I’ve seen a large number of posts where people look good on paper, feel like they nailed the interview, they did everything the WSO interview guide told them to do, but they still get a ding. That’s followed by some degree of introspective angst – “what am I doing wrong?”
Often, it’s because candidates are competing against people with similar or better credentials or screwed something up in the interview. Tough luck.
But sometimes – and not infrequently – the interviewers may think the candidate is great, but not what they are looking for.
It’s not you, it’s us.
Specifically, when we’re interviewing, we’re often looking for someone who complements our team’s skillset or addresses a deficiency.
Some examples:
1. Our team may be mostly guys and straying into too much locker room banter or chest beating. The few women on the team may be feeling alienated. We need to balance it out. So we’ll have a bias towards recruiting a female candidate or less overtly alpha.
2. Our team may be a front office team with a lot of extroverted sales personalities, but we need some numbers geeks or desk jockeys who will be happy modeling and preparing pitchbooks. We need those guys to be less extroverted, less ambitious to make sales, more happy to do the desk work supporting the sales team. So a candidate who would be an excellent sales guy is not what we’re looking for and will get a ding.
This applies even to summer interns. For example, for the two SA positions in my team for this year, we’d picked one outgoing, extroverted female candidate and that fed into our choice of SA #2, where we chose a guy with a geekier background and personality over other candidates who were comparable to SA #1. We thought that combination was what we needed for the team.
Unless you’ve got an insider who knows the score, you won’t know what the interviewers are looking for. And they are unlikely to tell you in the interview or afterwards. And, in the case of the SA example I gave, what we were looking for only evolved once we’d seen the candidates and made a decision on #1.
So, if you’ve been dinged and can’t put your finger on why, maybe it’s not you, it’s us.
Good post, but that still doesn't answer why those people would be interviewed in the first place, especially for further rounds...nobody likes having their time wasted and being jerked around or lead on for no reason
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