precisely 0% interest in actually seponding to applicants about, ever, because you either want to hire a very specific person internally, want to play fast and loose witu Equal Opportunity law, or, just to justify telling congress you 'neeeeeeed' more H1B visa placements, to avoid paying SS and pals on them.)

    Given there are like, 5 different reasons employers ghost applicants, and usually only 1 actual reason applicants ghost employers, I would suggest that maybe the phenomenon is a natural consequence to the employer's behavior, and NOT the other way around, but this is STILL a '2 wrongs' situation.

    The CORRECT behavior, is for none of this shit to be happening in the first place.

    • Re:2 Wrongs (Score:4, Informative)

      by hjf ( 703092 ) on Sunday January 19, 2025 @08:18AM (#65100689) Homepage

      The CORRECT behavior, is for none of this shit to be happening in the first place.

      While the correct behavior is that I shouldn't get mugged, I'll keep carrying my pepper spray. Thanks anyway.

      • At least carrying pepper spray may benefit you.

        That's what I don't get about 'career catfishing.' If you got another job in the meantime and don't bother responding to solicitations afterwards, that's one thing.

        But doing all the work of landing an interview just to jerk somebody around by not showing up for it seems like a lot of work for no benefit. Is that really what people are doing?

    • No. Wasting an employer's time like this is wrong.

      The correct moral thing is to do to others as they do to you and to start with treating them correctly if they haven't treated you badly.

      I don't see that if an employer has already been misleading or has a reputation for ghosting people you have any duty whatsoever to behave better to them. Sure, there's a "bridge burning" fear, but actually bad employers can be really damaging, are normally pretty visible in the hiring process and are able to suck people in so getting it clear you won't ever go there might

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 )

        The correct moral thing is to do to others as they do to you and to start with treating them correctly if they haven't treated you badly.

        Um, no, the correct moral thing is to treat others as you want to be treated.

        • That's what I'm proposing. With an appropriate system of justice where misdeeds, such as the behavior of the employers, do not simply get ignored. I want a society where actions get fair and just responses.

          • No. Correcting a wrong with another wrong makes things worse in almost all cases. Also, have people not considered the possibility that employers are keeping blacklists of the catfishers?

            • No. Correcting a wrong with another wrong makes things worse in almost all cases.

              It depends. If this ensures that employers do not get good people and go out of business, this is likely to fix the problem. Companies that behave like this deserve to die and that is why competition is encouraged in the market place.

              Also, have people not considered the possibility that employers are keeping blacklists of the catfishers?

              The correct answer to that would be to apply under a fake name or someone else's name so that consequences don't land on the person doing this. In cases where you might actually decide to take the job but likely won't, using a common misspelling of your own name and slightly mi

            • We are expecting that they are keeping such blacklists. But there a lot of employers.

        • Of course, we start with Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But certain people progress to Do unto others lest they do unto yourself or others. Vengeance is a form of altruism (self-sacrifice for the greater good, without which society might not exist, the eg it's the reason humans do well at the Ultimatum Game). For some reason Americans love throwing decades in jail levels of vengeance against people who grew the wrong plant or whatever, but we shouldn't even be upset at the assholes who v

        • That isn't happening so here we are.

        • That is absolutely not moral. It's a horrible rule to follow.

          Ponder a virile, strong man walking down the street, seeing a petite woman and thinking "I would love for her to abduct me and ravish me".

          Should he then treat her as he wants to be treated?

          The normal response to this is "but you have to consider...", which means that it's not moral at all to actually follow this rule. What has to be followed are all the "but..." statements which are highly individual, situational and often vague.

          Which makes this a

      • No. Wasting an employer's time like this is wrong.

        The correct moral thing is to do to others as they do to you and to start with treating them correctly if they haven't treated you badly.

        The opposite of treat others like you wish to be treated? If one employer treats you badly, that you are morally obligated to treat others badly? Indeed, the best thing about a person who ghosts an employer is that it shows that the employer dodged a bullet.

