The best rejection letter I ever got was a personal note from the person hiring, saying "You were good, but we just needed someone who is stronger with [x], [y], and [z]". It felt actionable because it told me things I could improve on.
Aside from that one, the rejections that were the least self-esteem-damaging were ones that said "we've decided not to fill the position". Even if not true, it's a good "it's not you it's me" type of rejection.
I just had one like this from a well known company over Christmas. I had made it to the first interview and it went exceptionally well. I received a follow up the next day that they were excited to continue and the hiring manager would reach out soon to schedule the next round of interviews.
Unfortunately a day later I got a notice from them that the role I was interviewing for was being closed down. They encouraged me to look for other roles I was interested in and we could continue from there. I sent two, and then right after new years was informed they were freezing all hiring until mid January when they finalized their new head count. Then they were among the number of companies announcing new layoffs in the last couple weeks.
Talk about disappointed but still being appreciative. I'm still excited about maybe getting on with the company one day simply because they treated the hiring process with a lot of respect and didn't waste my time. It wasn't a me thing, but just bad news coming down from higher up internally.
I hear this excuse all the time, but can anyone give first hand knowledge of how realistic this fear is when giving feedback about performance during a technical portion? Any lawyers or managers here that have faced actual consequences for giving feedback?
Having now been on the hiring side of things for technical interviews, I'll give feedback when asked, but I think that most people don't give feedback because its kind of a pain in the ass if you aren't organized.
In most non-dictatorships, private parties are free to start almost any civil case against each other. The judge may grant a motion to dismiss for things that are obviously bogus, but a decently filed grievance about the hiring process, supported by the counterparty's own statements, would likely require more scrutiny.
That is: the litigation could probably happen in most countries and even not be summarily dismissed.
I wonder how much of this is just their salary depending on the hiring market being as inefficient as possible. Seems like clear communication could go a long way to reducing HR workloads.
Back in 2016 I got rejected from Square. Admittedly I didn't do well on the interview and wasn't surprised.
The recruiter actually got on the phone with me, and pointed out the signals (from notes from the hiring manager) that I was lacking for them. And how I could improve if I wanted to interview with them again.
It all felt very respectful. Good for them for going above and beyond.
That said I don't expect any company to tell me anything beyond "No thanks" after a failed interview.
I gave someone feedback like that once; they actually came back a few months later to reinterview, having worked on the gaps. got hired and went on to become one of our best developers.
I practically wrote my own rejection letter for Canonical. Their interview process required doing multiple long form writing responses, including telling them why I was an amazing High School student. I wasn't, and I'm quite proud of how much I've changed since then. As if the jerk from 1996 had any bearing on anything of relevance. Laughable.
I don't want to be surrounded by people who can still brag about high school.
I had a very similar experience with Canonical when I was looking for my first job. The entire tone of the transaction was very negative and passive aggressive. It made me nervous about their work culture so I decided not to continue the application process. I'm still a bit bummed about it since I would have loved to work in that space.
Saying that SAT scores correlate closely with income in response to someone claiming that SAT scores measure IQ could be a statement of agreement or disagreement, depending on the relationships among the various measures.
I am disagreeing - why would more money make you inherently smarter? His premise that smart parents make more more is unquestionably false when 99% (or something) of wealth is transferred via inheritance - people don't generally get rich anymore[1].
Also, if you want to measure IQ, why not use an IQ test and not some arbitrary proxy?
It's not that more money would make you inherently smarter, but rather that more intelligent parents might (statistically) both make more money and also have more intelligent children.
Those children might go on to score better on the SAT, leaving a correlation between parental income and SAT scores that would be unsurprising at each step.
Your point about inherited wealth is not demonstrated on the chart you showed, which was parental incomes (not wealth) and in ranges unlikely to be perturbed by vast inheritances.
> Also, if you want to measure IQ, why not use an IQ test and not some arbitrary proxy?
I don't want to; I suspect colleges and D. E. Shaw felt like SAT scores were an acceptable/practical proxy for whatever purpose it was that they had. I thought it was weird and slightly off-putting to be asked, but it seems to work for them.
I've talked to some Canonical interviewers and they all were perfectly nice. No "high school brag" vibe at all. I suspect people who wrote those long form questions and people who actually do the interviews are completely different departments and the latter have no much influence on the former.
