Writing a Rejection Letter

Rejection letters aren’t easy for any of us. Whether you’re telling a job candidate that he didn’t make the next round, an entrepreneur that you’re not going to fund her project, or a vendor that you no longer need his services, these are emails most of us dread crafting. Because it’s unpleasant, too many of us put it off or don’t do it at all, essentially letting our silence do the talking. That’s a missed opportunity (and rude). Though painful, rejection has benefits: research by Linus Dahlander at ESMT and Henning Piezunka at INSEAD has found, for example, that when organizations take the time to explicitly reject (rather than just passively ignore) crowdsourced ideas, it both increases the quality of the ideas they’re being offered and increases the engagement of the crowd.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned in a decade at Harvard Business Review — during which I’ve rejected literally thousands of ideas, pitches, and drafts — it’s that a quick no is better than a long maybe.

Writing a Basic Rejection Letter

Writing good rejections does take a bit of time — especially at first. But one of the benefits of learning to write a good, clear rejection letter is that it forces you to think clearly about what it is that you want from other people, and what it is that your organization really needs. For example, I can categorize most of my rejections for HBR into one of five categories: too broad (and thus not very useful to readers); too repetitive with stuff we’ve already published; too jargony; too self-promotional; not supported by enough evidence or expertise. Knowing this, we were able to distill a set of guidelines for prospective authors that encouraged them to avoid these common pitfalls.

That said, rejection letters need not be long, and the reason you give for the rejection need not be super-detailed. If you don’t have much of a relationship with the person — you never met them, maybe just traded some emails — the entire letter might be just a few lines. I looked back at some rejection letters I sent, and realized that I usually follow a pretty simple format:

Say thanks.

Deliver the news.

Give the main reason.

Offer hope.

For example:

[Their name],

Thanks for your patience while I reviewed this proposal. I’m afraid I’m going to have to pass. We’ve published a lot on cybersecurity lately, and unfortunately the proposed piece overlaps a bit too much with other articles we’ve published. I hope you find a good home for it in another publication.

All the best,

[Your name]

If I were giving bad news to someone I’d interviewed for a job, I might tweak it a bit, but the basic format would stay the same:

[Their name],

Thanks for making the time to talk with me last week. While I enjoyed our conversation, I think we need someone with more hands-on project management experience for this role. I hope you find the right job for you in the near future.

 [Your name]

If you can’t think of any hope to offer at the end, then don’t. “Do not say anything that will give the recipient the impression that the door is still open,” Joceyln Glei advises in her new email writing guide, Unsubscribe, “Such clarity and finality can feel cruel, but adding additional language to ‘soften the blow’ only serves to create false hope. Say your piece and sign off.” False hope is crueler than no hope. False hope just encourages the other person to waste more of their time, and yours.