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…
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.
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.
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.)
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.
My current company makes the effort to at least tell whether you’re still under consideration but I don’t think they’re allowed by legal to give any details.
At least in the US, it’s fine to not give a reason but if you do give a reason you’re liable for it. What company wants to risk that?
Looks like a major loophole to me haha
All there is to accept is the knowledge that the vast majority of employers, the wealth holding members of society, do not actually care about anyone that won’t earn them more money.
And then also that not all, but most of society will also tell you that you must be doing something wrong, it must be your fault.
“The wealth holding members of society”
Hahaha, every hiring manager I’ve worked for (you know, someone looking to fill a spot on our team) wasn’t exactly what I’d call “a wealth holder”.
They’re middle-to-senior management, making anywhere from 100k to 300k, at most. Sometimes quite a bit less.
We’re talking people who are a good 3 levels away from the C class. Meaning they’d be competing with everyone at their level, and above, to get to those higher seats in the pyramid.
Hiring managers are rarely farther up the food chain, unless they’re hiring for those seats farther up the food chain - which isn’t any of us here.
It’s It like there’s a team of managers who just do hiring/interviews. HR handles the initial stages, and the actual “hiring manager” is the person who’s looking to add someone to their team, someone they’ll be managing.
Well, I’d say 100k to 300k qualifies as more money than I’ve ever made in a single year of my life, more than I’ve made in my entire life if we go closer to 300k…
But what I meant was that the ultimate hiring process is dictated, signed off on or altered, all the way down, by the wealth holding members of society. The top execs, the board.
And that the society created, and largely owned, by their policies is essentially gaslighting us every day.
Have you ever spent an entire year applying to jobs… as a full time job? After having had a career, losing it to a disability, then trying to go back after years of recovery?
With maybe one reply every few months, despite being qualified for everything you are applying to?
Becoming depressed as everyone around you spends the first month giving you mindless cheery platitudes, then forgetting you exist, then becoming angry when you tell them you can’t afford to do anything that involves money?
Then when you finally cave and go work some bullshit job you are immensely overqualified for, everyone blames you for not living up to your potential?
They made it, it worked out for them, why didn’t it work out for you?
Even though it never once occured to them to maybe help you out monetarily and avoid going into massive debt, or by putting in a good word for you with their network of contacts.
But what I meant was that the ultimate hiring process is dictated, signed off on or altered, all the way down, by the wealth holding
Unless it’s a small company, they don’t know anything about you, nor make a decision in any way specific to you. They agreed to a budget expenditure and they want to know the hiring manager followed through. There is no personal connection
You should send them one of those annoying feedback surveys.
1.On a scale from 1 to 10, how do you rate the overall quality of my application?2.How well did my qualifications match the requirements for the position?Very well matched
Somewhat matched
Not well matched
3.On a scale from 1 to 10, how would you rate the clarity of my resume/CV?4.Was there any specific skill or experience you felt was missing from my application?Yes (please specify)
No
5.On a scale from 1 to 10, how effectively did my cover letter convey my interest in the position?6.Were there any areas in which my application could have been improved? (e.g., resume formatting, better alignment with job requirements, etc.)7.On a scale from 1 to 10, how well did I communicate my strengths during any interviews or communications?8.Would you consider my application for future opportunities within your organization?Yes
Maybe, depending on the role
No
9.On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend me to another employer?Employment is like dating, there are frequently things that happen outside of the process that impact the process and there are often reasons to avoid direct rejection even if the reasons are different.
Jobs might be posted and then the position itself is made redundant during the interviews, so they are no longer hiring. Or they liked your interview, but want to offer you something else and have to do the HR circus to make that offer happen and the whole thing falls through. Or during the interviews they decide they want to change the position into something else. Orbthey are incompetent and HR forgot to follow up on the job offer. I have seen all of these happen!
Then there is the all too common scenario of finding out the candidate is a woman or a minority and sone jerk killing the process. Can’t admit that so they ghost. They might have a valid reason not to hire, but don’t want to be sued for giving a reason. They might also have posted the thing to meet a requirement although they know who they were going to hire from the start. I have seen all of those as well.
Or they don’t want to tell a candidate they didn’t meet the position for fear of violence. This is likely being over cautious and not specific to the applicant!
Or the applicant reminded an interviewer of someone they don’t like.
These often line up with dating because they are all things that have no real specific explanation that can be given as what the csndidate can even do to change. Knowing they are possible won’t really impact how the interview/dating should go in the future either, because they are all external to the interview or dating process.
So the best way is to come to terms with the fact that there is likely to be someone who is a better fit, or the position wasn’t really stable, or you didn’t want to work or date them anyway if they didn’t follow up.
Shit man, you forgot someone else was just better suited for the job.
Even though you might be 97% perfect for the job, if they find 98% you’re done and it’s not your fault. Hell you were an excellent candidate for the job and just got unlucky enough to happen to be in the same pool as them.
The final decision on who to hire never comes down to who is the ‘most qualified’. There will almost always be multiple people who are qualified and the tiebreaker is interpersonal stuff like a matching sense of humor, attractiveness, and not reminding the interviewer of someone they don’t like.
Someone might be told it is based on the most qualified, but working well with others is part of a job and not in the written qualifications. It is also a subjective determination and varies wildly depending on the job and who is interviewing.
I said nothing about qualified.
I said better suited and gave percentages of perfect for the job.
Perfect for the job included everything, social interactions, qualifications, hair style, maybe holding the door for one of the people on the panel yesterday at the doctor.
There’s actually multiple questions here.
The hiring process has an application “filter” layer, a candidate selection layer, and THEN the interview with the person/people who actually want to hire you. Sometimes there’s an extra technical interview after that.
These days, the filter layer is mostly automated. Asking the filter why it didn’t select you is like asking a Machine Learning model why it chose to do something a certain way — you aren’t going to get a useful response.
So the only way to figure it out is trial and error: vary your application in terms of structure and content until you find the combination that makes it last the current batch of filters.
OR
Find a way to skip the filters altogether by finding someone on the inside of the company to flag up your CV to the people looking to fill the position.
Once past the filter, you get to HR, and if you get this far, asking questions about why you didn’t get selected to continue will actually be met with a useful response (unless it’s a company you don’t want to work for). HR will tell you the basic things they’re looking for in an application, and possibly how you compared in certain criteria to the stronger candidates.
Next you get to the manager. If you get this far, you can usually have this discussion at the end of your interview. They’re looking for fit for the role, and you can ask questions about fit as part of the interview process.
And finally you get to the technical interview. If you get this far and don’t get the job, the reason why is usually fairly obvious: either they had someone who was both a better fit AND understood the problem domain / demonstrated an ability to learn and reflect the team culture better, or you failed to prove technical ability in a key area.
Oh God it was such an onslaught on my self image and psychology. I believe humans aren’t equipped to handle the amount of rejection you have to receive during that grind. I certainly wasn’t.
I had applied for a job in a busy area a long time ago. I followed up a week later, nothing. I called a few days later. Nothing. I went to the office in person and *spoke to the receptionist, who was pre-screening resumes. She picked up a box the size of a case of paper, and showed me another, half full. The full one were resumes she’d not looked at yet; the half full was what she had.
Send out so many applications and keep busy, so that every response is a surprise. Only after a response can you set a reminder to reach out after a week. After a reminder, send a message and do not set a reminder. Keep applying to other jobs.
I just lose track of jobs I applied to in my head. If they aren’t responding, they don’t care and neither should you.