The worst ones I've gotten are those that I didn't get. Like, after being actively engaged for several weeks and passing some interviews, just... wall of silence. Come on, people, if you don't want me - drop me a note, at least give me some closure.
The weirdest ones were "we don't want you, but we will keep your data in the database just in case". Like, in which case? Do you have any other positions that you think I could match? Why not talk to me about them then? Do you expect to have them in some indefinite future and expect me to stay unemployed in the meanwhile? Or do you expect me to drop the position I just recently started in the meantime and jump to your company as soon as you call - because that's the kind of employee you're looking for? I'm just not sure what's the message here. Is it just general "we don't want to hire you, but don't worry, you're not a complete basket case, there's still a chance we might hire you eventually. Or maybe not". Confusing.
> Aside from that one, the rejections that were the least self-esteem-damaging were ones that said "we've decided not to fill the position". Even if not true, it's a good "it's not you it's me" type of rejection.
"there is a hiring freeze put into place"
bro it's early Feb-Mar, the job advert is < 30 days, and budgets came out but a few weeks earlier -- hiring ain't frozen.
best guess was that it was a security-related tech company, and turning down people, esp. reasonably qualified ones, in a way that makes them mad is akin to drawing a target on your head. give custom feedback to those who got through the interview process so they feel like they are at least looked at, and shootdown the rest via something that feels impartial -- otherwise these wanna be blackhats will try to DDoS you.
I think the joke hints at the recent events when Sam Altman has been fired (for a few days) and MS announced that they would take over the whole team as they said they would quit in response to Sam being fired.
You are owed a rejection letter but we shouldn’t shame companies for sending them, who cares what platitudes they give you, all that matters is you didn’t get the job and they are doing the courtesy of telling you. You would be surprised how many companies in other industries don’t even bother, they just leave you hanging
The companies that told me I was a rejected applicant via email, I was disappointed for a short while, but moved on. The companies that left me hanging and never said a thing, I still hold a grudge.
My respect to the companies that care enough to offer us that swift closure.
My favorite rejection letters are of the "We received an overwhelming volume of well-qualified applicants" sort. Especially when it's for a position that's so niche that you know there's a good chance that you personally know most of the other people who would actually meet the stated requirements.
Fair enough. Last time I received one of these, though, it was from an organization where there are about five peers globally with a similar program, and I ran the program at one of those peers. That said, I'm sure they honestly did get an overwhelming volume of applications.
I have a doozy but I'm not comfortable sharing it without blanking the name of the company. The short version is I went through a ridiculous 7-stage interview process only to be told at the end (the night before my 8th and final interview) that they really liked me, got excellent feedback but were no longer hiring for that position.
For that reason, and others, I tell recruiters I’ll do a max of three interviews before I expect an offer or rejection, not counting the initial discussion for fit with the recruiter. That’s a few hours of my time, and they shouldn’t expect any more than that. I had one company scoff at that, but I explained to them that they probably wouldn’t dedicate a single person to interview me eight times, because that would be a waste of time for that one person, and conversely individuals don’t have time to talk to eight or ten people over a month just for a single job these days either. By three times I know if I’m a fit for the job and as a hiring manager previously I never did more than three: myself and one person up and down from me in the org structure.
Best interview experience I had was a 3 hour after-work meetup with 3 people from the company. No coding challenges, but nice and insightful engineering chat. I got to meet the team and had an offer ready within week
Worst was when a company told me they used my open-source project and wanted me to do 5 interview rounds, two of them being whiteboard-style. I didn’t expect that
I’ve done over 400 SWE interviews for a recruiting company. I’ve seen a steady stream of candidates who could talk the talk, but had incredibly weak programming skills when put to the test. And the reverse - I’ve seen plenty of candidates who were awkward socially but ask them a programming problem and they’re right at home.
If you’re hiring for a programming role, assess their programming skills. Not just their social skills. A conversation only tells you half the picture.
I very much disagree with this. There are bad engineers good at "sounding good", as long as it never gets too deep. Interviewed many people myself where they only started showing their real face while actually coding.
