Why You Didn’t Get the Job

So, you didn’t get the job. Bummer! But it’s happened to everyone at some point.

In the midst of disappointment, it’s only natural to ask, “Why?”

Here are just some of the possibilities:

• They didn’t like you.
• They had an unconscious (or conscious) bias against people like you.
• The CEO’s nephew wanted the job.
• The budget for the position was cut and no one was hired.
• You lacked a critical skill for the role.
• Someone else had more/better experience.

Maybe you weren’t hired for one of these reasons or a combination of several. Perhaps it was something else entirely.

Some of these reasons are illegal. Many are unfair. Some are within your control. Many are not.

The point is: I don’t know why you weren’t hired, and neither do you. You probably will never know the real reasons you weren’t hired.

Some career experts suggest asking the prospective employer what the deciding factors were, and this is certainly an option. However, you may not receive a response. If you do, the response you receive will almost certainly be a watered down, attorney-approved template “explanation” that offers little real insight. After all, the question itself puts prospective employers in a difficult spot. Whatever the reason, no one likes to deliver negative feedback. Doing so just opens the door to an uncomfortable conversation that could put the company in hot legal water if not navigated exquisitely. Most companies will simply avoid the potential for problems by declining to offer any details beyond something thoroughly bland like, “The other candidate was a better fit.”

Of course, in the absence of concrete information, the imagination is happy to fill in the blanks. And the stories we tell ourselves are often wildly inaccurate and unhelpful.

Maybe it was something you said or did. Maybe it had nothing to do with you at all.

Maybe it was a valid reason related to your qualifications and the job. Or maybe they just didn’t like your shoes.

Maybe it was a very close decision and you missed it by an inch. Or maybe you never had a chance to begin with.

It’s worthwhile doing a little self-assessment and working with a trusted mentor to determine what you could have done differently: Could you have presented yourself in a better way? Could you have made a clearer connection between your experience and the requirements for the role? Might your interview skills need some improvement?

Perhaps you can make some adjustments that would help your chances in the future. But of course, there are plenty of things you simply cannot change. You won’t be a fit for all roles, and that’s okay. It’s not a reflection of your worthiness or value. It just happens.

“But I was perfect for this job!”

It’s easy to convince yourself, as an outsider looking in, that a job was tailor-made for you. The qualifications were perfectly aligned with your skills!

But the truth is, you have no idea. Sure, you might have been a perfect fit for the version of the job you created in your mind. But that wasn’t the job. You actually know very little about the real job.

You have to trust that the employer and the decision-makers involved in the hiring decision know better than you do what they need. They determined that no, unfortunately, you were not a perfect fit for the job, regardless of how much you’ve convinced yourself otherwise.

“But they loved me in the interview!”

Interviewing is a weird game. Interviewers frequently will offer all kinds of false hope to candidates, and candidates frequently hear what they want to hear.

Even if you’re certain the interview was a slam dunk, nothing is final until you have an offer in hand. Maybe you were the top candidate, but the next day, an even more perfect person showed up. Maybe they intended to make you an offer, but circumstances changed and the position was filled internally. Maybe the interviewer was just being nice or wanted to pretend they had more authority in the hiring decision than they really did.

Take everything that is said in the interview with a hefty handful of salt and don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.

“But it’s discrimination!”

Often, I hear from people who claim to know that the reason they were not hired is due to discrimination based on things like age, race, disability, sexual orientation and so on.

Again, I want to emphasize this point: you simply do not know the reason. You may have a feeling about it. That feeling may be very strong and based on a reliable intuition built on vast experience. And you may even be right.

But short of being told in plain words that this is the reason, you are only guessing.

In the US, discrimination like this is illegal, so it’s virtually guaranteed you will never be told you weren’t hired due to your age or your race or any other “protected” characteristic. That doesn’t mean it never happens; it’s just not talked about. If such factors played a role in the hiring decision, there’s always another reason that can be legally cited to explain the decision (i.e., plausible deniability).

Some people ask me what they can do about discrimination in the hiring process, and this is where the conversation gets sticky. As a white middle-aged woman, I have a limited point-of-view. I am also not an attorney and do not provide legal advice.

I provide advice to help keep you sane and productive during the job search process.

Can you hide the aspects of yourself that people might use to illegally discriminate against you? I guess you can try, but what good does that really do? You can’t change who you are. You don’t have to. And you shouldn’t want to.

In the U.S., you can report suspected discrimination to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and allow the authorities to investigate it (if and when they choose), and you can certainly express your suspicions to the organization’s leadership. You can even hire an attorney to fight the situation in the courts.

But here’s how I think of it: If a company isn’t interested in hiring you based on these kinds of personal factors, it’s not an environment where you would thrive. When this kind of thing happens in the hiring process, it speaks volumes of the organizational culture. My belief is that, eventually, such practices always damage the underlying stability of the organization as a whole, even if it’s not as quick as we’d hope.

There is continued work to be done collectively on a broader social scale with regard to discrimination in all areas of life. But fighting systemic injustice individually is an extremely daunting task to take on during your job search.

The more useful approach is to target organizations where you will be valued for exactly who you are. Talk to your network. Do your research. Seek out organizations that appreciate diversity, not just as a PR tool but as an authentic way of doing business.

The frustrating truth is that you will never know why you weren’t hired. I wish I could tell you exactly what happened and what you could do differently in the future. But there are simply too many unknowns and too many variables. The best you can do is put together a finely tuned resume, practice your interview skills, and approach the process strategically. You will inevitably fail to get every job you go after, and that’s okay. The goal is to know (in your heart) that you did your best. That way, whatever the reason, you can feel confident that it simply wasn’t meant to be.

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