I went to an interview this Wednesday and haven’t heard back.

Naturally, my inner monologue thinks I’ve failed. I feel ashamed, because the people who have evaluated me might have decided I was unfit for the job. Maybe they had better candidates. I feel bad because they might’ve. I mean, what’s wrong with me?

On second thought, I believe the need for detailed, specific, actionable feedback is flawed.

It’s simple. Someone has decided they needed to open a job for someone with a particular set of skills and experience to do something. They define their crieria, post a job, screen resumes, and do interviews. You find the job interesting and apply. They call you in and try to figure out, within a few hours at most, if you could do this job for them.

It’s not an exact science. They could have an exam and have all the candidates take it, and then grade it, and hire the person who’d scored the highest, and in some industries maybe that’s what they do.

But no such test would account for cultural fit or for skills that you have vs skills you could learn, and so on.

Thus they make a decision based on how well they think you are suited for that job based on this short interaction. It’s error prone, and it’s not exact, and there are other factors at play, too. Like when can you start? How much do you need to be paid?

You are not owed an explanation why you were not chosen. It’s expected they would tell you they’ve decided not to hire you, but not if they’ve chosen someone else, or why they’ve done so. They are the ones offering the job, and you are the one applying. They don’t even owe you the feedback on how you could improve (assuming to get the job) because you didn’t get it. They could tell you if there was a particular thing that made them say no, but they are not obliged to.

We crave being told why because we hate being rejected. So we want to hear that we were really great, but that they had a reason to go with someone else. Implying that this other candidate was better but letting us hear past that.

I feel disappointed for not getting the job. But as a mature, experienced person, I know my weak points. I know where in the interview I didn’t do well, and I know, from talking to the hiring manager and the recruiter, what they were after with this position (that’s my job as the candidate). I recognise what I was missing, and I was hoping to convince them of my strengths that would make up for what I was short on.

It’s tough to know someone has evaluated me and has found me lacking. But it’s important to realise my worth is not determined by this evaluation. And while it isn’t, there’s plenty I could do to become better.

I own this.