Dear Applicant,
Thank you for your embarrassingly eager interest in our job opening and for getting to know us over the course of twelve rounds of interviews.
We regret to inform you that we have selected another, far more suitable candidate for the role—a starchy ten-pound sack of potatoes, straight from our local supermarket.
While we were impressed with your experience, we all agreed that your energy levels were a bit much for our taste. Your demeanor came across as eager, approachable, and ambitious, while we tend to prefer candidates who are more down-to-earth, dusty, and brooding.
It is potentially worth noting that the hiring manager has a personal attachment to potatoes due to a prized family gratin recipe. We are confident this has nothing to do with the decision.
Given our status as a fast-moving startup, we want to ensure that each new addition to the team helps us achieve our goal of increasing our revenue by 500 percent every two weeks. The sack of potatoes, covered in unsightly green sprouts, has proven it understands the importance of growth.
Although your skills align perfectly with what’s listed in the job description, you do not have specific experience in an additional secret skill that isn’t relevant at all. The potatoes do not have this experience either, but we thought we would just mention that it wasn’t a point in your favor.
Throughout this interview process, it also became clear that a sack of potatoes has certain advantages over human candidates like yourself, due to its lack of thoughts, feelings, and ability to speak up amid a vaguely toxic work environment.
Additionally, with your experience and salary expectations, we’re afraid that our compensation package might disappoint you. Our finance department’s proposed budget for this role will fall short of your desired salary range by at least 98 percent, whereas the sack of potatoes is willing to work with us, with a reasonable expectation of seven Euros per week (to feed their potato family). Consider being a little less greedy and a little more open when job hunting in the future.
For the technical interview, we asked you to complete a wildly overcomplicated strategic exercise in the space of one hour. Your performance was actually quite impressive, so we thought it would be good to steal your idea and use it ourselves. Sorry.
We also HAVE to point out the elephant in the room: You are not a potato or other starchy root vegetable. Yes, you were upfront with us about that fact before the dozen interviews, but we’ve just remembered it, and it’s actually a dealbreaker. We are not sorry.
Thanks again for interviewing. Feel free to try us again in the future, especially if you die and come back as a bag of yellow onions. If you have a chance, we’d love to hear your feedback on your interview experience so we can entirely disregard it. Please take the survey linked here. It should only take forty-seven minutes.
Warm regards,
“Human” Resources
