Friday, August 8, 2014

Some photos from my trip to Udawalawa








All images are copyrighted © Salim Malik.

Why doesn't sometimes the HR call you and say that you are rejected !





HR makes a list of people to interview. And they're not good at it. They think they're looking for a list of skills you already have. Yeah, not really. They want a checkbox, and it just doesn't work that way, most of the time. ...anyway...

Managers sometimes get the budget to hire someone, so they start looking at the list of resumes. They put a few of them in order, and ask HR to set things up.

Things go well enough to interview on site, in person. So, that happens.

Then everyone who interviewed you sits in a room, and talks about you. HR and the hiring manager ask a few questions.

And a decision is made.

The decision is one of several things:


We'd like to make an offer
This is one of the better candidates
This person might be interesting some day
Might be a better fit for a different team
No



Here's where your confusion comes in

The only one of those where HR feels that time is critical is "We'd like to make an offer."

In all of those other scenarios, HR feels no pressure to get back to you.

If you believe you're in the "This is one of the better candidates" category, you can try to speed up the process by telling HR that you're "considering other offers." Sound remorseful about it. The tone is, yeah, I'd like to work with you, but I have an offer on the table that's expiring, and I need to give them an answer. Note that if you're not in the "This is one of the better candidates" category, this won't help you at all.

One more thing

There's only one category where the company has decided to never hire you, and that's "No".

For ALL of the other categories, the company is still thinking to themselves that maybe they might offer you a job, some day, if they grow large enough, and your skills match what they need, and other candidates haven't accepted the offer.

I work with a couple people who got their offers 12 months after they interviewed. The timing happened to be right, and they were looking, so they accepted.

But it's never worth it to the company to tell you "no." It's not worth the time to pay the HR people to send you the letter, or call you. What if they called the wrong person? Or misunderstood and said "no" when they shouldn't have? There's just no value to them in telling you no.

Especially since your next question is going to be "why not," and there's no way they're going to honestly answer that. Too much legal liability.

So, if you ever get a "no" call from HR, it's because they're being super polite.

Don't ever expect a "no" call.