MEMO: Candidate Communication Optimisation Protocol — Why Silence Is Strategic

TO

All Hiring Managers and Talent Acquisition Partners

FROM

Office of Candidate Experience Excellence, Cromulent AI

RE

Streamlining Post-Interview Communications (Effective Immediately)

Recent industry benchmarking confirms that 94% of candidate follow-ups generate zero revenue. Every "thank you for your time" email you send is time not spent sourcing the next pipeline batch. Our new Candidate Communication Optimisation Protocol (CCOP) formalises what the market has been doing informally for years: strategic silence.

The protocol operates on a simple triage system:

TIER 1 — THE HIRED. You will communicate with them. Obviously. They start Monday.

TIER 2 — THE MAYBE. A single templated "we are still reviewing" email triggers a 14-day cooldown. If they follow up within the cooldown window, the clock resets. Most will self-resolve by accepting another offer, saving everyone an awkward conversation.

TIER 3 — THE DECLINED. Research conducted internally (sample size: vibes) indicates these candidates "probably deserve" the silence. Our sentiment analysis toolkit — currently in beta — will soon assign each rejected candidate a Deserve Quotient (DQ) score, allowing hiring managers to triage closure emails by urgency. DQ scores below 40 will not generate a response.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Q: Will candidates not just complain about us online?

A: Our brand sentiment dashboard tracks Reddit mentions in real time. If a thread exceeds 500 upvotes, the protocol triggers an automatic "we are reviewing our internal processes" LinkedIn post from the CEO account. Crisis resolved.

Q: Is this legal?

A: We have been advised not to answer this question in writing.

Implementation begins across all departments June 30. Compliance is strongly encouraged and weakly enforced, which is to say, not enforced at all. Questions may be directed to the CCOP Slack channel, where they will be read and not responded to. Strategically.

From the Satire Desk at goodbye, interview. All companies and people in this memo are fictional. Satire is always labelled and never names real companies — the true stories do that on their own. Spotted an error of fact in our non-fiction? Corrections.