Rejection Pattern: “The team loved you, but is going with someone with more experience”
A year and a half ago I switched careers into L&D. I’m currently in a contract role and am looking for a more permanent position. I’m doing well in my current role and recently received a promotion. I’ve interviewed with many companies (Twitter, Google, Intuitive, even when I interviewed for a full time role for the role I’m currently in) and after several interviews, I have been consistently told they are very impressed, the team thought I was a great fit, but they went with someone with more corporate experience or they can’t currently support my development. I am interested in thoughts on 1. whether this is a cop out or not 2. if it is not a cop out, is there an remedy other than more time in the role 3. any advice on how to instill more confidence while still being unfront regarding your years of experience Thank you in advance!
If you have a mentor/team lead at work, ask him/her on what areas you need to improve in; ask for wider variety of tasks to gain more experience and add to your skill set. Also, keep interviewing. With more practice, you will become good at it.
Politely request detailed feedback tell recruiter, the feedback would help you do better in your next interviews. There have been cases where our recruiter shared our email id with some genuine folks interested in honest feedback. That at times ended up making us feel good about candidates attitude and intention to learn and correct and works in favor of the candidates especially where there is a tie between two candidates.
Cop out? Slightly. But as others said. If you push you should get more detailed feedback. If not. You pry don’t want to work there anyway and you were saved. If you do get feedback. Just note some may not be fair. You could have had an off day. The interviewer could have had a bad day. Remember perception is reality. So if you don’t agree with the feedback try to figure out how they came to that conclusion so it doesn’t accidentally happen again. As to years of experience. Forget it. It’s about your skill stack. What do you bring to the table. I’ve known people that day “I have 10 years of experience doing X” yet know as much as someone with less than 6 months of experience. This also means that maybe your strong suit isn’t the core of what the job is but you are very strong in supporting skills. Tout those. It’s about making the team your applying for stronger not just being another cog in the system after all. At least that’s my take on interviewing.
That’s just a generic rejection. Reason can be literally anything. When they say this, you can push for the specifics and get feedback on your interview performance. Btw this is purely my personal exp