This is very common when you match the criteria very well, but aren’t hired. They knew when they posted the job who they were going to hire, they “had” to post it. Frankly, I’d like if if they had to let you know when you applied if they already had a “likely candidate in mind.” Of course, its possible to blow them away (my husband hired someone other than the likely candidate at the end of the interview process once or twice), but most of the time, when that likely candidate exists, they get hired.
It’s possible that their “Dear Jane” letter was just a form letter. I don’t think they take the time to explain to every single applicant individually why they aren’t being considered. They simply fire off a standard rejection letter.
Hell, in 2009 I would have been thrilled to get a form rejection letter. How about applying for, I dunno, 60 jobs and hearing nothing? Ever. At all.
If HR sent her the letter, she should call the person who would be her “boss” and discuss the job with him or her. There could be several different people who fit this description (e.g., immediate boss, higher level managers, etc.). Many times these people would be impressed by her persistence. Indeed, at my current job, we wound up hiring a woman who called us many times telling us that she had done so much research on our company, and it was really where she wanted to work and blah blah blah. She’s been with the company about five years now, and has had a few promotions.
Heh. During one particularly bad interview, the candidate knew he was doing badly and started asking me for interviewing tips right then and there. That was awkward. I don’t remember what I did though.
The only time I’ve ever queried a rejection letter it was pretty much exactly as you stated it.
I only went back to the agency handling the job because of the “WTF?!” reaction I had to rejection letter that basically said I didn’t have the experience they were looking for when, if anything, I was rather over-qualified for the job with rather more experience than they were asking for.
Now, maybe it makes a difference that a) it was an agency and not the company’s own HR department, and b) that I’m not in the US, but I did get a reply, and got to talk to the agent involved, who apologized for the letter – basically saying I got the wrong form letter. I was still supposed to get a “thanks, but no thanks” but not the *version *I got.
And the agent went on to try and place me with a different company she was handling. Didn’t work out in the end, but she was good to deal with.
Here in the U.S. even getting a rejection letter or e-mail following an interview seems to be quite rare. Most companies and HR departments I have dealt with have taken the “cease communications” attitude the moment they make a decision. If you call to follow up, you either get the “they haven’t made a decision yet” or, “I’m sorry, the job has been filled, but thank you for applying and we’ll keep your resume on file for future positions”
As a hiring manager myself, I can tell you that I have created job descriptions, interviewed candidates, selected folks I liked in descending order of preference and then been told they chose not to fill the position, and instead want everyone else to pick up the slack to increase profitability. What do I tell people then? Sorry to have jerked you around? I have gotten a request once or twice for feedback in my life, but I have always given them a vague answer about more qualified candidates simply because I don’t want to get in any kind of debate about how their qualifications really are the best. I used to get the same thing from small businesses when I worked at a larger business. They all expected to instantaneously get a subcontract with us simply because they existed, made a widget, and understood that we purchased widgets once in a while. What pissed me off worse was when I was putting together a team, and a small business really did exist with the skills and capabilities I needed, but my boss offered up their spot to one of his golfing buddies who vaguely thought his company did “systems engineering” but could offer no useful past performance, resumes, etc. Sometimes the feedback really would be “you really are perfect, but politics/nepotism/internal stupidity resulted in you not getting the job”.
I had that happen. And obscure requirements. It could have been written for me - and maybe half a dozen other people in the Twin Cities.
It was written for an internal candidate. I don’t think they ever interviewed anyone else. I heard about it later through the grapevine. When there are only half a dozen people who do what you do, information about jobs moves around.
I actually did this one time. It was a small web development company where I interviewed with two guys who were pretty much the entire company. Their rejection letter said that I didn’t have enough experience in some of the tools they used.
So I responded to the email and asked if he could tell me where I was lacking. He responded that I was lacking experience in one or two specific tools, I think one was Ruby on Rails.
It didn’t seem awkward or inappropriate at the time, but after reading some of these responses I’m not so sure.
In that instance, my advice has changed. If you didn’t interview, but just received a stock ‘no thanks’ letter, that tells me it was a position filled internally.
Look, everyone who goes to the interview probably fits the requirements. What it ultimately comes down to is who is the best “fit”. And it’s usually pretty intangible. More often the reason you didn’t get the job is because it went to one of the 5 other candidates who is pretty much just like you on paper.
But as a hiring manager / interviewer, I’m not going to give you any real feedback.
Most of the time it’s not worth the effort because they won’t tell you the real reason why, which probably has nothing to do with you anyway. In many cases someone is worried about being sued, and won’t tell you anything meaningful. In other cases they’ll be polite and not tell you about any deficiency they perceived. Some others may make up something to cover up actual discrimination because of some personal characteristic, or because you didn’t recognize him as the kid you stole a candy bar from 20 years earlier.
Some people will be honest, more likely through a phone call than on paper or messaging, which they can ignore. So if they take your call, maybe they have something worthwhile to tell you such as insufficient experience in some area. But even then you have no way to determine that they are being truthful, unless they let you know that they figured out you spent the last 10 years in prison, and you should have figured that was the reason to start with.
Or it is part of the immigration process, which forces you to advertise for a position which someone has with an H1 and you want to convert to a green card. You can tell these by requirements like “knowledge of lower Sobbovian” which has nothing to do with they job and 2 years, 4 months and 3 days of experience with an obscure package. I’ve written some ads like this.
And, since the government checks, I’ve been in places which basically had to hire someone because he had all the bizarre requirements.
I’ve never heard anyone, in HR or otherwise, say that not sending rejection letters is a good thing. They don’t send them, but mostly because 80% of HR, and especially the people dealing with recruiting, got laid off at the last downsizing, and if you have headcount available you’re going to hire an engineer.
