Re: Our Hiring Process

Dear Applicant J742B,

We regret to inform you that you have been eliminated from consideration for the creative-director position, prior to the final round of deliberations (Round 19).

We appreciate your efforts and understand the importance of feedback, so below are our notes on your eighteen-stage application.

While you have excellent credentials, your Round 4 “sixty-second video bio-pic” did not fully sell us on the concept of “you.” This was your chance to wow us with your uniqueness! Yet, despite our recommendation, you neglected to hire a film (or even television) director to realize your vision. However, we did enjoy the skydiving scene, and we gave you credit for doing your own stunts. We hope that your tibia heals soon.

During Round 6, you impressed us with your FaceTime, Google Hangout, and in-person interviews with our H.R. representative, your prospective supervisor, the fourth-floor security team, the U.P.S. guy, and the U.P.S. guy’s niece. A lot of people would not have written thank-you notes for each of those interviews, and, unfortunately, you did not either. You combined the U.P.S. guy and the U.P.S. guy’s niece into one note, which drove down your over-all “gratitude” score.

Your “super-secret handshake” in Round 7 was a little derivative.

While not a hundred per cent impressed with your Round 11 twenty-page, five-year, company-wide action plan with creative deliverables, we were able to cobble together enough content from your work to lay off a third of our marketing team. You saved us a lot of money, especially because one of those laid-off employees was days away from going on maternity leave. Thank you for that!

We appreciated the charisma you showed at our Round 13 office happy hour, where you ironically sang “Call Me Maybe” at karaoke. But you lost points when you refused to eat the third tray of nachos because of your “lactose intolerance.” At our company, we do not abide any intolerance. Plus, how do you expect to power through an all-nighter with a smile on your face when you can’t even power through a little dairy-induced gastrointestinal discomfort?

You further disappointed us during Round 15, when it turned out that you were not, in fact, the same blood type as your potential supervisor and therefore could not provide him with a transfusion or organ(s) should the need arise. We need someone who’s a team player down to her very core. Specifically, the blood part of her core.

That being said, you pleasantly surprised us during Round 17’s company retreat, where we asked you to build a mobile version of our sister site while spending a night in our H.R. representative’s haunted mansion on Deathbriar Cliff. As you so adeptly showed us (and your fellow-candidates), the real “evil spirit” is fear of failure. And the banshee.

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