You didn’t get the job

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There are many reasons why you didn’t get the job you interviewed for. Often, you never actually find out what the real reason is.

Working with a recruiter can often help you get the real story about why you didn’t get a job you interviewed for. Typically, the recruiter will get some feedback from the hiring authority as to why they chose to hire someone else and hopefully you’ll get access to this feedback and figure out how to use it to your advantage.

Many times though, you might not get any feedback from your recruiter either because they didn’t really get any from the company or worse, because whatever you did “wrong” in the interview was so bad, they didn’t want to tell you!

In that regard, there are many common reasons people lose out on jobs. Relative to you, perhaps the company hired someone who:

• Communicated better
• Performed better in the interview(s)
• Had a more suitable personality
• Had better references
• Had less gaps in their resume
• Worked for better companies
• Had more hands-on experience
• Went to a better school
• Had a more suitable degree(s)
• Was more confident
• Wasn’t arrogant
• Were better suited to the company’s culture
• Dressed more appropriately

than you did.

That’s a laundry list right there but it’s a list of reasons that various hiring managers have told me were reasons they chose one candidate over another. In some cases you might be under qualified for a job while in other cases you were over qualified! Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

With regards to the last point about dressing more appropriately, I don’t mean that the person got the job because they wore a nicer business suit than you but rather that they just “looked” like the person the company was searching for. Perhaps they projected the image that the company was looking for better than you did.

Sometimes people lose out on jobs because they live too far away from the company. When people are desperate for a job, they’ll say anything. Like when they live 1 hour away from the company but tell the interviewer they have no problem driving 1 hour in each direction each day when the hiring manager also has another candidate for the job who lives down the street and can walk to work.

All things being equal, who do think is more likely to make it to work during a snow storm in the middle of winter? The person who has a 1 hour drive or the person who can walk to work?

Hiring managers do take this stuff into consideration.

And why wouldn’t they?

They probably got burned by someone who they hired who quit three months later after they couldn’t take the 1 hour daily commute anymore. I’ve seen this happen.

And if you’d have to relocate from another city/state/province/country for the job, unless you have a specific skill or experience that other candidates don’t have, you’ll most likely be at a disadvantage when compared to candidates who live locally even if you don’t ask for relocation money. Again, the hiring manager may already have been burned by someone who took a job saying they had no problem relocating only to change their mind when they couldn’t convince their spouse to make the move. I’ve seen that happen too.

Other than the reasons mentioned above, there are other reasons you may have lost out on a job:

1. They hired someone who worked for a specific company (ie. competitor) that the hiring manager really valued.

2. They hired someone who was referred to the company by another employee. Maybe they hired someone internally.

3. The person they hired wanted less money than you and these days, that might be a consideration that the hiring company can’t overlook.

4. If you applied for the job through a recruiter, maybe they hired someone who didn’t come through a recruiter. In other words, if the company had hired you, they’d have had to pay the recruitment firm. By hiring the other person who didn’t apply through a recruiter, they didn’t have to pay a recruiter. Don’t think this isn’t sometimes a consideration. I’ve seen it happen.

5. They hired someone they were told to hire. Maybe someone above the hiring manager overruled the hiring manager and told them to hire someone else.

At the end of the day, any feedback you can regarding why you didn’t get the job can only help you, assuming of course that you actually use the information as a learning point. Sometimes you get feedback that you can use, sometimes you get nothing and you’re left to wonder what went wrong.

Tagged as: didn't get the job, hired someone else