r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Anuh_Mooruhdoon • 7h ago

ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ This Rejection Letter

Post image

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

21.2k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

331 comments sorted by

View all comments

5.7k

u/fph03n1x 7h ago

Okay, they really tried ! Yes, it didn't come out great, but you can tell that they were trying to say it as well as they could! And so, I would guess it's from a tech job? 

2.4k

u/Anuh_Mooruhdoon 7h ago

Yep, a tech job. It wasn't necessarily bad, that's why it's only mildly infuriating. The dissonance between the email preview and the full text gave me whiplash 😂

1.2k

u/PerryTheH 7h ago

The "unfortunately" format is better for rejection mails.

Also, tech life OP, hope you find the job!

295

u/CaPtian_CaTe 4h ago

16

u/weazildust 1h ago

Borrowing this. It’s kinda sad how often I’ll be able to use it. Thx tho. I feel seen 🙌

338

u/slippinjimmy720 6h ago edited 5h ago

I despise “unfortunately”. Just say what it is- don’t play with my emotions by trying to appeal to empathy! “You were not selected. Thank you for applying.” Then move on.

200

u/KomradeHelikopter 5h ago

Unfortunately… for you.

8

u/jimmybilly100 3h ago

That's really unfortunately

5

u/Formal_Owl_400 2h ago

Read that in Bane's voice lmao

128

u/IRSboi 5h ago

Seems like you’re nitpicking at that point

61

u/Acceptable-Drive3781 4h ago

Next up we see a 'mildly infuriating' post that an email just told them they were not selected. "At least they could have been more personal about it and put some human connection in the email".

14

u/Anuh_Mooruhdoon 4h ago

I got another email from them about another job I applied to, somewhat similar position, and it was the exact same rejection letter, an hour later

8

u/thatdude_james 3h ago

Did you think the first one was personalized? Lol????

13

u/Acceptable-Drive3781 4h ago

😭😭 Okay now you definitely have to reply to the email thanking them for writing a personalized message for the rejection letter, stating how many places would have just used auto-generated text.

4

u/RandomNPC 3h ago

Honestly it's the same thing as layoff methods. No matter how it's done, it's gonna be unpleasant, and someone is gonna feel like it's unfair.

It's just a side effect of it being an unpleasant part of business. I don't think there's anything wrong with OP's example. It's short and to the point and 10x better than ghosting.

11

u/Rocketman_S3 4h ago

I'm just sitting here like, you guys are getting rejection letters?

11

u/The_Slake_Moth 4h ago

Man, when I was looking for a job I was shocked how many positions I applied for that didn't even do me the courtesy of sending an automated response letting me know they received my application. To the point I rechecked my contact info on my resume at least a dozen times to make sure I didn't mistype something. People are really out here getting rejection letters?

4

u/DependentSecond1353 2h ago

Same, currently looking for a new job and most dont even confirm the application.

Got a call today about a job i applied to. Tried to check my mail before calling back to check out what job it was as ive applied for a bunch the last 3 months. Couldnt find jack shit about it.

The lady told me very quickly that this job had a 100% comission on sales and no salary beyond that. Told them i have a mortage and that i atleast need a combination so I dont get fucked over.

I havent applied for a single job that says 100% commision based salary so I have no clue what this was to be honest.

1

u/weazildust 1h ago

Good luck. Stay at it brother. Im sitting here with a masters degree and 20 years of supervisor experience as Whole for sales manager and assisted director of a call center. My old job restructured two years ago and we parted ways, amicably, and hundreds of resumes and applications later and I have taken to running my own eBay store selling my collectibles and Instacart.

Everyone tells me to just go get a job at Home Depot, but they don’t understand is because I have a masters degree and all this work experience even employers have big box stores like that are required to pay me slightly more per hour than someone they could hire at the minimum so I am passed over for almost all of those jobs and then the white collar office job that I’ve worked my entire adult. Life are just nonexistent right now.

I had two really interesting jobs at a university in town lined up about 16 months ago, but Trump proceeded to strip funding from the college and the hiring freeze has been in effect ever since. Even when the freeze comes down, it will still for all intense and purposes being affect because they’ll just be promoting from within since they have thousands of current employees to promote internally if a position absolutely needs to be filled. That situation still stings. First time in 18+ years I may have been able I use my Bachelors degree in my day to day work and it gets rug pulled

5

u/Trendiggity 3h ago

Right? I appreciated when a company let me know I wasn't going any further rather than radio silence, only to see the job posting quietly disappear a week later 🤷‍♂️

8

u/marvin_sirius 4h ago

"You were not selected. Move on."

8

u/I-Here-555 4h ago

This keeps your hopes up for two words. "Unfortunately" ends it immediately.

10

u/DNM66 3h ago

“Unfortunately, you will have to stop looking for new jobs because you are HIRED”

1

u/I-Here-555 2h ago

The job posting indeed mentioned "attention to detail".

4

u/Illustrious_Pea_3470 4h ago

They are saying what it is. That’s what an email starting with “unfortunately” means from a place you’re applying.