I have, personally, interviewed a lead software engineer candidate, claiming 8+ years of experience coding, who could not write a simple 5-minute exercise, in any language of his choosing. It wasn't FizzBuzz exactly, but if I'd thought to ask FizzBuzz, he'd have busted that as well.
"Write a function that takes a list of numbers [array, list, or equivalent] and returns the average."
That's it. Wasn’t that they got hung up on the details of whether the average of ints should be an int, float, or double, or how to handle overflow, but just couldn't even get started at all in any language.
I was the third on-site interviewer. He'd BSed his way past the phone screen and two others and I caught a whiff of "Johnny can't code" and decided to check by asking him one of our (at the time) new college grad questions.
> just couldn't even get started at all in any language
Let's apply Occam's razor.
You have someone who has been programming 8+ years professionally. Maybe they did good work or bad work, we don't know, but we know they've been programming as a profession getting paid to do it for 8+ years.
We also all know you can't really go through a week, or even usually a day, of programming without handling something as basic as an array or a list.
So, which is actually more likely:
a) Someone did 8+ years of programming without ever implementing an array loop
or
b) They know how to do it, but the test is flawed due to conditions (on a whiteboard in a high stress environment while being criticized).
A lot of people with deep expertise in programming are completely incapable of putting on a whiteboard performance under stress.
I can never believe the number of interviewers who go "Gotcha!! They don't know how to code despite doing it for years!" instead of considering the simple correct answer is usually (b).
> we know they've been programming as a profession getting paid to do it for 8+ years.
We don't know that! We know they submitted a resume that says they've been programming for 8+ years; we don't know whether that happened or not.
I can't remember exactly what it was that gave me a "this guy is actually full of shit" feeling, but other things in the interview gave me that feeling, so I pivoted the interview to check.
On that day and to this day, I have serious doubts that that particular candidate had ever held a professional software job for longer than a probationary period.
Sure we do. Or maybe you didn't that day, but it is easy to find out for sure.
While companies (at least in the US) will never give a formal recommendation, they will always issue a statement that such and such person worked for them from date to date and the title(s) they held, if you ask.
Sure, if they worked 8 years at Joe's Burger Shack as Senior IT, maybe that's not worth much.
But if they worked multiple years with a senior/lead software engineer title at any recognizable company, you know they really did. As I said above we can't know if they did a great job or a mediocre job, but we do know for sure they held that job with that title for so many years and did at least a good enough job to not get fired from a software engineering role.
Which in turn means they absolutely know how to write a loop over an array. Because even if they got rated "Just Barely Meets Expectations" for 8 years, that alone is enough to know they can loop over an array.
Therefore, if your test indicates they can't do it, it is guaranteed that the test is flawed.
I’m autistic. I do well programming but on the spot it’s hard for me to use words well. I sometimes even forget basic words and concepts! My brain does that due to stress in an interview, but day to day I’m fine developing very advanced software and algorithms.
I don’t know how many times I have to say this: you’re thinking about the average, neurotypical, able bodied persons when you assume things, but often logic or common sense does not work with disabled or neurodivergent people.
Please consider that next time maybe you can provide a second chance somehow with less stress. One thing is, if i have code in front of me, I can explain it pretty well I think. Maybe ask them to prepare samples and walk through them?
Edit: this was meant for the grand parent commenter
In a situation like yours, let the recruiter know your situation ahead of time* and they can help coordinate adjusting the interview process to accommodate a different way that you can demonstrate your capability to succeed in the role.
I think it's not reasonable/fair to other candidates to give a literal "second chance somehow", but it's entirely reasonable to adjust the format of the first chance to allow a non-neurotypical candidate a reasonable chance to succeed.
* I suspect you probably already know to do this; this is not meant as "advice to you" so much as "here's how it could be made workable and fair if that was the situation".
Thanks for the advice, I appreciate it since I know advice like this comes from a place of kindness and caring.
I have mixed success with telling people about my autism. Some places will take it as a sign I’ll be a unique problem and ghost me. I’ve learned mostly I have to mask as good as I can and hope it works. People only seem to be kind towards obviously autistic children, older men who are only low level autistic and can pass for “normal“ tend to be seen as dickheads regardless. I’m trying to be better at social stuff so I don’t seem an asshole, but my brain just can’t get some things down!
