Page 212 - 301 Best Questions to Ask on Your Interview, Second Edition

YOU BLEW T HE I N T ERV IEW. NOW W H AT ?

go with another candidate and I accept your decision. I’d appreciate
any feedback you can give me.”

Key here is acknowledging that you accept the interviewer’s deci-
sion. The issue of your application for this position has been decided.
You lost. Get over it. No recruiter will help you if he or she thinks
you want to debate an issue that’s been settled.

Unfortunately, many interviewers are not going to tell you what
you want to know under any circumstances. The fear of lawsuits by
former employees has so traumatized employers that they will almost
never give candidates the authentic feedback they request. Some com-
panies are so fearful that an HR person will inadvertently say some-
thing that might come back and bite them that they sharply restrict
what HR people can say. Many HR people will simply ignore you.

By the way, companies checking references on former employees
run into the problem of HR people clamming up all the time. Many
companies now reveal only the titles of former employees and the
dates of their hire and termination. Reluctantly, they may reveal sal-
ary information. In fact, a new trend at some companies is to have
reference checks conducted entirely by a computerized telephone
system that gives prospective employers the minimal information.
The idea is to remove the actual HR people from the process.

In this atmosphere it is all but impossible to get a hiring manager
or HR person to be honest. It’s a shame, because many HR people
are educators by nature and want to tell candidates what they could
do better next time or how their résumé could be improved. But they
have absolutely no incentive to do so and lots of incentives to keep
silent. For you, that makes getting authentic feedback very difficult.

An HR manager at a Fortune 1000 company who prefers not to
be identified reported the following exchange with a candidate who
had just received a letter of rejection:

CANDIDATE: Thanks for taking my call. I got your letter telling
me that you won’t be making me an offer. I was a little surprised
because I left the interview thinking that I was very qualified for

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