One of the more interesting job placements I made as a recruiter was when I helped a guy get a job as an IT technical support rep for a large financial services firm.

The job itself was fairly standard and the interview process was nothing out of the ordinary although it did involve a written test which is somewhat rare. Most companies don’t do testing especially for a relatively junior role like this, but in this case a skills test was administered as part of the interview process.

My candidate did well in the test and during the first and second interviews as well. I recall him mentioning after the second interview that he really felt he was going to get a job offer.

If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard a job searcher tell me that…

Alas, the job ended up going to someone else, a candidate who was being represented by one of my colleagues, a colleague who incidentally I’m very close with (he was my first manager when I became a recruiter) and he was also the client manager meaning that he was the person dealing directly with the hiring manager and was the account manager for them.

He told me that my candidate was in fact the runner up for the position and had finished second out of about 10 people they’d interviewed. The hiring manager had told my colleague that my candidate had done very well in the interview process but was basically the guy they’d have hired if the guy who ended up getting the job hadn’t been available.

My candidate was very disappointed as he really liked the job, the company and especially the hiring manager. I remember him telling me “I could really learn a lot from this guy” meaning the hiring manager, the guy he’d have worked for had he gotten the job.

In this case as is with so many things in life, finishing in second is like finishing in last because it doesn’t get you anything. Unless you get the job, it probably doesn’t mean much to be told that you were the bridesmaid and not the bride!

Or so we all thought…

About six months pass by and I’m still keeping my eyes open for this job candidate as although he was working, he was still looking for a better job.

Suddenly one day I get a call from my colleague and he asks me if my candidate is still looking for a job to which I reply yes, he was. I’d spoken with him one week earlier and he confirmed he was still looking for a job.

It turns out that the client who had hired someone else for the technical support rep role 6 months earlier needed to hire another person to replace a guy who had been promoted within the company.

Typically a company that faces this situation would do what most companies would do when they need to hire a new person: they go through the usual hiring process and start from scratch.

Fortunately though, the hiring manager for this position didn’t want to do that and didn’t see the point in starting over from scratch. He remembered how much he liked my candidate, remembered how much his team members liked my candidate, and asked my colleague if my candidate might still consider working for them.

My candidate was more than happy to reconsider the job and at the invitation of the hiring manager, went for another interview which was more like a “let’s get to know each other again” interview since they’d met 6 months earlier. They basically reiterated what they had discussed during the interview process 6 months earlier and confirmed what each other was looking for.

The same day of this interview, my candidate got a job offer and he took the job.

The company didn’t bother interviewing anyone else, they just interviewed him.

From the time we got word that they had the job open to the time my candidate got a job offer, only 2 days had passed.

And the company didn’t make my candidate go through the hoops of going through an entire interview process again just because 6 months had passed.

Moral of the story: How many times have you been in touch with a hiring manager after they’ve hired someone else, just to see what’s going on with the company and to see if anything has changed? You never know, maybe the person they hired isn’t working out or maybe when you contact them, the hiring manager recalls how much they liked you and that perhaps they decide to find a place for you in the firm afterall.

I’ve seen that happen.

When you’ve interviewed with a company and even after you don’t get the job but the hiring manager compliments you on your skills and performance, keeping in touch with them and dropping them a quick email a month or two after they hire someone else isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

What have you got to lose at that point?

You might just find that this time around your chances at getting the job are better than last time, just like my candidate found out.

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.

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.