But maybe I should try to bring it up again next time I interview, honestly it’s been years since I’ve had to really interview hard, maybe people are kinder and more understanding today. Lucky for me I was laid off and can get that practice in now!
See above answer. It is very easy to confirm they've held the job they claim on the date range they claim. If they have held a software engineering role for 8 years without getting fired, they absolutely know how to loop over an array.
Maybe at a real modern "software" company. But there are plenty of places where 50% of their so-called software engineers couldn't write a simple program from scratch.
In fact, as I think about the cases I've seen, it seems to get easier with senior "SWEs". They can exist going to meetings and delegating work until one day they forget themselves and apply at a company that actually expects SWEs to have a basic understanding of programming.
Reference checking almost always happens after the interviews. So no, the interviewer would not be expected to know this and should make an effort to confirm the person knows what they claim to know.
Reference checks and employment verification are different things.
Reference check is done after the interviews, you ask the candidate for references (past managers and coworkers) and call them up. That takes a fair amount of other people's time, so it only makes sense to do it after you're fairly certain you want to make an offer.
Employment verification is simply getting a statement from past employers that this person worked there from date to date and held these titles. That's quick and easy.
You remind me of many interviewers who had no idea who I was and asked me basic grad tests which I would struggle with mostly because I refused to be tested on fizzbuzz style questions I found it too easy to get caught out without recent revision which I often didn’t do as I was building critical software for paying customers.
I’m not saying you may have thrown out competent coders and made a completely incorrect decision I’m saying many who interviewed me seemed to ( when they hadn’t checked my background ) and were quick to assume idiocy.
Any SWE should already have a professional portfolio ready to share with employers. Even an entry-level coder should have some class projects and hobbies to show at that point.
If you don't go around with a portfolio, then yeah, you can expect employers to be skeptical, and subject you to coding on the whiteboard, or leetcode or something, which isn't really going to reflect your actual coding ability, but it's more geared toward weeding out fakers in interviews.
On the other hand, if you have a portfolio, especially a public one shared on GitHub or such, then you can directly point to it and take credit for a good, hopefully working project, and you can explain it at length, and your prospective employer should hopefully take this as a strong signal that your skills are commensurate with your CV.
If you run an opensource project on github, it’s remarkable how many times your repository will be forked into weird github accounts - that on closer inspection are just big lists of forked projects with nary an original patch to be found.
I have no idea why people do this; but I suspect it might be to look good in interviews. No idea if it works - it’s pretty obvious if you look closer that they didn’t author any of the commits. But I wonder how many people are out there claiming credit for other people’s work to get hired.
You can also fork to preserve a repo, although apparently GitHub can removed forked repos alongside the original during takedown action. (To avoid, do the fork manually).
Sometimes that is just bad internal communication.
I once had something similar happen, but I'd been flown across country for a couple days of interviews. Day 1 morning someone met me and said "this is awkward, but...".
I couldn't be too mad, it was in an interesting city and I effectively got a short paid for vacation.
I had one interview one time in around 1999 with Merrill Lynch in Princeton NJ that I got flown out to and then I show up and get signed in, then I am meeting with some guy who tells me that I was never scheduled to be interviewed.... I told the guy I literally flew out here from 2000 miles away to do this interview and had emails and plane tickets to prove it, and they just told me like that and I left without the interview.... I didn't have to pay for the plane tickets, but that was probably the most ridiculous one I ever went to.
The 8th guy looked at my resume and, without talking to me, decided I'm under-qualified. He cancelled the call 1 hour before it was scheduled. Qualifying 7 rounds before that, and getting positive reviews from 7 of his peers wasn't enough to instill confidence over my resume.
Now I thank my lucky stars. Because that's a representation of the minuscule level of trust and team cohesion that these people have in their peers. Good riddance.
The crazy thing is like 10 months later I got hired as a contractor at that same company and asked one of the devs what happened to the manager I interviewed with last year.
They told me the woman was a bit of a firebrand and after several years at the company was fired because she was trying to hire more developers and upper management didn't have the money or resources to do so - but she went ahead anyways and tried to do it.
I was one of the casualties who didn't get hired because of her stunt.
My favorite rejection letter - if you can call it that.
I had two interviews with a smaller agency that I knew of and really wanted to work there because of their reputation and the work they were doing.
