I’m finding the hard way that finding another job is a grind: you invest time reading what they want to hire, you write a CV and an application.
Most of the time you don’t get an answer, meaning you are that irrelevant to them. Most of these times it is YOU the one who has to ask if they decided for or against. On the limited times they write you back, it’s a computed generated BS polite rejection letter.
I asked one of them how many candidates they considered and why they rejected me, but that only made them send me another computer generated letter.
I’d like to know how close I was and in what ways I can become a more interesting candidate, but nobody is going to give me a realistic answer.
It sucks having to need them more than they need you. And I should consider me lucky, because I have a job, but jesus christ, I feel for those who have to do this without stable income or a family that offers them a place to stay…
My current company makes the effort to at least tell whether you’re still under consideration but I don’t think they’re allowed by legal to give any details.
At least in the US, it’s fine to not give a reason but if you do give a reason you’re liable for it. What company wants to risk that?
Looks like a major loophole to me haha
Life is all about probabilities, you can do everything right and still lose (however doing everything"right" is nigh impossible). You lose if they have a better candidate, you lose if their department is suddenly not in need of the position, etc.
With that mentality, I don’t bother with CVs, and just use the time saved to apply to more jobs or maybe some kind of relevant project.
There’s actually multiple questions here.
The hiring process has an application “filter” layer, a candidate selection layer, and THEN the interview with the person/people who actually want to hire you. Sometimes there’s an extra technical interview after that.
These days, the filter layer is mostly automated. Asking the filter why it didn’t select you is like asking a Machine Learning model why it chose to do something a certain way — you aren’t going to get a useful response.
So the only way to figure it out is trial and error: vary your application in terms of structure and content until you find the combination that makes it last the current batch of filters.
OR
Find a way to skip the filters altogether by finding someone on the inside of the company to flag up your CV to the people looking to fill the position.
Once past the filter, you get to HR, and if you get this far, asking questions about why you didn’t get selected to continue will actually be met with a useful response (unless it’s a company you don’t want to work for). HR will tell you the basic things they’re looking for in an application, and possibly how you compared in certain criteria to the stronger candidates.
Next you get to the manager. If you get this far, you can usually have this discussion at the end of your interview. They’re looking for fit for the role, and you can ask questions about fit as part of the interview process.
And finally you get to the technical interview. If you get this far and don’t get the job, the reason why is usually fairly obvious: either they had someone who was both a better fit AND understood the problem domain / demonstrated an ability to learn and reflect the team culture better, or you failed to prove technical ability in a key area.
There are a few benign-ish ways this happens, based on my experience from working on “the other side”. They reflect shittily on the hiring manager, but not on you:
You got no immediate rejection because they did consider you valid for the position, just not first place. Then they got a match on the first place and stopped giving a shit about the applicant backlog.
They got too many applicants and threw half in the garbage.
Upper management put a freeze, or reduction, on hiring right as they put an ad out.
They have a person already picked for the position, but they will get in legal or corporate or PR trouble if they don’t pretend to do a proper hiring process.
Their application process, human or computer, lost your CV.
I have never once been told I wasn’t hired, let alone told why.
I’ve been to probably a thousand interviews.
No one has time for that.
Imagine as a manager, you interview 100 people. Now you expect them to write a rejection letter, pass it through HR and the lawyers, for 99 people?
Imagine the time that would take, and what does the company get for that time? Nothing but risk.
As a hiring manager for nearly 4 years straight, dealing with way way more than 100 applicants for some positions, I know it takes minutes at most.
All hiring systems have ways to send batch emails to rejected candidates.
If you don’t have a hiring system for some reason, it’s still just hitting reply/ctrl-v/send to each applicant you move out of the “possible candidate” inbox.
Giving a reason “why” tends to hit people badly if they didn’t specifically ask, so a stock response is not only easy to give, but the best response. Whether and how to respond in more detail to people asking for “why”, is a less easy decision but good if you are able to.
Not OP, but just a boiler plate response would be fine for me. “Sorry [insert name here]. You are no longer being considered for this position. (Optional) Good luck on other applications”. Could even have it set up to sends those out automatically.
Giving you feedback opens them up to liability if you sue.
Not being dickheads when hiring people makes suing unnecessary
You’re assuming no candidates are dickheads.
