"We Regret To Inform You"—News of Nonappointment

Abstract

Traditionally one-half of the job seeking process has been stressed by writers in the field of business communication.' Numerous books and articles have been written offering advice to job applicants. Authors of these articles stress that application letters must be written with due care, citing the need for courtesy, choice of appropriate words, and use of a writing style that reveals the personality of the writer. The applicant is urged to put forth his or her best effort in writing. But what about the other side of the fence? Can we simply disregard the fact that many of our writing students will be in the position of replying to job applicants? And many times these replies must be &dquo;no.&dquo; REPLYING TO JOB APPLICANTS During the winter and spring of 1976 approximately thirty-five NABTE (National Association of Business Teacher Educators) schools announced position openings in business and office education. One of the writers sent a reply (letter and data sheet) to schools announcing a vacancy in the areas in which the writer qualified. The impact of the response letters prompted this article. It soon became apparent that many of the professional people, themselves business communications teachers, did not practice what they preached. Some of these letters are excerpted below. &dquo;We have reviewed the credentials of all the applicants for our announced vacancy, and we regret to inform you that you were not selected.We have reviewed your application for a position at the Campus. Unfortunately, we have decided to interview candidates other than yourself for the position. As you might expect we have been flooded with applications in your area. However, your application will be kept on file.Our Faculty Affairs Committee has reviewed your credentials, and we do not believe that your interests or background will fill our needs at the present time .... This is to inform you that the selection committee met to judge applicants and your credentials were not moved forward.&dquo;Although the writer received offers from several NABTE schools, the impact of many replies was demeaning and insulting. Surely that was not the intent of these professional business communicators.Every business message is sent to fulfill a specific need of the sender by evoking a favorable response from the receiver. The most difficult message to send or receive is the &dquo;bad-news&dquo; message. Such messages need to be carefully thought through and couched in terms that retain the good will of the receiver of the message. A person can say &dquo;yes&dquo; poorly and still be forgiven. To say &dquo;no&dquo; gracefully, without alienating and insulting the person involved, requires knowledge and finesse, especially when that &dquo;no&dquo; applies to the job market. Cannot the &dquo;bad-news&dquo; strategy, so often taught in textbooks, be employed in this situation? ' BAD-NEWS STRATEGY Consider the following suggestions:(1) Use the first sentence or paragraph as a buffer zone between the person and the news. Use the buffer to provide a n...

The Case for “Living” Models

“…However, the late 1970s introduced our first glimpse of a new direction in how scholars regarded and responded to negative messages and how to compose them. Some scholars began to question some of the accepted teachings on message organization (e.g., Locker, 1977Locker, , 1979Selzer, 1981;Suchan & Dulek, 1988), while others questioned the limited scope of textbook advice in its teaching of negative messages, in particular its sole focus on responding to customer complaints and claims instead of other types of negative news delivered in the workplace (Arnold & Soskis, 1977). By the 1980s, these initial dissenting voices were joined by others as business communication scholars began to question in earnest the accepted business writing conventions and principles propounded by business writing experts in existing textbooks.…”

“…As Harty concluded, "writers need to sell themselves to a most unsympathetic audience, and the effectiveness of these letters is directly related to the amount of goodwill they maintain" (p. 25). Arnold and Soskis (1977) also saw the merits of the bad-news strategy for other types of negative news messages, employing it as an alternative way to organize rejection letters to job applicants. Using information integration theory, Johnson and Indvik (1992) likewise promoted the benefits of the indirect approach as an effective means of shaping readers' attitudes to unfavourable news and helping them to facilitate this process.…”

“…The majority of researchers examining the organization and content of job rejection letters supported the use of buffered openings (Arnold & Soskis, 1977;Jablin & Krone, 1984). In reader-response-based experiments using job refusal letters, buffered statements were regarded favourably.…”

“…The scope of this literature review is intentionally limited to these journals in order to capture the nature of the debate by scholars of business communication and, in particular, by past and current members of the Association for Business Communication. A preliminary search quickly revealed that research on negative news messages is plentiful and has been a constant source of scholarly comment, debate, and research for the past 50 years, with the earliest article appearing in the mid-1970s (Arnold & Soskis, 1977) and the most recent published in 2011 (Jansen & Janssen, 2011). This article describes some of the central themes and questions that have guided the lines of research inquiry and fuelled scholarly debate over the last 50 years.…”