Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2012, as a news story about a viral email exchange, written as a same-week reaction.
The newspaper elEconomista.es has reported on something I at first took for a joke, but no: it really happened. An unemployed young man sent his CV to a production company, Riot Cinema Collective to be precise.
Carlos, the candidate, sent his application by email with a cover letter.
The production company replied in under an hour, but the candidate probably didn’t get the answer he was hoping for: he might have expected a yes or a no, but not a humiliation of that magnitude.
The first thing they criticised him for was using a generic cover letter format and not addressing a specific person. The production company openly mocked him, even reproaching him for addressing them with the formal «usted» (the polite form of “you” in Spanish), as if he considered them old.
They boast of working at a company where they treat their clients as equals, on first-name terms, although judging by the reply to that email, we can get an idea of the kind of personal treatment they might offer.
There are a thousand ways to reply to an email or a job application, including the already common one of “not replying”. Clearly, the person in charge of hiring chose the worst possible one. It was a completely inappropriate and hurtful reply to someone who, while he did make the mistake of using a generic cover letter, clearly didn’t deserve a response like that, since he treated them with courtesy and good manners throughout.
According to the same newspaper, once it became clear that things were blowing up online, Carlos received an apology from the “manners expert” who had replied to him, who claimed he was having a bad day.
What we can learn from this case for our own business
The first thing is to admit that the people at the production company had some nerve, because in the internet age, with its viral power, you have to be very brave to do something this stupid. I’m sure this company’s name will now be well known, and not in a good way.
The second lesson is that you have to be careful about who you let into your company, because in the end, the image your employees project is your company’s image, and in this case one person has seriously damaged it.
If that person worked for me, he’d be sending out CVs to other companies first thing tomorrow, and while he was at it, he could show us how a cover letter should be written. Would he be so funny and sarcastic when sending out his own cover letters?
Featured image: Thad Zajdowicz from Altadena, California, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
