Opinion
Last week, I sat next to my phone at the end of a long day and waited for it to ring. The caller was 15 minutes late. I had the same anxious feeling that I’d had when I’d dealt with men off dating apps. They weren’t going to call. I’d been stood up.
This time, I wasn’t waiting around for a guy. I was waiting for a recruitment manager to see if I’d get a job.
Welcome to 2026, when, sadly, the toxic behaviour from apps such as Tinder has crept into the hiring process, to the detriment of desperate jobseekers.
I don’t have an official name for this new practice, which I’ve encountered twice in the past month while applying for part-time roles. But this is what’s happened: potential employers have long-listed me for interviews at very short notice, even though (unbeknown to yours truly) they already had enough candidates. Then they have cancelled the meetings abruptly, saying they’d found someone else.
In dating language, it could be called a “booty call” (a short-notice message to hook up), “flaking” or “bailing” (what it says on the tin). But probably the most apt term from modern dating parlance is “benching” (keeping someone as a back-up while other options are explored).
Most recently, I received a text message from a hiring manager one morning in which she asked me to have a chat with her at 4.30pm the same day. “Sure thing,” I texted back, before making some quick notes and getting my head into interview mode.
By the time 4.45pm came around, I hadn’t heard from her. I knew something was up, and pretty soon I received a text telling me that she’d just finished interviewing for the day and had found a suitable candidate, so we wouldn’t need to chat.
I never even spoke to her on the phone. She was a human – I think – but I might as well have been communicating with an AI bot. And she had been texting me, a real person, albeit an easily disposable one, I was now discovering.
To say that I was flabbergasted to be “benched” so casually via SMS for a job is an understatement. Yes, Gen Zs are taking iced coffees into interviews. But with this behaviour, I can imagine they’re consuming something stronger outside work hours.
Then we have “ghosting”, as it’s known, a practice now so common that there are jokes about it in the Halloween lead-up on professional networking site LinkedIn. Not good jokes, mind. It is LinkedIn, after all.
There is at least some good news on this front, though, and it comes from the land known for its nice manners that has also given us the gift that is leader Mark Carney. A law came into force this year in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, banning “ghosting” in the hiring process.
Under an amendment to Ontario’s Employment Standards Act, employers with 25 or more staff must notify candidates within 45 days of their final interview whether they have been successful in landing the job or not. Employers who fail to respond can be fined up to about $100,000.
In Australia, we wait to see if employers will be forced to give up the ghost, a move that would surely take some power away from companies and hand it back to workers. Human resources executive Jessica Ciccozzi has noted that in today’s world of social media shaming and corporate brand risk, employers would do well to improve transparency and accountability.
“Candidates are already demanding better communication,” she writes, adding that “silence can damage brand credibility in ways that are difficult to repair”.
Until the hot mess that is the current hiring system can be sorted out, it’s perhaps best to look at it with a silver-lining approach. I am thankful that, just as I’ve dodged bullets in the past when it comes to matters of the heart, I’ve dodged some in my working life, too.
Amy Fallon is a journalist and media consultant.
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