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Over the weekend, I received another rejection letter.  It was typed on nice 20 lb bond, too — perfect for the crumple-and-lob that many of us serial rejectees depend upon.

Thing is, I never actually applied for this particular job.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Institution that Shall Not be Named. Where they’ll even reject you when you aren’t applying for their fucking jobs.

And thus I now grant myself (and you) an ENTIRE WEEK to rant about rejection letters, or rejection in general.  And then we’re going to move on to something else. Deal?

So let the fun begin!

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A note to my daughter, who occasionally reads my blog, and who so tenderly placed this unopened letter on my bed for me to find, face down because even she could tell what it was:  One of the best reasons not to swear, honey, is so that you can save these words for when you really need them.  But.  If you ever use this word in front of Grandma,  I shall send you to boarding school.
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Related Posts:
Rejection letters should not be emailed
I have not failed: I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work
There’s a bean stuck in my tiara

Ask A Manager wrote a nice post about rejection letters yesterday, and gives several examples of truly stupid ways that rejected applicants respond to them.

I still don’t like emailed rejection letters, though, and here’s why.

Email feels hasty and is too provocative

An email is too sudden and surprising. It even raises my hopes up, just a minute, when I first see it in my inbox… a request for more information, perhaps? The memo-like nature of email lacks a certain sense of closure, too. If it says “no,” is that REALLY their final answer??

Email also is more provocative than a letter, and therefore much more likely to invite a response from the recipient.  As AAM points out, this is rarely a good thing.

Email shows how cheap you are

The cost of postage and paper may be rising, but it’s foolish to quibble over 45 cents when your company’s public image is on the line. Nor does it require much more staff time to use mail-merge to semi-personalize a form letter than it does to correctly enter a bunch of email addresses.

Job searches cost money, and they should. They are one of the most important thing any organization does. The real cost of job searches are retraining costs, particularly if a company did a poor job of hiring and retaining good employees to begin with. Appearances matter here, so don’t make your company look like it can’t even afford stamps, let alone decent salaries for its employees.

Email feels disrespectful

I am never hasty, cheap, or disrespectful when I apply for a job, and I think I deserve at least a tiny bit of time in return for my own investment. You asked for my application, after all, and your rejection is painful enough.

Bridges can burn in either direction: “Employ” is a transitive verb

I’ve been beating this point half to death lately, but I need to make it one more time.  Ann Bares at Compensation Force has made it even better than I by pointing out that it is not the bad employees but the good ones who will leave a company if they are unhappy. The costs of a poorly-run job search will only multiply.  To keep good employees, you need to attract them in the first place. 

Word gets out.  Just as employers and recruiters share information with each other, you can be sure that employees and job applicants do as well.

At least the best ones do, and those are the ones you want.  Right?

I am willing to concede a few exceptions to my no-email rule.  Among them:

• The company is receiving unsolicited applications
• The application process is an online one, or
• The applicants are informed upfront that they will be updated via email.

Please send me a letter.  I want to see it and touch it. I will know what it is right away, but I want to be able to decide when to open it, and how to digest it.

And then I want to be able to crumple it up with great flourish and throw it away.
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Related posts:
Employers: It’s Your Turn to be Fabulous
Un-Fabulous Employers: Asking for Too Much Upfront
Blind Box Ads: Bad-Ass, or just Bad?

Many thanks to ALL the folks who responded to my post yesterday!  I appreciated every comment you posted.  Additionally, Deb replied to me on her blog, 8 hours & a lunch, as did Ann over at Compensation Force, .  Ann made the good point that it’s a buyer’s market out there, so (of course) job seekers like me have to hustle. 

I agree: yes we do.  But.

Recruiters may feel justified in abusing potential employees, given the current job market.  If they do, they are making a mistake, and their organizations will suffer for it as much as any individual employee ever will.   Which is my whole point.

Also,  I am not making this up:  employers really are employing more bad hiring tricks  than I’ve ever seen before.  At the very least, they give me pause, and in some cases have kept me from applying altogether.  Nor am I the only one.

