Short story, I interviewed and feel it went well. My current duties dovetail nicely with the position.
Now a week after they estimated I’d hear back from them, they call and give me the above news.
Do they really mean that they encourage me to re-apply? Or is that HR code for “None of you were worth hiring, but we can’t tell you NOT to apply”?
Or as my wife put it, “We like you, but we want to make sure there’s not someone we like more.”
My office reposts positions when they don’t get enough applicants.
The OP’s wife is right. They like you but there may be someone better that will apply tomorrow.
Don’t take it personally. It’s in the company’s best interest to look at a range of applicants.
They may ultimately decide the OP is the best choice.
It’s an internal position? It might be code for “This position was posted for a specific person we have in mind, but company regulations require us to post it and not fill it until either x weeks have passed or y applicants have applied.”
When I went to interview, I had to sign in. There was only 1 person to interview before me that I could tell, and there wasn’t time for but maybe 1or 2 after. So yeah, I’m guessing they want a bigger pool.
Nope, not internal. Did just go through something similar with an internal job, though…hey, we’d love you all to apply if you feel like this is the position for you…haha, we know that only the person we want will put in for it because the rest of you suckers can’t relocate. No, we won’t work with you to telecommute from your current office half the time even though it’s 100% feasible.
Or it could be that after interviewing, they decided they wanted something different, and that changed the requirements and the salary band. Then you get to start over.
i.e. they posted a Junior Analyst and you are qualified to be an Analyst. They would like you, they’d like you to stay, and they don’t want you to get in and discover that all the rest of the Junior Analysts are way less qualified than you are - in fact, you are as qualified as their Senior Analysts - and you leave after six months because you weren’t properly graded.
I’ve done this as a hiring manager. (I really like this guy, but not for this position. If I hire for this position, I won’t have the headcount for this guy, so I need to rewrite the job description and start over.)
But most frequently is “HR isn’t happy with the number of applicants” - often its that they didn’t have any minorities or women even apply for the job. So they need to keep fishing until they get the right mix of applicants. Whether they then insist on a non white male hire will be a completely different hurdle for the hiring manager - as my experience with HR is that “applicants” and “hires” are two different EEOC metrics in their minds.
I’m not in HR, but we do this all the time. We rarely get more than a handful of applicants on the first posing and end up reposting the position. However, I’m not sure why you’d have to re-apply unless they were changing the job description. Regardless, no harm in sending in another resume.
You may wish to review your resume and beef it up or polish it a bit.
The various “not enough” applicants sounds more like something that would happen before any interviews.
I know in previous job I had to take a course called “Legally Defensible Hiring”. There could be any number of things that makes them want a different pool if they want to make sure they don’t get sued.
Sometimes our company has to report a job because something has changed in the job - the report-to manager, or HR left out some qualification that needs to be there. “Must be able to lift 50 pounds” is pretty important if you 're posting a warehouse job, and “Must have SQL knowledge” for IT.
StG
I went through this about 20 years ago. I had been unemployed for about two years (officially, I was “consulting”) and saw an ad in the paper for a job that I fit like a glove. I knew that I was the best candidate. Really, the industry had seen a downturn and everyone else who had my knowledge and experience had either retired (or early retirement) or moved into another industry. Not only that, but the man would have been my boss (Mr. Boss) was a man I had known for nearly a decade, had worked with in the past, and respected my knowledge, experience, and work ethic.
So I applied. Was called for an interview within a week. I interviewed with Mr. Boss and a HR guy (a corporate guy who made sure I called him Dr. HR Guy). I had prepped for the interview by reviewing the business and the projects I had worked on with Mr. Boss in the past. The interview was strange. Mr. Boss asked me almost no questions, it was all Dr. HR Guy, and he kept asking me questions like “You say on your resume that you worked for XYZ company. If we called up your supervisor there, what would he say about you?”, to which I would respond with “I believe I gave you his name and number with my references, why don’t your just call him and find out?”. They thanked me and told me they would let me know. I wrote thank you letters to both letting them know how much I appreciated their consideration and looked forward to hearing from them.
