>When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people who aren’t even close to qualified and obviously didn’t read the job description, you understand why we’re not sending custom written rejection letters to every single application.

Then why not send the automated responses (or nothing) to the obvious spam appliers and save the feedback for the clearly more legitimate applications? If the argument is that so few applications are legit, then it should be proportionally few emails to send.

Awhile ago I applied to an internship at one of the larger, successful startups that most tech workers have heard of (several thousand employees). I got a response from a real person in a day. There's really no excuse for not being decent.