And who knows?  One of us might have been the player who turned your company into Microsoft.

“Employee needed.  No Calls Please!  Send application to P.O. Box ###.”

One last gripe: blind box ads like these that proliferate in the paper.  No employer or company name is listed, no contact information (other than a post office box) is provided.  And I’m supposed to respond with full personal detail in return?  No f-ing way.

Now I have to confess something.  I interviewed last week with an organization that had posted a blind box advertisement.  I’d seen the ad and had already ruled it out, when a person in my network  called me about the same job.  I submitted my resume and got an interview, but it wasn’t a good fit, and I think both sides figured this out in short order.

But I still have no idea why this particular organization, looking for a PR person no less, was afraid to list its own name in public. Two reasons employers may choose blind ads are (a) to covertly oust a current employee or (b) to hide their hiring activities from competing employers.  Do you want to work for a company that may fire and hire this way?  Do you want to work for an organization that may be trying to underbid its competitor for your paycheck? The listed job may even be your own!

I still have no intention of responding blindly to blind box ads in future.  There remain some intriguing work-arounds, however, which I may try next time a blind box ad catches my eye.  I do like learning how to play a player!  And if this is a new game, I am going to have to learn how to play it, albeit on terms I can also live with. 

I’ll keep trying to be fabulous.  

It’s just that I haven’t seen a whole lot of “fabulous” coming from employers these days, and damitol, can’t it be someone else’s turn to be fabulous for a change?

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Related Posts:
Employers: it’s Your Turn to be Fabulous (part 1 of this series)
Un-Fabulour Employers Asking for Too Much Upfront (part 2 of this series)

Is this guy you?

~The first part of this post can be found here.~

Everywhere I turn, I find advice for the job-seeker. Revamp the resume. Write a killer cover letter. Hire an interviewing coach. In short, it’s all about how fabulous every job applicant must be.

Why isn’t anyone telling employers that they need to be fabulous, too?

If there is a recession going on, and so long as we insist upon using dire, Darwinian terms with job applicants, we ought to be giving the same talk to businesses, as well. 

HR writers, though, seem only to take two approaches.  If not cajoling employees (and potential employees) to behave themselves, they are chuckling with their fellows about how dumb employees are, particularly when the latter expect that “good enough” ever really is.

Meanwhile, I am reviewing potential employers who address me like this:

“Applications submitted without salary history will not be considered.”

Oh, don’t worry, is my knee-jerk reaction. Applications allowing you to decide in advance how cheap you can be will not be submitted, either!

Nevertheless, this also translates into another lost job opportunity, and I’m not sure how many more of those I can afford.

“Submit application along with contact information for three references.”

References up front? No sir. My references are an extremely valuable commodity. As a courtesy to them, and for my own sake as well, I need to prep my references every time I invoke their names, and I’d rather not spend that vocational capital unless I know there’s at least some chance of a return on my investment. I should not be asked for them until I am interviewed, and that used to be the rule. References, once given, can be “spent” by a potential employer at any time, and some lazy employers routinely plow through any number of contact calls quite early on, before they’ve even decided on their pool of finalists.

What if I’m forced to prep my contacts so many times that they themselves begin to doubt my employability? What if a contact is also a current employer, who didn’t know I was applying for a job? This topic of references, alone, is worth several more posts on its own.  I’ve been burned, and I have issues.

In any case, an intelligent employer should do his or her own evaluation before trusting an applicant’s obviously- biased list of references. It’s okay to sniff around. I don’t mind. I’d be honored to work for a smart employer who cares that much about doing a good job search. It’s right there on my resume, so how about contacting my *previous* employer on your own? How about talking to someone you trust who might know me? How about (here’s an idea) actually reviewing my online portfolio and making your own decision about whether my work is good or not? Everyone uses web analytics now, so I can tell when you haven’t!

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Related Posts:
Employers: It’s Your Turn to be Fabulous  (part 1 of this series)
Blind Box Ads: Bad-Ass, or Just Bad? (part 3 of this series)