Increasingly, organizations are being ghosted by new hires as the freshly recruited employees never show up for work, reported The Wall Street Journal May 5.
Many companies are already struggling to hire enough staff, now some of those new hires are getting cold feet or deciding not to turn up on the first day without telling their supervisors. While not new, this phenomenon has picked up speed throughout the pandemic as the tight labor market has given potential employees more power.
"The incidence of so-called ghosting — of accepting offers and then saying that they’ll start and not showing up — is at a record high," Jonas Prising, chairman and CEO of staffing agency ManpowerGroup told the Journal. "It's multiples of what we've ever seen in other tight labor market cycles."
Southwest Airlines said that between 15 percent and 20 percent of new hires that accept offers never show up to work and security and facility-services provider Allied Universal said almost 15 percent of recruits never turn up on the first day.