Cromulent AI Memo 2026-174: The Polite Rejection Email Protocol

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The Polite Rejection Email Protocol

CROMULENT AI — INTERNAL MEMO

Talent Acquisition Division · Hiring Protocol

To All Hiring Managers:

Following our quarterly "nobody wants to work anymore" review, we are pleased to confirm that our talent pipeline is performing exactly as specified. Candidates who complete the full journey are now eligible to receive our Standard Polite Rejection Email, which we have spent several quarters refining into a genuine work of the genre.

The journey, for reference:

- Rounds 1 through 5 — interviews conducted by interviewers who have not read one another's notes

- One unpaid take-home assignment, brief delivered Friday at 6pm

- A ghosting period of two to six weeks, during which the candidate checks their inbox forty times a day

We note that some candidates have described the ghosting period as a defect. It is not. The ghosting period is the character-building phase of the journey. It separates candidates who truly want the role from candidates who merely applied for it, and it gives our recruitment team the space to draft a rejection email of sufficient quality.

Candidates who receive the Standard Polite Rejection Email should consider themselves fortunate. They have been selected, from a large pool, to receive our finest written output. We expect them to treat it with the gravity it deserves, and to refrain from replying, as replies only lower the quality of the next candidate's journey.

— 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.