        I don't see that if an employer has already been misleading or has a reputation for ghosting people you have any duty whatsoever to behave better to them. Sure, there's a "bridge burning" fear, but actually bad employers can be really damaging, are no

        • The problem with "ghosting an employer" is that you are really ghosting the hiring manager and the team that you would have worked on. Maybe it's a bad company. But that doesn't mean they are bad people. Those might be connections that you want in the future. This is much less about a moral right or wrong than a practicality. Taking a job and then not showing up is definitely going to cause you harm. It might cause harm to the people who would have been your future teammates. It's unlikely to cause en

          • The problem with "ghosting an employer" is that you are really ghosting the hiring manager and the team that you would have worked on.

            Very good point.

            Those might be connections that you want in the future. This is much less about a moral right or wrong than a practicality. Taking a job and then not showing up is definitely going to cause you harm. It might cause harm to the people who would have been your future teammates. It's unlikely to cause enough harm to the employer overall to change behavior.

            Also 100 percent correct.

            It turns out to be not much more than virtue signaling.

            This whole post gets me to thinking. What kind of person would do this? I'm very welded to the team concept, and would never do something to harm my team, other than normal actions like retirement or leaving for a new job. A person who would accept a job, then simply not show up for it has no other outlook than themselves, and has no concern for others.

            • What kind of person would do this? I'm very welded to the team concept

              Just playing devil's advocate but even myself in my old age have grown up in the world where a job is just a job and loyalty doesn't mean anything in these modern times. Also we are talking about new hires, team loyalty is built by the team and culture of the company.

              Employers played a large part in the perception nd many ways reality of "if you want a pay raise find a new employer every two years, your existing one more than likely will not reward you in kind for sticking around" so if that's the percepti

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by rta ( 559125 )

              A younger me would have agreed 100% and even now I'm at like 50%.

              But I'd say more than half of my onboarding experiences even with jobs I've taken have been unpleasant due to HR being incompetent or just by default applying obnoxious practices.

              in my company currently, on the hiring side, I'm in a long conflict to get HR to stop delivering 3 or 4 day exploding offers as the default.

              Not to mention that we've been on again off again "hiring" a principal dev type, but at basically 2/3rds market rate AND w/ hig

          • The problem with "ghosting an employer" is that you are really ghosting the hiring manager and the team that you would have worked on. Maybe it's a bad company. But that doesn't mean they are bad people.

            Hopefully the message goes up the chain. But I doubt it. Literally this meme. https://knowyourmeme.com/photo... [knowyourmeme.com]

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dgatwood ( 11270 )

            The problem with "ghosting an employer" is that you are really ghosting the hiring manager and the team that you would have worked on. Maybe it's a bad company. But that doesn't mean they are bad people.

            Came to say exactly this.

            When you apply for a job, you're applying to a company, but the company isn't the one making the hiring decisions. There's a recruiter who handles the interview process, and may screw up and lose track of candidates, may get laid off, may get sick at exactly the right time, etc. There's a hiring manager who may do the same. There's sometimes a hiring committee that makes the decision. And any part of that process can get gummed up.

            But all of those people involved in that process

      • No. Wasting an employer's time like this is wrong.

        The correct moral thing is to do to others as they do to you and to start with treating them correctly if they haven't treated you badly.

        I don't see that if an employer has already been misleading or has a reputation for ghosting people you have any duty whatsoever to behave better to them. Sure, there's a "bridge burning" fear, but actually bad employers can be really damaging, are normally pretty visible in the hiring process and are able to suck people in so getting it clear you won't ever go there might not be nearly as bad a thing as some people will tell you it is.

        I don't understand the actual article, maybe someone can explain it to me?

        When I'm offered a job (I'm retired now, but whatever), I send back an E-mail accepting the job.

        Do these people simply not respond to the E-mail job offer? That is somewhat believable, it might happen, although I'd consider it unprofessional. A response saying "thank you very much for considering me, I have accepted a job offer at a different company, but I'll keep you in mind if for some reason that doesn't work out, and I'll certain

        • I don't understand the actual article, maybe someone can explain it to me?

          You haven't applied for a job lately so I'll break it down.

          Employers get hundreds or even thousands of people applying for jobs. Employers know this and put ridiculous requirements in place or advertise a pay scale between poverty and top tier.

          You apply for the job. You might get a canned response or maybe not. If you're very lucky you'll get a response maybe a month later and asking for a phone interview.

          You pick one of the allotted times and then never get an acknowledgement. You'll most likely get the ca

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ogive17 ( 691899 )
        That's an odd set of morals you have. Typically it's better to act the adult in situations like that and move on.

