Page 213 - 301 Best Questions to Ask on Your Interview, Second Edition

THE QUESTION LIFE CYCLE

the job. Of course, I accept your decision, but I am calling to try
to understand why I did not get an offer. I want to learn from any
mistakes I may have made. Candidly, can you tell me why I did
not get the offer and what I might have done differently to present
myself as a stronger candidate?
WHAT THE INTERVIEWER WANTED TO SAY: I admire you for mak-
ing a call like this. It takes a thick skin to ask for such details.
In fact, you sabotaged yourself in a number of ways that can be
easily remedied. You had a couple of misspelled words on your
résumé and your choice to wear sandals instead of shoes caused
some of us to question your professionalism.
WHAT THE INTERVIEWER ACTUALLY SAID: I appreciate your call,
and we were impressed by your credentials, but the truth is that
another candidate simply had a little more experience in the areas
most important to us. Good luck in your job search.

Unless you have a personal relationship with the hiring manager,
it’s almost impossible to get honest feedback about the selection
process. And the irony is, the more you need brutally honest feed-
back—the more there’s something you can actually do something
about—the less chance you will get it. That’s because few HR profes-
sionals want to come clean on the subjective reasons one candidate is
chosen over another.

HR people can afford to be a little more honest about objective
standards. Let’s say you lost the job because it called for ten years
of speechwriting experience and you only had two years. That they
might tell you. If the job calls for a commercial driver’s license and
you don’t have one, that they’ll tell you. If the job requires a Micro-
soft certification and you don’t have one, that they’ll tell you. But you
probably knew all that already. The important thing is that if you
were rejected on any type of subjective basis, it’s very difficult to get
anyone to acknowledge it.

Here’s where a recruiter intermediary can be helpful. No one likes
to give bad news directly to a candidate. But if an interviewer knows

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