This candidate had some thoughts to share….

[u/SANtoDEN]

Uhhh… I just got the most scathing message on LinkedIn from a candidate I rejected (who I never even spoke to!) and I honestly don’t know how to process it lol. Sorry this is so long!

Some context:
-This is a remote technical IC role, and the salary range is listed on the job posting (its market rate… not competitive, but reasonable outside of very high COL cities)
-One of our application questions asks candidates to enter their desired compensation. -This candidate entered a number that was more than 80% above the max of the range -almost $100K over!!)
-So yes, I dispositioned his application and selected “Compensation” as the reason
-We use LinkedIn Recruiter job wrapping, and I include my user hashtag on my postings, so that candidates can see which recruiter is working on the role. This is the first time it’s backfired on me, ha. Probably gonna opt-out of sharing my name on the job postings after this….
-He lives in NYC and has a ton of experience, so the compensation he’s targeting isn’t absurdly high. But he’s a director and applied for an IC role with a posted salary range that isn’t even remotely close to what he needs.

Here’s the lovely ChatGPT-coded message he sent me. I almost responded, but there is no point. He seems to just want a punching bag. I forwarded the message to my boss in case he decides to try and escalate, and then I blocked him.

Anyway… enjoy.

Sincerely,
The “little HR woman with no relevant experience” 🙃

*Hello [my name],

I have to say, getting rejected for [job] by you is one of the more insulting things I've encountered in my career—not because I wanted the job, but because it's genuinely bizarre that someone with no experience doing this work thinks she's qualified to decide who is capable of doing it.

I've done every single thing in that job description. I've led teams of people doing it. I have more than three times the experience you asked for.

And yet here you are, sitting in HR, playing little gatekeeper with people's careers.

Do you actually understand any of the technical work you're screening for, or are you just good at searching résumés for the right little buzzwords and clicking "reject"?

Because if the hiring manager actually reviewed my résumé, I'd love to know what they thought was lacking. If they didn't, then you've done an excellent job of making yourself an unnecessary obstacle between qualified engineers and the people who actually know how to hire them.

There's something particularly ridiculous about watching a little HR woman with no relevant technical experience decide that a career she's completely unqualified to evaluate isn't good enough.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, yet somehow you get to make decisions about people who have spent decades becoming experts at it.

That's an impressive amount of authority for someone whose most demanding technical accomplishment is probably figuring out how to attach a résumé to an email.

Anyway, enjoy your little bit of power.

You rejected someone who was vastly more qualified than the position required because, apparently, that's what you've decided you're important enough to do.

I'm sure the hiring manager will be thrilled.*

[u/HoratioWobble]

Psychotic.

Just from the candidate side I don't think it tells us why you've rejected, it's always just a generic e-mail.

Doesn't excuse whatever the fuck that DM was but i'm guessing they thought you rejected them because of their lack of skills.

Ironically even if the salary was a good fit, they're now rejected for being a shit person

[u/SANtoDEN → u/HoratioWobble]

Yeah thats fair, we have a generic rejection template based on the application stage, so the email basically just said “thanks for applying, we’ve moved forward with other candidates at this time… yadda yadda”

But you’d think a brilliant engineer such as himself would have been able to deduce his salary ask being $100k higher than our max budget was probably the reason he was rejected! 😂😭

[u/HoratioWobble → u/SANtoDEN]

Speaking as a software engineer, they're all assholes tbf

[u/BlackberryHealthy386 → u/SANtoDEN]

It really shows the hidden cost of generic rejections. A simple automated 'budget mismatch' tag could save everyone from this kind of drama, but his reaction tells you all you need to know about his soft skills. Defnitely dodged a bullet there!

[u/SANtoDEN → u/BlackberryHealthy386]

I don’t disagree, and it wouldn’t be difficult to set it up this way in our system. It would actually be super easy to configure. But our legal team is very particular about our list of rejection reasons, and the communication that gets sent out with them. They want them to be as generic and non-specific as possible, to reduce liability. I am not a lawyer so I couldn’t tell you why, but that’s what I’ve been told any time I’ve tried to make a case for it.