UpTrajectory Review

The creative job market has become so broken that a Melbourne designer named Felix Toohey now builds sculptural résumés—foam sandwiches, paper latte art—to physically force his way past employer indifference. Fast Company profiles his 'Ghosting Busters' series, where increasingly elaborate objects serve as CV delivery mechanisms for an industry where digital applications vanish into automated voids. Toohey's gimmicks are clever enough to earn Instagram attention, but the deeper story is what they reveal about hiring dysfunction: companies post fake openings, ignore applicants entirely, and leave qualified candidates constructing foam food just to be seen. This is not a trend piece about creative marketing. It is a symptom report on institutional failure.

For small-business operators, this should land uncomfortably close to home. Toohey's stunts target the same large-agency world many of you compete against for talent, and his frustration mirrors what your own applicants likely feel—except they cannot afford sandwich foam. The piece underscores a critical asymmetry: big employers with broken processes drive desperate behavior that warps expectations for everyone. When candidates believe only spectacle gets noticed, the quiet competent operator who reads your posting and submits a standard application may assume you are another ghost job and never bother. Your hiring process is not just competing with other small businesses; it is competing with the cynicism that giants have manufactured.

What the article underweights is the structural rot behind the anecdotes. Toohey's 'unhinged résumés' are framed as plucky innovation rather than rational adaptation to a market where signaling costs have spiraled absurdly high. The piece mentions ghost jobs without examining why employers post them—resume harvesting, maintaining appearance of growth, satisfying internal bureaucracies—nor does it press whether Toohey's approach actually works beyond social metrics. We are skeptical that sculpture converts to employment at rates justifying the labor; the project may be portfolio-building for a designer more than job-seeking. The headline promises analysis of ghost jobs' meaning for small-business hiring, then delivers a profile. The gap is telling.

The downstream effects ripple in directions Fast Company does not pursue. If spectacle becomes the baseline for visibility, hiring costs rise for everyone—more time sorting gimmicks, more false positives on flash over substance, more candidates self-selecting out of straightforward processes. For small businesses without HR departments, this is particularly punishing: you lack the infrastructure to filter noise, yet you most need reliable signals. Conversely, there is opportunity in being deliberately anti-spectacle. A clear timeline, human acknowledgment, and transparent closure—basic respect—becomes a genuine competitive advantage when candidates have been trained to expect abandonment. The market is rewarding theater because the default experience is cruelty.

Watch whether Toohey's approach gets imitated into meaninglessness, or whether platforms and regulators finally crack down on ghost postings. Several states now require salary ranges; ghost-job disclosure may follow. For operators, the actionable response is immediate: audit your own hiring for ghostliness. Do your postings reflect real openings with real timelines? Do applicants receive confirmation and closure? Post your process explicitly—'we respond to all applicants within ten days'—and mean it. In a market defined by broken feedback loops, the small business that simply closes the loop competes above its weight. Toohey's sandwiches are memorable. Your reliability is valuable.

The creative economy's desperation should not be romanticized. Toohey's project makes good content; whether it makes good careers is unproven. Small businesses have the chance to prove that hiring need not be theater—if they resist the temptation to mimic broken systems and instead build processes that respect applicants' time. The labor market's broken feedback loop is not fixed by louder signals. It is fixed by functional ones.

“I wanted to be impossible to ignore” — Fast Company

Takeaway: Audit your hiring for ghostliness: explicit timelines and guaranteed responses outcompete spectacle when candidates expect silence.