The last interview was with one of the founders of the company. She was really cool and we had a great rapport. The interview was about 90 mins and we covered a lot of ground. She said she would be reviewing my resume with the other devs I interviewed with and asked when I would be available to start.
I figured, cool, I got this in the bag.
A week goes by. . . .then another four days and now its been around two weeks since I heard from them. I practically checked out at my last job thinking I would be leaving and now I was getting nervous.
By sheer coincidence I run into one of the devs from the company at a conference that weekend. He was stoked to see me again since we had some common hobbies outside of development. I immediately asked WTF was going on, I hadn't heard anything from his company.
He looks at me and says, "Nobody called you to tell you what happened?" I said, "Yeah, no man, nobody called me, WTF happened?!" He does that nervous look around and then looks back and says in a hushed tone, "Two days after your interview, the founder you interviewed with? She sent an email to the other founders just saying, "I have to flee the country, and I've taken all the cash from the petty cash fund. I'll send back my phone and laptop when I'm in a safe country."
So yeah, I didn't get the job because one of the founders fled the country, took the companies petty cash fund along with their phone and laptop.
After interviewing with a few teams and execs I'd be interfacing with in a Principal role, there was a pause, so I pinged them, and I got a rejection email.
Then the HR contact reached out, to say they thought I'd be a great fit for the company, and would I be interested in any roles there in the future.
Then I learned that they'd had a surprise big org chart upset (maybe AI poaching).
I suppose it's reasonable that surprise changes high up the org chart can prompt a company to pause other changes, while they assess the new situation.
I once got a rejection letter from a recruiter, complete with the boilerplate, "we'll keep you in mind for future positions" from a noreply@ email address.
They expect it to be from a company that’s better at masquerading that their email is sent from a real human’s inbox instead of lumped in with the rest of their automated emails default config values.
Just because a message is sent from a noreply doesn’t mean it wasn’t manually composed and sent. I would expect rejection letters to come from such an address even if they are manually typed up.
I've been rejected from a few jobs that I've applied to at this point. honestly, this was the only time I can remember that it was an email, let alone an email from a no-reply address. every other time I've been passed on after interviews, the recruiter at least had the decency to call and tell me over the phone.
If there is no yellow handkerchief, it might be that we just forgot. In which case, please pitch a tent outside for the following 14 business days, not counting Wednesdays in odd number weeks. Furthermore, please get up before the roosters are crowing and the cows are spinning circles in the pastures, as on certain days (we won’t tell you which), the handkerchiefs may be put up before this time but then promptly taken down again at such time. Thank you for your cooperation, and we look forward to working with you if and when it turns out that you have had the great privilege of getting to be employed by us. We reserve the right to let you go at any moment with or without notice, even when that moment comes before the moment at which you have been notified of employment.
Exactly. I'm usually a proponent of informing candidates why they were rejected, if they went through at least a couple of interview rounds. I think it's the least a company can do after they invested the time and effort to apply and go through the interviews.
But sites like this make this hard to justify. Most of the ones I saw on the front page are standard generic responses. If that's what it takes to get on rejectedagain.lol then you're encouraging companies to just ghost you instead.
Don't tip your hand. First of all, it opens up the possibility of a conversation, and disgruntled rejectees are not something you want to be dealing with. Once they're rejected, that's it. They're out of contention and should have no further contact with your team/division/company. Secondly, it could expose you to liability.
And yes, ghosting is very much on the table and likely to become more popular with time.
There's a reason why the hiring process is enshittified: it helps protect the organization.
Eh, sure. So in that sense, professional courtesy is only important while there's a potential interest in establishing a relationship. I disagree.
A rejection doesn't need to be a reason to burn bridges. The candidate could be rejected for any reason, even when it's out of their control. By not having the decency to inform them of the rejection, you're effectively closing the door on them applying ever again. And word goes around about companies with shitty hiring practices, so it's probably not in the company's best long-term interest to treat rejected candidates unprofessionally.
I don't see anything wrong with going beyond the generic rejection letter and being honest about why they were rejected. This doesn't mean you need to be negative or go into too much detail, but most decent people would appreciate the honesty. Those who don't, and start arguing, or post that kind of rejection on Reddit or a .lol site are just boosting the signal of why they indeed shouldn't have been hired. And the same goes for the people who ridicule such companies.
