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>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).