You can have an on-target resume, the right skills, multiple terrific interviews and you still might not get the job offer. Why? There are many things that happen in the hiring process that are out of your control and dependent on behind the scenes happenings at the company you are interviewing with. You may never know what happened, but here are some job offer insights that might make you feel a little bit better.
Internal Hire
At the eleventh hour someone turned up internally that wanted the position and had 70% of the skills needed. Companies do, and should, give preference to their existing internal staff if the transition makes any sense at all. Promotion from within, even just opportunity from within, is one of the reasons we want to join companies.
Hiring Freeze
You are right. You are perfect for the position and everyone who interviewed you thinks so as well. All you are getting is positive feedback, but no job offer. No one at the company can tell the reason is due to a hiring freeze. It doesn’t make the company desirable if word gets out that sales are down and the current emphasis is on expense reduction, so they can’t give you that reason. The result: no job offer and no reason why.
Incompetence
Your resume gets buried on someone’s desk or in-box. One of the essential interviewers can’t make time in their schedule to meet with you because of other deadlines. The position you want to interview for is low on the list of priorities for HR. The new manager can’t pull the trigger on a job offer through inexperience or just inability to make a decision. All add up to no job offer.
Black Hole
Ad responses go into a portal. You have to load your resume and answer some very specific questions about your background and interests. The portal is quite comprehensive and efficient but no one ever bothers to look at the resumes or your response. This is one of the reasons executive recruiters exist – to prevent resumes from vanishing into a black hole.
Lacking Unnamed Qualification
Even though you closely match all the skills detailed in the job description, you don’t get called for an interview. You even have a contact in the company that walks your resume over to the hiring manager and recommends you. It turns out the hiring manager really wants someone from their competitor or their customer, or from a certain college or some other odd requirement that they can’t state in the job advertisement. Those biases are working against you, and, unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do about it.
