There’s a homeowner in Arizona who posted about a two month sit for two cats. We applied. The qualifications were vague. We have tons of experience and great reviews. Piece of cake. It’s a nice spot so it reaches the “Reviewing applicants” stage within 30 minutes.
Within an hour we get the THS automatic rejection email. No explanation from the homeowner. Okay, we think, he found someone right away and decided without talking to us. No problem.
A few minutes later the same posting appears. I guess no one satisfied him. Five more people quickly apply and the posting disappears. An hour later it reappears. That’s ten people who haven’t met his unstated requirements. This time there’s an edit to the post requiring sitters to be 55+ because he’s in a retirement community. Wait. We’re 55+. I guess there was some other reason to reject us. No idea.
The same thing happens twice more so we’re up to 20 applicants. Finally, two days ago, the post went down and didn’t come back. Until today. Five more unsuspecting souls will submit themselves to this.
Has anyone seen this kind of thing before? It seems to me that, if people aren’t meeting a requirement, maybe you should explicitly state it in your post and stop wasting everyone’s time.
You say ‘we’ applied and you refer to him as ‘he’, so perhaps he is looking for a single male sitter over 55, because that is what his pet is used to, but perhaps he doesn’t realise he’s allowed to specify that in his ad. You’re not the right fit for him anyway, so move on to the next.
While I agree that it is best to move on when not getting a sit, I agree with @mikeh that listings should clearly specify their requirements and it would be great if we could discard them and not keep getting alerts for sits which are not a good fit for whatever reason.
Never seen such a thing myself, but I would assume it would take a lot of time and effort to reject so many people, especially when there are so many incredible sitters on THS, present company included. Perhaps he is looking for someone who meets very specific and unspecified standards? Regardless, I think you’ve had a lucky escape!
Hi @mikeh
I started a thread bout some HO’s rejecting all applicants after the 5 applicant rule started until they get no more applications then circling back round if they don’t find the exact sitter for them. I had a HO reject 25-30 sitters including me but then message me about doing the sit. I reject the sit as it felt a poor way to choose a sitter by the HO.
Maybe the OP was especially interested in that particular area. I have spots where I’m really keen to sit and yes, I do check back on HOs who’ve advertised in those areas. Isn’t that what the “Favorite” button is for?
After being declined, the OP checked the HO’s listing repeatedly. Why? If the OP made the listing a favorite for which he / she is declined, then no that isn’t what the favorite is for. If you favored a listing and you were declined, why would you keep the listing as a favorite?
I have favorites also; however, if I applied to a favorite and I was declined, I would not keep it as a favorite. I would get the message and move on.
Favorite or not, the OP was not a fit for what the HO was looking for. The OP can be interested in that particular area, but the HO was not interested in having the OP sit for him/her.
So, why keep checking to see how many applications the HO gets? Make it make sense.
May be a favorite, or more likely, it keeps popping up in a saved search. We have a saved search for San Francisco Christmas sits and we keep getting notifications for the same sits over and over again. This has been going on for months.
Sometimes it’s not that the person is actively checking the listing, more that they are being notified constantly that a listing has been unpaused.
If a sit matches the parameters of a sitter’s saved search (incl declined ones), it will reappear repeatedly every time the host deletes an applicant. This can be very frustrating/annoying. A simple ‘hide this sit’ button would easily solve the problem.
I completely agree. We keep asking for that but our request is always ignored.
You keep checking notifications at the most inconvenient times just to find out that it’s the same listings over and over again.
I applied for a 4.5 day sit in January, in a very desirable location, and got rejected. I’ve seen the sit being relisted again and again and again and again in the past 2 weeks. (E.g. when I refresh the listing pages, it pops up once again)
And interestingly it takes longer and longer for the sit to fill up to 5 again despite their location being ‘hot’. I guess they’re slowly exhausting the pool of available and willing sitters…
A couple of years ago, I applied for a sit in a highly desirable area. She read our message and replied within minutes, but then asked us to set up a video chat 10 days out. Perhaps she was really busy but I found that odd since she responded so quickly.
I let her know that it wasn’t typical to wait so long to set up a chat, and if we saw other sits in the mean time that we liked we would apply to them, and may no longer be available by then. We had connected on Whatsapp and I saw that she was active on it, so she clearly wasn’t doing something where she was completely offline and couldn’t talk.
A few days later I withdrew the application just on a hunch even though we hadn’t booked anything else–something just seemed off to me.
I was checking listings frequently for her region since it was a popular one, and I saw hers get re-posted 7 times–it could been even more than that and I just didn’t see it.
To be fair, it was a longer term sit in a very popular area of Thailand so she may have been getting a lot of unsuitable applicants and had no choice, but I do feel like something was off there, and I am glad I went with my initial instinct to let it go and find another sit.
Just to be clear, this sit was showing up in a saved search which is why I kept seeing it. I wasn’t complaining about it showing up as I fully understand how the system works and I wasn’t asking for a change to the app. It was more of a “has anyone experienced this before” question.
Someone suggested they HO might be “collecting” applicants to review at a later time and, since there didn’t appear to be any reason for all the rejections, that sounds like a reasonable answer. Also, as many people suggested, should they contact me later, I will ensure we are already booked for that time.