        If you know an employer has a history of yanking people's chains.. why even bother with them? If you felt mistreated or mislead during the process, just ignore their calls or turn down any offers. If you wanted to "stick it to them", counter-offer something significantly higher.

        I know my company is incredibly slow on hiring people, even when it's an internal transfer/promotion. Doesn't me

    • From the opposite viewpoint... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Pollux ( 102520 ) <speter@tedat[ ]et.eg ['a.n' in gap]> on Sunday January 19, 2025 @10:11AM (#65100873) Journal

      Gen Z doesn't look at this as reciprocating one wrong for another. They see themselves as facing an all-out assault of wrongdoings from corporate America from the moment they were born, so if that's the game being played, they're just following the rules.

      It took me a while to get it myself. (FWIW, I'm an older Millennial, not a Gen Z.) But after reading this article [bbc.com] and watching this Ted Talk [youtube.com], I realized Gen Z behavior can be summed up in just one word: Nihilism. They know the deck is stacked against them. They've tried to play by the rules, but they can't afford a car, they can't afford a house, they can't afford insurance, they can't afford health care, and that damned minimum wage hasn't been increased in over 20 years. They simply can't win; Gen X has taken that away from them. All they can do now is say "fuck it", and enjoy watching the forest burn.

      • I am GenX; we had the same attitude early in our careers too. Millenials were also the same; like GenX they blamed the generations before them for the shit world they inherited.

        I couldn't afford a house until I was 40. I retired at 47. Life is what you make of it, but starting out having already given up only makes things harder.

        • ...So here's that link again. [youtube.com] Watch it, please. I know it's easy to dismiss the argument I made above as, "Yea, we all went through that attitude when we're young." But that's not what's happening. The statistics clearly show that today's youth are not in the same financial position as the youth of my generation, or of yours. The country's wealth has been mined from our youth to create a rich and powerful "elderly class". Gen X has an unprecedented amount of wealth. Seriously, watch the video. Those

      • It probable depends more on the country rather than the generation. They did a similar study here in the Netherlands, and found that Gen Z was as well off as the 'Boomers were at that age, and better off than Gen X. Better prospects, better wages, more savings. The 'Boomers here went through a crippling housing shortage as well.

        Also, the image of Gen Z as the corpo-hating nihilist with poor prospects is silly. For every Gen Z crying on TikTok about how life is unfair and the world sucks and why even

    • Given there are like, 5 different reasons employers ghost applicants

      Employers don't ghost applicants on day one of work. At that point the contracts are signed. If we were talking about applicants not showing up to interviews then we'd be having a very different discussion, but the the two are not remotely the same. It's like saying you're justified to punch someone because they called you a name.

      • Employers will bait and switch, and that is found out either when the contract is presented or on day one of the work. If companies were honest about their requirements and salaries and presented them up front we'd be having a very different discussion.

        • Would you believe there are different employers who behave in different ways. Collectivist tribalism is cancer

          • Of course there are. And since we have no data on which employers get this treatment, why are you making the assumption that this is done to those who do not deserve it?

            Is it because of collectivist tribalism?

    • In all the time I've been in the IT industry, the scoreboard of when employers ghost applicants versus the other way around is quite lopsided. In fact, when I did project manager duties and watched people get hired at MSP jobs, I only remember one FTE ghosting, and that was because the person (who, ironically, had a clean record from background checks), knocked back one too many, hit the road, and got arrested for DWI. The actual number of people who just don't show up are exceedingly overhyped, even in t

  • Gen Zers say that their ghosting is in reaction to the company's behavior. More than a third of applicants who have purposefully dropped the ball say it was because a recruiter was rude to them or misled them about a position, according to Monster...

    Is it deserved? Sure. Is it a good plan? Nope. When queried employers can share facts as long as they don't come with judgement, like "they didn't show up for their first day". What they cannot say is anything wrongful, inaccurate, and/or malicious, what they can say is anything that is factual and accurate. A lot of employers won't share details beyond dates of employment because they fear lawsuits which are expensive even when they win, but that doesn't prevent them from doing so. And it's probably safe to assume that the incoming administration will do whatever it can to protect them more when they do than prior administrations, especially if they are large.

