Comment by Ethee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ethee | Hacker News Reader

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I can understand why you're saying this and my response here will be more of a general reply to your direct reply's as it seems like a lot of them are missing the key element of WHY you can act this way in the current market. The big 'L' word, Leverage. In the current market you have all the leverage in the world as the employer to find a perfect fit employee due to the overall supply of workers and declining job market. When the market swings back the other way eventually however, the shoe will be on the other foot so to speak, and you wont have such privilege.

It's amazing how short our memories are for all the companies 10 years ago bending over backwards to give those employees anything and everything they wanted.

A lot of my statement here is very generalizing but at the end of the day market forces really do dictate a lot of this. I keep seeing article after article from hiring managers about how they're FLOODED with applications. You can't be 'polite' to all those people, as most people don't have the attention span for all that. There are definitely 2 sides to this coin it just seems that from the side of the people wanting to be hired they just have no empathy for those doing the hiring.

> I keep seeing article after article from hiring managers about how they're FLOODED with applications. You can't be 'polite' to all those people, as most people don't have the attention span for all that.

I dunno. Being polite in the context of a job application is pretty basic: if the applicant didn’t make it to a phone screen, send them a polite form letter telling them that.

It doesn’t require much attention, just a little automation and caring enough to actually respond.

For those that made it to a phone screen but not past it, a polite rejection email is also sufficient.

This doesn’t seem like a lot to me.

Well sure then let's break it down. Assume I have an open role for a small business and I get 500 applications to sort through. The first step is most businesses will use at least some sort of filtering for the basic requirements to determine good fit. So those are pretty easy to sort through. Let's assume I cut those applications down to 50 that actually fit my requirements.

Now am I supposed to bundle up all those 450 initial applications that got filtered out just to send them a nice polite email that their resumes didn't even fit the position they applied for? From a pure business perspective this is a straight waste of time. Especially as most businesses aren't going to have an automatic way to do this easily, and building that automation doesn't make my company money. But if I already happened to have some automation setup for it, then maybe sure. This part is the majority 'ghosted' applications. For the rest of the 50 I'd probably be more likely to actually send them a personalized email about the role because at least they actually fit what they applied for.

>Now am I supposed to bundle up all those 450 initial applications that got filtered out just to send them a nice polite email that their resumes didn't even fit the position they applied for?

Yes.

>Especially as most businesses aren't going to have an automatic way to do this easily, and building that automation doesn't make my company money.

If you have the automation in place to receive and process 500 applications in the first place, and filtering that automatically cuts them down, I think it's reasonable to expect that you'd have automation that can email the people who were cut to tell them that they weren't selected and not to expect any further communication.

> Especially as most businesses aren't going to have an automatic way to do this easily...

I find myself surprised by the idea that, in most cases, any business is not used some form of automated solution for resume filtering. In that case, it seems like automated rejection responses should be a capability provided by that solution. I can't recall the last time I went through an application process that wasn't clearly provided to the company I was applying for by a third-party company, though I'll grant that the companies to which I might apply are likely not those to which you are referring.

From a straight business perspective it's not a waste of time, since the candidates you reject may be candidates you want in the future.

It's always good to be polite. It would be an advantage to send a form letter nowadays, since job seekers will remember it.

And come on. You have a list of emails. Do you really think it's insurmountable for a business to send an email to a list of emails? My "promotions" inbox begs to differ.

> Now am I supposed to bundle up all those 450 initial applications that got filtered out just to send them a nice polite email that their resumes didn't even fit the position they applied for? From a pure business perspective this is a straight waste of time.

It's not paper, dude. It's a Select-All operation and then a matter of removing the one person who you did choose to hire. It doesn't have to be personalized. That straw-man is a pure invention of your imagination. A rejection email that says, "You didn't get the job. We hired someone else." as coarse as it is, would be infinitely less insulting, stressful, discourteous, etc. than just flat-out ghosting.

There's no complex "automation" to set up. This is something that programs since the 90s have been able to do.

You could argue that this doesn't align with the software/workflow that you're using, but that's on you (and if this is your actual dayjob, you have no excuse, and the article's and other commenters' remarks about basic lack of respect and human decency are spot-on).

> a polite rejection email is also sufficient

The reason for the lack of those is that employers want to hedge their bets - emailing a rejection will make the candidate move on and potentially take another offer which would make them unavailable.

Letting them stew means the candidate may remain available if you suddenly change your mind or your top pick flakes out and you need a replacement on short notice.

It's understandable - what's less understandable is being butthurt about it when candidates start playing the exact same game and flake out because they too hedged their bets, picked another option and need to let you down.

This might make sense in the late stages of a hiring process (where it can veer into kind of unethical), but for early stages, it’s just not very compelling.

At any stage, if you take more than a couple of weeks to a month, the applicant has probably moved on anyway.

And for early stages applicants, almost no one is going to wait and not taking an offer in the hopes that they’ll hear back from a company that hasn’t given them feedback from a phone screen.

I have multiple open roles right now and am finding that I can’t afford to hire the top applicants. I honestly did not expect to have so little leverage.

And that should be expected. Leverage in this situation doesn't mean you get the cream of the crop for nothing. In this sense it means that you get applications that fit your role. When the market was flipped you were hard pressed to find people that actually matched at least half of your role requirements. Now even your statement gives away how much that has changed that you're only looking at the 'top applicants'. Now, you have so many people that fit you're struggling because you want the perfect ones.

I did expect there to be more strong applicants, but that hardly means I expect "perfect" applicants or "cream of the crop for nothing." With one role, for example, there are basically unqualified people, and qualified people who won't accept the top of our range (~$120K).

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