People hate to get “ghosted” in any situation, personal or professional. But for job seekers who may already be struggling with self-esteem, it can be particularly devastating. Ghost Reply is a new online service that will help you compose and send an email nudge to the ghoster, sending a “kind reminder” telling them how unprofessional it is to leave someone hanging like that.
Ghost Reply wants to help you reach catharsis in all of this stressful mess of finding a job. Almost all of the problems and feelings are compounded by this confounded pandemic that has decimated areas of the workforce and taken jobs and threatened people’s financial security. It is understandable to want to lash out at those in power, and sending a Ghost Reply email to the recruiter or HR person may make you feel better in the short term.
In the long run, though, will it solve anything? Ghost Reply suggests it may make the HR person or recruiter reevaluate their hiring processes, indicating this type of email may help them see the error of their ways and start replying to all potential candidates. If it helps them reassess and be more considerate in the future and helps you find closure in the application/interview process, that would be the ideal outcome on all fronts. It is not likely this will happen, though.
The Ghost Reply sample email has the subject line “You have a message from a candidate!” Then it begins, “Hi, (name), You’re receiving this email because a past candidate feels like you ghosted them unfairly.” It then has a space for said candidate to add on any personal notes regarding the recruiter or process while remaining anonymous.
I get it. It’s upsetting to have someone disappear after you’ve spent time and energy applying, possibly even interviewing, only to hear nothing but crickets back from the recruiter or HR person you interacted with. It’s happened to me more than once, and it’s no bueno. We all want to be seen. We all want to be valued. Ghosting is hurtful. The frustration and disappointment, even anger, that you feel is certainly relatable. According to several sources, being ghosted after applying for a job is one of the top complaints from job seekers on the market today.
Will an anonymous, passive-aggressive email achieve your end? Will the chastened company representative suddenly have a lightbulb go off over their heads, creating a wave of change in company policy? I don’t see it. The first sentence of the sample email, in fact, is not going to be well received by HR.
When you start talking about what’s “unfair,” most HR people will tune out immediately. That kind of language in itself is unprofessional and is a red flag to many people. Once you work at a company and know its culture and have built relationships, then, maybe, just maybe, can you start talking about your work-related feelings. I believe in talking about our feelings, but rarely is a work scenario the best place to do so (I speak from experience). Calling it unprofessional is better, less about you and more about the other person’s behavior.
However, it’s unclear how productive Ghost Reply actually is. Or how anonymous, frankly. By process of deduction, the recipient of the email may be able to figure out who sent it, if it even makes it through the company’s spam filters. Even if they cannot pinpoint the exact person, it may cast doubts on several applicants or leave a bad taste in the recruiter’s mouth. It sounds like sour grapes, which is never a good thing.
There may be any number of reasons you didn’t get the job offer or interview, and they may or may not have something to do with you. Recruiters answer your burning questions, including why you may have been ghosted in this recent article in The American Genius.
Ultimately, you will never know why they ghosted you. If it makes you feel better or at least see the issue from both sides, the amount of job candidates ghosting recruiters after applying and even interviewing is equally high. Some people simply either have awful time management skills or awful manners, and at the end of the day, there’s not much you can do about that.
Focus on your own survival while job hunting, instead of these disappointing moments or the person who ghosts you. It will serve you better in the long run than some anonymous revenge email. There are other ways to deal with your frustration and anger when you do get ghosted, though. Try the classic punching your pillow. Try taking a walk around the block. If it helps to put your frustration into words, and it very well may, then do so. Write it on a piece of paper, then burn it. Or type it all in an email and delete it. For your own sake, do NOT put their email address in the “To” line, lest you accidentally hit “Send.”
The sooner you can let it go, the sooner you can move on to finding a better job fit for you.
Roland Estrada
December 14, 2011 at 11:09 am
Technological advances are great and always appreciated on the backend. However, someone needs to fill the niche of designing attractive, modern looking websites for agents. You can spot a real estate website a mile away. You know the look. Because we all have that look – boring, dull and predictable.
If someone could come up with a way to let agents design WYSIWYG sites like Ryan McCann's site with all the tech goodness on the backend… Gold baby! Gold!
https://www.ryansellsedmonton.com/index.php
TheRECoach
December 14, 2011 at 9:08 pm
Eric, help us understand what differentiates this product from using Diverse Solutions IDX on a WordPress.org Blog, with the Agent Press Theme? Diverse Solutions is $29 (or maybe you go crazy with the mapping product for $89 a month) a month and Agent Press with SEO support and a helpdesk is a one time fee of $98.
What's really better and why?
Thanks
Coach
Eric Stegemann
December 15, 2011 at 4:47 pm
Eric
Great question.
