* A job application followup email I received:

Hi [programmerName],
Thank you for your interest in joining [companyName].

While we appreciate your application, we decided to move forward with other candidates whose skills and experience are a closer match to our requirements for this specific role.
Feel free to check back, as we are always adding new positions.

Best of luck with your career search!
-The [companyName] Team

* My (probably trashed) reply:

Hello

I personally ignore this precompiled stuff you HR people send.
I feel this answer will be probably trashed somewhere but I feel the need to write this.

You know absolutely nothing about my skills because you didn’t even talk with me.

Maybe I am not the best person in writing a resume or an introduction letter, the key skill appreciated in companies doing head hunting instead of building a solid corporate culture and cultivating talent. Or at least HR people in such companies.

Please consider that, maybe you didn’t like my resume or I didn't write a list of words matching your check list, but at least I honestly wrote my experience instead of trying to hack my way to a job interview writing a fake one that triggers usual HR patterns.
Consider that I do a job for a living and I don't live or have the time to make the perfect resume, I don’t even apply for all companies I see, I only apply for the ones I believe I can work well because I like them. I am not a professional job searcher, jumping from a company to another.

You keep posting this very same add since October 2019 and probably even earlier.
This sounds to me like:
- or your selection process does not work well and you end up hiring the wrong people
- or maybe your work place is not that good as you describe it, so that you have zero retainment despite your high salary.
But I cannot be sure because, guess what, I could not check personally.

If you want to talk about my skills and compare me to other people please test me otherwise don’t write (copy/paste) this offensive trash.

Best of luck with your career as a HR person in a tech company!

-A person tired of HR managers that do not give a f**k about the word “human” in their job description.

Welp. I think I witnessed a new job application hack. Someone listed my team’s general engineering email address for their Employee Referral.

That email address is listed publicly, but I’m pretty sure no one on my team told the applicant to list it as a referral contact. I suspect someone got the email from a Slack workspace. I had posted a job listing, in a threaded comment someone had complimented my employer’s public API, and I shared our engineering email and said we’d love to see what he builds.

It looks like someone else from that Slack saw this and decided to list the engineering email as an employee referral. I get that employee referral can mean different things to different people and it might be someone who’s new to job searching and doesn’t know better.

For my employer’s online application, an employee referral requires a name and email address for the employee. I’m curious what the applicant listed for the employee referrer’s name. Wonder if it was my name. If it is, guess I have to give my manager a heads up and tell him that I do not know this applicant.

This occurrence is a new one for me and I don’t think it’s happened to us before. And it’s not really a good tactic to get a resume read at my workplace. Where I work, my manger reviews the resumes and tells HR who he wants to set up calls with. It’s not HR or an ATS that screens resumes and sends them to my manager.