Why did they say no to the credible candidate?

Hi there, I am writing this story especially for one of my readers. I've known this guy for a while, he was applying for a job he really wanted. There were two reasons why he really wanted the job: firstly, he knew he was right for the company, it was the perfect role for him and he knew he could excel there. Secondly, he hated his current job and was desperate to leave for greener pastures. Now he did come painfully close to getting the job - he had a few interviews, they did the necessary background checks but finally, as they only needed to hire one person, they chose another candidate over him. There was no consolation prize, just a nice email to explain that they really liked him and thought he was an excellent candidate, but they felt that the person they had chosen was more suitable for the job. Of course my friend was so disappointed that things turned out like that and he began to wonder if he had done something stupid during the interview, like did he mess things up by saying something wholly inappropriate. I had to assure him that there are a thousand reasons why they chose the other guy over him - but he'll never know as they're not obliged to tell him why.

Here's the memo - didn't you read it?

Having been on the other side of the equation as a gatekeeper, I have witnessed a number of cases where we have exactly that situation: there is a shortlist of a few excellent candidates, so how do you pick one out of that list and say no to the others when they are all so good? Well, in that case, you then begin to split hairs and find fault with things that normally wouldn't be a factor if the field had been weaker. Below are a few real stories about some of the candidates who have been rejected for the more bizarre reasons - names and details have been changed to protect their identities of all involved of course. May I offer a disclaimer too as well: the following people are all highly qualified, highly skilled excellent candidates who had the misfortune of finding themselves in these situations and they all went on to find good jobs elsewhere. I hope that in sharing these stories, my friend will realize that there was probably nothing he could have done to have changed the way things turned out with that job application - it just wasn't meant to be. Some of these stories do go back quite a few years, but I am sharing with you things that most gatekeepers will never tell you.

Case study 1: The geeky nerdy candidate

"Charlie" looked like a very credible candidate on paper - he went to a good university and had a pretty respectable track record, having worked for some good firms over the last few years. However, Charlie didn't do very well in the interview: at first I thought he had failed to express any real passion or enthusiasm about the job, but then I realize it went deeper than that. He didn't dress well but I will overlook that: he didn't make an effort to try to charm me, to try to get me to like him. His answers were short and to the point, sometimes forcing me to ask him to elaborate on the answers. He didn't say anything wrong - some people just get so nervous during interviews they fail to perform well. I got the impression that he was a bit of a loner, a bit of a geek who would be the kind of person who would be sitting in the corner doing stuff on his phone rather than being surrounded by friends who adored spending time with him. Technically speaking, he wasn't applying for any kind of customer-facing role, so it really didn't matter if he was a geek as long as he could do the job. Normally, this wouldn't have been a problem at all and if we had no one else to applying for the job, we would have happily hired Charlie even if he was a bit odd and somewhat geeky  he could have done the job even if he was weird.

But no, there was this other candidate called "Paul" who matched Charlie on paper - the only difference was that Paul was charming and engaging. It was clear that this guy had excellent soft skills when it comes to handling people. He was funny, he told jokes, he was a good listener, he was witty and charming, he gave me eye contact when I spoke to him - not that any of those skills were that relevant to the job but Charlie didn't have any of those skills. The final decision came down to the fact that the team would have a far better experience working with someone like Paul than with Charlie. It was a simple decision - why would you want to hire Charlie when you could hire a lovable character like Paul instead? So, I wrote a very nice email to tell Charlie what an excellent candidate he was but we had found someone who was a better fit for our current needs. Charlie was clearly disappointed but he didn't pursue me for an explanation - what was I going to tell him? "You're a geek, you're probably autistic, I bet you have no friends. I know you're really quite intelligent and capable but you really need to make a greater effort to be charming because you come across as an oddball and the competition is tough out there. Don't let your geeky personality get in the way of your dream job. Some people don't like working with geeks like you. Are you even aware you have a problem here or are you so autistic you are unable to consider another person's point of view? You need to seek help or this will always be a problem." Of course I can't say all that! I had no intentions to hurt his feelings. I was very pleasant and polite with him, he wasn't interested in my feedback.

Case study 2: The overqualified applicant 

"Georgina" had applied for a job with us and I was really impressed with her CV - she ticked all the boxes and it got to the point where I thought, hang on, if she is really so brilliant, why is she applying for a job she is clearly overqualified for? Why does she want to leave her current employment for such a role with us? And if we do give her the job, would she get bored with that role pretty quickly and start demanding a promotion within months to something a lot more senior? Or would she even resign and start looking for another job within 6 months? But given how excellent she was on paper, I felt obliged to give her at least an interview and actually I was quite curious to meet her in person. So when I met her, I didn't want to make it too awkward but I did ask her open ended questions like, "so Georgina, where do you see yourself in 10 years' time?" The answer she gave was so out of this world that I thought, well, if you're really that ambitious, then this role, this company is clearly not right for you. Either that, or you just gave me an answer that is a pack of lies and daydream fantasies. Either way, there was something about her that just didn't feel right despite the fact that she was clearly a highly educated, motivated, ambitious young person. She reminded me of those candidates in the programme the Apprentice who all talk the big game and are apparently brilliant, but then each episode, you see them try to take on a somewhat straightforward business task and they then reveal that they lack even the most basic common sense.

