Ghosting. Premium tiers. Endless swiping. Settling for “good enough.”
That might sound like modern dating. It’s also what job hunting feels like in 2026.
Technology promised to make finding the right job—or the right candidate—easier. Instead, it has created a marketplace where everyone has more choices, less attention, and a stronger sense of being disposable.
Job seekers spray applications across hundreds of openings, often knowing they may never hear back. Employers sift through mountains of résumés, increasingly relying on automated screening to decide who gets noticed.
The result? Nobody feels particularly human.
Ghosting goes both ways
Job candidates can spend hours preparing for an interview, walk away thinking it went well, and then hear absolutely nothing.
A recent paper in the Academy of Management Journal, “Post-Interview Ghosting Casts Dark Shadows on Applicant Reactions,” found that being ghosted can leave candidates angry and feeling treated “like commodities”—while also damaging an employer’s reputation.
Candidates are returning the favor. A 2023 Indeed survey found that 62% of job seekers planned to ghost a prospective employer in a future search, up from 37% in 2019.
Jennifer Dulski, CEO of AI leadership platform Rising Team, says she’s even seeing job seekers adopt the dating term “NATO”—“not attached to outcome.”
In other words: Apply everywhere. Feel nothing. Move on.
That creates a vicious cycle. Candidates expect rejection or silence, so they apply more broadly and invest less in each opportunity.
Getting hired doesn’t mean finding the match
Even after someone lands a job, the dating analogy doesn’t disappear.
Leena Rinne, a leadership executive at Skillsoft, says many employees are effectively in workplace “situationships”: They’re there for now, but already wondering what comes next.
The data backs up the detachment. Gallup found global employee engagement fell for a second consecutive year in 2025, reaching its lowest point since 2020. In the U.S., just 31% of employees were engaged in the first half of 2026, while 18% were actively disengaged.
Why would employees feel loyal to organizations that don’t feel loyal to them?
If both sides treat a job as temporary from day one, Rinne argues, that’s not just an employee problem. It’s a leadership problem.
The antidote might be more human—and less tech
Dating-weary millennials and Gen Zers are increasingly looking beyond apps and meeting people in person. Neil Costa, CEO of recruitment marketing agency HireClix, sees a similar opportunity in hiring.
Real-world recruiting events let candidates and employers actually meet before reducing each other to résumés, keywords, and algorithms.
Online platforms are also experimenting with ways to make genuine interest stand out. Greenhouse, for example, has a “Dream Job” feature that gives users one monthly token to signal that a particular role is the one they really want—a workplace version of a dating-app superlike.
Scarcity creates meaning. If you can only signal serious interest once, you have to think about where to use it.
But perhaps the bigger lesson is that employers need to stop searching for the perfect candidate.
No person checks every box. No job does either.
Leena Rinne argues that someone who is 80% or 90% of the way there may be a better long-term hire than a supposedly perfect candidate who requires no investment.
The same principle applies to careers. A good job won’t be exciting every day. A good organization won’t be perfect. The goal isn’t perpetual excitement—it’s a relationship worth working on.
As Costa puts it, every job has ups and downs, just like life and relationships.
Maybe the future of work doesn’t need another algorithm.
Maybe it needs better judgment, more patience, and a little more humanity.
