Dear rejection letters,
Why are you so badly written?
You’re always like
Dear Applicant,
Thank you for taking the time to apply to our blah blah role. We appreciated your interview / work trial / psychometric test, but due to having unexpectedly many great candidates for this position, we will not be moving your forward at this time. We encourage you to apply for other positions at Blah Blah Corp in the future.
Best,
Person from Blah Blah Corp
Literally the only part of this which has any useful information to me are the words “not moving forward.” Why is it buried in all this garbage?
In my younger days, before I was familiar with the genre, I used to think that emails like this were ramping up towards an acceptance. The logic being: surely no one would be so cruel as to build up hope and suspense through a string of banal pleasantries only to dash my hopes at the last minute?
Here’s what an ideal rejection letter would look like:
Subject line: Unfortunately you did not get the blah blah job
Dear Applicant,
Unfortunately we are not moving you forward for the blah blah job.
We had x applicants, and you made it to the final y.
Here were the strengths of your application:
Here’s how you could have been a stronger candidate:
Here’s what it would have taken for you to be out top candidate:
Here’s a role that we think might be more suitable for you:
Thank you for taking the time to apply.
Best,
Person from Blah Blah Corp.
Why is this good?
It communicates immediately you didn’t get the job so don’t have a chance to get your hopes up.
Romantic rejections do this well: they always open with “I’m flattered.”
You can calibrate whether you’re aiming too high in your applications. If you always come out in the bottom quartile, then you should aim lower, apply to many more positions, or both.
You can alert you to strengths you should double down on.
Actionable advice on how to have better chances in your next application.
Why are rejection letters so bad? I suspect because there’s no feedback mechanism. A rejection email normally ends the interaction between applicant and employer. The employer has no particular incentive to provide or request feedback, and a rejected applicant is typically too sad and demotivated to provide or request feedback. So neither parties learn from their mistakes.
I recently started following up job application rejections with two questions:
What’s the lowest-effort thing I could’ve done prior to the application (up to a week’s work) which would have made me a much stronger applicant?
Can you suggest any other roles I might be better suited to?
So far I’ve gotten two replies, and one of them was really sensible advice. (It was that I should spend a bit of time learning figma so I can make nice-looking illustrations more easily.)
So rejection letters: I reject your genre conventions and I’m taking matters into my own hands to get useful feedback.
Best regards,
Applicant
This is a disappointing part. Let's say the employer can use feedback to let the employee know that "even if the employee fails the interview, there is something he can gain from the organization." Then employers will be able to attract more talented people. Wouldn’t that be an incentive for employers?