The Newest Hiring Headache: Ghosting

Utah Valley Dental Laboratory, Provo, UT, follows a fairly standard hiring process: once it receives responses to a job posting, it does short phone interviews to assess the candidates. “If we like them, we give them an overview of the job and set up a date and time for an interview,” says JD Henderson, Vice President/Lab Manager. “And then we never hear from about one-third of them again; they don’t show up at the appointed time and, if we text, email or call, they don’t respond.”

Like more and more companies across a range of industries, laboratories are being “ghosted”—when job applicants, and sometimes even new hires, abruptly cut off contact and go silent—a practice commonly associated with online dating. 

Employers say millennials are often the worst offenders, and an abundance of available jobs, the sustained labor shortage and candidates adverse to confrontation are...