Company compares applicant to Einstein despite rejecting them from a job

Job application rejections are one of life’s grim inevitabilities, but it doesn’t make them any easier to swallow.

They tend to take the form of boilerplate emails or, at best, a more personal message along the lines of “thanks but no thanks” – companies generally steer clear of adding insult to injury.

So one jobseeker was left stunned when his prospective employer chose not to let him down gently, but with a sarcastic thump.

Tamsyn Fox, who uses male pronouns, shared the unnamed company’s brutal letter to him on TikTok, describing it as “the worst job rejection letter I've ever received.”

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Reading it aloud, he recited: "We’ll cut to the chase: your application wasn’t successful. And who knows, maybe we’ve made a big mistake? Albert Einstein couldn't land a job as a maths tutor for kids, and Spielberg got rejected from film school. Crazy right?"

He continued: "The [sic] guess the point is: every great success story begins with little [sic] failure. We've had our fair share of failure too. Even though you won't be joining us just yet, who knows what the future holds?

“Prehaps [sic] you'll prove us wrong (we certainly hope so). Stay hungry, stay foolish. Sincerely [...]." (Tamsyn said he didn’t reveal the name of the sender because he didn’t want to be “sued”.)

The message was met with outrage by fellow TikTokers, who lambasted its “patronising” tone.

“Dodged a bullet honestly,” one wrote.

“We’re not like other companies, we’re fun,” mocked another.

“Why does it feel like an elder millennial wrote this?” asked a third, to which Tamsyn replied: “LITERALLY I FEEL LIKE A PAIR OF SKINNY JEANS WROTE THIS.”

“Why does this read like something from Innocent Smoothies?!” asked a fourth, prompting Tamsyn to point out: “They’re trying so hard to be quirky and it’s not working.”

Others focused on the sloppy typos in the text, with one saying: “PREHAPS. A copy-and-paste standard email and they couldn't even be arsed to proof read it?”

Another said: “I'd just correct the spelling and grammar in red, and send it back.”

So let this be a note to employers: when you’re letting down a job hopeful, keep it snappy and sober. And maybe give it a read-through before you hit “send”.

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