Rejection Letter Generator

Writing rejection letters is hard. Not only it takes away a lot of time (especially if the position is hot) but it’s also heavy on the heart 💔. That’s why many teams do the “we’ll call you” and either simply never contact declined candidates leaving them in the dark, or reply with bland, soulless copy-pasted templates.

With the help of Coda AI you can make this process quick, less painful, and more human.

This generator is set up to write rejection letters for job seekers. But you can adapt it to your own cases: reject applications for your VC fund, a discount program, a private community, you name it.

Inspiration

There’s two sides to this.

First, I didn't want to build cliche ideas. So I went on a lookout for the original ones. There’s plenty of positive text generators such as meeting summaries and birthday cards — but not so many AI templates that would help with something negative. So I thought it would be great to fill this gap and build something nice and brings-good-to-this-world in the area nobody thought of exploring.

Second, candidate ghosting is a real problem. This is a common topic on tech-related forums and even among my friends. I don't believe that anyone wants to be a meanie and that companies ghost candidates on purpose. Most likely they're just overly busy, plus they don't want to be bearers of bad news, plus they just procrastinate writing back to the candidate to the point where it's already too late.

I believe that if recruiters were given the tool to write and send that last token of respect to a rejected candidate in literal seconds, thay would use it, and the world would become a better place.

What it does

As it says on the tin, it generates rejection letters :)

Not just that though, but it also lets you choose the details for a rejection, such as what was the reason, what were the strong sides, and would you like to hear from the candidate again. These are optional, so even if you don't fill them out, Coda AI will still come up with a nice and cordial letter.

There's also the capability to bulk reject many candidates at once in just a click. And it also integrates with Gmail pack to send out the emails right out of Coda.

One last thing: the template comes with a tiny ATS. It's there for demo purposes and you'll probably throw it away if you already have a doc built atop e.g. Greenhouse. But if you don't, the included ATS is perfectly enough to become your starter kit.

How we built it

The doc was built with my Coda Best Practices in mind, so it has the characteristic doc structure that I encourage everyone to use. I spent quite some time polishing it to make the best user experience currently possible with Coda. Since most of my Coda work is private for clients and I need more docs that I can actually show, I hope to take this doc beyond the hackathon and actually put it proudly on my public portfolio.

Challenges we ran into

This was my first large doc built with Coda AI, so it took some prompt engineering and dynamic prompt building to make it work right. The prompt for making the letter is not just a single one — it is combined of all the different bits based on

The mini ATS also uses quite a few tricks, like dynamic buttons on cards that are only shown if a candidate is rejected. Took quite some time to hack those around. But the result is gorgeous.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm happy with how beautiful the resulting doc turned out, and how good the auto-generated letters are. And it's not every day that I am proud of my creations :)

What we learned

Since this was basically my first non-experimental project with Coda AI, this is when I learned to use it for something serious. I got to understand its strong sides and its limitations better.

What's next for Rejection Letter Generator

It will be proudly displayed on my portfolio. I'll also do some marketing for it to get the word out: post it on LinkedIn, ProductHunt, and a few other outlets.

I encourage you all to use it. Copy it and adapt it to your needs. I'm sure there is an area like this in your ops that could benefit from a respectful rejection letter generator like this.

Built With

• coda
• coda-ai
• gpt