You didn’t get the job – Part II
Back on September 18, we spoke about commons reasons that you didn’t get a job that you interviewed for.
Several other important reasons come to mind that I didn’t discuss that I’ve seen happen:
1. The economy and/or incompetence of the people you’re dealing with. In addition to economic reasons (ie. the company suddenly realizes they can’t afford to hire the person), it can also have to do with incompetence on the part of the company and/or hiring manager. This is when the company advertises a job, searches for candidates, interviews people, and then decides not to hire anyone. I’ve seen job candidates go through the job search process and then the hiring manager calls me up and basically says “we’ve changed our mind and aren’t hiring anymore.” This is especially infuriating for job searchers and recruiters because it’s such a waste of our collective time and effort.
In some cases, you can see a great job opening that matches your skills and experience so you apply…and then never even get called for the job or you get a form email response (the “we’ll keep your resume on file” email) and you wonder why. This leads us to reason #2:
2. It was a phantom job. A phantom job is a job that was advertised but was never a real one to begin with. Recruitment firms often do this and so do actual hiring firms on their websites. Recruiters often like to put fake jobs up on their website to get good candidates to respond (for future use) and actual hiring companies often do this too for the same reason. They make it look like they have a job but it isn’t really an active one. Numerous times I’ve seen a job(s) on a company’s website so I’ll call the hiring manager or HR manager to enquire about the job(s) and they’ll basically admit it’s not an open job but one that they expect will be open in the future or a job that was filled months earlier but hasn’t yet been removed from the website. In some cases, they say they have already hired someone for the job but haven’t gotten around to taking the job off the website.
So as you can see, sometimes when you interview for a job and don’t get it (or apply for a job and don’t get a positive response or any response at all) it’s not really your fault and not due to anything you could have done better.
