A Tale of Two Interviews

interviewOne of the most fascinating things about working as a recruiter is getting to sit between the hiring manager and job searcher – figuratively of course, not literally – and getting to hear both sides of the story after a job interview has taken place.

Often, the story that you get from the person being interviewed is much different than the one conducting the interview gives me.

In other words, both sides have a very different story about how the interview went. Unfortunately, only one side gets to decide who gets hired and it’s often this side that tells me that the interview didn’t go so well.

I don’t know how many times I’ve had an interviewee tell me that an interview went great and then have the interviewer tell me that there is no way on earth that they’d hire this person.

It’s like a Tale of Two Interviews. Two completely different perspectives on the same event. Typically, it goes something like this:

Interviewee: I showed up to the interview on time.
Interviewer: They showed up 20 minutes early and interrupted me during another interview I was doing with someone else.

Interviewee: I answered all their questions.
Interviewer: Their answers were mostly generalizations and they didn’t seem to listen to what I was actually asking them.

Interviewee: I have all the skills they are looking for in this job.
Interviewer: Most of their experience is theoretical, and I think their resume is inflated with things they’ve never actually done.

Interviewee: I asked them several questions about the job when prompted, just to show them I was interested in the job and their company.
Interviewer: They kept asking about the salary and when their benefits would start leading me to believe they are money motivated.

In cases like this, typically the next step is when the job searcher brushes off the feedback I give them and then says something to the effect of “ok, so can you find me another job to apply for?”

In other words, I should keep helping them look for a job, they’ll keep making the same mistakes in interviews, but eventually they think we’ll get a different result.

I don’t know about you but if I’m making mistakes I’m not aware of, I hope someone is going to tell me about them. If you can’t get constructive feedback post interview from any recruiter you using, I’d probably start looking for a better recruiter.

One of the silly things we humans tend to do is let other people give out bad news whenever possible or try to avoid giving it out at all.

Or at least, we postpone the bad news and wait a period of time before delivering it as if there is a grace period we’re obligated to observe. You wouldn’t expect for example that you’d be in the middle of a job interview and have the interviewer suddenly tell you “sorry but you’re not what we’re looking for, let’s just end the interview now.” Nor would you expect that as the interview is wrapping up, the interviewer tells you “nice to meet you, but you’re not getting the job.”

While I suspect this has happened to someone, it’s certainly not the norm. The norm is when a hiring manager continues to interview you for a “reasonable” amount of time – say 30 minutes – even though they decided after 5 minutes that they aren’t hiring you.

The thing is that the moment you’ve left the interview is when recruiters typically get a quick email or phone call from that same interviewer telling us that they’re not hiring you. I guess it’s the “rules of interviewing” or something. Thou shall not deliver bad news right away.

Why does this happen?

Probably for the same reason that you tell someone on a date that you had a great time and will call them even though you both know it ain’t happening, that you never want to see that person again and that the feeling is probably mutual.

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