My wife has been tasked with doing some research, and that was one of the questions she is looking to answer.
So, if you ever were offered an interview, accepted it, but ended up not going, could you please explain why.
Thanks.
To clarify, do mean cancelling after accepting, or just blowing it off?
Either.
I’ve cancelled interviews if I was giving a job offer prior to the interview and either had accepted or knew I was going to accept the offer.
One time. It was an interview for a promotion to a job I didn’t want. I had originally accepted the interview because I figured it was a day off from work. But then they rescheduled it to a day I wasn’t working on anyway, so I cancelled it.
I cancelled interviews when I’ve received/accepted a job offer. Recently I canceled two interviews when I realized I wasn’t prepared to take the jobs (for both personal and professional reasons), were I to get an offer.
These are all good.
Thanks for the responses.
A family health emergency. I had to cancel a scheduled interview, and as things unfolded, decided it would be a bad time to change jobs.
I was on my way to an interview when the highway was shutdown by a major accident. The alt-routes was a complete stand-still and the back road that had no chance of getting me to the interview remotely on time also wasn’t moving.
I ended up returning to my apartment and calling them. I never got a chance to interview with the company.
In 2003 I accepted an interview with what I thought was a great place to work. Got the plane tickets, hotel and rental car reservations the day before planned travel.
Less than an hour after the delivery I received a call from the company’s human resources people, saying the interview had been cancelled (by them). I asked the reason. “The hiring manager you were scheduled to talk with was just arrested and taken to jail.”
They didn’t even want me to send the plane tickets back. No great loss, I’d now say.
I think the reasons already given here are pretty much all the good ones I could ever think of. I’ve stayed away from an interview after making a bad surprise discovery about someone who would have been supervising me.
I cancelled; done it a couple times. I got some more information on the company and position that didn’t look good to me; bad enough that I didn’t want to waste their time for something I was not going to accept. Seemed like the most polite thing at the time.
September 11th, 2001
Only once in the winter of 2000. My city was hit by the worst ice storm I’ve every been in. I was without electricity for three weeks.
It was rescheduled and I wound up taking that job.
When I was job-hunting back in 2011, I did that twice.
One time was when the city where I was living had a big snowstorm the day before, and the highway patrol said, “No non-essential travel”, so I called them and rescheduled it. They were predicting - correctly, it turns out - a once in a lifetime blizzard for the region, to start the day after I returned from the rescheduled interview. It arrived early, and I drove back home in the early hours of that notorious Blizzard of 2011. If (generic) you dealt with it, you’ll know exactly which storm I’m talking about. In the end, I didn’t get the job, which was OK with me because I had a bad feeling about it when I saw the facility - outdated equipment, that kind of thing.
Another time, I had an interview scheduled for a hospital in a wealthy Chicago suburb, and I had a really bad feeling about the trip, so I cancelled it and never rescheduled. Weird thing is, my parents said they’d had the same bad feeling about it, so yeah, it was best that I didn’t go. It was the hospital where a nurse was later taken hostage and (among other things) severely beaten and raped, IIRC by a patient. :eek:
In my youth I had a job and was looking into other options. I contacted one company that had listed a job offering that sounded appealing via the short newspaper description. They called me soon after they got my resume but on the phone the HR person was very dodgy about what the job involved: evading questions, etc. The interview setUp seemed very “assembly-line” to me as well.
I did a little research (such as could, this was pre-internet days) and found the company had a lot of violations and fines for deceptive practices and the like. The “ job” was most likely going to be door to door salesmaning for sketchy products ( most likely magazine subscriptions) and that was nothing like the job ad said.
Day of the interview I said the heck with it and did not go.
I did it twice, for reasons already mentioned. The first time was a family emergency. Fortunately I was able to reschedule — they didn’t bag on me — and the interview went well. They offered the job and I took it. The second time, I had just received and accepted a job offer, and the interview I cancelled was with a company and for a position I wasn’t too excited about.
Twice I was ordered to go to interviews, didn’t go but still got processed.
The orders were from my government’s Employment Assistance Office; if you’re given interviews twice and don’t attend, you lose your benefits. Now, one of the uses of the EAO is for companies to find workers, and some do (mostly in the hospitality industry), but often if you find an ad through EAO what happens is that the company is doing CYA for a foreign mothership: they already know who will get the job but must “publish” it to make the foreign lawyers happy. The first time it happened, it was for a company I wasn’t familiar with; I called them, explained the situation and asked whether they were really interested in interviewing me; after all, even if not for that job, maybe they’d like to have my info in case a similar one came up. They weren’t, they apologized, since I still did need my paperwork stamped they sent a courier to get it (paid for it as apology for the inconvenience to me) and sent it back stamped.
The second time, it was for a company for whom I’d recently had an interview for precisely that post. Their HR manager is a neighbor and former schoolmate; he told me that sadly I was never going to be allowed to work there because the American mothership forced a policy of “no women, no locals” and I was both. I hopped over to his house with the letter from EAO and asked if he’d kindly get it stamped for me. He did and dropped it off in my mailbox.
- From what I know of US labor issues, those two groups are the ones most likely to unionize. In Spain that’s irrelevant since the whole country is unionized, and in fact women and locals have the advantage of being less likely to leave a company or cause union troubles :smack:. Thanks to those specific policies, that particular factory ended up hiring lots of men from a specific area nearby and a specific political bent, who have given them enough union troubles to make Chicago unions proud. Real smart.
My former roommate did, years ago. He was in a dead-end job and one of our mutual friends was leaving his position, and arranged to have the former roommate interview (after the window for interviews was officially closed).
Instead of going to the 10 am interview, the former roommate went to the bar and drank. Gave other friends and me conflicting reasons as to what happened (told some that he went to the bar, told others that the interview just didn’t go well).
When I called him on it, he said that he’d had an anxiety attack and couldn’t handle the stress of going through with it.
Was a major sore spot for a lot of people for a variety of reasons, and I felt bad for the friend who stuck his neck out and pulled some strings to arrange the interview.
I cancelled because the location turned out to be way outside the range I was willing to commute. I was working with a headhunter (who turned out to be terrible), and he essentially lied about how far away the job was - told me it was about a 45 minute drive from my house, it was more like 1:45. Pre-google map days, so I didn’t realize it until I pulled out an actual AAA map the night before to see how to to get there & realized how far it was, so I cancelled the morning of the interview.