And I waited…and waited…and waited… After three weeks of hearing nothing, I called a colleague who worked there and asked him if he knew what was going on. My colleague told me that he didn’t know, but had heard the guy I had interviewed with had been sick and out of the office a lot, but, no, the position had not been filled.
So, I waited some more, hunting up some more “consulting” work. After another three weeks, I saw the same job posted in the paper. Exact same ad with the exact same wording. I didn’t respond, since they already had my resume and knew how to get in touch with me if they wanted to.
Well, two weeks after they ran the ad the second time (two months after the first time they ran it), I got a call. Mr. Boss wanted me to come in, again. He offered me the job within 2 minutes of sitting down in his office. I asked him about the delay, and he told me he had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer and it scared the shit out of him, but they got it all and he was fine (he just needed to keep a close watch on his iodine levels). I mentioned the reposting of the job a few weeks back and he told me that it was Dr. HR Guy’s idea, that Dr. Guy didn’t have any idea of what the job entailed or what kind of person was needed to fill it. Dr. Guy was just a corporate HR guy trying to impress the corporate overlords. I asked if this was a sign that I might not be accepted in the position, and he said, “No, the only guy around here you need to worry about is me, and you have no problem there”.
So I took the job. Mr. Boss left the company within six months of my hiring. I was not ready to, nor was I interested in, taking his place. The others in management who saw what was going on when I was hired thought that they could get corporate brownie points by running me off, but corporate really didn’t care (Mr. Boss was right about that). I stuck it out there for nearly 14 years, helping increase their output by ten times (that’s 1000%) and ending up reporting to the company president. When I gave notice that I was going to work for a competitor, instead of saying “Fine, there is the door and we don’t want to see you around here any more”, which is typical for people who leave for a competitor in the industry, they said “We can’t accept two weeks notice, we will need six weeks. We will make sure your new employer is OK with that and give you a 20% bonus (based on annual salary) at the end of those six weeks”.
So, don’t give up. Since then, I have worked on the other side of hiring quite a bit and have found out that a lot of things go on that have nothing to do with your or the position, but do take a lot of time to take care of. For most of the people involved, hiring people is not really their job; their job is doing the things that makes the company work. Filling the position is just an “extra job” they have to take care of in addition to their other duties.
Better yet, ask HR and the people you interviewed with if there is anything you can do to show yourself as a better candidate, and THEN polish it up. Can’t hurt, right? The worst that happens is that they say they can’t discuss it since the job is still open. Best result is that you get clued in on what’s going on AND the interviewer is impressed by your desire for improvement and ability to accept criticism.
HR person checking in.
I can think of several reasons this may happen.
First, there may have been an internal screw up of some kind. The company may have misworded the original posting, given it the wrong title, etc., such that they candidate pool they received did not accurately reflect the skills/talents they were looking for. Because candidate pool documents are subject to audit for a lengthy period of time after the job has been filled, companies may choose to correct the error by treating it as a new posting. In a related item, managers don’t always know what it is they want, or can’t sufficiently describe it to the HR staff leading to postings being in error, so this situation also occasionally occurs, and is usually solved in the same manner as the above.
Second, an offer may have been made, but the candidate chosen didn’t work out. Perhaps they declined the offer, didn’t pass the drug test, etc. The company opts to repost rather than calling their second choice applicant and fielding awkward questions.
Third, the job posting-interview-offer process may have taken far too long and the company fears their applicant pool has aged out (found other jobs in normal English). Rather than risk those abhorred awkward calls, they start over.
Fourth and finally, the company may simply be a rotten place to work and when an employee takes a job there, they realize it’s a mistake and quickly leave. The company hopes to fool applicants by reposting the position. They hope applicants will view it as a second position with the same job title rather than a bad job.
Asking you to reapply is most likely an intentional remark on their part and they truly do want you to do so. There was no reason for them to encourage you to reapply if they didn’t want you to do so.
All good stuff.
I may not ask them…doesn’t that seem a little pushy? No?
