Cromulent AI Memo 2026-171: The Gap-Year Appendix

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The Gap-Year Appendix

CROMULENT AI — INTERNAL MEMO

Talent Acquisition Division · Policy Update

To All Recruiters:

Effective immediately, every resume gap of six months or longer must be accompanied by a Gap-Year Appendix explaining, in no more than 500 words, what happened and why it is not the company's problem.

Initial guidance on acceptable gaps:

- 'I went to Yale' — acceptable. The interviewer is instructed to hire the candidate immediately, ideally before the candidate finishes the sentence.

- 'I cared for a family member' — acceptable, though the committee would prefer you spend the full 500 words proving it.

- 'I was laid off' — flagged for human review. Human review is currently scheduled for next quarter.

- 'I tried to start my own company and it failed' — do not write this. We have seen this before. This is not a Yale.

Candidates who decline to provide the appendix will be marked 'insufficiently reflective.' Candidates who provide an appendix without an Ivy League affiliation will be scored against a rubric we will write later, in private, and which no candidate will ever see.

We are confident this policy will reduce time-to-hire for candidates with the right background while giving everyone else a clear, documented reason for the outcome they had already assumed.

— The Satire Desk

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.