Dear Applicant,

You are not a fit for the Creative Strategist / Thought Leader Associate role you applied for. We’ve also deemed you unfit for general living on planet earth. Fuck you.

We are sending you this form rejection on a Saturday, when we think you won’t be checking your email, only a full quarter after you applied.  We forgot to get back to you because we forgot that we were running a business. If we were interested in minimizing our performed guilt, we have used obsequious words like “thank you”, “opportunity”, “regret”, and “unfortunately.” Instead, we hope you appreciate our direct, radically honest candor in the opening paragraph.

We intentionally write vague job descriptions to make both your and our lives harder. Surely asking for a 10-page work sample from well over 100 applicants and subsequently forcing our HR people to read the resulting ~1000 plus pages of material means we are doing something right. Because we have inevitably managed to hire someone for every role we have ever made public, we have adopted a hardline anti job-requirements position. Think about it: most requirements sections make any given description too long and too informative. And we all know that job hunting is better if there is an element of mystery regarding what you are applying for.

That being said, if we had our shit together, we’d edit our job descriptions to include the lightly disguised resumes of people we have previously hired. Then, we’d say “if you are similar to these successful hires, or if you have a very different background, please apply. We encourage you to look elsewhere if you fall somewhere in the middle.” But we aren’t that well-organized because, in part, we are incapable of critical thought. We also just don’t care.

We should mention that we have also bought into our own BS: we think we are special, that our work environment is unique, and that we have all of the power in the job market. In the quiet moments that never happen, we sometimes get close to suspecting our insistence on our own success might be a case of confirmation bias. We have absolutely no intention of doing any more work to see if you fit for the other roles we are hiring for, including the job we just posted to LinkedIn whose (very few) concrete requirements (which those amoral bastards at LinkedIn forced us to write) are ones which you happen to match. In fact, we used your resume and application materials as kindling back in December. In fairness, it was cold.

If it wasn’t clear, don’t ever apply to our company again. If you do end up working in management, or even running a company, we hope you never test our hiring process to as a way to assess how we do things.

Lastly, though on the surface we appear to be a disorganized creative studio, our true purpose is to promote a Marxist revolution among job-seekers. We’ve done a lot of collective introspection and concluded that we can only be happy when the basic societal systems we live by are completely re-designed, which will only happen when the means of production are seized by people who are not us.

Viva la revolution,

K

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Evan Warfel lives, thinks, and writes in San Francisco. He will gladly lead your Marxist revolution for a monthly fee and/or a completion bonus.