39 reasons why you didn’t get the job

The explanations you don’t deserve, job-seeker

Hey, you! Thanks for applying for that job we advertised. You didn’t get it. You’re out because:

1. No reason.
2. No reason at all.
3. Your resume is too short.
4. Your resume is too long.
5. Your resume is nicer than mine.
6. Your resume is the 12th one a person saw this morning and her limit is three.
7. Your experience comes from other industries.
8. Your skills & experience hint you’ll want an above-market wage.
9. Your skills & experience hint you’ll want a fair market wage.
10. Just kidding about 8 & 9. We won’t look at your skills and experience. We’ll just scan your titles and dates. And they didn’t match my imaginary perfect candidate that had the exact career path as me.
11. Your skills and background threaten me.
12. Your resume is written in a human voice.
13. Your resume isn’t written in a human voice.
14. You’re a man and we’re hoping for a woman.
15. You’re a woman and we’re hoping for a man.
16. We think you might be too … something: Old, young, dark, white, fat, principled, unprincipled, complacent, a job-hopper, attractive, unattractive, gay, straight, educated, uneducated, experienced, inexperienced, unexpected, different, from the wrong school, from the wrong city, used to work for the government, never previously worked for the government, foreign, religious, conservative, liberal, my spouse used to date someone with your name, I cannot pronounce your name, I used to know someone with your name and I don’t like that person, or any other whimsical criteria that pops into our heads.
17. Our guy was asked to collect eight viable candidates to present to his boss and your resume came in eleventh.
18. We don’t know what we want.
19. We changed our mind about hiring anyone.
20. We lost funding to hire anyone.
21. We cannot make up our minds.
22. People that hold the purse strings in our company cannot make up their minds.
23. The hiring manager doesn’t understand skills different from his own.
24. The hiring manager opted for a boilerplate job description irrespective of current needs for the role, gave it to the recruiter and the recruiter has little idea what will really work.
25. You haven’t been at your last job long enough.
26. You have been in your current job for too long.
27. Your past employers aren’t sexy.
28. I’ve decided I know what people are like where you used to work and our culture is different.
29. You weren’t repped by an outside recruiter.
30. You’re tainted because an outside recruiter pushed you in front of us and we have a bad history with her.
31. You work remotely. And we can’t figure out how to make Skype or Zoom meetings work.
32. You’ve never worked with a remote workforce.
33. I would never live where you live and commute to where we work.
34. You’ve been a freelancer or contractor.
35. You don’t know what it’s like to be a freelancer or contractor.
36. I don’t understand this gap in your employment.
37. You’ve got a record.
38. This was all a charade. We had an internal candidate in mind the whole time.
39. Because fuck you, that’s why.

We don’t need to tell you any of this. But we did anyway. No need to thank us!

Looking for more helpful information to understand your, let’s call it “career” search? Read the longer, even snarkier original post in Marketing Communications Leadership:

We have no idea who you are and you will never get a job with us