    You can take the job or not, but don't take the job and then not do it. That's a real bad plan for your future. If the job is the kind of trivial bullshit that lots of people flake on, it's probably not a big deal. If it's a large employer, don't. They will never forget and they will tell other large employers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hjf ( 703092 )

      "Do not do anything that may anger the Corporate Machine, or else".

      • "Do not do anything that may anger the Corporate Machine, or else".

        Do you want to know why that's a stupid take, or do you already know and you're just trolling? I'm not familiar enough with your work...
        wait, I can fix that ...Oh, I see, you're fucking delusional [slashdot.org].

        Your comments only make sense if you believe the published unemployment rate, which is and always has been a deliberate and willful lie, and it gets to be more of a lie by design the longer people are out of work — the worse things get, the more it undercounts.

        The corporate deciders are not going to decide t

        • Then I guess the worker should feel justified in not showing up. The next job you apply for isn't going to call the job you didn't show up at unless you are stupid enough to use them as a reference.
          • I think the worker may want to worry a bit today. Did they post they got the job on FB or some other social media site like linked in? If they did, does some clever startup troll the databases, package it up, and provide for a fee of course a history for the person? After all, there already exists your credit score, your bank score, renter score, driving score, and of course the grand daddy lexis nexis that knows pretty much everything about everyone, the closest thing the US has to the Chinese social score

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hjf ( 703092 )

          oh yes, working for the corporate machine is the only line of work out there.

      • Do not jeopardize your entire future career for a trivial moment of satisfaction!

    • The proper response to inquiries about a job seeker from other employers is either:

      'They are eligible for rehire'

      or

      'They are not eligible for rehire'

      Any more detail is unnecessary and risks complications.

      • If they took the job and didn't show up, I would make then not eligible for rehire. If they declined the job, the answer would be that they never worked there. Either way taking a job and not showing up is harming yourself and nobody else.
        • Horseshit. You have no idea how much you might be inconviencing your supervisor and/or an HR person who helped in the hiring decision. You have no idea whether or not the supervisor pushed away three days or two weeks worth of their usual work to train you/orient you, whatever. They might've written up documentation to aid in your learning. Catfishing like this is just another excuse to act like an asshole because you didn't like the way you were treated in the past. It's basically like a child saying "pe

    • Gen Zers say that their ghosting is in reaction to the company's behavior. More than a third of applicants who have purposefully dropped the ball say it was because a recruiter was rude to them or misled them about a position, according to Monster...

      Is it deserved? Sure. Is it a good plan? Nope. When queried employers can share facts as long as they don't come with judgement, like "they didn't show up for their first day". What they cannot say is anything wrongful, inaccurate, and/or malicious, what they can say is anything that is factual and accurate. A lot of employers won't share details beyond dates of employment because they fear lawsuits which are expensive even when they win, but that doesn't prevent them from doing so.

      Agreed about the not good plan. Not showing up for the first day of a job is a career killer. Like you note, it is a fact that will follow the person.

      Getting references from previous employers is tricky. There are some questions you are legally not allowed to ask. So many times, we ask a simple question, "Would you hire this person back?"

      side-note Off-record conversations are often held, as a part of networking. If Joe has a habit of harassing the staff assistants, we probably want to know about that. I

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        How does it work, finding employers that people didn't start at? Is there some kind of database in the US?

        There isn't in the UK or anywhere else I know of in Europe, and it would almost certainly be illegal anyway due to data privacy rules.

        • How does it work, finding employers that people didn't start at? Is there some kind of database in the US?

          There isn't in the UK or anywhere else I know of in Europe, and it would almost certainly be illegal anyway due to data privacy rules.

          Yup, you are correct.

          Networking. It is how my present employer found me. The "official" channels have been hamstrung to uselessness, and there are some jobs that a poor employee would create an actual disaster.

          In illustration, I have a number of questions I am forbidden to ask, especially in matters of female candidates. Like childbearing plans. That said, I've had several lady candidates who have outright said a version of this "I know you aren't allowed to ask or discuss this, but I have no plans to

        • How does it work, finding employers that people didn't start at? Is there some kind of database in the US?

          There isn't in the UK or anywhere else I know of in Europe, and it would almost certainly be illegal anyway due to data privacy rules.