There are many HUGE differences.
1) Diverse Solutions does not offer a fully functional CRM system. Our system keeps track of all of the users that register on your site. You can automatically start them on drip email campaigns, send out a newsletter to everyone that has registered and a whole lot more.
2) You mention SEO support, however, I would challenge anyone to beat the SEO that we produce on these sites. They have been written from the ground up for top placement. As an example, the site referenced in the story had about 3000 pages indexed for his market when we took over the site, now it has 11,400! In addition to that in just a few weeks, Tony's Google placement is already moving up. Instead of focusing on what we can sell for 98 a pop, at Tribus we really focused on what RESULTS we could produce for our agents that would speak for themselves. Even the smallest detail has been considered in the code.
Furthermore, we setup a SEO strategy for each site to get optimal ranking. On top of this we setup our system to ping Google each time new listings are added in one of our Realtor's key markets. This helps them get top placement in Google since Google knows that our sites always have the freshest content.
Along with SEO is hosting. Our sites are professionally managed by a team of server specialists to be served as quick as possible. Did you know Google is starting to rank sites based upon how fast they load? If it's over 1.5seconds you could receive lower rankings! Not to mention that our sites are secured. We fix it for you if there are any problems.
3) TRIpress is written by Realtors for Realtors. We've made it significantly easier to setup communities, listings, and more. Our code then automatically pulls in listings in the area, the map, community information and news and a whole lot more!
4) Speaking directly to Diverse. We do work with Diverse and that's why our product is similar to theirs. They offer an amazing product and instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, we choose to work with them to build a suite of new tools on top of their product to make it even better. For example, TRIpress has pop up registration forms. You can't get that on IDXpress. This feature alone should increase lead volume 100s of %. Never asking a user to register for the site is akin to opening up a website that says I'm giving free money away, here take some. We suggest that Realtors don't FORCE their users to register but instead politely ask them after 3-5 listing views.
Furthmore, on top of that we have amazing call to action buttons on our listings, the call to action buttons we have studied and tested to get more requests. We have contextual information about the house for example a map, shopping, schools and other information that many users would want to know about the area. There are even other things that we're working on that I can't even discuss!
5) Altos Market Data – You could go and sign up with Altos and manually build pages for each market you have, however we worked directly with Altos to build the most sophisticated, search engine optimized market data platform out there. There is a reason Altos uses our sites as a demo when showing off their products! When you sign up you have a page automatically created for each market you serve that is beautiful, has numerous calls to action, not to mention the contextual listings and community information included right on the page, helping your site rank higher for those communities!
6) Simplification – Even if a Realtor could get all of our features from a few companies out there. I don't think this is what they want. Realtors are too busy to do setup, management, hosting, and all of that. They want something that just works and is simple for them to use. We've focused on providing a near turn key solution for them. And if you include one of our optional upgrades Posted@ you even get unique, custom, SEO optimized content on your site regularly. TRIpress is a product for serious Realtors that want something they can be proud of that generates them leads and just works.
So with AgentPress or something like that you spend countless hours figuring out how to set it up, signing up for all of these third party services, figuring out how to integrate them with your site, and then in most cases seeing little to no increase in rankings. With ours – we do all of that for you plus we'll be adding more features all of the time at no additional cost! There are other reasons as well, but I hope you see just with the 6 items I listed above that our cost is MORE than worth the price we charge.
TheRECoach
December 15, 2011 at 10:10 pm
Any chance you can "Elaborate" any further!? lol, just kidding … Thanks for the great answer and for the record, I LOVE Posted@, I think it's a biz model long overdue, and at this point, under utilized because of the economy. They (posted@) may be the "Gold Medal" standard for content creation!
Best of luck with this new venture!
Coach
(do you think people will catch on that we know each other? lol you called me Eric!)
TheRECoach
December 16, 2011 at 1:16 pm
Yo "E", one more question .. Statistics indicate that less than 2% of CRM users utilize the additional tools (beyond Client Info)available in most CRMs. Yours has a ton of amazing stuff, how are you gonna get them to understand that, and use those tools?
Coach
Eric Stegemann
December 16, 2011 at 1:49 pm
Well first of all, all of our agents receive a 40 page quick reference guide with photos on each page of how to do exactly everything our system can do. We found this increased uptake immensely. In addition to that, we offer our helpdesk system which has a video for everything in the system as well as bunch of other questions that people ask.
But the biggest reason we see people use the system is because it's where they get their leads. Because thy are all stored in our system agents use it because they want to see what people were interested in and keep a log of communications with the client as well as set reminders to do call backs, send birthday emails, etc.