Thanking you, Aruba Networks, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company

This came into my queue last month:

I find it interesting for several reasons.

The only time in the past years I applied to Aruba Networks, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, was last October. So—six months for a response; not the worst ever from any modern business.

However, it looks like they’ve outsourced their recruiting, their communications, or both. Or perhaps they’re simply saving money by hiring gerbils to write these things.

I refer you first to the subject line, where “And” has been substituted for “An”. And paragraph three, where “show” is used instead of “shown”. Another possible money-saver is not using appropriate punctuation. Perhaps they’re saving up all those commas like air miles for a trip to Vegas.

It’s indicative that they talk about “find[ing] jobs that match the content of your resume.” Everything in the corporate recruiting business hinges on the data-mining algorithm of the Applicant Tracking System (ATS); you’ll never speak with a humanoid unless the ATS finds sufficient mention of keywords in your résumé.

(True suggestion given by a savvy recruiter: you can splatter keywords like “Javascript” or “data science” all over your résumé by entering them in tiny type that you then color white. Human eyes won’t see them, but the algorithm will, and it will move you to the top of the list because it’s programmed to give preference to the number of times the keywords appear.)

But the telling touch is that closing. “Thanking you” is just so South Asia. The email doesn’t start out with “Hope you are doing great!”, but I’m still thinking it originated somewhere in the vicinity of Bengaluru.

If the ATS was done by the same crowd of gerbils, then I’m truly sorry for anyone who has to navigate it in hopes of finding a job with Aruba Networks, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company.