          Sorry - I didn't answer your question in my other reply.

          We can do preliminary background checks on people, open source stuff, social media, Sex offenders registry.

          And like I noted in the other post, networking. Now it is possible that employers in Europe aren't allowed to talk with each other anytime ever, but here we very often know other employers hiring people personally, and the conversation at the pub might go like this:

          Me: "A guy who used to work for you made a job application to us. What do y

    • For bottom-rung jobs, anecdotally, my experience is there is no effective 'grapevine' (let alone database). At least in a sizeable city.

      My daughter, for reason I won't go into, is not a very good employee. So she's a good barometer of how easy it is to land a job. I have felt very lucky for her timing, because during the last few years it was relatively easy. It didn't seem to get any harder no matter how many times she quit or was fired.

      The only bridge she did burn was starbucks. That was a pretty cu

    • Good points. If the person didn't show up and gets fired, the employees can say "Person x worked for us from xx to x for a total of one day." Other employers will get the message.

    • Its only "deserved" if they know that the particular company has behaved in an unethical fashion, and in that case why did they apply there in the firs place.

      Its self destructive because an employee's reputation goes far beyond formal references. Having lots of people know that you are a good, honest worker will open doors - you will hear about job opportunities, and jobs will hear about you. OTOH if people know that you do not behave ethically, that you are not reliable, those contacts will never happen.

  • Let's rephrase this problem: Job seekers don't trust or respect potential employers. Also potential employers don't trust or respect job seekers.

    The solution to this is a mutually trustworthy entity that can vet candidates and employers. It can be a website. Candidates would not be vetted for being good employees but for being honest and responsive candidates. Employers would not be vetted for being good employers, but for being honest and responsive hirers. People on both sides of the desk would sign up t
    • This will inevitably end up being in control of the financiers (employers) and will be used as a means of disciplining and threatening workers. You're essentially asking for a common database with which employers can blacklist employees from all companies or spy on them if they want to leave their current jobs.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 )

      Let's rephrase this problem: Job seekers don't trust or respect potential employers. Also potential employers don't trust or respect job seekers.

      You believe that is universally true it appears. Good luck with that.

      I've worked for employers who were bad, and I've worked for employers who were really good. Trying to have a universal statement is a part of the problem.

      The solution to this is a mutually trustworthy entity that can vet candidates and employers. It can be a website. Candidates would not be vetted for being good employees but for being honest and responsive candidates. Employers would not be vetted for being good employers, but for being honest and responsive hirers.

      Won't work, because many prospective employees will simply say it is yet another tool of the employers who don't trust or respect job seekers. Too many people simply hate employers, and have no intentions of ever changing their minds.

      To me, if an applicant has ever ghosted an emplo

  • I am skeptical this is a real thing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sinij ( 911942 ) on Sunday January 19, 2025 @08:31AM (#65100711)
    Such behavior from applicant's point of view is illogical - you spend time and effort interviewing to not follow up on this. More so, you have to take time off work for in-person interviews, so this isn't zero-cost endeavor. Yes, spite is one possible explanation, but would that be widespread?

    Here is what I think is happening. This is manufactured story, where media is colluding with big tech to justify H1B visa increases. If they can discredit US applicants (i.e., push the narrative that they don't show up even when hired) then you can hire more cheap migrants. More so, it is trivially easy to organize no-shows by maliciously sending acceptance letters to a wrong address or wrong email.

    • Re:I am skeptical this is a real thing (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Sunday January 19, 2025 @08:51AM (#65100731)

      >Such behavior from applicant's point of view is illogical - you spend time and effort interviewing to not follow up on this

      In today's market, job seekers have to spam their resumes out just to get a response or two. Long gone are the days where someone would actually respond with a 'thanks but no thanks' letter.

      So you get a couple of interviews. That's already 'lucky'. They still don't bother to call you unless they want you, so when one does... well, it's not your dream job but you have bills to pay. ...except before you start your other interview turns out to have also gone well and you get a second, better offer. So you take it.

