Crossposted on Substack.
A while ago, I was running a hiring round for a role in AI safety fieldbuilding and sent the following rejection email to candidates we didn’t move forward with. At that stage of the process, I wasn’t able to provide individualized feedback, but I still wanted to offer some general orientation points to applicants.
Several candidates told me they appreciated the email, so I thought it might be useful to share it as an example of a relatively low-cost way to provide feedback to a large number of people who are filtered out early in hiring rounds.
The email:
Hey there,
I hope you are doing well. I’m writing this email as you have recently applied for the Director role at ENAIS.
I regret to inform you that we have decided not to move forward with your application at this time.
While we cannot provide individualised feedback at this stage, I wanted to share some general observations that can help you understand the decision. Our strongest candidates tended to have:
Reasons we didn’t proceed with some applicants:
Please note that these are general trends we observed; they are not meant to imply that applicants lacked these entirely or have checked all the boxes.
For reference, we received over X applications for the role, which made it a particularly competitive hiring round. We are only moving forward with a small number of candidates. Please don’t take this email as evidence that you wouldn’t be a good fit for similar roles. If you feel down upon reading this, we recommend reading these resources [ 1,
Additionally, I would like to share with you these 5 articles that I believe can really help find work in the field.
Thank you for being interested in working with us, and for the effort that you have put into your application. We wish you good luck in your job search.
Gergő