He didn’t evade the question, and he answered it competently. We had some good rapport, actually – Or I thought so, anyway – because we were cracking the standard jokes of coding like it’s 1995. (There is very poor support for web standards in email.) He has worked in this niche for as long as I have, so he said, and started out in campaign execution himself. He ended up at this company because he used to work for their email vendor, so when they moved email in-house, they poached him to run things.
They rejected me about three days after the phone interview, through the recruiter, which was how I found out they ‘thought I wasn’t interested.’
Is it possible they thought you weren’t interested because you didn’t follow up the interview with a letter/email restating your interest? So maybe not at all connected to this question at the interview?
I sorta wonder if the questions you asked indicated that you only wanted a very specific part of the job.
I really don’t know much about email campaigns, but let’s say they have parts A, B, and C. You go in and say “I can do A or B or C, but I need to know which one I’ll be doing”. When you get a vague answer, you might be thinking “why can’t he answer any questions about the job” but he might be thinking “It’ll depend! What, you think I’m going to hire you for C and never ask you to do anything else? She must not be interested if she’s trying to define her job down to some tiny little piece even before she’s got an offer.”
I’m not saying that’s what you meant, I’m saying that may be the impression he got. I’ve worked with people that had “not my job” syndrome before, and they’re a pain in the ass. Maybe he got that vibe from you.
Oh, hell. That doesn’t mean squat. You’re waaaay over-analyzing it to tie it back to something specific you said. They happened to hire somebody else; who knows why. They told the recruiter they “didn’t think you were interested” because they had to say something. It’s as meaningful as “it’s not you, it’s me” as a break-up line.
The job was already planned for somebody else, but, there was a requirement that they interview X amount of people.
President of company: “How come you didn’t hire Kaio?”
Interviewer: “Kaio asked totally inappropriate questions, which showed total lack of interest. I mean, Kaio didn’t even know what the primary focus was!”
President: “OK, give the job to your wife, since you didn’t note that she wasn’t interested.”
^ If this is a government office we’re talking about, this is almost certainly the case. Not necessarily somebody’s wife, but an internal promotion or transfer that was planned all along.
Which was why I said it was the dishonesty that bothered me. They went out of their way to lie. They could have just said “Found someone else, thanks.”
My experience interviewing for IT positions would be that, if the first interviewer didn’t want to explain what the job was, it meant he didn’t have a freaking clue what it was. All he had done was take a job description and bump it up against a database full of contact information, and it gave him a list of names, email addresses & phone numbers. He’d email the vague job description out to everybody on the list and ask “Do you think this job would be a good fit for you?” and then it’d be up to me to figure out what the job was. Anybody who replied “You bet!” got sent along to the actual client, who would look at the resumes and, in most cases, think “WTH was this guy thinking?” and hit the Delete key.