Four rejections on a Sunday holiday weekend: Netizens explain why the automated rejection system never takes a day off

A post on Reddit’s r/recruitinghell has talked about receiving four job rejections on a Sunday during a US Labor Day holiday weekend.

“I think it’s amazing that all of these HR people are busy toiling away during the Labour Day holiday to thoroughly consider and vet so many applications and send out heartfelt emails to prospective employees,” the original poster wrote. “They truly are the tireless, unsung heroes of corporate America and they deserve our respect and admiration.”

The sentiment was universally understood. The sarcasm was not lost on everyone.

What Reddit explained

The thread promptly demystified the timing for anyone who had not encountered it before.

“People get salty when the rejection comes too soon after the application, so the company builds in a delay of two days or 100 hours or whatever between the actual rejection and the notification. But they don’t micromanage it,” one commenter explained.

Another kept it even simpler: “You were rejected on Friday.”

One commenter confirmed the mechanics from the other side: “The application systems are designed to send notifications to all candidates who have been dispositioned or otherwise determined not to be moved forward at a certain day and time. HR people aren’t toiling away on a holiday weekend.”

And one offered a commiserating anecdote: “A couple of years ago, Sunday before Labor Day, I was grilling outside with friends. One asked about my job hunt. I said I was excited about a particular role and hoped to hear back after Labor Day. Fifteen seconds later, I got a rejection email about that role.”

The sarcasm does the work here; the original poster is not actually praising HR departments. They are expressing the specific absurdity of a hiring process so automated that it cannot even observe a public holiday, sending rejection emails that were never written by a human to applicants who were never considered by one, on a day when the offices are closed.

The rejection was probably generated the moment a keyword filter or a certain score determined the application was not up to par. The Sunday delivery is simply when the queue reached the original poster’s name. A coincidence, in short.

It doesn’t make the rejection feel any better, though.