←back to thread

369 points surprisetalk | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.215s | source
Show context
jp57 ◴[] No.45065311[source]
One great piece of advice an informal mentor gave me long ago is that there is no information in a rejection.

That is to say that you cannot draw any conclusions about yourself or your interviewing technique or your skills or anything from the single accept==0 bit that you typically get back. There are so many reasons that a candidate might get rejected that have nothing to do with one's individual performance in the interview or application process.

Having been on the hiring side of the interview table now many more times than on the seeking side, I can say that this is totally true.

One of the biggest misconceptions I see from job seekers, especially younger ones, is to equate a job interview to a test at school, assuming that there is some objective bar and if you pass it then you must be hired. It's simply not true. Frequently more than one good applicant applies for a single open role, and the hiring team has to choose among them. In that case, you could "pass" and still not get the job and the only reason is that the hiring team liked someone else better.

I can only think of one instance where we had two great candidates for one role and management found a way to open another role so we could hire both. In a few other cases, we had people whom we liked but didn't choose and we forwarded their resumes to other teams who had open roles we thought would fit, but most of the time it's just, "sorry."

replies(28): >>45065407 #>>45066721 #>>45067214 #>>45067507 #>>45067669 #>>45067749 #>>45067752 #>>45067853 #>>45067877 #>>45068124 #>>45068162 #>>45068646 #>>45068946 #>>45069685 #>>45070016 #>>45070244 #>>45070366 #>>45070789 #>>45070808 #>>45071113 #>>45071336 #>>45071402 #>>45071583 #>>45072653 #>>45073540 #>>45074003 #>>45074100 #>>45081560 #
1. Bukhmanizer ◴[] No.45067749[source]
I would also guess that in at least >50% of cases your application is never given a fair shot for random reasons. I remember when a company that I was working at was doing intern interviews, they would almost always run out of time to do interviews (this was back when interviews were in person), so they would pick 2-3 schools that they had time to get to (proximity * prestige was the factor there) and everyone else got a blanket rejection.

Maybe it’s because my school wasn't on that list, but I remember feeling like if I got rejected like that I would very much feel like I wasn’t good enough. But it was essentially random.