‘GHOSTING’ OF WORKPLACES BECOMING A SCARY PROBLEM
At the central Ohio retailer Mutts & Co., just getting applicants or workers to show up can be considered a success some days.
At least a dozen times the past few months, applicants or new workers have ghosted the pet supplies and grooming company for interviews or didn’t arrive for the first day of work. They don’t bother calling either.
“Professional ethics seem to be lacking,” said Mark Vitt, who owns the seven central Ohio stores with his wife, Heather.
As the economy reopens, restaurants, stores and other businesses say finding applicants and scheduling them for interviews is one thing. Getting them to show up is another.
The same goes for newly hired workers who may decide that the job they just landed isn’t worth the effort even after going through interviews and screening.
The result: Some restaurants have had to reduce seating capacity or cut hours, and businesses struggle to fill orders or provide customers the service they expect.
The complaints about applicants ghosting companies comes after the state began requiring Ohioans to resume searching for work as a condition of receiving unemployment benefits.
Undoubtedly, some workers are going through the motions of applying for jobs to keep their benefits, said Catherine Burgett, an employment law attorney with the Frost Brown Todd law firm in Columbus.
“There are some who accept an offer and later change their minds because they’d rather stay on benefits,” she said.
A more likely reason, though, is that applicants received a better offer, such as better pay or a signing bonus from another company and they don’t contact the first company, Burgett said.
Technically, applicants who don’t show up for the interview put their unemployment benefits at risk, if the state knew about it, but the benefits are largely based on applicants self-reporting their job-search efforts, she said.
If an applicant ghosts a company, many would likely have an easy excuse if they did get in trouble, such as child-care issues, transportation problems or mandatory vaccinations, she said.
State workers who monitor unemployment beneficiaries are fairly liberal with the rules, stressed Tom Barnard, a retired employment attorney and an adjunct professor of employment law at Case Western Reserve University. Job seekers don’t need to set up job interviews to keep their benefits as long as they can prove they’re actively searching for work.
“As a practical matter you would have to be doing virtually nothing” to lose your benefits, Barnard said.
Even after workers start, companies might still get ghosted.
“You interview people, hire them and when they do come to work they get their first paycheck and quit,” said Norm Blanchard, director of the Guernsey County Community Improvement Corporation and Port Authority in eastern Ohio.
Blanchard, who speaks with a variety of employers, said the problem is impacting businesses across the spectrum.
“You just can’t get people to come to work,” he said. “It’s really hard right now.”