People Like Us turns real rejection emails into a film about automated hiring

A four-minute film built entirely from real rejection emails is the centrepiece of “Reject the Rejections”, a new campaign from the non-profit People Like Us that argues automated hiring is quietly locking ethnic minority candidates out of jobs. It launched on 15 September with the Copenhagen agency Worth Your While.

The film, Dear [Name], stars Ebenezer Gyau, who viewers will know from Amandaland and Black Mirror. He sits in a dim waiting room among other ethnic minority job seekers, facing a two-way mirror, and performs the language of rejection as spoken word: “after careful consideration, we’ve made the decision to move forward in a different direction”, and the quieter cruelty of “not quite the right culture fit”. A phone rings, and the only white applicant in the room is told she has the job. She walks through to join the all-white team behind the glass.

Amara Abbas directed it through new-land, with a script co-written with Yasmin Ali, as Creative Review reported. The research underneath it is the point. Ethnic minority applicants are rejected faster than white candidates, 41 per cent within an hour of applying against 32 per cent, and are far more likely to strip parts of their identity out of a CV to get past the software, 70 per cent against 57.

People Like Us is careful not to cast employers as villains. Co-founder Sheeraz Gulsher says most adopt automation in good faith to cope with application volumes, and four in ten believe it reduces bias. His answer is that good faith is not governance, and the campaign’s practical demand is a legal one: every applicant has the right to have their application reviewed by a human rather than a machine.

It is a strong piece of charity work for a reason this site keeps returning to. Like Comic Relief’s deadpan excuses, it puts the mechanism of harm on screen rather than the victim’s tears, and rejection emails are a script every viewer has already received. Whether it moves the recruitment software industry is another matter, but it makes a dull, invisible process suddenly very easy to picture. The wider question of what automation is doing to this industry’s own hiring is not a comfortable one either.

Credits: Worth Your While. Creative directors and partners Tim Pashen and Lukas Lund, design director and partner Carl Angelo, design director Mads Jakob Poulson, copywriter Tim Pashen, creative and art director Oscar Gierup. Director and writer Amara Abbas, co-writer Yasmin Ali, director of photography Magnus Jønck.