I wrote a stinging letter to an employer who rejected me. Was that wise?
Years ago, I applied for a job at a large organization. It was a tough interview process and I made it to the final stage.
I spent hours preparing and applying, but I thought it was worth it until the end. From everything I saw and heard in my interactions with various members of the organization, this seemed like a real dream job. I was very excited about this opportunity. Then I encountered two months of silence.
I wrote to the organization. I delivered my letter in full. I was wondering if you thought I was being hasty in writing, or if there was a legitimate reason for sending my letter.
Sending the letter was the right thing. It was beautifully written; This revealed your genuine enthusiasm for the role, underlined how much effort you put into your application and various interviews, and then conveyed your deep disappointment. Yes, it had finally been pointed out, but after eight weeks of silence there was no need to hesitate.
And in fact, as Professor Carol Kulik of the University of Adelaide Business School told me, the organization could benefit from clear closing paragraphs.
“When organizations receive a constant stream of applications for vacant positions, they don’t get much feedback from the market about the consequences of mistreating applicants,” he said. You gave them some by writing openly about what you were going through.
As organizations face financial pressures, basic courtesy is the first thing to go through in the hiring process.
Although your situation is extremely discouraging, it is also instructive. I can’t help but feel that the disdain for job applicants (manifested as ‘ghosting’ as you experienced, but also manifested through various other acts of discourtesy and dismissal) has reached epidemic proportions.
But it is easy to assume that the ‘disease’ was introduced entirely by the rise of artificial intelligence, the sudden massive technological leap exemplified by the release of ChatGPT 3.5 at the end of 2022.
But your experience dates back well before this moment. Yes, HR teams were using AI before the advent of big language models. And yes, applicant tracking systems undoubtedly play an often insidious role in the coldness of modern hiring processes (more on this later). But no, AI is not the only culprit here.
Professor Kulik told me: “Recruiting funnels, [which] One of the main challenges is that in some organisations, especially in professional, technical, postgraduate, managerial and highly paid roles, people like you are naturally asked to go through these extensive, versatile and exhausting tests, interviews and auditions.
This is a problem for several reasons.
First, greater investment in applicants means higher expectations from the employer. This can lead to what Professor Kulik describes as a “violation of procedural fairness”; An applicant who spends hours or even days on the hiring process may find ghosting not only frustrating but also deeply unfair.
Another is that “longer hiring funnels lead to more handover between people who are responsible for a small part of the process, and some of those people are external vendors. This means that responsibility for the applicant experience also becomes more fragmented.” This type of fragmentation makes the chances of communication breakdown much higher.
Professor Kulik says these hiring practices become “more transactional” the longer they last. And it’s often the case that “no person has ‘applicant experience’ among their clear responsibilities or performance measures.”
I’ve seen it reasonably theorized that “politeness has no return on investment,” and as organizations face financial pressures, basic courtesy is the first thing to take from the hiring process. Professor Kulik says a company’s approach to hiring is the wrong way to go.
“The recruitment process is a golden opportunity to show applicants your company’s values. For the candidates you hire, [it] This is a place where you can set an example for what you expect from them. And the candidates you reject may still be customers.”
Of course, artificial intelligence is not blameless. Professor Kulik said the aforementioned problem of lack of market feedback is “exacerbated by AI-powered recruiting systems because they are much easier to evaluate using time-to-fill and cost-per-hire metrics than applicant satisfaction metrics.”
There is also the unpleasant reality of supply and demand. “When employers are struggling to fill roles and applicants have a multitude of alternatives, employers need to compete on speed, respect and communication. Then there is much more incentive to improve the applicant experience.”
Currently, as ‘cruelty out there’ becomes a reality for job seekers, market forces are relegating kindness to the status of an ‘unnecessary’ luxury in the minds of many corporate leaders.
Send your questions to Occupational Therapy via email jonathan@theinkbureau.com.au
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Jonathan Rivett is a writer living in Melbourne. He’s been writing about workplace culture and careers for more than a decade.
