I’m finding the hard way that finding another job is a grind: you invest time reading what they want to hire, you write a CV and an application.
Most of the time you don’t get an answer, meaning you are that irrelevant to them. Most of these times it is YOU the one who has to ask if they decided for or against. On the limited times they write you back, it’s a computed generated BS polite rejection letter.
I asked one of them how many candidates they considered and why they rejected me, but that only made them send me another computer generated letter.
I’d like to know how close I was and in what ways I can become a more interesting candidate, but nobody is going to give me a realistic answer.
It sucks having to need them more than they need you. And I should consider me lucky, because I have a job, but jesus christ, I feel for those who have to do this without stable income or a family that offers them a place to stay…
I think your expectations are too high. They DO indeed care nothing for you, EVEN if they DO hire you.
You cope with this by understanding that and doing your best to make sure you NEVER need them more than they need you.
Giving you feedback opens them up to liability if you sue.
Not being dickheads when hiring people makes suing unnecessary
You’re assuming no candidates are dickheads.
Company has to watch out for
- maybe a candidate was a dickhead
- maybe one of the interviewers was a dickhead
- maybe something changed so it looks misrepresented
If job candidates are suing because they believe a company is being particularly inappropriate, that is at direct cost to the candidate who 99/100 times has less resources than a company. And they will be snuffed out in court in a jury trial if they are clowning around with the legal system.
The company will also pay, but in that same 99/100 times the company will have more resources to fight in court in most states. It’s in the best interests of communities, culture, and the people’s right to force the legal battle upwards instead of downwards
Sure but the point remains that it’s not in the corps best interest to be too forthcoming with their reasons. It doesn’t benefit them, and can only hurt them
You think people only sue when necessary?
You don’t get “rejected”, they just hire someone who isn’t you.
New stratagy…apply to the same company 400 times. With 400 different aliases. With 400 different disguises.
Exaust them with competition all looking for the same job. Which drowns out the 20 or so candidates. And then you just need to start a new life under your new name. Easy peasy.
Except not easy at all. It’s actually incredibly complicated keeping each character seperate, and remembering which accients to use, and then commiting to the bit for the next 60 years.
Answering you is a liability to them. They have no incentive to do so and legal liability if they do.
sometimes even if you had the best application in the world you’d get ignored. Lets say HR has limited resources, X work hours to find a suitable candidate. They post an add and get 400 replies. After reading 100 of those, they are running out of work hours, and have already shortlisted a bunch of good candidates. So they toss the 300 others in the bin.
This happens all the time sadly.
I’d like to know how close I was and in what ways I can become a more interesting candidate, but nobody is going to give me a realistic answer.
I can tell you from the employer side there is nothing to gain by answering this question asked by a candidate, and everything to lose which is why you the candidate almost never hear a response.
There are some legally protected reasons you cannot be turned down for a job. Its all the stuff you’d think of: race, religion, marital status, sex, age, etc. The likelihood you were turned down because of one of these illegal reasons is usually very low in the USA. I’m proud to say for the hiring efforts I’ve been a part of, these have never been considered criteria for disqualifying a candidate. Its always been for things like lack of knowledge/education, criminal history (example multi-DUI for a job that requires driving or conviction of embezzling when put in charge of company finances ), etc.
However, any documented reason a prospective employer gives back to a candidate becomes a liability. Will that candidate sue the company claiming that they weren’t hired because they think the position required some not married, which would be a crime of the employer?
And now with AI it’s even worse …… how do I respond that when i asked a technical question, it was suspicious that you looked down, paused several seconds, then appeared to be reading an answer? While being able to use the tools is a prerequisite, that’s not what the interview is for …… but I have to make a judgement call with no proof
I saw a job posting for a court domestic violence advocate and they would probably reject men on principle.
Legally they cannot. Also, domestic violence happens to men too.
Legally they cannot.
gender supremacists:
“Hold my beer and watch me do exactly that. Again and again and again without any censure or pushback, purely because I am being a gender bigot against men, and for no other reason. We have full societal and legal ability to employ open misandry, because opposition of any kind is misogyny by default.”
domestic violence happens to men too.
71% of non-reciprocal (only one person being abusive) physically violent (actually striking) domestic violence involves women striking men.
As in, 71% of those victims are men.
And under those same conditions (non-reciprocal physically violent DV), two-thirds of victims that were injured seriously enough to require hospitalization were men, yet almost 100% were also arrested as the “perps”, even though they were the only victims.