When I started in 1980 our center of fewer than 500 people had three full time recruiters. Things went very smoothly, and all the letters were sent. Not now.
It’s also entirely possible that too many people applied, and there’s just simply not enough job openings. The last job I applied for (and didn’t get) the recruiter said over 300 qualified applicants applied for the one position.
I wouldn’t bother asking why you didn’t get it. It’s a buyer’s market for companies hiring these days.
The only e-mail reply that would be acceptable is “Thank your for letting me know. I appreciate your consideration. Please keep me in mind for future openings.”
I would guess most HR people who got that would be delighted (and maybe flabbergasted).
In regards to interviewers who detest having to seek out and interview job applicants, hate the process and are far too busy/important to respond in a polite and timely manner to those who don’t meet the job requirements (including brief feedback to an unsuccessful interview candidate): I suspect this works adequately in a field where applicants far exceed jobs and you can have your pick of possibilities.
In another situation this attitude likely correlates with bringing in unsuitable people, dissatisfaction on the part of both workers and management, high job turnover and the necessity for spending lots more time on filling vacancies.
Not really. Why should companies waste time and resources stroking the egos of candidates who they don’t really want working there anyway? Good companies spend their effort identifying and attracting the top talent and making sure they are a good fit for the organization.
There could be a million reasons a company didn’t offer you a job. Bottom line is that they found someone they thought they were a better fit. As awesome as I am, I typically have to compete with half a dozen people just like me for a position.
I think it demonstrates an extreme sense of narcississm and entitlement to think that the company should take time out of its busy schedule to coddle people so they don’t feel bad about being rejected. And there are a lot of practical reasons not to send a rejection letter.
One of the main reasons companies don’t send rejection letters is simply that they are inundated with resumes (most of which suck). When I was graduating college in 95, it was pretty much standard practice that companies mailed back responses to nearly every application. But applications/resumes were typed back in the day. People couldn’t send a thousand resumes at the push of a button.
I’ve been an interviewer at a couple of Fortune 500 companies that had this as a corporate policy. To hire a temp who’d been there already working the role, knew the job perfectly, and we wanted full time, we still had to post the notice and run obligatory competitive interviews with at least a half-dozen external applicants. The selection process was all a sham, basically, and we totally wasted the time of all of the applicants by giving them false hiring hope, and were of course prohibited by the company from telling them otherwise.
I’ve literally been in meetings where we’ve come across an applicant’s resume and said “This person looks amazing and perfect for the job, it’s going to be tough to justify saying no. Let’s not interview him/her.”
As others have stated, this isn’t 1980, and there are people out there who are desperate for work, so their response is to e-mail resumes to anything they are remotely qualified for, and often times, wholly unqualified for. I would argue every job opportunity on Monster falls into this category, no matter how specific you make the job requirements. In those circumstances, HR glances at the potentially hundreds of applicant resumes, finds the choice handful, and you interview some. HR sometimes doesn’t know once they hand off the handful who you interviewed and why you may have rejected them. I would hope the hiring manager would have the courtesy to let the other candidates they interview that they were rejected, but if their work is like my own, sometimes a series of “brushfires of the week” interfere to prevent that follow up. Odds are, the reason we are hiring is because we are short staffed, so I’m busy dealing with that issue until the new person accepts, comes on board, gets up to speed, etc. If the reason we are hiring is because the last guy was let go for incompetence or other performance issue, odds are we are cleaning up his mess. Thankfully, only a handful of candidates have ever asked for feedback, and when they have and they have the time, I will usually write a vague (i.e. can’t be sued) response that will at least let them know if we really would hire them in the future (i.e. they were really good but just not the best), or not (i.e. they bombed the interview).
And what do I do if the reason you bombed is something you can’t change? Do you want to know, even if I could legally tell you? If two equally qualified candidates come in, and one talks in a heavy accent that is hard to understand because English is his second language, he will always be the second choice. Same thing for the person who chooses to wear anything unusual to the interview that screams “I am religion X!” or “I come from country X!”. I know some of that stuff is required, but in my experience, it can be done tastefully. If I have to worry you are going to be pushing your religion or culture on others, even if you aren’t, you are hurting your chances of getting a job. I’d never be able to tell you that because it’s discriminatory, and if you really are the best candidate by a wide margin, you’ll still get the job. That said, I never would say that, and it’s rare that any one candidate is that much better than the others.
A few years ago when I was out of work, I applied for a job at a well-known company. I went through two interviews and thought they went very well. I waited for them to call me with an offer and then… nothing. Since one of the interviewers had given me her card, I called her directly after a few weeks to ask how things were going. She basically said, “I’m sorry, but all the positions have been filled.” I didn’t press too hard, but clearly no further information would be forthcoming.
Then about 3 months later, a temp agency contacted me wanting to place me into a lower-level position at that same company. I accepted. After starting the job, I again met the interviewer I had called, who remembered me. She said that the entire business unit had transferred from another state, and they didn’t expect enough people to relocate to staff the department, so they advertised and interviewed. But as it happened, more people moved than they’d expected, and no outside applicants got any jobs. She said I would have been the first one they hired if they could have. She obviously couldn’t tell me that at the time.
Eventually I was hired on permananetly and have moved up to the level I originally applied for and then some. I’m still there.
So Athena, this long-winded post is my way of saying tell your friend to chill out and not take every rejection so personally, to keep on plugging away, and even if it seems hard to believe right now, things will work out in the end.
I was still supposed to get a “thanks, but no thanks” but not the *version *I got. 