Job seeking
What's with the 2am rejection emails?
Trevor Churchley ·
Another Hustle Game player told me their rejection email landed at 2am again, just before they woke up, just in time to add anxiety before another day of job seeking. Poor user experience, or do employers even care?
Same conversation keeps happening in the weekly check-ins. Someone mentions the time stamp, 2am, sometimes 3am, and asks me why a company would send it then.
Nobody I've ever come across at these companies actually chose that hour. It's an ATS running a nightly batch job, set up once and forgotten, firing off decisions made hours earlier while the person reading them is asleep.
What gets players every time isn't just the hour. It's realising the whole thing reads like it was built by someone who's never actually had to be a job seeker themselves, and has never thought about how it would affect a job seeker who believed they were a perfect fit for the vacancy.
So I've started asking our community. If not 2am, when? The feelings are mixed. Mid morning sounds obvious, at least the day has started and morning coffees are not spoilt. Friday at 5pm just ruins the weekend before it starts.
What does a genuinely humane version of this look like, and I don't think it's really about picking a nicer hour. What's the best time, or the worst, to deliver rejection news to someone? And is there a better way than box ticking automated responses with no reason?
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