The Vacancy

At 02:17 a.m., Emily’s phone lit the ceiling like a match struck in a crypt.

One email. One word.

Soon.

Hope licked at her ribs. Then the cold moved in. She opened the portal with trembling, midnight-shaky hands. Her status sat there, perfectly still and perfectly wrong:

Under review…

The ellipsis blinked. Once. Twice. Never finishing. The loading bar crawled and stopped, crawled and stopped, as if it too were listening.

Rain knifed the window. The radiator clicked like distant footsteps. In the corner, her jacket slumped on the chair and learned the shape of a person.

She watched the portal until her eyes stung. Nothing changed. The screen’s blue cast turned her room into a waiting room with no receptionist. She refreshed. She refreshed again. She refreshed until the button squeaked in her head.

Sleep didn’t come. Lights off, the phone became a lighthouse. Every buzz, a flare. Every flare, a false alarm. Grocery slots. A sale on trainers. A newsletter she never asked for. Her heart rose, fell, and left dents.

By morning, the cursor’s blink had a personality. Patient. Polite. Predatory.

Days stretched thin. Each one a corridor with no doors. Emily lived on the threshold: kettle on, ear pricked; shower running, phone propped on the sink; laptop open, portal tab pinned. In daylight, the status was manageable. At night, it breathed.

The dream started on night four.

A corporate corridor. Carpet deadening her steps. Frosted glass panels with names that refused to be read. She walked past coats on pegs—heavy coats, expensive coats, coats holding their sleeves as if holding hands. A whiteboard waited at the end, humming with old notes. At the bottom of a checklist:

Ghost.

No tick. Not yet.

She woke with the taste of dry board pen and the word Soon echoing like a footfall that never arrived.

On day six, the portal developed a stutter. Her name glitched at the top of the page—Emliy, Emliy, Emly—before snapping back. She blinked hard and blamed the Wi-Fi. The ellipsis pulsed in time with her pulse. Under review… Thud. Under review… Thud. She phoned the number in the footer.

“Hi—just checking on the status of my application?”

A soft click. The distant fluff of a headset mic. A voice in a room she could not imagine.

“The team will be in touch… soon.”

The call ended of its own accord.

By day eight, the house absorbed the waiting. The hallway light flickered when she refreshed the page. The fridge hummed softly until the status pulsed, and then it went quiet, as if listening. Emails arrived that weren’t emails: blank, sender unknown, subject lines like breaths. Her phone buzzed twice at 03:03, once at 03:33, and again at 03:36, as if someone were learning the pattern of her sleep.

She started rehearsing answers to the empty room. “Tell us about a time—” she began, and the jacket’s shadow lengthened, a second silhouette nodding along. “Why do you want this role?” The radiator clicked. “What would your colleagues say about you?” The ellipsis blinked. She realised she was waiting for it to clap.

On day ten, she refreshed and the portal refused to load. The padlock spun. The URL elongated, letters sliding out of order. When it finally opened, the headline had changed:

Under reconsideration…

She smiled with her whole body. The bar moved. Moved. Stopped. Her reflection in the screen grinned back at her. The white of her teeth looked too white. The room behind her looked deeper than the room she was in.

That night, the corridor returned. Longer. Colder. The coats turned their collars as she passed. The whiteboard now had three lines ghosting beneath the final one:

Under reconsideration…

Under water…

Under.

A pen hung from a string. She reached for it. The air held her wrist.

On day twelve, LinkedIn bloomed with confetti.

So thrilled to welcome our new [Job Title]!

Faces she didn’t know beamed at her with the glassy warmth of good lighting. She went very still. The phone slipped on the duvet, and the screen flashed her face. For a second she didn’t recognise herself. The portal blinked. Her ceiling light hummed a note she’d never heard before.

That evening she went to the office. The building’s glass watched her cross the lobby. The receptionist smiled with every tooth but none of the eyes.

“Hi—I applied for the [Job Title] a couple of weeks ago, and I—”

“The team will be in touch soon,” the receptionist said, before Emily had finished. The words came out perfectly placed, like a recorded message slid into a mouth.

“How soon is—” Emily started, but the sliding doors were already opening for her to leave. She stood outside with the rain in her hair and the building behind her, both of them running.

At home, the portal locked. A red bar. Access denied. Her email pinged.

A survey.

How did we do?

She laughed. It came out like tearing fabric. She clicked. The questions were nothing. The answers were impossible. The page asked her to rate the temperature of a room she’d never been allowed into.

The house exhaled. The ellipsis in her head kept blinking. Blink. Blink. Blink. She put the kettle on and didn’t drink the tea. She wrote a message to herself and didn’t send it. She placed the phone face down and didn’t move away.

At 02:17 a.m., the phone decided. It lit the room again. She flipped it over.

No Subject. No Sender. No Body.

Just an attachment. A photo. Her room, taken from the doorway. The jacket on the chair. The phone in her hand. The portal on the screen, reflected in her eyes.

The whiteboard returned, not in memory now but in the glow off glass. The final line brightened.

Ghost.

A neat tick bloomed in black like a bruise spreading under skin.

Emily’s inbox filled with silence. Not empty—full. Full of the weight of messages that would never arrive. The status in her head changed shape. Not Under review. Not Under reconsideration. Not Under.

Below.

That word found a place behind her ribs and sat down.

Morning came at its usual time. She opened one eye. The phone was a small sun. Another buzz—one more—just enough to make a person believe. She didn’t move.

The message previewed itself.

Soon.

The same word. The same hour. The same metallic lift in the heart, the same drop. The timeline had looped. Or maybe it had always been a circle. Or maybe the circle was her.

In the corner, the jacket learned to breathe.

The radiator clicked, and the portal blinked in the black mirror of the screen, and somewhere inside the building with too much glass and too much silence, a whiteboard was wiped clean, ready for a fresh list.

She waited anyway. Because that’s what the haunted do.

And the haunted are always… soon.

The twist (and the truth)

This isn’t made up. It happens every day.

People put hours into an application. They study your values. They rehearse their answers to questions you may never ask. And then — nothing. No reply. No closure. Just a bright little “We’ll be in touch soon” that turns into a cold spot in the room.

Ghosting doesn’t just haunt candidates. It haunts brands. It lingers in Glassdoor reviews, in WhatsApp groups, in the space where your good reputation should be. Culture starts at the interview. If you vanish there, everything you say about being people-first rings hollow.

The fix isn’t witchcraft:

1. A clear timeline in the first email.
2. A real human name candidates can write to.
3. A simple “no, thank you” when it’s a no.
4. A line or two of feedback when you can.
5. A portal that closes the loop instead of swallowing it.

At WeLove9am, we help employers turn their haunted hiring into honest, human experience. No jump-scares. No vanishing acts. Just empathy, clarity and follow-through — the kind that keeps your brand warm, alive and very much present.

Because in the world of work, the real horror isn’t the monster in the corridor.

It’s the silence at the end of the process.

Don’t be the ghost in someone’s job search. If you want help building a candidate journey that actually calls back, we’re right here.