We’ve already talked twice about why you often interview for a job and don’t get it. These topics were posted back on September 18 and October 29.
But what if you’re applying for jobs and aren’t even getting interviews let alone job offers?
Certainly some of the reasons discussed in the two posts on September 18 and October 29 apply ie. the company changes their mind and hires no one, it was a phantom job, etc. We covered these and other reasons in those two posts.
There are other reasons that you are applying for jobs and aren’t even getting to the interview stage, reasons that you might not be aware of:
1. You’re applying for the wrong jobs: If you’re applying for a job that requires 5 years of experience and you have 15 years, it’s probably the wrong job for you. As a recruiter I’ve seen plenty of cases where we’ve sent a person’s resume over for consideration for a certain job and the hiring manager simply says that the job would bore the person and is too junior for them. Pay attention to what the job description requires and use common sense when deciding whether or not you are suitable for it. Sometimes you think you’re the right person for the job but you’re not.
2. You don’t have the necessary skill(s): Similar to Point #1 above, sometimes you don’t have the necessary skills for the job. Often it’s hard to tell just by looking at a job description but if a job requires skills A, B, C and D and you only have A, B and C, perhaps skill D is a must-have skill and the fact that you don’t have it rules you out of consideration. This happens quite frequently even if you often aren’t aware of it.
3. Your resume sucks. Your cover letter too: Sometimes people don’t want to interview you based on the impression you give just by your resume and cover letter alone. Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, poor organization and lack of necessary skills and experience often add up to you being considered unqualified for a particular job.
4. They hired internally: Similar to the phantom job example mentioned above and in the October 29 post, the end result if they hire internally or if the job was a phantom one is that you didn’t get the job and that’s all that ultimately matters. Sometimes a company posts a job – and sometimes they even interview external candidates – and then they hire someone internally, someone who already works for the company in another area. This is especially frustrating when they get recruiters to help them with a job search and then they end up hiring someone internally because not only do we waste our time and yours, it makes use look bad because the job searcher typically blames the recruiter. Companies are supposed to search internally first and then use recruiters, not the other way around. The excuse from the hiring company is usually the same: they say they didn’t know about any internal candidates until the last minute when someone miraculously applies out of the blue.
5. You never had a chance: These days with high unemployment combined with the ease of emailing dozens of resumes and applying for numerous jobs so quickly, hiring managers might get bombarded with hundreds or thousands of emails for even one job. Then they get dozens of recruiters emailing them on top of that to see if they can help them fill the job. If a hiring manager get hundreds of emailed submissions for a single job, it’s doubtful they go through and read all of them or even most of them. Maybe they read through resumes until they find a few good ones and interview them. That stuff happens. If you happened to email your resume several days or weeks after the job was posted, maybe they never got around to even reading yours.
Bottom line: Sometimes when you don’t get an interview it’s because of something you did but other times it was beyond your control. Many times, you’ll never know what the exact reason was unfortunately.
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