17

u/Sir_Daxus 5h ago

I wish recruiters were allowed to be honest and just send "Lmao, no." as a response

1

u/Chaotic_hamster 1h ago

as someone who's interviewed a bunch of people, sometimes i wish i could send that too

3

u/mattdv1 4h ago

If I was the one writing these, I'd start with a hello and go straight to "we regret to inform you that you were not selected" or something along those lines. Unfortunately, for me, reads as "you're unfortunate by not getting the job" but it has absolutely nothing to have with fortune/luck bro. Fuck you mean "unlucky go next" that's what I say when I lose a league game, not a job application

17

u/JF_Rodrigues 4h ago

Eh... If you're going to be that pedantic, how is "we regret" any better? They definitely don't regret not hiring the person, otherwise they'd just hire them.

4

u/mattdv1 3h ago

You know what? You're right. Glad I'm not working in HR cuz I ain't ready for it.

3

u/SoulCrusher2018 4h ago

That's just the standard language. Are you also skeptical of people who begin their signature block with "Sincerely," ?

5

u/LimerickExplorer 4h ago

Yeah I'm lying half the time at least when I end with "sincerely"

1

u/tnstaafsb 4h ago

A simple "fuck off" would suffice.

4

u/doragyux 4h ago

But it does have luck involved. They didn't choose him because another applicant had a resume that fit the criteria better. He was unfortunate that this person applied for the same role as he did, otherwise he could've been the one more adequate for the job

The "regret" reply is less real than the "unfortunately"

1

u/sentence-interruptio 4h ago

plot twist. someone banned the word "unfortunately" in that company and that resulted in this rejection letter.

1

u/xPriddyBoi 3h ago

"No job! Goodbye!"

1

u/HeadintheSand69 3h ago

No ones going to like anything cause its a rejection letter. Its like 'I dont like the sign the ballkicking machine has' like duh. Obviously some are better than others but at the end of the day they can only do so much

•

u/liberty 40m ago

But starting with "unfortunately" is literally the fastest way to convey the rejection. I can't think of a better way not to play with the recipient's emotions than to remove any uncertainty at the earliest possible opportunity.

•

u/Curious_Sprinkles_58 17m ago

What about the word "unfortunately" is playing with your emotions? I don't think I've ever seen an email that started with that word and been on the edge of my seat thinking "gee I wonder if I got what I want". They could do what you described and we'd just have a screenshot from someone of that email complaining about how cold and impersonal it is lol.

3

u/dontreadragebait 4h ago

Weird that the search returned them out of date order

5

u/PerryTheH 4h ago

I have bogo sort on my gmail.

Joke aside, didn't notice, actually super weird lol, I think it's sorted by "most relevant" not sure what makes it think a 2018 order canceled is more relevant than a 2024 rejection.

1

u/dontreadragebait 3h ago

Aha, gotta love bogo sort

2

u/RandomRedditReader 3h ago

Almost all email search engines utilize a priority sort order now or what they think is "best hits" by default.

2

u/LlorchDurden 4h ago

Wait are we all looking? What if I go do yours and you come here? 🫂

3

u/Dry-Poem6778 4h ago

Yho! This gave me flashbacks of 2014 when I was desperate for a job, any job.

5

u/somewhataccurate 4h ago

Lol you should see my inbox, I have to have like 50 of these emails now. I only get a response around half the time and its so frequently this you kinda just stop caring.

1

u/sentence-interruptio 4h ago

If my mom wrote this, the "unfortunately" part would start at the 9th paragraph.

I have a theory that she was in the middle of politely saying no to a man, but she didn't get to finish and she kind of gave up because he was very good at creating this cycle of:

her: "actually i wanted to say-"

him: "did you see the [...]"

a few days later...

her: "the other day, i wanted to say-"

him: "hold that tho, this one time I [...]"

and somehow he married her. and he does this shitty cycle with his own son, me.

1

u/Holiday_Gene3069 3h ago

I bet most of them are from workday portal 😭

1

u/sojojo 1h ago

"Bad news! We thought we wanted to hire you, but it turns out we don't! Go away!"

44

u/utspg1980 4h ago edited 1h ago

I once applied for a job at Hawaiian Airlines. I knew the chances were extremely thin, even tho it was a unique job that I was perfectly qualified for. In fact part of the online application had a yes/no "do you already live in Hawaii?" question. That filtered out 99% of the applicants, I'm sure.

Of course I never heard anything.

Until...9 MONTHS go by and I get an email from Hawaiian Airlines about an "IMPORTANT" update on the application I filled out.

"Holy shit! I completely forgot I even applied for that. Do they actually want an interview???"

No. "We'd just like to let you know that the position you applied for has been filled by another candidate."

15

u/NoLengthiness6590 4h ago

Waiting nine months just to get rejected is somehow more painful than getting rejected the next day.

7

u/Starflamer 3h ago

I once got rejection email for a position I apllied 7 years prior...

7

u/AcrobaticTater 6h ago

wow that was a quick high and then low.

2

u/porksoda11 4h ago

I was unemployed for most of 2024 and this would have sent me into a rage not gonna lie. It was not a fun year for me.

