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…
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.
Answering you is a liability to them. They have no incentive to do so and legal liability if they do.
sometimes even if you had the best application in the world you’d get ignored. Lets say HR has limited resources, X work hours to find a suitable candidate. They post an add and get 400 replies. After reading 100 of those, they are running out of work hours, and have already shortlisted a bunch of good candidates. So they toss the 300 others in the bin.
This happens all the time sadly.
Don’t take it personally, applying for a job is a game of chance as much as a game of merits. It’s simply a numbers game and luck whether your resume even gets looked at in the first place, even if you’re résumé how all their keywords. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of other resumes also hit their keywords.
If you’re lucky enough to get through the first sifting and get an interview with the hiring person (not an HR screener who doesn’t know anything about the job), then you can ask and maybe get a response on how you could have improved. (Don’t ask why you weren’t hired.)
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.
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.
This is something that, as long as you ended up getting a job, you should really just not give a fuck about.
They probably had 1 position to fill, but got many times more applications than that, maybe 10, maybe 20, maybe 50, maybe 100. That means that they had to reject 9 or 19 or 49 or 99 people and they have better things to do with their time than to explain this to all these people, however many they may be.
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
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.
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.
Oh God it was such an onslaught on my self image and psychology. I believe humans aren’t equipped to handle the amount of rejection you have to receive during that grind. I certainly wasn’t.
how do I accept I’ll never know why any employer rejected me?
Ask yourself if it was ever a real job offer to begin with. Did you have the required skills? Were your pay requirements reasonable? (For YOU not them). Then you did fine.
try a DBT program xd
If you are based in Europe you could always try a GDPR subject access request to see the notes they’ve taken. Not sure if you can try something like that wherever you are though!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