Being unprofessional and shitty is worthy of ridicule. Not honesty and transparency.
It wasn't the intended purpose, but I might consult this site before sending a rejection letter. Some of the language used is awful, of course, but some of it is fine.
Indeed. I’ve always tried to send decent rejection letters but doing it honestly takes so much effort. Sometimes it just got to the bottom of my to-do list to die. You want to give constructive feedback to someone you met briefly and sometimes the reasons are really not kind: “we don’t think you are smart enough”, “we didn’t like you”, “having seen your blog we are worried you are not able to be professional enough”.
This is true feedback a manager might have, or the team has voiced. For most people sending that verbatim is scary as hell. Wording it respectfully but also staying honest takes a lot of mental energy and is still scary. Over the years you build some muscle memory and thicker skin for it, but some copy paste templates of respectfully written rejection letters would be a great resource for hiring managers.
While the site you provided is completely off the rails now (thank you for the lesson in content moderation). I see people have been using this comment section to complain about rejection messages, while I share the feeling and in no way condone about how poor the situation is, I think it's too negative and depressing. On a light-hearted note I'd like to share the best rejection message I received.
Whilst still a student in university I messaged Valve my resume, I knew they only hired wizards or people with extreme seniority, but I really liked what I knew about the company and I said hey I'd be really cool. I received a rejection in ample time, sent by an account that has an actual person's name (not just hiring@company.name). The message was a few paragraphs long of (what seemed like) personalized non-auto reply text about what skills I lack, what Valve looks for in a hire, and how the people at Valve acquired their knowledge.
Checking back on the details of the person I now see it wasn't even just an HR person, but an actual engineer. And I do need to say I applied to a lot of considerably smaller (in number of people) companies than them and never have I received such a nice experience.
It is not enough to say that after dealing with hundreds of rejections that one was actually the first uplifting one I ever received. And also the only. So for that I want to thank that person @Valve.
Yes. I got rejected, and then a couple months later they figured out that the role they were trying to fill wasn't actually what they were looking for. I was hired, stayed for 4 years, and built out the team. It was a success.
It actually worked for me. I applied for a position a while ago, no interview. Then one year later a recruiter from the company reached out to me saying I should apply for a new position. So I did, and I got an internship that way!
I've had scenarios where one candidate ticks all the boxes and we hire them, and we have another great candidate who was earlier in the hiring funnel that I stay in touch with even if we don't have an open requisition at the time. I've gone on to hire folks months later if they're still open to looking at opportunities.
It's objectively not a small company, but that's actually how I got the job at Apple. I had applied to a job, gotten rejected, but my resume had "Clojure" on it which was triggered for a search about a year later.
I've been on the other side where as the hiring manager, I've had recruiting contact prior candidates. Sometimes there legitimately are more high-quality candidates than open roles at a given time.
Our company hired someone that they interviewed and initially rejected. The developer wasn't a good fit for the initial role, but then a maintenance role opened up about six months later.
For my current job, I almost had an issue during the interview process because the recruiter had my old resume that was still in the system from the first time I was referred three years ago.
I applied to some internships to 2 huge consulting firms everyone knows, got denied, and I wasn’t able to fill out able to apply to full time roles with the same email address a year later
It's funny just how terribly many of these are written. That Palantir example has got to be my favorite. Check out this hum-dinger of a sentence:
> It was a pleasure to learn more about your skills and accomplishments; however, I'm afraid that after careful consideration, we regret to inform you that we do not have any positions that are a fit for your experience and skills at this time.
I was rejected by Palantir years ago. The recruiter called and said that I wasn't technical enough. I replied that none of my interviewers asked me a single technical question (I was interviewing to be a lawyer there). The recruiter was slightly embarrassed and said she'd follow up after investigating. Of course, I never heard back.
I had similar. Was told I didn’t have enough troubleshooting experience when my previous 4 jobs involved it centrally or exclusively, and no questions were asked about my process when troubleshooting.
I've applied to OpenAI four times in the last two years, and in my experience if you're rejected, they simply don't respond at all. I haven't gotten any rejection emails, but I seriously doubt they've been been considering my resume for eighteen months.
