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Ask HN: Is it okay to ask employer why the application was rejected

1 points by suralind ↗ HN
I've recently applied to a position as a Software Developer. My impression was that I ticked majority of the boxes, albeit the work was in a different time zone than mine.

I was feeling rather good about this application - I've been using most of the technologies the position had listed, and my job history reflects that.

I didn't even get to the interview stage, which was quite surprising for me.

Do you think it's polite to send an email in response to thank them for the response and ask which skills was I missing?

7 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 30.8 ms ] thread
jstx1
You can ask, you probably won't get an answer and there's a decent chance that nobody ever saw your resume anyway.
suralind
Why would they not see my resume if they have taken the time to respond?
thatwasunusual
They are using an automated solution which picks out the most interesting ones, while the rest gets an automated answer ala "Thanks for applying, however..."
suralind
Ok, not that I have read the email again, it does look like an automated response.
jstx1
It's very easy to automatically reject someone - either by a system that processes resumes (so a person never sees it), or a person who doesn't understanding anything about the job rejects the resume wihout reading it, or because they aren't hiring anymore, or sometimes because they were never hiring in the first place and the job ad was there for the sake of appearances or to tick of a legal checkbox (e.g. there might be a requirement that all jobs are open to external candidates and the company is only interested in hiring internally so they put up the external ad as a formality).

This is why you shouldn't take rejections very seriously.

beardyw
You might get lucky, but legally it could just open a can of worms. They might well decline.