Well Georgina didn't get the job because we had the opportunity to interview "Yvonne" - who wasn't as brilliant on paper as Georgina, but we felt a lot more comfortable with her. Yvonne was down to earth, realistic, less experienced but very eager to take this opportunity to learn more about the financial services industry. Most of all, Yvonne came across as humble whilst Georgina had an air of arrogance (well, one might call that confidence) about her - between the two, it was a unanimous decision that Yvonne would be a much more pleasant person to work with even if Georgina was clearly superior on paper, but who cares? We felt a lot more comfortable with Yvonne and we were even worried that Georgina may turn out to be difficult to work with. So once again, I was given the task of telling Georgina that rejection and I simply told her that whilst we thought she was a brilliant candidate who impressed us all, we had found someone who was a better fit for our current needs. She didn't even reply to that email - I guess she wasn't interested in my feedback but I didn't know what I could tell her: you're wasting your time because you're overqualified for the position? We need to pick the most suitable candidate for the job, not simply give out the job to the person with the best CV you know.

Case study 3: The candidate who mistook me as a friend

This is an interesting story: "Zal" was again an excellent candidate on paper that performed very poorly at the interview. He had a credible CV but his story is a bit different: he was an engineer by trade and felt that engineering really wasn't right for him. He was keen to push the reset button and cross over to finance instead, thus I thought, yeah why not. He's clearly a very bright guy, you don't become a qualified engineer if you're that incompetent so I granted him an interview despite the fact that he lacked the experience that some of the other candidates had. Zal fared badly in the interview I'm afraid because I could sense his desperation. Sure I extended a lot of compassion and understanding as someone who has worked in different industries and I told him that there was nothing wrong with wanting to cross over into another industry: he responded by giving me a sob story about how he was pressured into engineering by his parents and teachers at school, even though he wasn't sure that was right for him and he needed this opportunity to make things right. That certainly wasn't the right thing to say in an interview situation - perhaps that's the kind of thing he would say to a good friend, but to a gatekeeper? Even a nice one like me? Even if that was the truth, he shouldn't have put down his experience as an engineer because there are a lot of transferable skills he had as an engineer - I do have a lot of respect for highly qualified engineers yet he was putting himself down, almost begging for help to 'make things right' in his life.

Zal mistook me as a friend - bad choice!

Zal went as far as to tell me things how he would be the first person to arrive in the office and the last one to leave. I responded by telling him that the person who got the job would not be trusted with the keys to the office to do that in the first instance - so he said, when the boss arrives in the morning with the keys to the office, he would be standing there waiting and the person locking up in the evening would have to kick him out. That just came across as desperate, almost like begging - I would have much rather he said something like that quote from the Thai movie I Fine Thank You Love You: "As a maintenance engineer, I believe everything can be fixed and made to work again. No matter how hard it is to fix, I will always find a way." Okay, I know that's a cheesy quote about the spirit of engineering, but that at least demonstrates a certain tenacity when it comes to problem solving that engineers would have; whilst a banker or accountant would simply look at a project, crunch the numbers and if they don't add up, they'll say, "it can't be done". I like people who find solutions when there are none, rather than people who are simply very good at following the rules. I had no problems giving an engineer a chance to prove himself in a completely different field but I had a problem with Zal's mindset because it was clear that he wanted to wipe the slate clean and didn't want anything to do with his past. Regardless of how dissatisfied we are with our past, we should never pretend it never happened, otherwise how are we going to learn from our mistakes? Oh there was so much advice I wanted to give him, but I couldn't as a gatekeeper.

I felt sorry for Zal - but the bottom line was, I was not his friend - I was the gatekeeper and it wasn't my place to coach him, to teach him what he had to say during an interview. I wasn't suppose to tell him when he had crossed the line and said something inappropriate or silly. However, he kept saying the wrong things during the interview, much to my frustration. He was up against quite a few other very credible candidates and he made it pretty easy for me to eliminate him from the short list based on his poor performance during the interview. The problems that Zal had with his interview could have been so easily fixed but that would have been like the kind teacher giving a student help during an important exam. There are times when you can beg a friend for help but you never show up to a job interview asking for mercy - even if life has dealt you a few blows, a job interview is not the time to show weakness. Even if you are to reveal something that can make you look weak (say a mistake you've made in the past), demonstrate how you were able to make things right and fix the situation but never ask for help at an interview. There are times when you can let your guard down and be honest with a good friend, but there are times when you should remain quite formal and guarded with a gatekeeper during an interview. Unfortunately for Zal, even though he was clearly an intelligent guy, he couldn't tell the difference between a friend and a gatekeeper and he made it too easy for me to say no to him. Sadly, he thought I said no because he was an engineer, he wrote me an email that said that he realized how hard it was for him to cross over into another industry altogether and thanked me for my time but he didn't actually ask me for my feedback.

