Recently, I’m ashamed to admit, I received an email that initially made me feel warm, human, even grateful: a rejection for a job I’d applied to. But my thankful feelings quickly curdled into self-loathing—the nausea one gets when looking back over pathetic, paragraphs-long texts to an ex, whose monosyllabic responses suggested they’d clearly moved on. The rejection was a form letter, not even a late-round, personalized “we gave you serious consideration but ultimately decided to hire a VP’s nephew” message. I was so accustomed to being treated with indifference, I realized, that the barest acknowledgment of my existence felt like a win.

Putting aside the question of whether the job market itself is in good or bad shape right now (it’s bad), the code of what behavior is and isn’t acceptable seems to have broken down. Ghosting has become more rampant not just by employers but also by job seekers. In 2024, candidates reviewing employers on the website Glassdoor used the term ghosting nearly three times as much as they did in 2020. And a 2023 Indeed survey of job seekers found that 62 percent of respondents planned to ghost a prospective employer in a future job search, compared with only 37 percent in 2019. The disappearing act is not just in the early rounds, either. Employers routinely ask applicants to do multiple interviews and time-consuming test work, and are never heard from again; a survey this year from Greenhouse, a recruiting-software company, found that nearly two out of every three candidates in the U.S. had been ghosted after an interview. Meanwhile, some applicants who make it through the onerous hiring process and accept jobs never show up for their first day. One California recruiter told me that some of the candidates who ditched had even signed offers for positions that paid six-figure salaries. Today, many people on both sides of the hiring equation—whether because of convenience, self-protection, or resentment—have abandoned even the pretense of courtesy, resulting in a job market that’s as rude as it is dysfunctional.

It might sound glib to blame a simple loss of manners for employment woes. The way cultural norms tell people to comport themselves can seem silly—like empty formality (Smile even if you don’t mean it) or even hypocrisy, because this behavior often hides the way people actually feel or what they actually want to say. But try going a single day telling a boss or a landlord, an employee or a co-worker, what you really think, and why everybody obscures their true opinions all the time would quickly become apparent.

Manners, it turns out, have long been smoothing over a lot of rough edges in the hiring process, hiding the uglier realities that can emerge from the unequal relationship between employers and the employed. In a society where many workers have little power, the fig leaf of societal niceties is often the only difference between a functioning system built on trust and a polarized one roiled by humiliation, disgust, and retribution.

Before a code of conduct was something that HR had you read and initial when you started a job, it was the main deterrent against open class warfare. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, in Europe and America, manners essentially boiled down to “Good fences make good neighbors.” People avoided class conflict mainly by avoiding each other; associating outside your class was strongly discouraged, according to Informalization, a history of manners by the sociologist Cas Wouters. When “class mixing” was necessary, people maintained psychological distance by acting with extreme formality, often making elaborate shows of haughty superiority or craven deference. When people clashed, norms dictated that the privileged classes were afforded the prerogative of violence; retribution from lower classes tended to be penalized. An 1859 guide to courtesy, The Habits of Good Society, for instance, advised that if a gentleman were confronted with a “dishonest cabman,” then “one well-dealt blow settles the whole matter.” The author goes on to specify that violence is only for punishing a “man of a class beneath your own.” (This may partly explain why they had so many revolutions back then.)

In the late 19th century, class mobilization and urban density increased, and people of different backgrounds had to live and work in close proximity to one another. Courtesy slowly evolved into a system of “self-regulation,” Wouters writes. In other words, the upper class had to start acting like it tolerated the lower ones when they interacted. The main goal of acting with these manners, according to Wouters, was to eliminate the kind of gross “displays of superiority” that could inflame social conflicts. Etiquette manuals from this period are filled with reminders that “social inferiors” are human beings, though the reluctant and heavily qualified tone of the writing often suggested that the author was convincing themselves as much as the reader (and notably, race was not explicitly mentioned in the manuals for many years).

Still, the new rules of social conduct codified the notion that no matter people’s social class, they were, at least in theory, entitled to being treated with decency. As these changes took hold, complementary displays of superiority and deference died out; talk of social “superiors” and “inferiors” disappeared even from etiquette manuals. But it was mostly an aesthetic change. Differences in status remained, dictated by class but also by factors such as race, gender, and age. In the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s book The Theory of the Leisure Class, he points out that expressions of superiority became less direct—people demonstrated their status more with the sort of clothes and goods they bought than by, say, beating a cabman with a cane.

In the modern workplace, under the new self-regulatory form of manners, a boss “asked” an employee to do something even though they weren’t really asking, and the employee said “sure” when they both knew he didn’t have a choice. Or, to fast-forward to the more recent past, these internalized norms are the reason HR might send a form rejection email stating that the company “gave your application very careful consideration,” when in fact the résumé was in the first tranche of 2,000 auto-deletions. They’re also why a rejected applicant might reply “Appreciate the opportunity; thanks for your time” when they actually mean “I hope there is a catastrophic natural-gas leak in your office.”

But this style of courtesy, like a callus on your heel, is maintained by constant friction, and with the rise of 21st-century technology, many interactions that might have once happened face-to-face now take place via a screen. Tech has essentially allowed society to revert to the 18th-century style of avoidance, the British etiquette expert William Hanson told me. “A screen gives people the illusion of distance and, with it, a sense of moral exemption,” Hanson said. “If I can’t see you wince, then perhaps I haven’t hurt you.” People still avoided one another in the past, of course—but there were more layers of formality to cushion the blow, at least for the upper classes. They sent calling cards ahead to announce their arrival, Hanson explained, and a butler could always convey that you were “not at home” in a pinch. Contemporary avoidance is a merciless absence. “We’ve confused convenience with civility,” Hanson said. “The truth is, good manners demand effort, and effort is precisely what technology has generally been designed to remove.”

Any display of discourtesy is an assertion of power, and those with more power tend to be more prone to abuse it. In the case of the job market, employers are typically the ones with most of the control. Besides ghosting, multiple researchers told me, employers engage in all sorts of behavior that might mislead applicants, such as reposting positions despite already having promising candidates. Fake jobs, which employers sometimes use to mine data from the applicant pool, are so common now as to have the nickname “ghost-job postings”; a survey that polled more than 750 U.S. recruiters found that 81 percent of them said their employers had posted roles that were either already filled or never existed. The situation has gotten so bad that lawmakers in Ontario, Canada, recently made employer ghosting illegal. “When courtesy declines,” Hanson said, “the edges of status reappear, sharper and more visible.” No wonder that applying for a job today can feel like feeding both one’s résumé and one’s dignity into a wood chipper.