The Ghosting Game: How pandemic-era hiring has become psychological warfare for freelancers

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.

What began as an unfortunate byproduct of overwhelmed HR departments has morphed into something far more sinister: a deliberate psychological assault on working professionals who dare to seek employment.

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.

Uncertainty? Being overwhelmed? These are the excuses of people who’ve forgotten that basic human decency costs nothing to implement.

The theatre of cruelty

The creative industries have been particularly savaged by this trend. Technical workers in theatre are already amongst the most precarious of freelance professions. They find themselves lurking in an increasingly hostile recruitment market where silence has become the standard response to job applications.

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.

A troubling report from Greenhouse reveals that 79% admit they’re feeling heightened anxiety in this current job market. This isn’t merely job market jitters. This is a generation of workers being systematically traumatised by an employment system that has abandoned basic courtesy.

The pandemic gave hiring managers a convenient excuse to be lazy. Suddenly, being “too busy” became an acceptable excuse for treating fellow professionals like disposable commodities. What started as crisis management has calcified into standard practice, leaving candidates in a perpetual state of limbo.

The psychological warfare

Make no mistake: this is psychological warfare. Every unanswered email, every ignored follow-up, every void where feedback should be is a calculated assault on professional confidence. The message is clear: you are replaceable, forgettable, and ultimately worthless.

For freelancers and contractors, who already exist in a state of professional vulnerability, this represents an existential threat. Without the safety net of permanent employment, each ghosting incident becomes a reminder of just how expendable we’ve become in the post-pandemic economy.

The particularly insidious aspect is how ghosting has been reframed as a somehow acceptable business practice. Career experts suggest that a hot job market and “circular” behaviour have led the practice to become more common, as if treating humans like disposable objects is merely an inevitable market correction rather than a moral failing.

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.

This isn’t merely unprofessional, it’s cruel. It demonstrates a callous disregard for the mental health and professional dignity of people who have invested time, energy, and hope in their companies, projects or productions.

“After the pandemic, a large number of technical theatre and stage management staff decided to leave the industry for a more stable lifestyle,” relays Matt Elesmore, a freelance company/stage manager based in Kent.

He explains the dangers he has witnessed firsthand in his industry in an opinion piece for The Stage, “The experiences people are having now regarding ghosting is leading to a depletion of staff in the industry. Why stay in an industry where a courteous rejection email is too much to offer?”

He continues, “Unfortunately, if production companies carry on with this style of hiring, more and more of the highly skilled workforce will disappear due to feeling undervalued and underappreciated. It is paramount that production companies examine their responses to interviewees and provide the same level of consideration the candidates put into compiling their application by a set deadline and to certain specifications.” 

Ghostbusters

The solution isn’t necessarily complex. It just requires a shift in how we perceive the hiring process. Recruitment isn’t a one-way transaction where employers hold all the power. It’s a professional interaction that deserves basic courtesy.

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.

The pandemic may have normalised ghosting, but we don’t have to accept it as inevitable. It’s time we called it what it is: bad manners as business practice.