I’m frustrated.

I’ve worked in the online industry for nine years and as a founder for the last five, where I’ve been responsible for hiring.

I spent most of today going through the emails in our company’s hiring email inbox.

I log in full of optimism. 497 messages.

“Yay!”, I say to myself. “There’s got to be someone awesome in here, we just need to find them.”

But by the 10th email, my optimism fades.

The emails are so poorly written my head starts to hurt. With 487 emails to go and more coming in, my mind begins to look for shortcuts.

I love when our inbox is full. It means people would rather work with us than do any of the millions of other things they could do instead. This means a lot to me and I pride myself in looking at every email.

But as I slog through each message, I notice myself moving emails straight to the ‘no’ pile without reading them.

An impersonal subject line or a ‘To whom it may concern’ greeting immediately triggers a mouse click to the trash bin.

I don’t want to filter emails this way but like many companies, we have a limited amount of time to review applications.

On average, the person looking at your application gives it 6 seconds.

I’d like to say we give more time than that but if I think about the fast ‘no’s’ compared to the applications we give more time for, 6 seconds might be our average too.

This sucks for us just as much as it does for you. Every company is desperate to hire great people and only giving an application a 6-second review likely causes us to miss someone who is talented.

I’m sure we’ve missed people with the skills and work ethic to be great teammates but we don’t have the time to dig deep on everyone.

So instead, we look for early signs. Although it doesn’t work all the time, it works most of the time. The people who are looking to hire you are likely using some set of early signals to determine if you’re the right fit. It’s the only way they can afford to spend 6 seconds per application without feeling like they missed something.

After going through these latest messages in our hiring inbox, I wrote down the red flags we were seeing over and over, and decided to put them here.

If you’re looking for a new gig or career, I wanted to share this list of hiring red flags publicly. These things to watch out for will vary by industry and company, but this list will help you avoid ending up in the immediate ‘no’ pile for us.

Don’t do the following things and give yourself more than a 6-second chance:

The Red Flags of Hiring

(Don’t do these things)