Company has to watch out for
- maybe a candidate was a dickhead
- maybe one of the interviewers was a dickhead
- maybe something changed so it looks misrepresented
If job candidates are suing because they believe a company is being particularly inappropriate, that is at direct cost to the candidate who 99/100 times has less resources than a company. And they will be snuffed out in court in a jury trial if they are clowning around with the legal system.
The company will also pay, but in that same 99/100 times the company will have more resources to fight in court in most states. It’s in the best interests of communities, culture, and the people’s right to force the legal battle upwards instead of downwards
Sure but the point remains that it’s not in the corps best interest to be too forthcoming with their reasons. It doesn’t benefit them, and can only hurt them
You think people only sue when necessary?
the good news is it’s very easy to get some practice
Lol why would anyone fuckin hire someone that bitches about the basics of finding, applying and following up on new job interviews.
“I feel for those who have to do this without stable income or a family that offers them a place to stay…”
It’s common sense to most non-pampered people who don’t expect people to wait on every one of their super bitchy complaints to just take a job beneath their qualification as a bridge the gap income while putting in the work to find their right employer to build their career with.
I’d like to know … how to be a more interesting candidate
Homie is just trying to be better and being frustrated they aren’t getting feedback on how to be better
You’re out of touch. Employers don’t want overqualified people. They are the ones that decide for you that you can’t possibly be motivated for such a job. You’ll only leave when you find something better they think, which is definitely true when you claim to just “bridge the gap”.
Lol I am currently working at a job that is my fill the gap job. I left because I didn’t like the direction they were going so I left and took a job as a laborer for a contractor. When I find the right fit I’ll move on from this job.
Shiit so many comments here.
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment
As someone who’s been on the hiring side there are some legalities involved on what to answer here. But I’ve always made a point of telling people who asked why. However I’m not in HR, so lots of people might get filtered before I even got a chance to interview them.
Also we asked candidates to do a take home and we talked about their solution during the interview, so most people got a good understanding of why they were rejected, but a couple of times people asked afterwards and I replied to them with the reasons we considered they were not at the level we were looking for, but that we would keep them in consideration for a more junior role if there ever was an opening.
There are thousands of possible reasons and many of them won’t have anything to do with you. There are fake job postings. There are many jobs where the hiring manager already has someone in mind for the job (but they have to check the required boxes and pretend to open the position to any candidate). Another candidate may have gone to the same school or been in a frat with the hiring manager. The list goes on and on.
There are many jobs where the hiring manager already has someone in mind for the job (but they have to check the required boxes and pretend to open the position to any candidate).
I had a manager who offered a promotion to our department and went through the whole process of interviewing and whatnot before giving it to someone outside of the department who had no idea what he was doing and had to be trained by us on how to be a manager. It was really cool to find out after I bailed that he had the job before we even knew about the possible promotion. Glad I bailed on that asshole, that was the same manager who was buddy buddy with the office diddler and tried to run interference for him around the office when he got a new set of bracelets.
This is a good list. Another, often overlooked is:
Sometimes we just get incredibly unlucky and interview at the same time as someone wildly unusually more qualified.
someone wildly unusually more qualified.
Or at least someone who lied big enough on their resume to pretend that they’re wildly more qualified.
In my experience the people who do the hiring can’t fucking tell the difference.
I really hate the whole “you need to inflate what you did on your resume” because it’s just fucking lying.
You know what’s a fucking really valuable thing in this world that gets shit on: Having a fucking sense of humility and of a keen knowledge of your own limitations. Having that being viewed as a negative is fuck stupid and how we get fuck stupid people running the show.
EDIT: I accidentally the whole word
I’ve been on both sides of this and when you’ve spent the whole day talking to a dozen people who all seem competent enough to do the job, you go with the person that either has a little more (or more relevant) experience, or whoever you enjoyed talking to the most.
I’m a huge dork, so if you happened to mention something like D&D or Fallout during the interview, you’re probably going to get it. (Assuming everyone is equally qualified.)
But at the same time, I’d never mention anything like that at an interview, because I wouldn’t expect the interviewer to appreciate it.
Sure, but it’s perfectly legit to use that to put a plus next to social skills or works well with team.
I’ve definitely dinged people who were too robotic - you do have to interact to successfully do your job.
