Thanks But No Thanks
The economy still sucks, and my consulting business has been way, way off, so I’ve been applying for jobs. This is hard because the set of skills I have is sort of sprawling and outside the scope of most corporate jobs (in that world you’re either a developer or an administrator, not an unholy mix of both with some business planning thrown in for good measure). I do get called for phone interviews and I’ve had a few on-site interviews as well, but I haven’t yet gotten an offer.
One particular company took almost two months to go from receiving my application to interviewing me and finally rejecting me with a brief email:
While your qualifications are impressive, unfortunately we are not able to offer jobs to all the excellent and qualified people who have applied at this time due to the very high number of candidates.
OK then. At least they bothered to send an email, which was nice. But then, three weeks after sending me that email, they reposted the ad.
I’m OK with not being selected, but I am a bit confused. One of the tasks they URGENTLY* NEEDED TO DO was to migrate their company email off of sendmail and onto something easier and better to deal with going forward. I’ve done exactly that. Twice. In the interview I even talked about the tools and approaches that have made the process work.
* Well, not so urgent that they didn’t take two months to reject somebody like me. But they said it was urgent and they were sweating a little while they talked about it.
So while I’m OK with not getting hired, I’m in a bit of an information vacuum as to why. The way I see it, the rejection probably falls into one of two general categories:
- Personality. Geeks are all prickly, so I could easily understand somebody not thinking a particular person would fit in, except for the fact that IT departments are almost all misfits anyway, so I can’t really see how my personality would be any worse than anybody else’s. But maybe it is.
- Experience. And this is actually a two-parter: either I’m so experienced I’d be too expensive (possible), or I’m more experienced than the guy who’d be my boss — or at least I have so much experience that he’d be uncomfortable with me under him.
What I don’t understand is how they would choose not to hire anybody — leaving their urgent problem undone for that much longer — rather than pay the extra salary I’d cost. It’s hard to be sure, but I have a suspicion that I was actually rejected based on both halves of the second point. The guy who interviewed me on-site clearly had a lot of knowledge and had done the right things setting up their server room, but I think I made him uncomfortable. It’s hard to attach a price to inaction, but I do wonder if that cost is less or more than a month of my salary would have been.
But that’s a business planning question, and outside the scope of the job anyway.
