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I'm writing an email and just came up with following sentence:
I contacted a couple of suitable candidates, of whom I thought would be capable of handling such job, but unfortunately none of them were interested.
I've got the feeling something is wrong?
"Of whom" must be qualified by some sort of quantitative descriptor. "None," "some," "few," etc, or even an actual number, although that's less conventional.
You should add "some" in front of "of", but there's another minor problem: you've forgotten an article between "such" and "job".
I contacted a couple of suitable candidates, some of whom I thought would be capable of handling such a job, but unfortunately none of them were interested.
Be careful when you use commas with particular clauses like this, so that you don't create a comma splice.
Tunny's suggestion is close, but I think somewhat innaccurate. "Who" is a subject pronoun, and "whom" is an object pronoun, this is true. However, "that" is also used to refer to people, and "that" is used to denote an essential clause, which is the middle of your sentence between the commas. (Edit: The second sentence of this paragraph shows how not to use commas... don't do that.)
I contacted a couple of suitable candidates that I thought would be capable of handling such a job, but unfortunately none of them were interested.
Essential clauses add vital information to the sentence. In this case, we wouldn't know what kind of candidates you were choosing. You can also remove the adjective "suitable" (or, alternatively, the whole clause in the middle) since they mean the same thing. In this particular case, the "essential" clause isn't actually essential because "suitable" implies that they would be capable of handling whatever job you're talking about.
<plural noun indicating multiple people>, of whom does not hold up.
Oct 21, 2014 at 20:34
In that particular sentence you need just 'who', not 'of whom':
I contacted a couple of suitable candidates who I thought would be capable of handling such a job, but unfortunately neither of them were interested.
Here is an example of 'of whom' used correctly:
I contacted a number of candidates, none of whom was interested.
