Imagine going through round after round of interviews for your dream job, being told that you got the job…and then…nothing.

That’s what happened to one London-based worker, who was told she got the job, and never heard from them again. Ghosting by both employers and companies alike is becoming increasingly common. Are we stuck in a spiral?

What else matters this week?

How to prevent a lost generation of women at work.

Workers question office life, two years later.

Can we celebrate neurodiversity yet?

The power of lifelong learning.

We’ve got a full breakdown of all the top headlines you can’t miss this week.

#1. Why workers and employers are ghosting each other.

Laura was invited for a final-stage interview at a multinational company in London, and she thought she was on the cusp of landing her dream job.

“It was presented to me as a formality,” she told the BBC. “The interview went well, and I was later told I’d got the job.”

But after that – nothing. Despite those initial guarantees, Laura never got any contract or follow-up emails. In fact, she barely heard from the company at all. She is one of many workers who were ghosted. Instead of sending formal rejection letters, or explaining what happened, her potential employer ignored her.

It’s not just companies, either. Employees are ghosting back. Some of that ghosting is happening during the interview process, while others never even show up to work. Are we stuck in a ghosting spiral? Read more at the BBC.

#2. Remote work has opened the door to a new approach to hiring.

Imagine going back in time to 2019 and telling a C-suite executive that their entire workforce would have to move to remote work with just a few days’ notice.

That C-level executive would probably laugh.

But that’s exactly what happened. In 2020, countless companies were forced to transition to remote work by no choice of their own. The experiment, often called the Great Remote Work Experiment, let organizations see the upsides to remote work. Many executives might not have considered remote work otherwise.

But it also showed workers that they don’t have to be locked into a traditional, 9-to-5 office schedule.

That’s why it’s so important for companies and organizations to reassess the way they work. Does project-based work or temporary work fit better for freelancers? How much firm-specific knowledge is required for a project? How can open talent offer companies better flexibility. Read more in the Harvard Business Review.

#3. The “new normal” applies to the cyber threat landscape, too.

There’s been a lot of talk about the “New Normal.” As a growing number of organizations moved their workplaces online, tech teams had to implement short-term fixes… that later became more permanent. Those changes that happened as companies adjusted to the New Normal applies to cyber threats in the workplace, too.

Deep Instinct, a pioneer in applying deep learning to cybersecurity, released their bi-annual Cyber Threat Landscape Report. Here are some of the key learnings for companies:

• Supply chain attacks are being used to widen the potential reach of a cyber attack
• There’s been a shift towards more high-profile attacks
• The public and private sector have collaborated more to fight cyber threats
• Zero-day exploits aren’t new, but bad actors are working harder than ever to develop exploits against these vulnerabilities

Read more at Forbes.

#4. Goldman Sachs is ordering employees back to the office.

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon wants his employees to resume working together in person. But when the company reopened its 44-story headquarters last month, the turnout was tepid at best. Only half of their HQ workers showed up, despite having over two weeks notice.

It was a move made in defiance of the CEO’s desire to have everyone back in the office as soon as possible.

Top-tier tech firms like Salesforce and Twitter told workers they can work remotely full-time. Even some of Goldman’s rivals, like Citigroup and UBS, let their staffers work from home regularly. But CEO David Solomon has said the opposite.

Remote work “is not ideal for us, and it’s not a new normal,” Solomon famously told a finance industry conference in February 2021. “It’s an aberration that we’re going to correct as quickly as possible.”

One year later, he’s still not backing down. “The secret sauce to our organization is, we attract thousands of really extraordinary young people who come to Goldman Sachs to learn to work, to create a network of other extraordinary people, and work very hard to serve our clients,” the CEO told Fortune last month. Read the full story here.

#5. What Equal Pay Day is – and is not – telling us.

This year, Equal Pay Day falls on March 15. That signifies how far into the new year the average woman must work to be paid what the average man was paid the year before. This year, the day falls slightly earlier than 2021, signifying to some a general improvement. Are the numbers telling the whole story?

Not quite.

In February 2021, 1.1 million fewer women were in the labor force than at the start of the pandemic. That number doesn’t accurately reflect the women who moved to part-time roles or who were forced out of the labor market due to a lack of childcare, or other factors.

“It is important for us to also look at all workers,” Jasmine Tucker, director of research at the National Women’s Law Center, told Forbes. “If you lost your job, if you were forced into part-time work because you were a retail or restaurant worker and didn't have as many hours [during the pandemic], the wage gap is much wider.” Read the full story here.