Job Interview Questions

Susan Trainer suggests that if a candidate is rejected, he or she send should a short note that conveys the following thoughts:

Thank you again for interviewing me. I understand you decided to go with another candidate and I accept your decision. I’d appreciate any feedback you can give me. Key here is acknowledging that you accept the interviewer’s decision. The issue of your application for this position has been decided. You lost. Get over it. No recruiter will help you if he or she thinks you want to argue.

Unfortunately, many interviewers are not going to tell you what you want to know under any circumstances. The fear of lawsuits by former employees has so traumatized employers that they will almost never give candidates the authentic feedback they need. Some companies are so fearful that an HR person may inadvertently say something that might come back and bite them that they sharply restrict what HR people can say. Companies checking references on former employees run into this problem all the time. Many companies now reveal only the title of former employees and the dates of their hire and termination. Reluctantly, they may reveal salary information. In fact, a new trend at some companies is to have reference checks conducted entirely by a computerized telephone system that gives prospective employers the minimal information. The idea is to remove the actual HR people from the process.

In this atmosphere it is all but impossible to get a hiring manager or HR person to be honest. It’s a shame, because many HR people are educators by nature and desperately want to tell candidates what they could do better next time or how their résumé could be improved. But they have absolutely no incentive to do so and lots of incentive to keep mum. For you, that makes getting authentic feedback very difficult.

An HR manager at a Fortune 1000 company who prefers not be identified reported the following exchange with a candidate who had just received a letter of rejection:

CANDIDATE: Thanks for taking my call. I got your letter telling me that you won’t be making me an offer. I was a little surprised because I left the interview thinking that I was very qualified for the job. Of course, I accept your decision, but I am calling to try to understand why I did not get an offer. I want to learn from any mistakes I may have made. Candidly, can you tell me why I did not get the offer and what I might have done differently to present myself as a stronger candidate?

WHAT THE INTERVIEWER WANTED TO SAY: I admire you for making a call like this. It takes a thick skin to ask for such details. In fact, you sabotaged yourself in a number of ways that can be easily remedied. You had a couple of misspelled words on your résumé and your choice to wear sandals instead of shoes caused some of us to question your professionalism.

WHAT THE INTERVIEWER ACTUALLY SAID: I appreciate your call, and we were impressed by your credentials, but the truth is that another candidate simply had a little more experience in the areas most important to us. Good luck in your job search.

Unless you have a personal relationship with the hiring manager, it’s almost impossible to get honest feedback about the selection process. And the irony is, the more you need brutally honest feedback-the more there’s something you can actually do something about-the less chance you will get it. That’s because few HR professionals want to come clean on the subjective reasons one candidate is chosen over another.

HR people can afford to be a little more honest about objective standards. Let’s say you lost the job because it called for five years of C++ experience and you only had two years. That they might tell you. If the job calls for a commercial driver’s license and you don’t have one, that they’ll tell you. If the job requires a Microsoft certification and you don’t have one, that they’ll tell you. But you probably knew all that already. If you were rejected on any type of subjective basis, forget it.

Here’s where a recruiter intermediary can be helpful. No one likes to give bad news directly to a candidate. But if an interviewer knows the recruiter is willing to communicate the bad news, then the interviewer may be more willing to tell the truth. Susan Trainer remembers that a well-qualified candidate for a position as a hospital administrator was rejected for a particular job for which he was well qualified. When she inquired, the hospital interviewer disclosed that the candidate asked to smoke during the interview. It was clear that the interviewer would not have revealed that critical fact directly to the candidate. Trainer then had the unenviable task of confronting the candidate with the costs of his addiction. But the candidate learned, took control of his addiction, and soon got a well-paying position.

Sometimes the subjectivity of hiring managers can be unreasonable. Jason Rodd, senior consultant at TMP Worldwide, Inc., in Tampa, Florida, recalls working with a hiring manager who rejected a perfectly qualified candidate because, well, let Rodd tell it:

I couldn’t understand why she was rejected because she could do the job with her eyes closed. After pressing for a reason, the hiring manager eventually told me it was because the candidate wore a turtle broach on her suit. Turns out he did not like turtles and questioned her professionalism for wearing a turtle to a job interview. There is no way the candidate would have gotten that feedback directly. I tell candidates that story from time to time because I want them to know that it is the little things that can get you ruled out late in the game.

You Blew the Interview. Now What? HR manager, reject, rejection

Allow me to rephrase the celebrated serenity prayer:

Grant me the confidence to accept the rejection I cannot change, the determination to change the rejection I can, and the wisdom to learn from each.

When they are rejected, most candidates fold up their tents and slink away. That is understandable, but precisely the wrong strategy. To a salesperson, a no is just the beginning of another conversation. Many candidates have parlayed a rejection into a relationship that led to another job offer, if not for the original job then for another job. Even if you can’t do this, a rejection can be beneficial if you can get authentic feedback.

Your first challenge is to find out why you were rejected. Be honest with yourself as you think about it. Oftentimes you will know why. You were underqualified, you were overqualified, or your previous salary was too high or too low. These objections were surely brought out in the interview, so your rejection should have been no major surprise. You can take some comfort from the fact that there was nothing much you could have done to overcome these objections.

Every once in a while, you will blow an interview, quickly realize what you did wrong, and kick yourself immediately afterward. You might recover from some of these mistakes, but others are fatal, at least as far as that job is concerned. Perhaps you dressed inappropriately. Or perhaps you inadvertently insulted the interviewer. Perhaps you permitted yourself a moment of anger to vent at your current supervisor. Maybe you were late to the interview or were unprepared because you didn’t have any questions to ask. By the time you left the interview, you knew it was hopeless. Consider these learning experiences and resolve to conduct yourself more professionally next time.

But occasionally a rejection will come out of left field, and you will feel blindsided because you just didn’t see this one coming. You felt you were well qualified for the job. The interviewer seemed to like you and gave you some positive indications that everything was going to work out. You left the interview feeling positive. Then you get a letter or phone call telling you thanks, but no thanks.

You Blew the Interview. Now What? job offer, no thanks, reject, rejection