What one hiring process taught me about values, humanity, and what it really means to show up for people.
Last spring, Murmur Creative posted a job opening for a Brand Project Manager. Within weeks, 175 people had applied.
175 strangers sent us their resumes, their cover letters, their career histories. They told us where they’d been, what they’d built, and what they were hoping for next. Some of them were clearly overqualified. Some were stretching. Some were changing directions entirely. Every single one of them had taken a breath, hit submit, and made themselves a little bit vulnerable to a company they’d never met.
I was the one who had to read all of it. And before I’d even opened the first application, I had a decision to make.
I almost let AI do the screening. Here’s why I didn’t.
It would have been easy. We use Workable to manage applications, and I was staring down a stack of 175 submissions. The rational move was obvious: run the job description and the resumes through an AI tool, let it filter by keywords, surface the top matches, and move on.
I sat with that option for a while. And I kept coming back to the same feeling: it wasn’t right. Not for this decision. Not at Murmur.
I’ve spent decades in marketing and branding. I know what a great project manager looks like. I also know that the person we hire doesn’t just need the right skills. They need to fit how we work, how we talk to clients, and how we show up for each other. That’s not something you can keyword match. That’s something you feel when you read how someone writes about their work, the examples they choose to share, and the things they decide to leave out.
So I read every single application myself.
When everyone sounds the same, nobody stands out.
Here’s something I didn’t expect to think about so much during this process: how many of the cover letters sounded identical.
Not similar. Identical. The same cadence, the same structure, and the same phrases showing up again and again across applications from completely different people with completely different backgrounds. Once you’ve read enough of them, the AI-generated ones become easy to spot. There are tells. A certain kind of polished emptiness. Constructions like “my work sits at the intersection of…” that appear word-for-word across dozens of letters. The em dash, used with suspicious frequency and precision. A tone that is professional and articulate and utterly without personality.
I want to say this clearly to anyone who is job searching right now: your voice is your competitive advantage. It always was, but it has never mattered more than it does in this moment, when so many applications are being written by the same tool. A cover letter that actually sounds like a person, that has a point of view, that makes a specific and genuine case for why this job and this company stands out immediately. It’s almost jarring, in the best possible way.
AI can polish your writing. It can clean up grammar and tighten structure. But it cannot replicate the thing that makes you worth hiring, which is you. Don’t outsource that part.
Not good enough for this role is not the same as not good enough.
Once I’d gotten down to eight candidates, I realized what I’d signed up for next: rejection letters. A lot of them.
I’m not going to pretend that task wasn’t daunting. But the more I thought about it, the more I understood what was actually being asked of me. Every person in that pile had done something brave. Applying for a job means sharing your work history, your ambitions, and your sense of who you are professionally with a complete stranger who is absolutely going to judge it. That takes courage. It deserves a real response.
I didn’t want to send a form letter. I wanted to write something that honored the effort people had made, that acknowledged their worth as human beings, and that made clear they hadn’t been passed over because of who they are. We were looking for a very specific combination of skills and experience. Most people who didn’t make the cut were simply not the right match for this particular role. That’s a different thing than not being good enough.
So I wrote the letter. It took a long time. And then I sent it to 167 people.
What happened next genuinely surprised me.
More than fifty people wrote back to thank me for the rejection.
That sentence still feels a little surreal to type. But the responses kept coming. People said they’d never received a rejection that felt human. That they’d applied to dozens of jobs and never once heard back at all, let alone received something that acknowledged their time and their effort. That the letter had given them a little hope at a moment when the job market had been grinding them down.
Two of those responses were so thoughtful, so well-crafted, and so revealing of exactly the kind of emotional intelligence this role requires, that I went back and added those people to the interview pool. I went from eight candidates to ten.
Neither of them ended up in the final three. My initial read of the applications had been right. But I learned something important: a rejection letter doesn’t have to be the end of the conversation. Sometimes it’s the beginning of one. And sometimes the way someone responds to a “no” tells you more about them than anything they put in their original application.
What candidates told me about everywhere else.
Through those responses, I got a window into what job searching actually looks like right now. And it’s brutal out there.
