[Foundation-l] New list admin: Ral315

Sun Aug 17 16:49:04 UTC 2008

On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 5:27 PM, Jon <scream at datascreamer.com> wrote:

> In the future, I highly encourage the list owners to strive for
> transparency.  That is to say, that right before an appointment, it
> should be stated "We are considering appointing so and so, please send
> comments privately to listowners at whatever.org".
>

Well, yes, I'll try to do this next time.

> Also, I highly encourage the list owners as a courtesy to let those who
> applied know that they were considered, but not chosen.
>
>
> I'm not asking for a boilerplate email, I'm asking for a personal one
> with a couple of sentences.  This is professional courtesy in any
> corporate or volunteer organization.  It is impolite not to do so.

With this, though, I have a bit more problems. It's not that I strive
to be impolite, but rather, I'm doubting about its practicalities:

1) Even with the comparatively small amount of applications that I
myself have already written to corporations, I can tell you that it is
by no means standard practice to reply to every application - many
companies only reply to those whom they want to do an interview with
etc.
Now, of course, this alone wouldn't prevent us from "doing better".

2) However, what kind of mail would you have liked? You said that you
didn't want a boilerplate email, okay. But how do you write "personal
emails" to the ca. 10 applicants who we did not choose? Either you
keep it very short and simple ("Hi, this is to inform you that you
were considered but that we found Ral315 to be the most qualified
candidate after all"), which would be a form of a boilerplate again.
Otherwise, you'll have to outline for every candidate the exact
reasons why the successful candidate was "better" (read: more
qualified) than him and it's a) difficult to formulate this without
being impolite and b) it takes a lot of time.  In fact, I know until
now absolutely *no* company that will write you a personal letter
explaining why you, in particular, were not chosen. I don't know
whether in the US, corporations have that large HR departments that
they can make this effort, but it doesn't strike me as SOP.

This said, if you find a medium way between boilerplates and
tailor-made emails for every individual candidate, I'm glad to
consider it.

Michael

-- 
Michael Bimmler
mbimmler at gmail.com