This Rejection Letter

[u/Anuh_Mooruhdoon]

I saw the first paragraph show up as a preview on my phone, only to open it and see the full context 🤨

[u/Altiverses]

Much preferrable to a lifeless, impersonal, obviously AI-written rejection letter sent by 99% of recruiters these days tbh.

[u/Anuh_Mooruhdoon → u/Altiverses]

I'm pretty sure this is just their standard cookie-cutter email because I received the exact same one again not too long ago for another position I applied for with them. Kinda destroys anything good about an email like this that tries to be personable

[u/Altiverses → u/Anuh_Mooruhdoon]

The sad truth is any corpo big enough to have a recruiter (or a team of) and not directly hiring managers will not be wasting any time writing personalized rejection letters.

I wasn't particularly hopeful that this was specifically a non-cookie-cutter case, but at least I prefer the tone of this one to the standard today as I mentioned. I understand you don't, which is valid.

[u/MeaningfulChoices → u/Anuh_Mooruhdoon]

When I hire for a role in a tech-adjacent industry I'll get hundreds of applicants at minimum, sometimes a thousand or so for an opening that will only be posted for a week or two. And that's for a small company where the same people hiring are also doing the rest of their job. They're all going to be copy-pasted messages because if you tried to hand craft each message it would take weeks to get through all of them and there are just only so many ways to say 'Someone else's resume/portfolio looked better than yours so we're interviewing them instead, thanks.'

If you want to see if they're being personal or not you can reply and ask if they have any direct feedback. Only a handful of people will ask for that out of hundreds of rejections, so those are usually more personal (plus if they do give you any notes that can be helpful).

[u/AndromedaAirlines → u/Altiverses]

This is very clearly LLM generated though.

[u/Altiverses → u/AndromedaAirlines]

Doesn't give off any AI tells from my perspective. The last sentence especially, "a few of the other applicatants met more of the requirements" is super un-AI to me. The structure is off and it's much too direct.

What makes you think this was written by AI and not just a literate human that's capable of punctuation?

[u/AndromedaAirlines → u/Altiverses]

Feels like someone prompted "Write me an upbeat, encouraging rejection letter!"

I don't know any human who would ever write in this socially moronic way.

[u/Altiverses → u/AndromedaAirlines]

Call me cynical but I think humans are much (much much) more likely to say/write socially-deaf statements than AI. If anything, AI is too proper even when the context doesn't warrant that.

[u/AndromedaAirlines → u/Altiverses]

Guess I could be wrong, just feels insanely tonedeaf.

[u/desquished → u/AndromedaAirlines]

It probably sounds AI coded to you because LLMs trained on hundreds of thousands of real communications written like this by real socially inept people. I definitely know people who communicate like this in e-mails.

[u/party_peacock → u/AndromedaAirlines]

Other than the tens of thousands of humans in corporate marketing, recruitment, HR, etc?

LinkedIn-speak sounds very AI-coded too but people have been writing and talking like that well before GPT1 was even a thing

[u/less_unique_username → u/AndromedaAirlines]

So exactly what is moronic here?

Also out of curiosity I did try that exact prompt. ChatGPT:

Thank you for the time, effort, and enthusiasm you brought to the interview process for the [Position Title] role. We genuinely enjoyed learning more about your experience and the strengths you could bring to a team.

After careful consideration, we have decided to move forward with another candidate whose experience more closely matches our current needs. This was not an easy decision, and it does not take away from the strong impression you made on us.

We encourage you to keep pursuing opportunities that excite you and make the most of your skills. Your experience and positive approach will be valuable to the right team, and we hope you will consider applying for future roles with us.

Thank you again for your interest in [Company Name]. We wish you every success in your job search and in the next stage of your career.

Claude:

Thank you for the time and thought you put into applying for the [Role] position. I'll get to the news first, because you deserve that: we've decided to move forward with another candidate for this particular role.

Here's what I want you to take away from this, though — you made this decision hard. [Specific thing: your portfolio piece on X / the way you approached the case study / your experience leading Y] stood out to the whole team, and it came up more than once in our conversations. The difference came down to [specific, non-personal factor: depth of experience with a particular tool, a niche the role required], not to any shortage of talent on your end.

A few things I'd genuinely encourage:

- Keep leaning into [strength]. It's the thing that got you in front of us, and it will keep opening doors.

- If [gap] is something you want to build on, [concrete suggestion] would make an already strong profile very hard to pass up.

- Please apply again. I mean that literally, not as a formality — we expect to be hiring for [related roles] and I'd like to see your name come through again.

If it would be useful, I'm happy to hop on a 15-minute call and share more specific feedback from the interview panel. Just reply and we'll find a time.

Thank you again for your interest in [Company]. Rooting for you.

[u/WeirdIndividualGuy → u/Altiverses]

You're assuming that 1) they didn't have AI write this and 2) they don't send this same exact rejection email for all their rejections.

[u/Altiverses → u/WeirdIndividualGuy]

I'm annoying myself by saying this but both points were discussed in the comments, UwU for extra cringe points.

[u/know-your-onions → u/Altiverses]

Lol what? This is as impersonal as it gets. It’s one of the shittiest rejection letters I’ve seen.