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- American employers are desperate for workers, sometimes hiring employees without full control.
- Recently, some new hires are showing up just long enough to get paid before they disappear.
- A source called the practice a “freewheeling ghost,” according to the Atlanta Federal Reserve.
Faded away. Left read. Get up. Ghost.
It has become a fact of modern social life that someone – at some point – will leave you hanging without any explanation. Chances are, you’ve done the same to someone else.
Now, this act of social disappearance has arrived in the workplace in a new way as American employers scramble to find staff – sometimes hiring candidates without full control over their qualifications.
Ghost images have become such a problem for employers that none other than the
Federal Reserve
Atlanta made mention of it in the Fed’s latest round of economic trends in its 12 districts.
“Retention continued to be a growing problem for businesses,” reported the Atlanta Fed. “Restaurant owners have raised concerns about ‘ghosting coasting’, where a new hire works for a few days and moves to the next restaurant without notice before being fired due to lack of skills.”
The trend can be even more costly when employers offer bonuses and upfront incentives such as free food and discounts for simply applying for or accepting a job.
As disruptive as the trend may be for employers, Adrienne
Soft
, the regional executive of the New Orleans branch of the Atlanta Fed, would be giving workers the benefit of the doubt here.
“The restaurant industry in particular can be a tough place to work,” she told Robert Smith and NPR’s Adrian Ma on the “Planet Money” podcast. “It’s very demanding. And as people who haven’t necessarily worked in this industry before realize, they realize that they may not want to work in this particular job for very long.”
“I hear this from multiple contacts,” she added, “not just in the restaurant industry, but I hear it in manufacturing as well.”
Turnover and retention rates have long been an important reality in the fast food industry in particular. Two years ago, the average monthly turnover rate in the industry was 135%, which basically meant that four people were hired each month for every three people left. This summer, the turnover rate climbed to 144%.
What’s more, data from the US Department of Labor shows that restaurant workers are quitting their jobs at the highest rate in two decades. In the accommodation and food services industry, the quit rate was 5.7% in June 2021, more than double the national average quit rate of 2.7%.
“What restaurants and manufacturers are thinking about is how do we make our industries more attractive to the workforce? How do we deal with the reasons for this ghost drift? So it’s really about retention,” Slack said. .
If you are a worker who has ghosted an employer or an employer who has been ghosted, please contact Dominick Reuter by email. The answers to this story will be kept confidential.
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