Either way, I’m doing something along these lines. The interview was actually eye-opening, in that the description in the announcement didn’t capture the true scope of the position.
Now that I’ve been through the interview once, I know exactly what to expect. On top of that, I have maybe a month to bone up on some of my answers and make my experience more closely relate to the job.
I did a lot of background research on the agency, position, and programs they administer prior to the first interview; they did seem to be very impressed with that. Now I can go back for round 2 and show that hey, not only was I interested enough to apply again, I also did X and X to increase my familiarity with the policy aspects of this job etc. that I may be lacking in knowledge of.
Last week I told my wife that my assumption is that it was offered t someone else, and they were delaying telling those not selected pending the result of the background check. So this scenario is plausible.
I don’t think it’s a rotten place to work as my current work touches them kind of tangentially and I’m fairly familiar with them. The position did seem to be fairly intensive, at least initially. I can see where someone could get in and within a few days decide they weren’t really interested or it wasn’t for them.
My thoughts on the invitation to re-apply are that they had choices in the words they used…they could have simply said that I may re-apply. I feel that their particular use of ‘encourage’ probably bodes well.
You can never really tell. I interviewed for a job, it went really well, and they seemed to love me, as everyone always must. But then a few days later I get told that the entire department I interviewed for was reorganized and that job no longer exists. Awesome.
…then a few months after that, along comes a very similar job, which has been upped in spec a bit. I contacted the person who semi-recruited me previously, but whereas before they were warm and personable, now they were distant and formal. Weird. I applied anyway, and heard nothing back. Oh well.
…then a year or so after that, I browsed through the same place’s website, and the person who had semi-recruited me previously was in the more advanced position that had been reposted. Mysteries solvedish.
When I posted my advice, I thought it was a job within an organization you’re already working at, but I realize that’s not in the OP.
So, yeah, if it wasn’t an internal application, then I agree it could be pushy to try to talk to the interviewers, and probably not worth it. On the other hand, if someone ‘invited’ you to apply, you could (very politely) still ask them if there was anything more they’d like to see in your re-application.
Whenever someone puts “SQL” on their resume, I like to ask them “what is the SQL statement you would write to select all the records from a table (let’s call it “A”)?” (here’s a hint…I basically gave you the answer in the question).
If they can’t provide an answer that’s some variation of “SELECT * FROM A”, there’s a good chance that is the reason you didn’t get the job.
Back in 2001 I was interviewing for tech consulting jobs in Boston and New York. The first interview went well. A few weeks later I got called back to a second interview. Although interestingly, the company had moved from a swanky corporate office tower in the Financial District to a converted warehouse on the waterfront (before that area gentrified into a swanky tech hub). That too went well, but then I never heard from them. And then their web site became available. And finally I ran into the HR director and the executive who interviewed me at a job fair.
They weren’t there as vendors.
I know everybody was gnawing their fingernails along with me to see what happened. Got called for an interview next week.
The first time around, they called for interviews only a week after the posting closed. This time it was more like 6 weeks.
I did notice that the administrative assistant position that supports the job I am applying for opened a couple weeks ago. Wonder if that has something to do with the delay.
Good to hear you’re making progress, even if at a glacial pace.
I wonder if the budget for that slot got tied to next year’s funding.
This time of year, a budget tie up is certainly possible. I’ve also had situations where I had a candidate I wanted and then had to wait to hire while re-structuring went on internally. Sometimes you hit hiring freezes. The job is posted, then the freeze hits. End of the quarter approaches, or something else changes, and the freeze is lifted. Once HR re-did all of the job descriptions for every job in the division. We had to re-list everything. The jobs themselves weren’t necessarily different, but the titles all changed so that we were industry-standard. Wait, one more, we had a lot of trouble hiring for a while because HR was switching their computer software. Parts of the process were on the old platform, parts on the new, and nothing worked right. That caused all kinds of delays too.
There are a lot of reasons why hiring gets delayed. If they encouraged you to re-apply, you can keep after it. They could just as easily told you they were not interested, even if the position was still open. Generally, we would let people who weren’t going to make it to another round know that they were “out” right away.