When you are a recruiter, you get to see all sides of human nature, and all the accompanying emotions. When people get the job, there is elation. When they don’t dejection. You get to see kindness, competitiveness, nervousness and aloofness. While all these things are great and each have their own place, I feel the need to highlight my favorite….stupidity.
I devote a short bit of time (and catharsis) occasionally here at RI3D to the absurd, amazing and usually unbelievable snippets of things recruiters hear. As comedian Ron White says, “You Can’t Fix Stupid”.
Maybe we should have hired that guy after all?
Some of the things that fall into the YCFS category are the things that people write back after being rejected for a job. Look, I get it…..the job market is tough, and you’ve applied to 200 jobs (of which you are qualified for all of them, I know) and I’m just the next recruiter to stand in your way. But there is a graceful way to reply to a rejection, if you feel so compelled to respond to it. Below are two examples of how NOT to respond. Recruiters get hours of entertainment out of these. I hope you get a laugh or two.
- “LOL I am more than qualified good luck to u”
- F$ck off – Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
I’d put each of these in context, but, well this is all they wrote. At least I don’t know which cell phone company the first person uses.
Yes friends, the old saying goes, “you can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose”. But, you can pick your choice of words. Aside from the obvious lack of salutations that most professional e-mails tend to contain (what? I embraced my geekdom long ago) and the “sentences” written in “Textglish”, these are pretty funny. I mean, unless you are the angry person who wrote it.
So, if you need to respond, then do so with a little dignity and tact. And maybe one or two less F-bombs.
But then again, those are funny.
Recruiting In 3D 
I came across your response on an article title,
“Recruiting’s Dirty Little Secrets — What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You” after finding a review that was written about our hiring process here. It annoys me that candidates can treat us the way they do or bad mouth as but we also do have stories to tell! I actually am adamant about having Google desktop or Windows desktop installed on my laptop so I can always research an email, interview or anything of sort that have come across my desk, this is CYA but have felt that I needed to protect myself! But I am digressing, as I wanted to share a reply I had gotten from a candidate that we hired at one point, but decided to not show up and that continously apply to a posting, I finally just said, ‘that’s it, I have to let him know, he has burnt his bridge here”. I dispo’d him nicely and reminded him of the offer and how he neglected to show up on Day 1 – his response, “I dont remember that and forget it, this is a WAIST of time!”
Yes, it was a colossal waist of my time. 🙂 I just wish that if candidates can go talk about the candidate experience, that we as recruiters, can also share, what kind abuse we get without getting in trouble. Wouldn’t that be a fair world?
Keep writing!
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