      I've seen the no-shows. I've also seen the 'show up for a day and then don't come backs'. I believe it's the inevitable result of dehumanizing the hiring process - why should someone treat your company with gratitude just for the opportunity to work for them when your company is treating them as a mass-produced cog in a bin before they're even hired?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sinij ( 911942 )
        Sure, there are circumstances where applicant would accept a job offer and not end up taking a job. One you mentioned (multiple offers in a short time) is a plausible scenario. Another scenario, where your current employer matches your new salary, is also possible. The issue I have with all this is the narrative that this is a widespread phenomenon. I don't think it is widespread and I think this is artificial narrative.

        • I'd say it can be (and likely is) a combination of these things:

          1) employers dont want to accept the actual consequences of discarding 99.9% of the labor pool, because 'they only want the creamiest cream', at 'bargain, wholesale prices', resulting in billions of gallons of 'skim milk' looking for a place to go in the market.

          2) even with the despressed wages caused by desparation of all that milk in the economy, if they feel they *must* have to begrudgingly accept that milk, it wont be at market prices, so t

      • Th dehumanized hiring process has a lot to do with how both parties choose to go about it. For my small company we only put up ads for real positions, but we get spammed by both recruiters and unqualified applicants. Don't apply for an architectural engineering job saying how much you love biotechnical engineering. We had >95% spam rate; on some postings it was 100%.

        My advice for someone looking is to focus on smaller companies for entry level positions, and when you get a job make sure you stick around

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Njovich ( 553857 )

      Are you saying we should be sceptical of a small online survey from some no-name foreign company held in some foreign country?

      What are you going to ask for next? Journalistic standards?

      I can sort of buy that young people skip out on simple jobs like dishwasher or even one time event jobs, and then you asked them 'did you ever skip out of a job' some answer yes. That has absolutely no bearing on real world jobs that they'd care about.

    • I worked at a video store and we had people apply and get accepted for jobs all the time. At the time, to continue to get unemployment benefits after a certain length of time, you had to prove you were applying for new jobs. People would apply for a new job, interview, we'd send out an acceptance letter and never hear from them again. It happened a lot.

      When they changed it so you had to actually work to reset the benefits clock, people would work for the minimum amount of time (one or two months) then stop

      • I'd forgotten about that. I've been pretty lucky to never have a period of unemployment long enough to worry about benefits, but that's certainly the way it works here - at some point, those benefits continuing depends on proving to a case worker that you're actually trying. So of course people game the system to extend their benefits period.

        I assume the case workers know and are also just going through the motions most of the time. Another of life's great farces.

        • It's how it works everywhere since Clinton signed a welfare reform act [wikipedia.org] in 1996, except when there are temporary waivers for widespread emergency or high unemployment (which apply to SNAP, or sometimes Medicaid.) Without a waiver or an exemption, you have to perform work or specific work related activities to get food aid for more than a brief time. You're also not allowed to quit a job without a good reason.

          Eligibility workers are not permitted to dissuade applicants from completing an application.

    • Young graduates (some I know) apply to jobs they don't intend to take, just to get experienced in interviews.

    • Here is what I think is happening. This is manufactured story

      It is not. I've seen it happen first hand. In fact the wife experiences at at school literally every school year, some teacher will not show up on day 1 of work, or will show up on day 1 and quit halfway through. I've seen it happen from an engineering graduate position as well (see the reality is people apply in multiple places and then pick the best result afterwards).

      One of the underlying problems is GenZ is too timid to negotiate a timetable with a future employer (that comes with experience, and they h

      • "thanks, as I am awaiting another offer I will let you know in x weeks whether or not I accept."

        This is true but on the same hand employers should do better to actually send rejection letters to anyone who sent in a resume, applied online or didn't make the cut on the interview. Most resumes submitted get zero response and many times in my limited experience less than half of interviews actually received a followup to check how the interview went in the first place, "Oh we already hired that last week".

        IME and observations employers love ghosting potential hires throughout the process.

  • Employment is at will, meaning you can quit or be fired at any time. If employers don't want their employees to quit before their start date, then make the job attractive enough that they actually show up. This is honestly just employers complaining "Nobody wants to work!!! (For minimum wage where a full day of work barely pays for dinner)"

    • "(For minimum wage where a full day of work barely pays for dinner)"

      In Arizona the minimum wage is 14.70. Maybe $70 a day net after taxes.

