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…
It really doesn’t hurt to keep asking. Nobody that matters is going to be offended by it. Eventually someone will tell you, but just be aware that different people may have different reasons so don’t assume feedback from one employer applies to all employers.
At the end of my interviews, before saying bye,I ask what I could have done better. Almost always received constructive criticism. I highly recommend it.
Whenever I’ve been on the hiring side of an interview, the people seated in the interview aren’t given any special “Keep the company safe” training, but the HR person coordinating always have been. I suspect that’s why it works much better to ask in the interview than after it.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Some people fell better when they find fault in others. So blame them for being too stupid to see your worth and be thankful you don’t have to work somewhere with people like that. It’s their loss. You’re waiting a company worthy of your talents finds you.
So blame them for being too stupid to see your worth…You’re waiting a company worthy of your talents finds you.
Careful with this. If you legitimately feel you are entitled to be hired by a specific employer, you are almost certainly less likely to get the job. Nobody wants to deal with entitled people.
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.
All there is to accept is the knowledge that the vast majority of employers, the wealth holding members of society, do not actually care about anyone that won’t earn them more money.
And then also that not all, but most of society will also tell you that you must be doing something wrong, it must be your fault.
“The wealth holding members of society”
Hahaha, every hiring manager I’ve worked for (you know, someone looking to fill a spot on our team) wasn’t exactly what I’d call “a wealth holder”.
They’re middle-to-senior management, making anywhere from 100k to 300k, at most. Sometimes quite a bit less.
We’re talking people who are a good 3 levels away from the C class. Meaning they’d be competing with everyone at their level, and above, to get to those higher seats in the pyramid.
Hiring managers are rarely farther up the food chain, unless they’re hiring for those seats farther up the food chain - which isn’t any of us here.
It’s It like there’s a team of managers who just do hiring/interviews. HR handles the initial stages, and the actual “hiring manager” is the person who’s looking to add someone to their team, someone they’ll be managing.
Well, I’d say 100k to 300k qualifies as more money than I’ve ever made in a single year of my life, more than I’ve made in my entire life if we go closer to 300k…
But what I meant was that the ultimate hiring process is dictated, signed off on or altered, all the way down, by the wealth holding members of society. The top execs, the board.
And that the society created, and largely owned, by their policies is essentially gaslighting us every day.
Have you ever spent an entire year applying to jobs… as a full time job? After having had a career, losing it to a disability, then trying to go back after years of recovery?
With maybe one reply every few months, despite being qualified for everything you are applying to?
Becoming depressed as everyone around you spends the first month giving you mindless cheery platitudes, then forgetting you exist, then becoming angry when you tell them you can’t afford to do anything that involves money?
Then when you finally cave and go work some bullshit job you are immensely overqualified for, everyone blames you for not living up to your potential?
They made it, it worked out for them, why didn’t it work out for you?
Even though it never once occured to them to maybe help you out monetarily and avoid going into massive debt, or by putting in a good word for you with their network of contacts.
But what I meant was that the ultimate hiring process is dictated, signed off on or altered, all the way down, by the wealth holding
Unless it’s a small company, they don’t know anything about you, nor make a decision in any way specific to you. They agreed to a budget expenditure and they want to know the hiring manager followed through. There is no personal connection