After 1 round of technical interview for a Manager position:
> "Sorry, we're on a hiring freeze"
I pressed my contact to reach out to the guy who interviewed me. He said, 'Yeah. I like the guy. I gave a positive feedback' (I would've been his manager, actually).
So, what really happened?
> Sorry, we're only looking for women candidates for this position.
(My name can apply to both genders. The recruiter called and heard my voice before scheduling the interview.)
I like sending these to companies I applied with that seem interested but about which I discovered something God-awful. "Unfortunately, after careful consideration I have decided not to move forward with my candidacy, but I wish you the very best of luck in your search to fill the role" and that. It's a little passive-aggressive, but it makes me feel good and shows them about as much good will as they would show me.
Small quirk/bug report: maximized images can only be closed by clicking outside of them (no "X" or other control for that function that I could see), but the code doesn't take into account a browser window that is smaller than the image; in that eventuality the image can't be closed and the user is forced to close the tab because also the back button doesn't work.
Had similar idea, e.g. identifying typical sections of a rejection letter and creating random letter from the hundreds of them I have received. Gave up the idea. Nobody cares about your bitterness. It's impersonate, someone found your CV repulsive and simply clicked send button.
currently applying for jobs and just getting automated, boilerplate rejection letters.
there are companies that don't respond to your application at all, and i have started to feel that it is ironically a better approach.
funnily enough, one time i applied for a role in a company, which i never heard back from. however, someone else in there looked at my CV and sent me another job offer, which I ended up getting in the end.
I'll post it on your site as well to give it a bit of traffic, but here's one of the goofier rejections I've gotten.
-----------
I applied to a large newspaper (I won't say the name but you've definitely heard of it) as a software engineer. They made me do some idiotic Myers-Briggs style test that took me about two hours to do, which was annoying, but the pay seemed like it would be ok and I was unemployed anyway.
Outside of an ITIL certification that I had to get for college, my resume is extremely technical, as I've only ever done engineering. I have bullet points about different tech I've used, programs I've written, and basic tasks I did for the company. I've had a ton of jobs so the resume is long, and basically devolves into a bunch of software engineering buzzwords. We can argue all day on whether it's good or not, but I don't think anyone would claim it's not technical [1].
Nowhere on my resume (outside of one line that said I mentored some junior and mid-level engineers and some lecturing I did for two semesters) does it say that I've done any kind of "people management", but the response I got from the recruiter was as follows:
> Does not show technical keywords or statements in his resume. Showing to be more of a PM and not a hands-on coder. Not see enough Java experience. I don't see him as a focused Java developer like the other candidate you've sent us. Needs someone who can write the code.
I found this extremely bizarre, as I don't really think my resume could in any way be interpreted as a PM's resume, and assuming I wasn't lying I feel that it's pretty obvious I am a "hands on coder".
I think what happened is that the hiring manager already knew who they wanted for the job, but for legal and/or bureaucratic reasons they had to have a pretense of "trying to find the best candidate". I suspect that they never even looked at my resume, had some basic boilerplate rejection text that had some vague plausibility, and was just going to reject every candidate sent to them.
That's fine, but I really wish they had done this before I had to spend multiple hours trying to get a read on my personality. I think a lot of hiring managers are sociopaths.
So I asked the recruiter about that specifically, because that would be an easy mistake to make. The recruiter agreed, reached out to the hiring manager again, and the hiring manager doubled down. The recruiter was extremely apologetic to me, and he agreed that the feedback made absolutely no sense to him either, but the manager had assured him that the feedback was correct.
I suppose another potential thing that happened is that they did send the wrong feedback, the hiring manager was embarrassed and just doubled down as a sign of bravado. Hard to say for sure.
I note that there's zero attempt to verify that any of the messages actually came from the companies they purport to have come from.
I dislike corpos as much as the next guy, but there's no reason to treat these as anything other than completely made up by randos on the internet.
Personally I'd anticipate a string of defamation lawsuits from something like this. And dick pics. I'm actually surprised that so far there's only a bunch of garbage and not dick pics.
Aside from that one, the rejections that were the least self-esteem-damaging were ones that said "we've decided not to fill the position". Even if not true, it's a good "it's not you it's me" type of rejection.