I could list ‘works with wildly dangerous substances in a public environment’ or ‘drug dealer’ and both are technically accurate.
I work at a petrol station and between caffeinated drinks, the medical aisle and cigarettes, I sell a lot of drugs. Dangerous substances being the 100,000 litres of aggressively flammable fluid we stand on all day.
There are fake job postings.
IIRC, there was one very recent (mid-2024) study of job ads that strongly suggested that 60-75% of them were never meant to be filled. As in, the company posted them for entirely unrelated reasons.
It’s why these are called “ghost jobs”: they don’t exist.
I haven’t seen the numbers. I have read that they do this for a few evil reasons.
- It makes their business look like it’s thriving.
- They can gather intel on who’s job hunting.
- They can use job application tasks to get free work out of candidates.
You forgot one, test runs. See what works and what doesnt.
Great summary.
Recruiters are essentially salesmen. They want to have a full dossier of product (you) when they talk to a potential client. They might also job hop among agencies, and bringing a full dossier of product helps them get their new job. It’s much easier to build that product inventory with ghost jobs than it is to actually work directly with someone looking for a job.
Maybe it’s my limited experience, but I’ve never worked for an employer that did this, as far as I know. Any opening was real at the time it was posted. However we’ve held onto people if we expect another opening or we like them even though they don’t fit but can’t promise a new opening until we get it approved …… or maybe we got the ok to hire and started the process but were shut down by bad numbers somewhere but hope that will change again
I think your expectations are too high. They DO indeed care nothing for you, EVEN if they DO hire you.
You cope with this by understanding that and doing your best to make sure you NEVER need them more than they need you.
I make sure to always assume it was nepotism and my confidence remains sky high no matter how long I stay unemployed. It just works.
Until you get rejected for a job at your own dad’s company.
I still attest that to nepotism. Lousy older brother.
I’d like to know how close I was and in what ways I can become a more interesting candidate, but nobody is going to give me a realistic answer.
I can tell you from the employer side there is nothing to gain by answering this question asked by a candidate, and everything to lose which is why you the candidate almost never hear a response.
There are some legally protected reasons you cannot be turned down for a job. Its all the stuff you’d think of: race, religion, marital status, sex, age, etc. The likelihood you were turned down because of one of these illegal reasons is usually very low in the USA. I’m proud to say for the hiring efforts I’ve been a part of, these have never been considered criteria for disqualifying a candidate. Its always been for things like lack of knowledge/education, criminal history (example multi-DUI for a job that requires driving or conviction of embezzling when put in charge of company finances ), etc.
However, any documented reason a prospective employer gives back to a candidate becomes a liability. Will that candidate sue the company claiming that they weren’t hired because they think the position required some not married, which would be a crime of the employer?
And now with AI it’s even worse …… how do I respond that when i asked a technical question, it was suspicious that you looked down, paused several seconds, then appeared to be reading an answer? While being able to use the tools is a prerequisite, that’s not what the interview is for …… but I have to make a judgement call with no proof
I saw a job posting for a court domestic violence advocate and they would probably reject men on principle.
Legally they cannot. Also, domestic violence happens to men too.
I know
Legally they cannot.
gender supremacists:
“Hold my beer and watch me do exactly that. Again and again and again without any censure or pushback, purely because I am being a gender bigot against men, and for no other reason. We have full societal and legal ability to employ open misandry, because opposition of any kind is misogyny by default.”
domestic violence happens to men too.
71% of non-reciprocal (only one person being abusive) physically violent (actually striking) domestic violence involves women striking men.
As in, 71% of those victims are men.
And under those same conditions (non-reciprocal physically violent DV), two-thirds of victims that were injured seriously enough to require hospitalization were men, yet almost 100% were also arrested as the “perps”, even though they were the only victims.
Losts of people have problems with these facts. Wild how bad anti-reality ideological indoctrination has gotten.
I just was rejected from 5 jobs in a row. I straight up asked how I could have been a more competitive candidate. I got some specific feedback about software I didn’t know (fair), an answer on a questionnaire that was milquetoast (also fair), but mostly kind things said. They’re not going to drag you but it can be a productive conversation.
Answering you is a liability to them. They have no incentive to do so and legal liability if they do.
