BENGALURU: Ghosting is the stuff modern nightmares are made up of. The term is popularly used in the dating world when one cuts off all ties with someone, sans any explanation. Companies are noticing a similar pattern, especially with students they recruit from campuses across the city. These ‘ghost’ students seem eager to take up the job but then ditch the employer for better prospects, sometimes even days after they have joined the job.
The recruitment head of a city-based company said, “Last year we made 25-30 offers in the software development domain at a college. Only 50 per cent of them showed up to join. The others did not bother to tell us that they had rejected the offer.” Ghosting includes candidates not turning up for scheduled interviews, accepting the offer but not showing up for work and vanishing from the workplace without any prior notice.
“A recent survey on staffing and workforce solutions has shown that 30 per cent of respondent job seekers attributed workplace ghosting to accepting another job offer and 19 per cent said it occurred because they felt the role was not a good match for them,” another recruiter pointed out.
Colleges tend to allow students to accept more than three offers to help them land a good job. As a result, engineering colleges around Bengaluru are seeing companies issue four to five additional offers in this year’s placements, in order to make up for those who do not show up.
Professor Ravishankar, placement officer at BMS College of Engineering, said, “At least 10 per cent of the companies approach us with such complaints. But if students get better offers, we cannot insist that they join a particular company.”
Some colleges made it a policy for students to not accept more than two offers. For example, at RV College of Engineering, students are restricted to three offers. Professor Sridhar, placement officer at PESIT, said, “Students who gets offers under tier 1 will not be allowed to accept offers under tier 2 companies, because tier 1 has offers above eight lakh,” said.
Students defend their act and say companies earlier used to give offer letters and withdraw the same. “Our seniors got offer letters but were not taken. Now as we are getting better offers we are also ignoring the earlier ones,” said a student.