      If you need dinner better than that, you should be able to work at something that's worth more than minimum wage. Like maybe as clerk at Home Depot? Average pay $19+/hr, you get cab fare home

      Actually, why not do what was done 50 years ago and eat cheap at home. But hey, Gen Z expects it all now, entry level wage for them seems to be expected to cover a mortgage, nice car,

    • Employment is at will

      At-will employment is not a thing in most of the world, and not even a thing in most of the United States.

      • *developed world. Obvious in some African forest you're unlikely to find employee protection or contract law has any meaningful impact on employer-employee relations.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hwstar ( 35834 )

      At will employment: A United States thing. Not practiced in any other first world country.

      It cuts both ways, but it benefits the employer more than the employee.

      The only advantage for the employee is that you can quit at any time and with no notice and there's nothing the employer can do about it.

      The rest of the first world countries use employment contracts, and you get more job security because the conditions for breach are spelled out in the contract.

  • We need indentured servants, err..H1-B because American workers are ghosting us. Someone familiar to me has literally dropped close to 800 resumes and got 3 interviews, and no jobs. We need to crack down on the ghost job listings by these "sad" employers. And if a recruiter is not getting back to an applicant, that recruiter should be fired. We have no standards in the job application market anymore.

  • I would recommend that you instead do it like the assistant manager that got hired back in the 90s at a university that I worked at:

    He showed up, worked two weeks, then announced that he didn't really like the job, and wouldn't be coming back.

    He had taken vacation from his other job, to see if he liked this one before actually committing to it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hwstar ( 35834 )

      Use your vacation time for something like this. What a waste! If he was getting paid, I'd use unpaid leave and keep the vacation time for something more worthwhile.

  • I've seen a consistent position across employers that it's acceptable to tell a candidate when they show up on their first day to complete paperwork that the job offer has been revoked and they don't have a job waiting. The justification is that nothing is final until the paperwork is signed, and until it's final the employer is free to decide they don't want to fill that position.

    As long as employers take that position, then employees have the same freedom to decide they don't want to accept the offer unti

    • This. It goes both ways. A couple years ago I took a contract temp position in a mostly rural state. It was arranged as an emergency fill with only a couple days notice. So the agency pays $1150 (I shit you not) for a plane ticket to Santa Fe. From there I have to get a rental car and drive about 90 minutes to the site.

      When I get there, there's no hotel arranged. So here I am calling the emergency help line for the agency, and finally get something arranged at some cheap motel on the edge of town. The next

  • The way companies hire now is also completely screwed up. They post phantom jobs to 'Gage Interest' then ask for a pile of credentials that are not necessary. I worked some where a few years ago, they hired this individual with a whole list of Java certifications. They couldn't even write basic simple code, let alone work through production code ( On a dev env) with a debugger to figure out what was broken. Not sure how they got all the certifications. Stuff like that. You force someone to apply for

  • The companies MUST be lying that there is a shortage of skilled labor.
    The facts are: companies hassle and jerk candidates around and make them jump thru countless hoops and they filter out countless candidates then even tell you so.
    Wages have not increased significantly.
    Everyone is complaining about not finding a job.

    They have got to be lying just to get those sweet, sweet defacto migrant slaves⦠no evidence can back up the claim there is a labor shortage. It is a job MARKET, and it is currently

  • Seems to me that if you have to apply for 100 positions in the hopes that you will for sure get at least one offer, and you get 5 offers, you may as well accept them all and see what other bullshit they want to put you through like NDAs, non-competes, drug tests, skin-color tests, etc. If you don't like the bullshit, don't show up. Why waste time and energy telling robots that don't give a shit about you that you aina comin' to their hoedown.

  • A post about not going to work getting thousands of upvotes on the....checks notes......antiwork sub? Will wonders never cease?

  • Oh that...not showing up for a job after you applied, interviewed, and accepted.

    I would like to see that when people do that with an army recruiter after signing up.

    JoshK.

  • Every generation has felt like the deck is stacked against them. And to some extent it's always been true. What's different now is that they get to sit in their homes, reach out, and connect to each other en masse. Then they wind themselves up into cathartic rage about it and reinforce each other's bleak opinion until all nuance is lost.

    Then it's not that jobs are limited, it's that somehow they don't exist. It's not that they can't afford to buy a home, nobody can, and nobody will. It's fatalism on a grand

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