[A bitter, satirical piece not-so-loosely based on a real rejection email I received after a job interview.]
Hey you.
You did such a great job tonight. We know that group interviews can be a little intimidating, especially when we essentially required you to out-interesting everyone in the room, bare a small portion of your soul, and handwrite a 5 sentence introduction script for a stranger on a single notecard in under 60 seconds. Obviously, we did that because we’re a start-up focused on pulling great candid moments out of stuffy business people, and the easiest way for us to find a solid future employee in a crowd is to encourage you all to claw each other’s eyes out to be the quirkiest and most energetic.
We want to thank you for all the effort you put into us. Over the course of a month, you made a video introduction of yourself, completed a 10 page edit test, and had to submit to last night’s final humiliation, and again: you did such a great job. We loved that moment where we asked everyone to share a big loss, and instead of bemoaning the fact that you didn’t get that one position in college, you chose to share a 30 second soundbyte of that time you fell in love with someone and severely fucked it up; we know that as an intellectual lady, that was a big risk on your part, and an attempt to talk about something real as opposed to framing your professional accomplishments in a way that makes them all learning experiences.
Because of how specific this position is, we’re only looking for the best of the best–-and we have so many more candidates than slots to fill. We need the people with the best general people skills and ability to write human dialogue that we can possibly find, and despite your extensive background in theatre and writing, you didn’t prostrate yourself well enough in last night’s group interview to warrant a spot in our company.
We believe in being an honest and candid company, so if you’d like to hear exactly why we didn’t hire you, all you have to do is ask. If the answer’s just, “We didn’t like you as much as we liked someone else,” then we’ll still make up some inspiring bullshit about how maybe you just didn’t open up enough, or how that one kid’s “craziest thing you’ve ever done” story was way cooler than yours. Whatever insight we give you, we’re sure it’ll help with your next real world job application where no one cares to ask what inspires you and you don’t have to play icebreaker games to make money being an office grunt at first.
If you really love what we do and would like to offer any of your services for free, or volunteer your time and energy towards a company willing to exploit you, we’d love to hear your ideas!
Best of luck.