I Didn’t Get A Job Offer
Not Because I Wasn’t Qualified, Because… Nepotism
For the past few months, I’ve been job searching actively while still doing some freelance work. During this time, I’ve been in three multiple-interview processes for three different jobs.
The first one was for a startup (that process is another article in of itself). The last one is currently in the “waiting on hearing if I get an offer” stage. But the second one is the one this article is about.
I’m sure you’ve been there, applied, invited to an interview, made it to the next round, and interviewed again. Then ultimately, didn’t get the job.
It happens a lot. And we do not talk it about a lot. We hear all the stories about people who get jobs and share that exciting news, but I rarely see stories talking about the struggle of job searching when you don’t get the job.
There’s a deflating aspect to hearing you don’t get a job, mainly because, despite making it fairly far down an interview pipeline, you don’t get a lot of feedback.
Usually, it’s something like:
Thank you, but we’ve chosen to go in another direction.
OR
Thank you for your time, though we have chosen a candidate who more closely meets our needs at this time.
It is so rare to hear the reason, or feedback from the hiring team, about what you could have done better, or why you didn’t check the final boxes for a job.
So when I heard that I didn’t get job number two, I was a bit surprised. I had gone through a phone interview, then an initial interview with four people. One of those would have been my actual director. Then I was asked to I provide writing samples. Then I interviewed again with four additional people who would have been colleagues at the same managerial level as me.
I thought the interviews went great, and they all exceeded the scheduled timeframe because we kept talking and the interviewers kept asking me questions. These are all good signs from my previous experience.
Yet, a week later, I didn’t get the job. I let myself be disappointed, shrugged it off, continued my search, and moved on. But curiosity got the best of me. I wondered who got the job, and I wondered how I compared to them. What qualifications did I lack the other had?
Maybe I could look at their LinkedIn account and use their experience to help me better prepare myself for future searches, future work, and education so I could be a more complete candidate next time.
Well, it wasn’t until recently that I found out who got the job. Turns out the candidate who got the job was a sibling of the company president. Nepotism.
Sure, they definitely had some great experience in similar roles — but so did I. The area we couldn’t compete? I wasn’t a sibling of the president. It took me less than three minutes on Google to figure out they were siblings. How could I possibly compete with that?
I find myself more frustrated knowing that I went down the path so far, and dedicated nearly three hours of my time to interviews, only to not get the job because of nepotism.
Was the intention always to hire the sibling? Was the other candidate interview process just a show for doing due diligence? It’s hard not to feel that way.
Of course, the inverse is possible too. Maybe they were more qualified than me. They are older than me and have another decade-plus of managerial experience than me. It just happens that their sibling is the president.
And it is that point that is impossible for me to remove from the equation.
I don’t know the story about what happened behind the scenes, and I can only judge myself against the hired candidate based on what they’ve publicly shared about their professional career.
The lesson that I will takeaway from this — and one I hope other do too — is that you never know the full story about the interview process. We have to stay positive, affirm our professional accomplishments and skills, and remain optimistic.
We can’t control decisions that impact our professional lives unless we’re the ones making them.
Deep breath. Let it go. Get back to the search.