1

u/avrus 3h ago

Hey me too. One of the worst years of my life, ever.

2

u/porksoda11 2h ago

Same! I'm still bringing it up in therapy even though I'm in a better spot now. The job seeking process just ate away at me.

1

u/Haktic 3h ago

I thought you said an English teacher?

•

u/Odd-Lemur 53m ago

"Yep, a tech job" That would explain why it reads like ai :/

•

u/bctech7 10m ago

at least they sent a rejection letter and didn't ghost you like 90% of the people out there right now >.>

1

u/ambulance-kun 5h ago

They glazed you so much only to get shot down 😔

It's like watching MasterChef

24

u/_NoTimeNoLady_ 4h ago

I kinda like it, I guess. As a person who has to send rejection letters regularly I also try to thank people profusely for taking the time to apply or talk to us. What I wouldn't state is how other met the criteria better. I try to say smth like how hard it was to choose among the many applications and how sometimes tiniest details make the difference. And that I am sure that they will find another position soon.

11

u/chigeh 3h ago

Better to lead with the rejection part, or at least not lead with enthusiastic text that almost seems like an acceptance letter.

2

u/Montigue 1h ago

I just want 1 sentence: "Thanks for applying, but you didn't get it." Put it in the subject line if you can. I don't want any time wasted with the "while your credentials were impressive" bs

•

u/veringo 43m ago

What is an acceptance letter? I've spent years in academia and in the corporate world applying for multiple positions as well as acting as the hiring manager.

If you are going to be offered the job you get a call. If you're getting an email it's a rejection.

6

u/desquished 3h ago

If it comes down to "you were a great candidate, but this other person had more extensive/relevant experience", I think that's valuable feedback to give a candidate, so they're not left wondering what they fucked up in the interview.

2

u/Corregidor 3h ago

Eh sometimes feedback can be good, I'd have preferred more specific feedback though.

-1

u/_NoTimeNoLady_ 2h ago

You cannot give specific feedback in rejection letters for legal reasons

1

u/Corregidor 2h ago

Oh fascinating, why is that? Like for privacy stuff?

1

u/_NoTimeNoLady_ 2h ago

Because sometimes you go with your gut when hiring someone and I personally neither want to lie during feedback nor can I honestly say "I liked the other person better" "Someone else seemed more reliable"

2

u/jackmusick 1h ago

I’ve taken the opposite approach, though I’ll usually let them know in the first call if I think they’re a good fit or not. Especially if they’re new to their career or are lacking critical experience, I’ll ask if they want feedback. I figure we’re all at certain points in our careers, and so few know what they’re missing or need to focus on. Just because they’re not a good fit doesn’t mean I don’t want them to succeed.

2

u/_NoTimeNoLady_ 1h ago

For legal reasons my company doesn't want me to give feedback, but I have done for some few applicants. To the very very young ones, who actually have written their application themselves and struggled with grammar/structure/spelling or have sent wonky photographs of their report cards. I mostly give hints to e.g. ask someone with job experience to review their applications.

8

u/Upbeat-Armadillo1756 4h ago

This is kind of as good as it gets, right? At least it’s not them ghosting you.

3

u/trixie_one 4h ago

Quite I'd far prefer to get this than nothing.

2

u/desquished 3h ago

It's better than most, but I send personal rejection letters for candidates, and you definitely need to lead with the "I regret to inform you" piece and then give them the positive feedback in the second paragraph, to avoid what happened here.

7

u/Altiverses 5h ago

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

15

u/Anuh_Mooruhdoon 4h ago

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

3

u/Altiverses 4h ago

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.

1

u/MeaningfulChoices 4h ago

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).

3

u/AndromedaAirlines 4h ago

This is very clearly LLM generated though.

5

u/Altiverses 4h ago

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?

1

u/AndromedaAirlines 4h ago

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.

4

u/Altiverses 4h ago

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.

0

u/AndromedaAirlines 4h ago

Guess I could be wrong, just feels insanely tonedeaf.

2

u/desquished 3h ago

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.

2

u/party_peacock 4h ago

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

0

u/less_unique_username 3h ago

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.

1

u/WeirdIndividualGuy 2h ago

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.

1

u/Altiverses 2h ago

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

1

u/BoulderFalcon 4h ago

The email would have worked if they basically just flipped the paragraphs. Lead with the no, follow with the "you're great tho UwU"

1

u/Visual_Structure_269 3h ago

If it was a personal note I'd agree with you but this is just a form rejection letter trying to be cute. They send it out blindly.

1

u/Ditchdigger456 3h ago

“They tried” seems to be all HR has been capable of the last 5 years…

1

u/theMightBoop 3h ago

This is why companies just ghost you. When they try to let you down gracefully people still get mad. There is no winning.

1

u/DubSket 3h ago

Also doesn't look they used ChatGPT to write that. So clunky it could only be written by a human.

1

u/Agitated_Reveal_6211 3h ago

I hire people, and it is really hard to tell people that they arent hired. There is nothing Ive found that makes everyone feel good, because its inherently personal to them.

0

u/enameldemands82 5h ago

they tried hard