The Second Call

Hey, I woke up this morning, coffee in hand, and the thing sitting on the patio with me wasn't the weather or the crops. It was an email from a recruiter.

A good one, actually. A position I'm qualified for, one I'd probably do well in. The kind of opportunity that ought to get a person's attention, and it did, for about the length of time it took me to open my job search spreadsheet.

That spreadsheet is where I keep a record of every company I've talked to, applied to, or been approached by over the years. It's not fancy. A row for the company, a column for the date, a column for what happened. So when this recruiter's email came in, I did what I always do. I checked the history.

Turns out this same company had reached out about this same position a year earlier. The person they hired then has apparently moved on, which is how I ended up back in their inbox. But the history told me something more important than the job description did. A year ago, I applied, I interviewed, and I heard nothing. No "thanks for your time." No "we've gone with someone else." Nothing. The company just went quiet, and I was the one left checking my phone for a courtesy that never came.

So when the recruiter and I talked, I gave her the truth as plainly as I could. If a company doesn't have the respect to tell me no, I don't have the interest to talk to them about yes. Not this year.

Here's the connection I keep coming back to. This isn't rare, and I don't have to guess at that, because my spreadsheet tells me so. Thirty percent of the applications in my job search database ended in a ghost. Nearly a third, gone silent. And that list isn't full of strangers. It includes a local cooperative where I hold membership. A national check-off program I contribute to every single year. Companies I promoted, by name, in past jobs of my own. The ghosting isn't isolated to companies I've never heard of or never supported. It's industry-wide, and it reaches all the way into organizations I've helped fund and represent.

I hear versions of this story constantly in agriculture, from young people just starting to look for work, from experienced hands testing the market, from folks who took the leap to apply somewhere new. The application goes in, the interview happens, and then silence. No closure, no courtesy, just a slow fade until the applicant figures out on their own that the answer was no.

The lesson, for me, is that a spreadsheet isn't just record-keeping. It's memory with a purpose. It kept me from walking back into a situation that had already told me who they were, and it did that without a single second of guesswork. Companies that ghost candidates aren't just losing a moment of goodwill. They're writing themselves into somebody's permanent file, and in an industry as connected as ours, that file gets read more than once.

So here's the call to action, for anyone doing the hiring, whether it's a co-op, a family operation, or a Fortune 500 with a recruiter on staff. Close the loop. It costs you one email and about ninety seconds. It costs the applicant nothing, but it costs you a lot more than you think when you skip it.

Agriculture runs on relationships that outlast any single transaction. We ought to treat our people, even the ones we don't hire, the same way we'd want to be treated if the roles were reversed. We can be better than this. I know we can, because most days, we are.