AI-Generated Rejection Letters: Are Recruiters Using ChatGPT to Turn You Down?
TL;DR
A Reddit post asking “Is this recruiter using ChatGPT to reject me?” went viral with over 2,500 upvotes and 190 comments, striking a nerve with job seekers everywhere. The telltale signs of AI-generated rejection emails are becoming increasingly recognizable — and people aren’t happy about it. While recruiters may use AI tools like ChatGPT to save time, candidates feel it adds insult to injury when automated systems reject applications that were themselves often AI-assisted. The debate raises real questions about authenticity, fairness, and what human connection should still mean in hiring.
What the Sources Say
A single Reddit post managed to crystallize something a lot of job seekers have been silently fuming about: the growing suspicion that the rejection email sitting in your inbox wasn’t written by a human at all.
The post, shared in r/ChatGPT, hit a clear community nerve. With 2,547 upvotes and 190 comments, it’s not just a curiosity — it’s a conversation that clearly resonated with a lot of people going through the job search grind.
The Telltale Signs
So how do you spot an AI-generated rejection? The Reddit community has gotten pretty good at pattern recognition here. Common red flags include:
- Overly polished, generic language — phrases like “After careful consideration of your application…” that feel corporate but hollow
- No specifics whatsoever — no mention of the role, your background, or any detail that suggests a human actually read your resume
- Suspiciously consistent formatting — the same structure, the same cadence, the same closing line that you’ve seen in five other rejections
- That particular brand of HR-speak warmth — the kind that says “we wish you all the best in your future endeavors” with the energy of a Terms & Conditions page
The irony that the community picked up on quickly: many job seekers are using AI tools like ChatGPT to write their cover letters and optimize their resumes. So in some cases, you’ve got an AI-generated application being rejected by an AI-generated response. It’s AI talking to AI, with two humans on the sidelines wondering what just happened.
The Recruiter’s Perspective (As Discussed in the Thread)
To be fair to recruiters, volume is a real problem. Large companies can receive hundreds or thousands of applications for a single role. Crafting individual rejection emails for every applicant isn’t realistic at scale — and the alternative, ghosting candidates entirely, is arguably worse.
But there’s a meaningful difference between templated rejections (which have existed for decades) and AI-generated ones. Templates are at least written once by a human with intention. AI-generated rejections can feel like the company couldn’t even be bothered to write a bad template — they just outsourced the indifference.
The Reddit community wasn’t buying the efficiency argument. The consensus in the comments leaned toward: if you’re going to use AI to screen applicants and then AI to reject them, what exactly is the human doing in this process?
No Official Confirmation — Just Pattern Recognition
It’s worth being clear about what we know and don’t know. The original Reddit post didn’t include a confession from the recruiter. It was the suspected use of ChatGPT based on the writing style of the rejection email. There’s no official company statement, no leaked policy document, no whistleblower. Just a job seeker who recognized the patterns well enough to call it out publicly — and 2,500+ people who said “yep, same.”
Pricing & Alternatives
If you’re a recruiter or hiring manager thinking about which tools are in play here, or a job seeker trying to understand the landscape, here’s a quick look at the relevant platforms:
| Tool | What It Does | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | General-purpose AI chatbot — can draft emails, rejection letters, job descriptions, and more | Free tier available / From $20/month (Plus) |
| DALL-E 3 | AI image generation from text — less relevant to recruiting, but part of the OpenAI ecosystem | Included with ChatGPT Plus / Paid via API |
| Better Call Jobs | Recruiting platform connecting candidates with employers | Not publicly listed |
For job seekers, the uncomfortable reality is that ChatGPT’s free tier is accessible enough that any recruiter could plausibly use it to draft rejection emails at zero additional cost. The Plus plan at $20/month unlocks more capability, but frankly, writing a rejection email doesn’t require the premium tier.
The Bottom Line: Who Should Care?
Job Seekers
If you’ve been suspicious that your rejection emails all sound the same — you’re probably not wrong. The patterns are real, and the Reddit community’s ability to spot them is getting sharper. Does it change the outcome? Unfortunately, no. But it does reframe how you should think about the process.
Don’t take a rejection email personally. If a recruiter used ChatGPT to write it, it wasn’t written for you — it was generated at you. That’s a meaningful distinction, even if it doesn’t make the sting disappear.
What you can do: focus your energy on applications where human contact is more likely — smaller companies, referrals, roles where you can reach a hiring manager directly. The mass-application-to-AI-screener pipeline is increasingly a numbers game that doesn’t reward quality over quantity.
Recruiters and Hiring Teams
The Reddit conversation is a signal worth paying attention to. Candidates aren’t just frustrated — they’re noticing. And in an era where employer brand and candidate experience are increasingly tracked and discussed publicly (Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Reddit), the reputational cost of feeling impersonal or automated is real.
Using AI to handle volume is understandable. Using it in ways that feel dismissive to candidates who invested time applying is a different story. A middle ground exists: AI-assisted drafting with meaningful human review and at least some degree of personalization.
The Broader AI Ethics Conversation
This Reddit thread is a small but telling data point in a much larger debate about where AI belongs in high-stakes human processes. Hiring decisions affect people’s livelihoods. When both the screening and the communication become fully automated, something important gets lost — even if it’s hard to quantify exactly what that is.
The fact that a single post about a suspected AI rejection letter generated nearly 200 comments suggests this isn’t a niche concern. It’s a widespread frustration that’s going to keep growing as AI tools become more capable and more casually deployed.
Whether you’re a job seeker, a recruiter, or just someone watching the AI space evolve — this is the kind of mundane, ground-level friction that tells you more about how AI is actually being used than any product announcement or benchmark score ever could.
Sources
- Reddit — r/ChatGPT: “Is this recruiter using ChatGPT to reject me?” (2,547 upvotes, 190 comments)
- ChatGPT — OpenAI
- DALL-E 3 — OpenAI
- Better Call Jobs