When You Ace the Interview and Still Aren't Hired

This falls right into the if-it-hadn’t-happened-to-me-I-wouldn’t-have-believed-it Hall of Shame.

Imagine this: You go to a networking meeting and make a connection who agrees to forward your resume to a friend at a large consulting firm. You go home, look at the Web site, polish your resume with all the appropriate “buzz words” and fire it off to him. He e-mails you back and suggests a few additional tweaks. You make them, and he submits it for a position. Before you know it, the recruiters are calling and you’re slowly making your way up the interview chain. Finally, after nearly two months, you’re invited out to another city for a face-to-face interview with the senior team. You diligently prepare for the interview, rehearsing the likely questions and proper answers, and when the time comes, you nail the interview. In fact, you so impress the interviewers that as one of them is walking you back to the conference room, she’s telling you what to do when the offer comes. Does it get any more promising than this?

But it doesn’t end there – two weeks later, you get an e-mail with the subject line, “Employment Offers.” You eagerly click the message and read about how the company has had some difficulty preparing all the offers because of the summer hours. You’re told to expect your offer no later than the following Tuesday.

You don’t hear anything until Wednesday.

And what do you hear on Wednesday? After all these months of positive interviews, encouraging signals, and what appear to be pledges of impending offers? You get something like this at 5:01 p.m.:

“Hi, this is SUZY Q. We wanted to get back to you and let you know that your interviewers were very impressed with your skills and qualifications. However, I’m afraid that while they recommended you for hiring, our business plan dynamic has changed, and consequently we won’t be moving forward with an offer for your position at this time. We thank you for your interest, however, and encourage you to consult our Web site for further opportunities…”

Now, HOW are you supposed to respond to this? On the one hand, you want to be professional and not close the door – particularly if you’ve been out of work for 18 months and obviously demonstrated the fact that you were qualified by passing several interviews culminating in a face-to-face with senior staffers who recommended that the company hire you – but on the other, you can’t help but wonder if you really want to go through this entire process all over again with this particular outfit. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me…” runs repeatedly through your head.

But let’s take a deeper look at the company’s side. Assume each person who interviewed you got paid roughly $100 an hour once salary and benefits are put into the mix. This means if you go through three phone screenings before some face-to-face interviews with only two people, a back-of-the-envelope breakdown of the costs look something like this:

$100 First phone screen interview with initial recruiter
$100 Second phone interview with a manager
$100 Third phone interview with another manager
$100 Face-to-face interview with senior manager #1
$100 Face-to-face interview with senior manager #2
$800 Round trip flight costs for face-to-face interviews + overnight hotel stay
$100 Miscellaneous meal and travel charges for your interview (taxi, meals, etc.)
$100 Staff time to process your submitted expense report
$300 Three hours to prepare your offer (salary, benefits, etc.)

$1,800 Total

So, in other words, a company can spend close to $2,000 to interview and screen you as a candidate for a position that it feels you are qualified for but which it ultimately – for reasons unknown – decides not to fill. Assuming this happens not just to you but to several other candidates each year, and you have to wonder how much capital is being wasted screening people for positions that ultimately don’t exist.

Which naturally brings up the question that’s guaranteed to make any CFO pound his or her head on the desk in frustration: What other, more profitable uses could that capital have been used for? Think about it for a moment:

• How many candidates reject offers for salary reasons – in other words, a competitor makes them a better offer – but who would have been willing to work for you if only you had been able to make a slightly higher offer?
• How much staff time could have been put to more productive uses instead of having screeners interview candidates for positions that ultimately aren’t going to be filled?
• What damage is done to the company’s image when people who experience this treatment advise their friends against applying to the firm? ("Let me tell you what happened to me when I applied there...")
• What happens to internal morale when people who recommend others as candidates learn that even though you were recommended, the company chose not to hire you. Will they recommend anyone else for a position, or will they show more hesitancy based on this experience?
• What are the talent implications of these decisions as a whole on the competitive standing of the firm?
  

Now, granted, since this happened to me, I'm obvoiusly a bit biased in my outlook, but perhaps the worst part of this experience was the fact that it was not unique. I went to a roundtable meeting for job seekers this week and relayed the story in its entirety to the group. Know what? Nearly everyone in the room admitted having had a similar if not identical experience. It's enough to make any sane person wonder why they willingly submit to such an insane process; except perhaps that unemployment is simply an unacceptable alternative.

I haven’t given up my job search; but as I experience more and more incidents like these, I can’t help but have a growing sympathy for those who do.