Unread Offers

ebook Tone Literacy and the Structural Cost of Misrecognition in Hiring

By Sungba Asanti Kofi

cover image of Unread Offers

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Unread Offers™ reframes hiring not as a neutral evaluation-but as a behavioral system prone to emotional misrecognition. Silence, restraint, guardedness, or culturally informed tone are often misread as aloofness, arrogance, or instability-especially when expressed by Black candidates. These misreadings don't just reject people; they reject context, grief-coded survival strategies, and emotional nuance shaped by systemic navigation.

Drawing on grief-literacy, trauma-informed HR diagnostics, and lived Scrollkeeper frameworks, Sungba Asanti Kofi introduces a field-ready toolkit for decoding how hiring processes collapse under emotional misreading. This brief but potent volume examines how "fit" becomes a proxy for comfort, how composure becomes suspicion, and how excellence becomes unread when it isn't performed the way systems expect.

Unread Offers™ is designed for:

  • HR leaders navigating retention, risk, and equity
  • DEI professionals building anti-bias hiring systems
  • Therapists supporting emotionally misread clients
  • Coaches and hiring managers eager to rewire institutional misalignment
  • Inside you'll find:

  • Real-world breakdowns of how tone bias derails qualified candidates
  • Audit prompts to reframe how silence or delay are interpreted in interviews
  • Scrollkeeper Tables™ for documenting emotional misrecognition
  • Guidance for inclusive hiring design, feedback integrity, and panel calibration
  • A grief-informed approach to validating unseen excellence and decoding unperformed offers
  • Whether you're interviewing, onboarding, coaching, or documenting, this book gives you new language-and sharper rhythm-to read what's already been offered, even when grief-coded tone hid the message.

    Because the offer was made. It was simply unread.

    Unread Offers