A shockingly fast rejection from the National Grid has racked up some outrage on social media – with the applicant ruled out of the process just three minutes after sending an email
Applying for jobs is stressful at the best of times – so when you get an instant rejection it can be disheartening.
From polishing up your CV, to spell-checking a cover letter – it’s so easy to overthink practically everything. But one applicant claims this was taken to another level, after they had been rejected from a position just three minutes after sending an email. Taking to Reddit, the frustrated candidate said they ‘spent hours writing’ the cover letter for a job at the National Grid, only to be ‘automatically rejected by a bot’.
“I love the current job market in the UK,” they wrote, sharing an image of two emails from the UK-based energy company. The first picture appeared to be an automatic confirmation letter, thanking the candidate for their interest and getting in touch.
“We are reviewing applications and will be in touch within the next 14 days,” it read, with a timestamp at ’10:37′. However, another unexpected email came through at ’10:40′ – and it was bad news for the applicant.
“Thank you for your application to the role,” it said. “After careful consideration, we have decided that we will no longer be progressing your application any further on this occasion. Thank you for your interest in National Grid Careers.”
This shockingly fast rejection certainly racked up a lot of outrage on social media, with others also claiming that similar things had happened to them. One person wrote: “Yeah did this at a website for a local mine. Spent 35 mins signing up, uploaded my resume the website did something weird and had to manually fix it.
“Then hit submit and instantly got a email that said you are not a good fit. It was a forklift/operator job and I have 15+years of experience. Was a little mad.”
Another person later added: “I work in HR and in the past I’ve also done recruiting…We had a rule that we only sent rejections after two weeks, never earlier and never on a Friday. It’s devastating to get rejected immediately.”
Others speculated that AI and keyword matching may also be at play here, with one person writing: “Your cover letter obviously didn’t contain the key words they wanted.”
While the National Grid declined to comment on the individual’s incident, it’s important to note that the firm uses pre-screening questions to narrow down its candidates ahead of the interview stage. If an applicant is ‘negative’ on a non-negotiable ‘yes’ or ‘no’ tick-box answer question, its system is sometimes programmed to send an automatic rejection letter.
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