Maybe you're undaunted and determined. Maybe you long ago concluded that passivity doesn't get you anywhere and that you have to be proactive to succeed. Maybe you also concluded that patience is hardly a positive virtue when it comes to job searching and you have to be persistent. Or maybe - like this writer - you have zero patience left to begin with. In any event, you take it upon yourself to write some polite thank-you messages and follow-up e-mails to be professional, and your reward is that sweet sound of what Art and Paul sang about more than 40 years ago. What do you do?
Well, in my case, having had this happen twice in the past three weeks - that quote in the first paragraph is verbatim, by the way - I decided there was nothing to be gained by being passive and very little if anything to be lost by being persistent, so I did what I always do in these situations and wrote to other contacts at the companies. I also did a very dangerous thing.
I tried to think about what could be happening on the other side of the wall.
Near as I can figure, here are the most logical explanations:
It's the fourth quarter of the year. Typically, most firms hire in the first and second quarters of the year; the summer is when people are frequently out of the office and vacationing (thus making it difficult to get all the players on the same page for any hiring discussions); and the fourth quarter is that end-of-the-year time when holidays and budgets make it all too easy to kick the can down the road.
It's an undead or phantom position. Yes, I know, we left Halloween last month, but these sorts of position descriptions still play havoc with the job search. In this particular case, however, given that I had internal connections at both organizations, I'm thinking the jobs actually exist, they may simply be -
Frozen. Yes, as we know from earlier postings on this blog, leaving a position up on the Internet after it's frozen is an all-too-common tactic to disguise a hiring freeze. Plus, companies are always happy to interview available talent to see "what else is out there," they're just usually far too hesitant to do anything beyond keeping your resume on file these days when they're still trying to sort out whether the budget will allow them to bring on more staff at this point (or keep the ones they already have).
But if the position does exist, hasn't been frozen, and hasn't been filled from within, there's always that other, uglier possibility -
You didn't measure up, kid. Nobody likes to face this prospect, but we all know it happens. Maybe your skills came up short in one other area no one considered essential; maybe your age and salary needs put you just a hair beyond the new range that the company decided - why, just yesterday, in fact - that they needed to have for this particular job band. Or maybe you just didn't match the hiring manager's profile, which is all-too-often defined as "someone more or less like me or made in the same mold as I am." (And yes, men and women both do this subconsciously - it's called "compatibility.")
The only problem with any of these possibilities? None of them explain why a company can't simply acknowledge a response or reply with a polite message telling the applicant that the job is still being evaluated, other candidates are being interviewed, or even something as general as "things are moving forward, albeit slowly." To say nothing paints an unflattering picture of the corporation and its culture; and it also ignores the fundamental fact that the hiring market is no different from any other market in that it has its highs and lows. And just as sellers can be choosy in a sellers' market, so can buyers when it's a buyers' market.
Or to put it another way, someday the job market will change as well - and chances are applicants will have very strong memories about how they are treated or mistreated by firms that can't even bother to acknowledge messages or make good on their pledges, commitments, and even their verbal offers to candidates.
I can hardly wait.
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