Worker Receives Pages-Long Email After A Job Application Detailing All The Things Wrong With Her Work History
"'Applied for a Job, Got a Life Audit Instead"
Yan Krukau | Pexels | Canva Pro In today's ridiculous job market, ghosting and radio silence after job applications and interviews have become the order of the day, and workers routinely say it drives them crazy and makes the process even more stressful. But there is such a thing as TOO MUCH communication, and one worker's recent experience is a perfect example.
The worker received a pages-long email detailing everything wrong with her work history.
The worker posted her story to Reddit after the email left her in disbelief. The position was for a software engineer, a field the woman has a decade of experience in. The email started out normally enough by thanking her for her time and the other usual pleasantries.
Reddit
But then it quickly took a hard left into the kind of presumptuous territory that makes you raise your eyebrows. As the worker herself put it, "applied for a job, got a life audit instead."
The email criticized her for working in too many industries and having an 'unconventional' education.
To be fair, it sounds like this woman definitely does have an outside-the-box career history, and experts say it's very important to properly package yourself if you do have a non-linear career path on your resume. That's even more true in this day and age, where so much of the resume review process is completely automated.
Nevertheless, this email? It is insane. It starts off by basically accusing her of lying about her career. "While you list 10 years in the field, your Linkedin profile suggests that your academic background was primarily in art fields and biomedical engineering," the email read, as if the arts and biomedical engineering don't use software. Or something?
Reddit
It then went on (and on, and on) about how her certifications are not up to snuff, nor are her software development skills, nor is her educational background, due to her attending "multiple universities," including Yale, without actually graduating from that institution. And that was just the beginning.
The email then criticized her for not knowing 'what you actually want to do with your life.'
"While a diverse background can bring valuable skills, it raises questions about whether software engineering is your primary field of expertise and what you actually want to do with your life," the email read.
Again, the summary of this woman's background suggests that she could use some resume advice. Still, this email is pretty shocking, not just because of its accusatory, judgmental tone but also because it is completely out of touch with reality.
Our job market is composed of short-term contract assignments to a degree that was unheard of prior to the Great Recession, and there is basically no job security anymore. Wages have not kept up with inflation, and a higher education is not financially accessible to most.
There are myriad reasons, most of them structural factors completely out of workers' control, for why a person would have a varied, all-over-the-place job history these days. It's mainly because unless you have a lot of privilege and nepotism on your side, those good, solid, long-term jobs are hard to come by.
This has created a job market that is "catch as catch can" for most people, and it's been this way for a very long time now. Recruiters and HR people can be averse to "job hoppers" like this woman all they want, but "job-hopping" isn't going anywhere, and if anyone should know this by now, it's them.
Many assumed the email had to have been written by AI — which just made it even more aggravating.
Aside from how rude and unfair it was, the email this woman received was also insane. Who has the kind of time to sit down and write a three-page email to a candidate in the first place, let alone one that contains a level of detail that would require such extensive digging into and cross-referencing of a worker's history?
And this was all just in response to a job application — not even an interview! It led several on Reddit to assume that the email had to have been written by AI, which made it even more offensive.
Because it showed that the company's HR team is completely out of touch — not only is this email dehumanizing, but it's intrusive and creepy. As one Reddit commenter put it, "Honestly, I’m surprised it doesn’t say 'and while digging through your trash last Sunday, we found an old lotto ticket, which means of course that you’d rather win a jackpot than work for wages; this is concerning.'"
Automating recruiting work may be the wave of the future, but so far, it doesn't seem like the robots really know what the heck they're doing. Maybe the problem isn't that "nobody wants to work anymore" but rather that decision makers are insisting on a level of resume perfection so ludicrously unrealistic that only a robot could ever find it in the first place — if those robots weren't terrible at the job of recruiting, that is.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.