Losts of people have problems with these facts. Wild how bad anti-reality ideological indoctrination has gotten.
I know
I make sure to always assume it was nepotism and my confidence remains sky high no matter how long I stay unemployed. It just works.
Until you get rejected for a job at your own dad’s company.
I still attest that to nepotism. Lousy older brother.
Don’t take it personally, applying for a job is a game of chance as much as a game of merits. It’s simply a numbers game and luck whether your resume even gets looked at in the first place, even if you’re résumé how all their keywords. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of other resumes also hit their keywords.
If you’re lucky enough to get through the first sifting and get an interview with the hiring person (not an HR screener who doesn’t know anything about the job), then you can ask and maybe get a response on how you could have improved. (Don’t ask why you weren’t hired.)
Life is all about probabilities, you can do everything right and still lose (however doing everything"right" is nigh impossible). You lose if they have a better candidate, you lose if their department is suddenly not in need of the position, etc.
With that mentality, I don’t bother with CVs, and just use the time saved to apply to more jobs or maybe some kind of relevant project.
As someone who’s been on the hiring side there are some legalities involved on what to answer here. But I’ve always made a point of telling people who asked why. However I’m not in HR, so lots of people might get filtered before I even got a chance to interview them.
Also we asked candidates to do a take home and we talked about their solution during the interview, so most people got a good understanding of why they were rejected, but a couple of times people asked afterwards and I replied to them with the reasons we considered they were not at the level we were looking for, but that we would keep them in consideration for a more junior role if there ever was an opening.
I straight up ask any job I apply and interview with why they didn’t proceed. One time they were actually taken back and ended up hiring me (after some convo).
If a company cannot communicate to you why you didn’t make the cut, they’re a shitty company and not worth working for. I realize that’s easier said than done to swallow, but it’s true.
I used to work in sales and I did a lot of cold calls. The world-weary senior sales guy would always just shake his head at me when I got frustrated. “It’s a numbers game,” he would say. “It’s just a numbers game.” In the beginning I would waste a lot of time researching each individual call, but that didn’t help me make sales. The truth was a certain percentage of people that I could call would have a need for the product I was offering. Of those people who had a need, a certain percentage would choose us over a competitor, because we were the best fit.
Looking for a job is the same as sales. Your product is your labor. It can feel personal, as though the product is you, yourself. But you’re not selling yourself, you’re selling your work product. A certain percentage of buyers (employers) will need the labor that you can provide. A certain percentage of those will choose you over a competitor because you are the best fit. It’s a numbers game. It’s not personal, it’s just a numbers game.
Since the answer is unknowable, you might as well assume the best for yourself. Imagine that the job would have sucked anyway.
For example, I once interviewed for a job, was accepted, then showed up on my first day only to find out that the position had been given to someone else. Was I angry and disappointed? Of course. I made myself feel better by deciding I was better off not working for someone so untrustworthy.
I once interviewed for a job, was accepted, then showed up on my first day only to find out that the position had been given to someone else.
And with written proof of acceptance, any employment lawyer worth their degree could have gotten you a healthy amount of compensation even after their cut. Behaviour like this by any company is illegal in almost all jurisdictions, and should never be tolerated.
I didn’t have anything in writing. That’s what stopped me from taking it further. You’re completely right, though.
Most of America (all but 7 states) and all of Canada are one-party jurisdictions. That means you can record conversations without anyone else knowing so long as you are a primary participant in said conversation.
If you have an iPhone (which prevents calls from being recorded as a security feature), it helps to invest in a small digital recorder and to take all calls on speakerphone.
If you take communications through apps like Teams or Slack, there are third-party apps that can screen record your entire monitor such that the other person won’t be informed of the recording. Recording through teams, for example, would have Teams tell the other person that the screen is being recorded.
Don’t just record convos that you think might be important. Record all calls just in case someone does something particularly in your favour, such as asking an illegal question.
Don’t just record convos that you think might be important. Record all calls just in case someone does something particularly in your favour, such as asking an illegal question.
Because this is something sane people do. /s
Because employers are opaque and their evaluation of you isn’t something that should be important to you. They’re not giving you a clear response oftentimes because they want to avoid legal issues.
This is something that, as long as you ended up getting a job, you should really just not give a fuck about.
They probably had 1 position to fill, but got many times more applications than that, maybe 10, maybe 20, maybe 50, maybe 100. That means that they had to reject 9 or 19 or 49 or 99 people and they have better things to do with their time than to explain this to all these people, however many they may be.
