I wrote a stinging letter to an employer who rejected me. Was that wise?

Years ago, I applied for a role with a large organisation. It was a rigorous interview process and I got through to the final stage.

I dedicated hours to preparing and applying, but until the very end I thought it had been worth it. From everything I had seen and heard in the interactions with various members of the organisation, this seemed a true dream job. I was so excited by the opportunity. Then I was met with two months of silence.

I wrote to the organisation. I have passed on my letter in full. I was curious about whether you thought I’d acted impetuously in writing or whether there was some justification in sending off my letter.

Sending the letter was the right thing to do. It was beautifully written; it demonstrated your genuine enthusiasm for the role, underscored how much effort you’d put into your application and various interviews, and then conveyed your deep disappointment. Yes, it was pointed at the end, but after eight weeks of silence, there was no need to be tentative.

And, in fact, as Professor Carol Kulik from the School of Management at Adelaide University told me, the organisation could have benefited from the forthright closing paragraphs.

“When organisations are receiving a steady flow of applications for vacant roles, they don’t get much feedback from the market about the consequences of treating applicants poorly,” she said. By writing plainly about what you went through, you gave them some.

As organisations meet financial pressures, the first thing to go from a recruitment process is basic decency.

Although your case is profoundly disheartening, it’s also instructive. I can’t help but feel that disdain for job applicants (manifesting as ‘ghosting’ like you experienced, but also in various other acts of discourtesy and dismissal) has reached epidemic proportions.

But it’s easy to assume that the ‘illness’ was brought about entirely by the rise of AI, that sudden massive technological leap exemplified by the release of ChatGPT 3.5 at the end of 2022.

Your experience, however, predates this moment by quite some time. Yes, HR teams had been using AI prior to the arrival of large language models. And, yes, applicant-tracking systems undoubtedly play an often-insidious role in the coldness of modern recruitment processes (more on that later). But, no, AI is not the one and only culprit here.

Professor Kulik told me that “hiring funnels, [which] have gotten longer in some organisations, especially for professional, technical, graduate, managerial and higher-salary roles” are one of the main complications. Today, as a matter of course, people like you are asked to go through these extensive, multifaceted and exhausting tests, interviews and auditions.

That’s a problem for a few reasons.

The first is that more applicant investment means higher expectations of the employer. This can bring about what Professor Kulik describes as a “procedural justice violation”, where an applicant who has invested hours or even days in a hiring process, doesn’t view the ghosting as merely frustrating, but as painfully unfair.

Another is that “longer hiring funnels are creating more handoffs across people with responsibility for one small part of the process – and some of those people are external vendors. That means responsibility for the applicant’s experience is also becoming more fragmented.” Such fragmentation creates a far higher chance of communication breakdown.

As these recruitment exercises get longer, they’re also getting “more transactional”, Professor Kulik says. And it’s often the case that “no single person has ‘applicant experience’ among their explicit responsibilities or performance measures”.

I’ve seen it plausibly theorised that “politeness has no return on investment”, and so as organisations meet financial pressures, the first thing to go from a recruitment process is basic decency. Professor Kulik says this is the wrong way for a company to approach hiring.

“The hiring process is a golden opportunity to show applicants your company’s values. For the applicants you hire, [it] is a place to role model what you expect of them in the job. And the applicants you reject may still be customers.”

AI is nowhere near blameless, of course. And Professor Kulik said that the lack of market feedback problem mentioned earlier is “exacerbated by AI-enabled hiring systems, because it’s much easier to evaluate using time-to-fill and cost-per-hire metrics than applicant satisfaction measures”.

Then there’s the unsympathetic reality of supply and demand. “When employers struggle to fill roles, and applicants have lots of alternatives, employers need to compete on speed, respect and communication. Then there’s much more incentive to improve the applicant’s experience.”

Currently, when ‘it’s brutal out there’ is becoming a truism for jobseekers, market forces relegate courtesy to ‘unnecessary’ luxury status in the minds of many corporate leaders.

Send your questions through to Work Therapy by emailing jonathan@theinkbureau.com.au

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