How to reject a candidate without ghosting: Glen Cathey's playbook

2026-07-19

How do you reject a candidate without burning the bridge? Deliver the decision in the first two sentences, name the real reason for the rejection, promise only what your company actually does, and sign the email with a human name. That is the short version of “The Respectful Rejection Email Playbook”, a ten-page guide published on LinkedIn by Glen Cathey, one of the best-known sourcing and recruiting experts out there. I found the playbook in Recruiting Brainfood, Hung Lee’s newsletter, which half the recruiting world seems to read. I read the whole thing and below I walk through what I think matters most: the six rules, three of the templates, and a way to run all of it in your ATS.

Ghosting is not a volume problem

Cathey closes his playbook with the line that sets the tone for everything else: “Ghosting applicants isn’t a volume problem. It’s a values and priority problem.”

From what I see on the Polish market, where I run an ATS company, that sentence lands painfully well. Silence after an application is still the default in many companies, and feedback after an interview gets treated as a courtesy rather than a step of the process. Candidates rarely resent the rejection itself; they resent that nobody bothered to send it.

Cathey does not stop at the diagnosis. He gives you six rules for writing rejections and seven templates bucketed by rejection reason, ready to load into your recruitment system. He is also open about his inspirations: Kyle Byrd’s “The Way of Kindness” and Josh Bourke’s approach at Ashby.

Six rules for a decent rejection

Before you copy any template, Cathey wants you to internalize six rules:

The decision comes in the first two sentences, because ambiguity is what prolongs the pain, not honesty.
Numbers absolve, they don’t excuse. “1,617 applications, 4 interviews” placed after the decision tells someone it genuinely wasn’t about them.
Never narrate the candidate’s feelings. Cut lines like “we understand this is frustrating” and show respect through honesty and specificity instead.
Every promise needs a truth condition. Write “your application was reviewed” or “you may be matched to future roles” only if that actually happens at your company.
A human name changes everything. Even a template lands differently when a real person signs it.
If AI helped draft the email, say so. Transparency preserves trust, and AI-assisted closure beats human silence.

Rule two is the one I keep coming back to. Recruiters often open with statistics to soften the blow, and Cathey shows that the order does the work: the same numbers before the decision sound like the company excusing itself, while after the decision they absolve the candidate.

Rule six also rings familiar, because I argued a similar case in my piece on whether getting an email from AI instead of a human is a problem. Cathey frames it the same way: candidates mind the silence far more than they mind the tooling.

Seven templates, one rejection reason per email

The core of the playbook is seven templates mapped to typical rejection reasons:

high application volume at the early screening stage,
seniority mismatch, in both directions: overqualified and underqualified,
missing hands-on experience in a specific domain, technology or market,
company-stage mismatch, meaning startup versus enterprise,
compensation expectations misaligned with the role’s budget,
an application that gave too little evidence to evaluate,
the “silver medalist”, a candidate rejected after final rounds.

The company-stage template Cathey credits to Josh Bourke, who at Ashby carved out a separate disposition bucket for “startup experience”. I like that example because it shows a rejection reason can be specific to one company and still be worth communicating openly. Three templates deserve a closer look, because they show Cathey’s method best.

High volume: the everyday workhorse

Cathey himself calls it the workhorse template. Here is the key fragment, in his original wording:

Thank you for the time you put into applying for [Role]. Out of respect for that effort, I’ll be direct: we won’t be moving your application forward. Some honest context: we received [1,617] applications for this role and were able to interview [4] people. At those odds, we passed on many genuinely qualified applicants – so please know this is not a verdict on your skills or your potential.

Every rule shows up in practice here: the decision in the second sentence, the numbers after the decision, and no “we understand your disappointment”. The template then offers an optional paragraph about the resume staying in the database and recruiters searching it as new roles open, but Cathey tags it with “if true for your org”. That caveat repeats in every one of the seven templates and I’d say it is the most characteristic element of the entire playbook.

Compensation misalignment: honesty instead of dragging it out

I’d rather tell you plainly than waste your time: we won’t be moving forward, because your target range and our budget for this role aren’t aligned. This says nothing about your value in the market – it only reflects what this position is funded at. We’d rather part respectfully now than negotiate you below your worth later.

Cathey stresses that this template is only usable if the company actually collected the candidate’s compensation expectations. With salary ranges appearing in more and more job ads, this mismatch will get caught earlier, but in processes without published ranges it remains one of the most common reasons for rejection and one of the least communicated.

The silver medalist: the most valuable rejection in the process

This is a hard email to write: we’ve decided to move forward with another candidate. You were one of our final [2] candidates out of [1,617] applicants. The decision came down to [specific differentiator – e.g., deeper experience with X], not to any shortcoming of yours. I’m glad to share more detailed feedback on a short call if that would be useful to you.

Cathey’s comment on this bucket is one sentence long: your future hires and referral sources live here, so invest accordingly. It is hard to argue with that. A candidate who went through final rounds left a dozen or more hours of their time in your process and knows the company better than some employees do, and yet many firms send them the same auto-reply as people screened out at the CV stage.

How to move the playbook into your recruitment system

The most practical part of the guide covers implementation, because Cathey treats rejections as a process to configure, not an act of goodwill by an individual recruiter. His plan:

Upgrade the generic “not selected” status to a real taxonomy of rejection reasons that maps to the seven buckets.
Load the templates into your system and attach each one to its disposition code. Cathey notes that most systems support this today; it is just rarely configured.
Batch your sends daily or weekly. A rejection that arrives a second after the application tells the candidate nobody looked at it, while a short delay says the opposite.
Keep only the promises that are true at your company: resume matching, reapply invitations, feedback calls.
If AI drafts or personalizes rejections at scale, review the output and disclose its use.

Technically there is no magic in any of this. In systems like Element you set it up with message templates attached to pipeline stages: moving a candidate to a rejection stage triggers the message from the template tied to that rejection reason, automatically or after the recruiter confirms. The bottleneck is not the technology but the decision to define the taxonomy and attach content to it. That is exactly the difference between a volume problem and a priority problem that Cathey writes about.

How to reject a candidate: common questions

Do you have to tell a candidate why they were rejected?

In most cases there is no general legal obligation to justify a hiring decision. Cathey argues, though, that a plainly named reason is what separates a rejection that builds your employer brand from an auto-reply that damages it. One true sentence is enough: about the application volume, the seniority of the role, or the missing skill.

When should a rejection email be sent: instantly or with a delay?

Cathey recommends batching sends once a day or once a week. An instant automated rejection suggests nobody read the application, while a short delay makes it credible that someone actually reviewed it.

Can AI write the rejection email?

It can, under two conditions: a human reviews the content before it goes out, and the company discloses that AI helped. As Cathey puts it, “AI-assisted closure beats human silence”.

Which template to start with

Cathey ends by asking his readers which of these templates their team would actually stand behind sending. I’d say that is the right test to start with, because it forces a conversation about which promises your company really keeps. My suggestion: start with the volume bucket, since it covers the largest number of candidates at the smallest effort. One template, one rejection reason in your system, and an automatic send on stage change are enough to stop ghosting from being your company’s default answer. The full playbook is on LinkedIn, and Glen Cathey is worth following there because he keeps publishing hands-on material about AI in recruiting and sourcing.

I have also taken ghosting apart myself in a guide on how to avoid ghosting in recruitment. You will find practical tips for both sides of the phenomenon there, because candidates can vanish just as effectively as companies do.