The fastest rejection ever!

by clothwright

I spent all morning working on a cover letter.  Created an account at the company website, uploaded my resume, pasted a cover letter in the text box, uploaded a pdf of the cover letter, answered the standard questions which I am getting quite tired of seeing, hit submit.  As I pressed the submit button I thought “Well, at least I’ve done one thing today.”  I went to check my e-mail for the canned submission message, then went to look at some other stuff, then clicked back into my e-mail box and lo and behold, there was another message from the company, saying “Hi, we’d liked to update you on the status of your application… your qualifications don’t fit our needs at this time.  But we’ll keep your resume on file!”  (Yeah, I’m sure lots of people get hired that way, by HR people going through saved resumes to see what matches up with current job openings.  The other one has bells on).  Here’s the astounding part: according to the time stamps on the e-mails, the time between the confirmation of submission and rejection was 12 minutes.  TWELVE MINUTES.  Honestly, I feel as if that must be some kind of record.  Do I get a medal?  Or a plaque or a certificate or something?  Because come on, that’s not even a quarter of an hour!  That is one HR staff that is so on top of things they might as well be working from the peak of Mt. Everest.

Right, ok, I recognize that in all probability there was no human involved in that decision.  My first thought was that it was the result of one of the infamous resume keyword scans.  Oops, didn’t pick the right buzzwords, too bad.  That would be very frustrating because I was pretty sure that my resume had some valuable keywords on it.  I know that my cover letter included significant phrases from the job ad.  A friend suggested that maybe the position has been filled already and they simply didn’t take the job posting down.  That explanation makes more sense to me; I’d prefer to believe that, because to contemplate the possibility that my qualifications are discarded so quickly, whether by computer or human, is truly discouraging.  I should perhaps note here that the job wasn’t CEO or graphic artist or kindergarten teacher–by which I mean that it wasn’t a position that had nothing to do with my skills and experience.  According to the ad, it was something that I’ve done in the past and could reasonably do again, and I have most of the key qualifications that were listed.  While I do appreciate the explicit expression of rejection–I won’t be going around thinking or hoping that this position might suddenly come through–it is hard to escape the feeling that I wasted an entire morning.

Lesson: one more example to support the maxim “apply immediately”.

Before all of that, I got another polite rejection message in my e-mail from a place I applied to weeks ago.  I wasn’t holding out hope and I’m glad they went to the trouble to notify me.  Even so it’s not exactly something to buoy up my mood.

And then, just as I was breathing deeply and getting past the frustration and disappointment, I got a text from my stepmother: Dad is in the hospital.  The text was maximally alarming and minimally informative.  As you might imagine, this did not lead to an afternoon of calm centeredness and the smooth production of several more cover letters.  No, in fact, I was on edge and worried and upset and didn’t get anything done.  I talked to my brother for a while.  I am a 4-5 hour drive from Dad; he is several thousand miles away.  Brother said that in the best case scenario, we can probably expect many more incidents like this over the coming years.  Both of our parents have health issues and they were born before WWII.  He’s right, much as I hate to consider it.  Later this afternoon I was able to talk to my Dad and he’s ok for now; he’ll be in the hospital for a few days while they figure out what’s wrong.

All in all, an unproductive day.  I am feeling a bit grouchy and not too positive about the whole job thing right now.  Brother has a high-paying job in an expensive city and wants to be doing something else.  He worked hard to get where he is and he’s good at what he does; many people would envy him.  He’s bored and wants to do something that more closely matches his values.  I was surprised to hear him mention ageism–he thinks there is a lot of prejudice against not-young people who want to start new careers.  I absolutely agree but it is strange to hear this from my younger brother!  He’d be willing to start over at something interesting, but people look at his experience (nearly 20 years excelling in a field that requires a special degree) and assume he’d never stick it.  I can’t know for sure, but I think this might be at play in some of my applications too… it wouldn’t surprise me if I was dropped from the possibles list after last week’s interview because of the PhD.  They want someone who is willing to do a lot of moderately skilled but in some ways boring work (interviewer’s words, not mine).  I would do boring with occasional challenges if it meant no worries about food and rent.  I don’t think I convinced the interviewer of that, though.

Thinking about that, and about brother’s anecdotes about exorbitant rents in his city, and about my age and my ebbing tolerance for busywork and office politics, today is one of those days when I think I should simply pick a nice place to live and then figure out how to make a living there.  I’ve always wanted to live in the country and here I am looking at major urban areas–Chicago, D.C., Fairfax, Boston, L.A.  A great job posting came through today but it’s in NYC; I have to draw the line at New York.  I think I’d go insane, even if I could afford to live in a suburb and could face two hours of commuting a day.  I am wondering if I should focus on some smaller cities in areas where having a farm is not unrealistic.  I’ve heard Indianapolis is nice.  Kansas City was featured in the NY Times a while ago as a pleasant place with relatively low cost of living.  Portland Maine?  Ithaca?  Some small town in Pennsylvania or Vermont?  Maybe there is a nice mid-sized insurance company in Des Moines that needs a data analyst.

I am now shoving the whole problem aside for the evening to get some much-needed relaxation.