Five Signs Your Interview Is Fake Because They've Already Hired Someone

Jul 26, 2016 @ 12:30 PM Liz Ryan

http://www.forbes.com/sites/lizr ... meone/#65bbcff467f2

We met Alex, who had interviewed with the same company twice. “The first time I had an interview at that company, the HR Manager was very nice and very engaged in our conversation,” said Alex.

“She told me that the job I was interviewing for was one of their highest-priority job openings,” Alex said. “I had a great conversation with the hiring manager, too, but they ended up hiring someone else because they needed someone with more experience than I had back then.”

Alex left that interview process with a good feeling. The HR Manager, Allison, told Alex, “We will be sure to contact you if we have another opening that is a match for your experience.”
  
Alex was working full-time but she kept her job search going on the side. Three months after Alex’s first interview with Allison, Alex got an email message inviting her to come back and interview with Allison’s company again.


“They had a new job opening come up,” said Alex. “I was excited about the interview, but when I got here, Allison seemed like a different person than the woman I had met three months before.”

At Alex’s second interview, Allison was polite and distant. “She seemed to be going through the motions,” said Alex. “She didn’t ask me one question at the interview! She checked her watch several times. Our entire interview lasted 26 minutes. I couldn’t understand it.”

Alex didn’t get to meet a hiring manager that day. By the time Alex got home, there was a terse “Thanks but no thanks” email message waiting for her. “What did I do wrong?” Alex asked us.

“We are pretty sure you didn’t do anything wrong, but rather the job was already filled,” we said. Companies and institutions will interview people like Alex to pad out a candidate roster only in order to get approval to hire someone they’ve already chosen for the role. They don’t mind wasting job-seekers’ time on fake interviews just to satisfy a policy.


Sometimes a company policy says that internal candidates can only be considered for a job opening if several external candidates are also interviewed. That’s why Alex was dragged out of her busy life to a job interview where the interviewer barely looked at her.

It is sad that employers put job seekers (not to mention their own interviewers) through insulting, waste-of-time meetings just to satisfy a pointless corporate policy, but it’s common.

Vendors are used to (and sick of) being part of “three bid” programs where suppliers spend hours completing RFP documents just so that a purchasing agent can say, “I got three bids from three different vendors, and here’s the one I choose!”

They already knew which vendor they wanted to buy from. The other vendors donated their time to the RFP process just for the “optics,” and job-seekers can easily donate their time in a fruitless exercise in making corporate weenies happy, too.