Blog Economie Numérique - Hired, then disappeared : Inside the rise of "career catfishing"

A new generation of workers is rewriting the rules of quitting by simply not showing up. This phenomenon is called career catfishing, the ghosting trend flipping the balance of power in hiring.

Picture the scene from the employer’s side. Weeks of interviews, a desk set up, a laptop configured, a welcome email drafted. Day one arrives, and nobody does. No call, no message, no explanation. The new hire has simply disappeared, as if they never existed at all. Recruiters have started calling it « career catfishing, » borrowing a term first used to describe online daters who invent a fake identity to lure someone in.

The numbers behind the vanishing act

According to some HR publications this year, roughly a third of Gen Z workers admit to having ghosted an employer after accepting a position. Millennials are not far behind, at around a quarter, while the practice remains far rarer, though not absent, among Gen X and baby boomer workers. What was once dismissed as a quirk of younger job seekers now shows up, in smaller numbers, across every generation in the workforce.

France Travail, the national employment agency, has documented the phenomenon directly. Indeed, candidates who sail through interviews, receive a formal promise of employment, and then go silent right before their start date, forcing employers to restart a recruitment process from scratch or scramble for temporary staff. What makes the French case notable is the context surrounding it.

Whoever ghosts first

That statistic is the key to understanding why career catfishing has spread so quickly. It is very often framed, by the candidates who practice it, as retaliation rather than rudeness. Long before workers started disappearing on employers, employers were disappearing on workers, leaving applications unanswered, interviews unfollowed, promises of « we’ll get back to you » broken by default rather than by decision. For a generation that has spent months submitting applications into what feels like a void, failing to show up on day one can read less like betrayal and more like a company finally being handed its own medicine.

Nearly a quarter of candidates who admit to ghosting an employer say they simply felt empowered by it, and some of then say that they have gone on to publicly criticize a former or prospective employer on social media afterward. Recruitment has always been an asymmetric relationship, with the employer holding most of the visible power, the ability to reject silently, to reschedule without apology, to let an application die in an inbox. Career catfishing is, in part, a blunt correction to that asymmetry, executed by candidates who have realized that in a tight labor market, silence can be a weapon available to both sides.

Why this generation, why now

Two forces appear to be converging. The first is economic. Indeed, application volumes have exploded as job seekers, often encouraged by AI-assisted tools that can generate dozens of tailored CVs in an afternoon, apply to far more roles than they ever expected to actually want. Accepting several offers in parallel and quietly choosing the best one at the last moment has become a rational, hedge against a market where any single offer might not materialize or might fall through.

The second is simply digital distance. Much of modern recruitment happens without the two sides ever meeting in person until, at best, a final interview. Offer letters arrive by email, onboarding paperwork is signed electronically. When an entire relationship has been mediated through screens, ending it by going silent can feel less like abandoning a person and more like closing a browser tab.

The cost of both practices

For employers, the damage is real. A canceled start means restarting a search that may have taken months, reactivating candidates who have since accepted other offers, or paying premium rates for temporary staff to cover the gap. Multiply that across a tight sector (healthcare, hospitality, warehousing, tech) and the aggregate cost to hiring pipelines becomes significant, even if no single company likes to admit how often it happens.

But the reputational cost of the practice that provoked it in the first place may be just as bad. Candidates who are ghosted report losing confidence not just in the company that ignored them, but in their own qualifications. In an era when a company’s treatment of rejected candidates spreads instantly on social media and review sites, silence has stopped being free. Both employer ghosting and career catfishing, in other words, are symptoms of the same underlying breakdown : a hiring process that has scaled up its volume of applications and interviews far faster than it has scaled up basic, human courtesy.

What happens next

Some employers are already adjusting. Recruiters interviewed on the topic describe compressing response times, keeping in regular contact with candidates between the offer and the start date, and treating « closing the loop », even with a simple, timely rejection. In France, the appetite for something more binding is striking. Indeed, the same 2026 survey, well over eight in ten workers said they would support a law requiring companies to formally respond to every candidate who reaches interview stage.

Whether or not such a rule ever materializes, career catfishing has already made its point. It is not, at its core, a story about a lazy or disloyal generation, however tempting that framing is for employers stung by an empty desk on a Monday morning. It is a mirror held up to a recruitment industry that got very good at generating interest in candidates, and comparatively bad at treating them like people once the interest stopped being useful. Ghosting, it turns out, is not a generational trait. It is what happens when nobody involved feels obligated to say goodbye.

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