Many people told me they routinely apply for positions and never receive any confirmation that their application was received. No acknowledgment, no update, and no rejection. They apply into a void and wait. Weeks pass. Sometimes they find out they didn’t get the job by seeing it reposted.
A lot of companies have automated their hiring pipelines so completely that no human ever reads the applications at all. AI scans for keywords, compares the resume to the job description, scores and ranks and filters, and the people behind those documents never get seen by the people doing the hiring.
I want to be direct about this: that’s not just inefficient. It’s a reflection of your values as a company. If you can’t be bothered to acknowledge that a real person took the time to apply for a job at your organization, that tells candidates everything they need to know about how you treat people. They’re paying attention. And they remember.
How we actually used AI (and how we didn’t).
I want to be clear that I’m not anti AI. I used it throughout this hiring process, just not for the parts that involved making decisions about human beings.
I used AI to edit and proofread my candidate communications. I used it to help organize the candidate pipeline into a spreadsheet and coordinate the interview process with my colleagues. For those organizational and logistical tasks, it was genuinely useful. I also used AI to help edit and refine this very article. The story, the opinions, and the voice are entirely mine.
What I didn’t use it for was deciding who was worth talking to, who had the right instincts for our culture, or who should get the job. Those decisions required judgment that comes from experience and from knowing what Murmur is. I trusted myself with that. I still do.
The moment I met someone I had rejected.
About a week after we made an offer to an incredible candidate and finally closed out the search, I was invited to speak on a panel for On Purpose Oregon, a B Corp organization, about marketing and values in a difficult economy. The panel was at Rex Hill Winery. The whole hiring process was still fresh in my mind, all of it, and when the conversation turned to AI, I had a lot to say.
I told this story. The applications, the decision not to use AI for screening, the rejection letters, and the responses I didn’t expect. I talked about what it cost me in time and energy, and why I’d do it exactly the same way again.
When I finished, a man in the audience stood up.
He said he had received one of those letters.
Out of everyone in that room, at that winery, at that panel, there was someone who had been on the other side of the email I’d been describing. He told me what it had meant to him. He’d been in a hard stretch with his job search, feeling defeated, and wondering if anyone on the other side of these applications was paying attention at all. When my letter arrived, it wasn’t the news he wanted. But it reminded him that there are companies out there that still treat people like people. It gave him enough hope to keep going.
He wasn’t just thanking me. He was telling me that taking the time to write that letter had mattered to a real person in a real way at a real low point in his life.
I’ve thought about that moment a lot since then.
We will run into each other.
The odds of that man being in that room were pretty small. But in another sense, it wasn’t surprising at all.
We will run into each other. That’s just true. The candidate you reject today is at the networking event next month, or at the panel, or introduced to you by a mutual contact two years from now. Every email you send, or don’t send, is a signal. People are paying attention even when you think they aren’t.
At Murmur, our values aren’t just something we painted on a wall. Though we did paint them on a wall, with a mural that anchors our studio and greets everyone who walks through the door. They’re what we use to make actual decisions. Inspire Trust. Practice Empathy. Create Impact. Nurture Ecology. I’ve worked in this industry for a long time, and I’m genuinely proud to be at an agency that doesn’t just write those words down but gives its people the autonomy to live them, even when living them means creating more work for yourself.
That’s what this hiring process was, at its core. A choice to do the harder thing because it was the right thing. To treat 175 strangers as the full human beings they are. To write the letter, read the responses, and stay in the conversation.
I would do it again tomorrow.
What I want you to take from this.
If you’re hiring: read the applications yourself. Write the rejection letters. Use AI for the logistics, not the judgment calls. Your candidates are watching how you treat them, and so is everyone they know.
If you’re job searching: your cover letter matters. Your follow-up email matters. The way you respond to a rejection matters. Don’t let AI flatten your voice into something that sounds like everyone else’s. I put two people back in the pool because of how they wrote back to me. Your character shows up in the small moments. Let it.
And for everyone: living your values isn’t a brand statement. It’s a practice. It’s what you do when it would be easier and faster to do something else.
That’s the Murmur way. And it’s worth every extra hour.
Mary Breslin is Executive Director of Client Services at Murmur Creative, a creative branding studio in SE Portland.
