How Not to Job Hunt

I review zillions of job applications. I’ve seen good ones, mediocre ones, and bad ones. However, there’s one recently that took the cake. If any of you are looking for jobs, please don’t do this. It’s the fastest way to remove yourself from consideration.

All of our job applications go through the company website. Once a candidate applies, an automated e-mail is generated informing the candidate that we will contact him/her if we wish to conduct an interview and wishing him/her good luck in the job search. This e-mail is sent from a generic address.

It used to be that the generic address was a dummy address that could send outgoing mail but couldn’t receive incoming mail. Then the IT guy decided to make it real. Now mail sent to that address goes to my inbox, the receptionist’s inbox, and my boss’s inbox. My boss is the VP of HR, I’m the main HR contact person, and the receptionist helps out the HR department with administrative support.

A few weeks ago, we opened up a new position, and we started getting applications for it almost immediately. This one guy applied, and the standard generic thanks for applying e-mail went out. A few minutes later, he replied to the generic e-mail. He said that if we weren’t considering him for the position, to please remove his information from our database.

I ignored the e-mail because we are required to keep every resume and application we receive as a condition of our federal contracts. We have to prove that our hiring isn’t racially discriminatory, so we have to keep the resumes to demonstrate that we hired the most qualified candidate for the job. (It’s a Silicon Valley software startup. It’s not surprising that our workforce is roughly 60% Asian. So is our applicant pool.)

The hiring manager said that he wanted to talk to this candidate. The receptionist was getting ready to schedule things when the candidate sent another response to the generic e-mail. I have reproduced it verbatim: “CAN YOU CONFIRM THAT ALL MY PERSONAL INFORMATION HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM YOUR SYSTEM?” Yes, it was indeed in all caps.

Needless to say, we showed this e-mail to the hiring manager. The guy ended up not getting an interview.