Case study 4: The candidate who was better connected.

This was a really difficult case whereby we had two equally credible candidates - let's call them "Victoria" and "Ivana". Both candidates were highly educated, had a great track record, very pleasant but we couldn't hire them both - we had to find a reason to say no to one of them. In the case of Victoria, she had just gotten married and she talked about her husband. He happened to be working for one of the companies we were hoping to target in the near future but that was something she couldn't have known - it was just a coincidence that she would then be in a position to ask her husband to help open some doors for us in that company. Ivana too was married, but her husband worked in a totally different industry - a very capable man of course, but just not relevant at all to what we're doing. Thus it was with that in mind that Victoria was chosen over Ivana, though we didn't specifically tell Victoria, "you must tell your husband to open some doors for us and exert the right kind of influence to make this business relationship happen." No, it was all very subtle and when Victoria realized we were intending to target her husband's company, she volunteered to be on the project and we were like, "oh alright, does your husband work there? Well, if that is what you would like to do Victoria, go ahead."

Who you know actually does matter - so get networking!

As for Ivana, well, if she wasn't up against Victoria, she would have gotten the job. Or if we didn't know where Victoria's husband worked, we may have chosen Ivana over Victoria. Here's the thing, I don't even think that Victoria had used that piece of information to try to get the job - she showed up at the interview with an obvious tan and I asked the innocent question, "it looks like you've been on holiday recently, did you go somewhere nice?" That led to her telling me about her honeymoon and her husband, so that information came out quite by accident, it wasn't planned at all. It was all just casual small talk. After all, you don't talk about where your spouse works on your CV and if that topic isn't raised in the interview, well, it is essentially irrelevant. But it somehow just came out and we didn't ignore it - that led to Victoria being chosen over Ivana even though Ivana didn't do or say anything wrong at all throughout the interview process.

Case study 5: The candidate who was, well, better qualified and had more experience!

Oh this is a tricky one because it can happen to anyone. We were in a situation where we had two equally strong candidates: let's call them "Alicia" and "Wendy". Both of them were excellent on paper and because Alicia was somewhat older and had a few more years of work experience, her current salary was a bit higher than Wendy's. And unlike Charlie, Georgina and Zal, Alicia didn't make any mistakes or say anything stupid during her interview at all - she was flawless and we all liked her. However, when we had to make our final decision, we went with the younger Wendy because she was going to be cheaper to hire given that she was asking for less money. Nothing against Alicia but her few years of extra work experience really didn't come into play here because it was in a role that wasn't directly relevant to the job she had applied for. We could have gone back to her with an offer with less money (quite specifically, the exact amount that Wendy had asked for), but we thought, why would she leave her current job only to take a pay cut? Who would want to take a pay cut for no good reason? No, we had to either offer her the job at the rate she was asking or hire Wendy instead. So we went for Wendy because we didn't want to discriminate against her for being young and inexperienced: we saw great potential in her and thought it was a chance worth taking with someone as bright as her.

Alicia's work experience actually worked against her.

Alicia's situation is more common than you think - many older executives in their 30s and 40s face that situation when they get used to commanding quite a comfortable salary. When they are forced to look for a new job, they will come up against younger, more inexperienced candidates like Wendy who are far more willing to accept less money. Indeed, if Wendy hadn't applied for the job, then Alicia would have been our first choice but when you put the two candidates next to each other, it made far more sense to hire Wendy even if Alicia was a brilliant candidate. So how do you turn down someone like Alicia who has clearly not put a foot wrong? Well, you write a standard email, thanking her for her time and saying how impressed you were with her but that you've found someone who was a better fit for our current needs. In hindsight, could Alicia have anticipated this issue during the interview process? Probably not, how was she to have known that she was up against someone like Wendy? No, if Wendy hadn't applied, then we would have gladly hired her without a moment's hesitation given how good she was and probably offered Alicia her asking salary. It was a shame for Alicia unfortunately, but there was really nothing Alicia could have done to have changed the outcome of that decision.

So there you go, that's five stories about people who were turned down for various reasons you would not have ever thought of. I would say that Charlie, Georgina and Zal have clearly made some crucial mistakes during the interview process and there are things they can certainly do to improve their chances at their next interview but the problem is that the gatekeeper cannot cross the line and become the teacher midway through the interview, I had little choice but to sit back and watch them falter. Then there were the cases of Ivana and Alicia when neither of them did anything wrong, they performed very well but somehow, things just didn't work out and they didn't get the job in spite of everything. As for my reader who didn't get the job, I can't comment on why he didn't get the job as I didn't watch his interview - perhaps he did make a mistake during the interview, or perhaps he didn't do a thing wrong, but even if the latter was the case, it is still entirely possible to do everything right and still not get the job through no fault of your own. What do you think about the five case studies I shared? Let me know your thoughts. Feel free to leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.