Dear applicant,

Thank you for your interest in working at our company. We’ve received your application, and we’re positively over the moon that you’d consider joining us. We’re passionate about transparency in the hiring process, which is why we wanted to let you know that this passion stops just short of our own 37-step approach.

We know how grueling the job hunt can be, and we believe no one should go through it only to be left hanging. That’s why we promise to inform you of our decision no matter what it may be, so long as you follow up with us via email, carrier pigeon, or skywriting at least nine times after our specified decision date has come and gone. Please, no phone calls.

Unfortunately, we can’t respond to everyone who applies for this position. We receive hundreds of applications a day. How wild is that? Almost makes you think we’d have a kinder, more empathetic approach to this thing by now.

The first step in our process, should you be selected to move forward, is the Phone Screen. This is not to be confused with the Phone Interview, which is not to be confused with the Conference Call Interview, which is not to be confused with the Pre-Phone Interview Video Interview Questionnaire From Home. We recommend preparing for this phone screen for about an hour. The conversation itself will last five minutes, and we will ask you none of the questions you think we will. This is when we want to hear the fun stuff, like what your favorite kind of soup is!

After the first four rounds comes our five-part work assessment. You might think it would be more logical to do this right off the bat, before the interviews. It would. We recommend spending a few hours on each assignment, and we’ve been told it helps to ignore the fact that we have not and will not consider paying you for this work.

Following the phone interviews and the work assessment, we’ll hold off on contacting you for several days. This may turn into weeks, which may even border on months. Thank you for bearing with us! The hiring process is tricky and time-consuming, and this catches us by surprise every time. Again, follow-up emails are welcome, but it’s our right to respond to them only on the first full moon of the season unless it’s raining that day, in which case we may not respond to them at all.

After this unspecified length of time, should we deem you worthy, we will invite you to participate in a trial day. We may or may not pay you for this. Haven’t decided yet.

We urge you to refrain from getting too excited should you make it to the trial day as, at that point, you will not even be halfway through the process. Among other things, you’ll still have to conquer the hedge maze; the blood sacrifice; the recipe swap; the What Will You Build With Three Popsicle Sticks, a Marshmallow, and a Bachelor’s Degree Blindfolded Test; and the in-person interview.

At this point, you may be asking yourself whether or not this job is worth going through all the trouble. Lucky for us, you don’t have a choice! After all, you’re in an incredibly competitive job market, and we are one of the few places to email you back in the first place. We are the light at the end of a long, depressing tunnel, and we reserve the right to flicker on and off for as long as we’d like. If we could make this process easier, we so totally would! It’s just that we can and we won’t.

All the best,
The Talent Acquisition Team

Please note: Do not reply to this email. Replies are automatically sent to our printer, where they are scooped up by our unpaid interns and set ablaze along with your application.