So far, I’ve received three varieties thereof:

• The “we don’t have any money so we’re hiring nobody” letter.
• The “we hired someone” letter.
• The “we hired someone, and just to rub it in, we’re going to give the entire life story of the person we hired, because he’s so great” letter.

Frankly, I find the third variety of letter incredibly insulting. I couldn’t care less what university that person received their Ph.D. at, where that person worked before, how ideally he met your (not actually articulated in the advertisement, mind you) needs for the position, how you were fortunate enough to find such a vast pool of candidates that you didn’t even need to stoop so low as to call me, or anything else. I couldn’t give a shit what (rather pedestrian, IMHO) Ph.D. program he graduated from or what low-rent Ivy you hired him away from to fill your lame-ass one-year in a town full of lumberjacks with a six-month winter while your real faculty member goes off to write some dusty tome that will see fewer readers in the remainder of human existence than this blog sees in an hour.

The bottom line: a simple, “go fuck yourself, you’re dead to us” will suffice quite nicely.