What my job rejection should really say

Dear Applicant,

We have never enjoyed dicking around with a person’s mental, financial and emotional stability as much as yours. That being said, it needs to stop. When we first came up the idea to just stop doing our jobs and instead focus our attention on fucking around with people we could not have possibly anticipated such an easy, albeit diligent, candidate as yourself.

We figured once people started catching wind of the fact that our office was not actually in the business of hiring people anymore; just messing with them, that eventually our fun would be short lived and turn into a quiet and permanent vacation from work. If our superiors ever wondered at our lack of ability to fill open job positions we would be able to back it up with the gaping lack of qualified, or indeed, any, applicants as we would have driven them away with our flagrant lack of professionalism coupled only with our thinly-masked sadistic “hiring” requirements.

We knew a few of the tougher candidates would stick it out for awhile. We know that the job market is currently a bitch and that a Master’s and twelve bucks will get you a cup of coffee at nationally recognized coffee chain. We guesstimated that only the most desperate of job seekers would make it about halfway through our ridiculous gauntlet of an application, testing and interviewing process, the rest deciding to move back in with their parents or get a job working retail. In our evil hearts we relish the though of sending hard working folks with families to feed and bills to pay to the moors of big box chain stores.

We practically get high reading the pathetic resume’s and CVs, deleting the online applications and shredding the paper ones, working ourselves into a frenzied euphoria that actually makes us come to work on an almost semi-regular basis, and this is just for the regular folks. Not the ones, the few, like you, who keep naively coming back for more. We’re not sure what would motivate a person to complete a daunting, two hour online application and then re-submit supplemental data no less than three times at our inane request. We’re also not sure what kind of person would wait patiently to hear back from us for over two months, even after politely calling and being “accidentally disconnected,” twice!

The dedication you demonstrated in showing up to a cock and bull standardized state test during the regular work week should be praised, especially since you stayed and took the test even though there were clearly over thirty other applicants taking the test for one piddly job opening. People with your sort of perseverance are the kind of people we imagine make good job candidates; if we weren’t more convinced that you are a glutton for punishment.

Surely, we thought, after we try to make you interview in person three times with three different sets of people from three unrelated departments, again, all during the regular work week, we imagined that we would break your spirit in no time. We won’t lie and say that at this point you were getting to be rather vexing. Many of those other fools who showed up to the standardized state test simply walked out when faced by both the daunting odds and the futility of it all; but not you. No. You cheerfully showed up to all three interviews like a champ. Toward the end there we were even scrambling for people for you to interview with. Do you know how hard it is to coordinate several people each from different departments and keep them totally in the dark as to their purpose? We couldn’t very well have them know why they were interviewing you, no, that would have taken away some of our fun. Unfortunately even after you likely realized that your interviewees had no idea who you were and what you were doing there you continued to pursue the job. You wrote thank you letters. You followed up.

People like you have an illness, and honestly, we were starting to get pissed. You were creating far more work for us than had we actually just hired someone and we couldn’t have that. Your spirit, it seemed, needed to be irrevocably broken. We didn’t even give us pause for a moment to email you a curt form letter stating that the funding had been re-evaluated and the recruitment for the job you had applied for was being pushed out three months. We were on the brink or orgasm when we emailed you again, a month later, to say that there had been good news and the recruitment had been moved up a month. We were in a near nirvana state when we emailed you only a few weeks later to say that the recruitment had been moved up to that very month! By the time we had strung you miserably along for months we were taking bets in the suicide pool when we sent out the final, cold, short letter that the recruitment had in fact been cancelled due to an issue with funding. We didn’t even apologize. We combed the obituaries for days.

Much to our chagrin we never did catch your name in the papers, but imagine our surprise when, only a month later, you applied for another open position with us! Yikes! This is not a good surprise. You kinda scare us. We have taken to walking in groups out to our cars at night. At first it was all kinds of fun to mess with you. Now we don’t even enjoy it anymore. Sure, we fired off that half assed request for clarification on additional questions one and two on the application. We even made sure to send the email at 4:17 pm and require that you have your answers in by 5:00 pm that very day.

We are requesting that you stop this immediately. Whereas you certainly rank as our favorite, and most pathetic, applicant of all time we simply don’t have the energy or creativity to go through this whole thing again. The first go around was more than enough fodder for even our most frenzied of daydreams. You made it both infinitely easy to torture you yet also created far too much work for us. We have decided to find some permanent fault in your most recent application and black ball you from ever applying again. Please don’t make us remove you from the top of our favorite list just by being the idiot you so clearly are.

We don’t want you.

We don’t want anyone, obviously, that is how the system is set up.

Do not apply ever again, we will see to it that it will be the last thing you ever do.

Thank you for your interest in our company, we are sorry, you are not what we are looking for at this time. Please note that we keep all our applications on file for a year and if any suitable position comes up we will contact you. (Seriously though, we won’t. Go away, now.)

Sincerely,

Evil Human Resources Department
Large Employer
Crap Town, USA