Page 180 - John Kador - 201 Best Questions to Ask on Your Interview-McGraw-Hill (2002)

YOU BLEW THE INTERVIEW. NOW WHAT?

Key here is acknowledging that you accept the interviewer’s decision.
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 argue.
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 need. Some companies are
so fearful that an HR person may inadvertently say something that might
come back and bite them that they sharply restrict what HR people can
say. Companies checking references on former employees run into this
problem all the time. Many companies now reveal only the title of for-
mer employees and the dates of their hire and termination. Reluctantly,
they may reveal salary information. In fact, a new trend at some com-
panies is to have reference checks conducted entirely by a computerized
telephone system that gives prospective employers the minimal infor-
mation. 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 ed-
ucators by nature and desperately 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 incentive to keep
mum. For you, that makes getting authentic feedback very difficult.
An HR manager at a Fortune 1000 company who prefers not be iden-
tified reported the following exchange with a candidate who had just re-
ceived 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 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 making a
call like this. It takes a thick skin to ask for such details. In fact, you

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