The Silent Struggle: How Ghosting in Hiring is Shattering Freelancers' Mental Health

The pandemic has turned many hiring managers and clients into apathetic ghosting gatekeepers, leaving freelancers battling psychological warfare. We look at the dangers of ghosting in recruitment and how candidates can come out the other side less broken.

The silence is deafening. You’ve pitched, and it was looking like all green lights. You followed up professionally and waited patiently for that inevitable response. But it never comes.

Welcome to the post-pandemic hiring market, where ghosting has transformed from a dating app faux pas into an epidemic that’s systematically dismantling the mental health of contractors and freelancers from Boston to Barcelona to Brighton.

The Phantom Menace of Modern Recruitment

Around 81 per cent of recruiters acknowledged that their employers posted ghost jobs, and more than one-third admitted up to a quarter of all openings they listed fell into that category, according to recent data from MyPerfectResume. That is four out of five recruiters being complicit in what amounts to corporate catfishing on an industrial scale.

Meanwhile, HR Dive reports that eight in ten hiring managers admit to ghosting candidates, citing reasons that are akin to apathy and professional laziness: uncertainty, being overwhelmed with CVs and a poor fit between the candidate and company.

The Psychological Toll

The psychological toll is immense. When you’re a contractor or freelancer, every pitch, every application, every follow-up email represents not just potential work, but validation of your professional worth. The sustained silence that follows becomes a form of gaslighting that whispers: “Perhaps you’re not good enough. Perhaps you never were.”

The Pandemic’s Poisonous Legacy

The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t create ghosting culture, it weaponised it. Sadly, remote working normalised digital distance, making it easier for hiring managers to dehumanise candidates into mere email addresses rather than real people with mortgages, families, and fragile egos that require occasional attention.

The Cost of Silence

Hiring managers who ghost as practice fail to grasp that their silence costs them nothing, while imposing enormous psychological costs on candidates. A simple email takes thirty seconds to send. Instead, they choose to inflict weeks or months of uncertainty, forcing candidates to wonder whether they should continue waiting or move on.

How to Fight Back

For contractors and freelancers, the psychological impact of ghosting culture demands active resistance:

• Set clear deadlines for responses in your initial communications
• Follow up once, then move on
• Protect your mental health by recognising that their silence says nothing about your worth and everything about their character

Any organisation willing to ghost you during the hiring process has revealed exactly how they’ll treat you as an employee, contractor or recruitment firm. Consider their silence a favour. They’ve saved you from discovering their unprofessionalism the hard way.