Hathaway caught identical ChatGPT thank-you notes from every candidate

Hathaway's anecdote lands in a hiring market the article describes in unusually bleak terms: an uncertain economy, a wave of AI-driven redundancies, and the worst job market in 37 years. In that context, automating a thank-you note is less a lapse in manners than a rational response to applying at volume—sometimes to hundreds of roles at once. The thank-you note was already a sore point, criticized as asking candidates to do free work on top of multi-stage interviews, aptitude tests, and even secret personality assessments.

But the Hathaway episode shows what happens when those same tools and prompts meet the same task: the notes do not just fail to distinguish a candidate, they actively signal the opposite. Her story sits alongside the article's other example—a young man with a master's degree who applied to thousands of positions over more than six months without a single callback—as evidence of how few ways remain to stand out among millions of unemployed young people.

The stakes hinge on whether candidates treat a handful of personalized notes as a cheap edge, as the marketing professional Sophie Rocha suggests. Her claim is that handwritten notes are now so rare that sending one reliably stands out. Whether that remains true as more candidates hear the same advice is the open question; right now, the upside belongs to whoever bothers to write.