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Finished up the final interview today with a company for a position. Previous interviews went extremelyy well.  My meeting with the hiring manager was going great then this is what's said in the end.

Hiring Manager: Everything I've heard today is good and I have no more questions.

Me: Thanks, well I look forward to possibly joining your team and hearing from you soon.

Hiring Manager: I'll be blunt with you, I have an internal candidate who if they say yes they are interested in this position, I will give the job to them. But there may be other opportunities for you within the organization. I like what you've said today.

I've been a hiring manager a few times in my career and basically, this indicates that one did not get this particular job. :-)

 

The good news is that something else may be a better fit for me within his org based on his followup statement. Wait and See. I like the hiring manager and what he wanted to do with the org. It was something I could definitely help him with.

ashdenver's picture

Egads, talk about unprofessional!  It's one thing to say "Here' s a question for you - based on what you've learned about this company during the interview process, do you think you would be open to any other possibilities within our organization?" and completely ANOTHER thing to say what he said!

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ken_wills's picture

 I may quibble with the hiring manager's style, but to write it off as  "unprofessional?"  Hardly.

ashdenver's picture

I think that this sort of thing happens fairly frequently (where external candidates are interviewed to fulfill HR requirements to confirm a show of good faith that the best candidate was selected, that the group isn't terribly in-bred, if you will) but most companies handle it much more discretely. 

If anyone said to me "Hey, I wanted to make you jump through some hoops just so I could check off some boxes on the HR form even though we fully intended to give it to some internal person all along - you weren't really in the running for this job - but hey, we could probably throw you a bone with some other job if you wanted" I'd call that unprofessional.  To reveal to a candidate that there were underlying motives all along, that someone else had already been earmarked, that they were interviewing for a job that essentially didn't exist is - to me - unprofessional and more than just a difference of style. 

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ken_wills's picture

"If anyone said to me "Hey, I wanted to make you jump through some hoops just so I could check off some boxes on the HR form even though we fully intended to give it to some internal person all along - you weren't really in the running for this job - but hey, we could probably throw you a bone with some other job if you wanted" I'd call that unprofessional. " 

 

Yeah, so would I.

But - Wow! - that's a lot that I didn't read in CLEMBM's actual post.  The post I read said that he would come in second to an internal candidate, and even so, the hiring manager wants to connect him to other opportunities.

Respectfuly - and I mean it, because Ash, I've been reading your posts for several years...maybe you're bringing a smidge of pre-judgment to this?  I mean "jump through hoops", "throw you a bone", "check off some boxes"?

 

CLEMBM: everything Ash says could well be true, I don't know.  But I DO know this: I was unexpectedly unemployed and interviewing about a year ago - so this feels familiar and recent to me...I agree with your outlook as expressed in your final paragraph.  Good luck!

clembm's picture

I'm going to withhold comments on this public forum until I get a final decision.

asteriskrntt1's picture

If Clembm's quote of the hiring manager is accurate, it reads like the manager has not even talked to the internal yet. 

So just like M&M say you should not go on an interview if you have no intention of wanting an offer, you should not be interviewing people and wasting their time if you don't know that you can actually make them an offer.  This is not developing bench strength. 

jhbchina's picture

The situation with the phantom candidate makes this discussion a place for us to discuss "what ifs". If the internal candidate says no, you are the number 1 choice.  For every interview that anyone goes on, only one person gets the offer, everyone else gets the " Sorry we selected someone else" speech. Internal or external, it does not matter.

What is the internal candidates decision date? Once you have that information, you can follow up and find out if the position is filled or still open. Go forward from there.

JHB  "00"

refbruce's picture

I got told more or less the same thing on an interview some time ago.  Turned out the internal candidate wasn't able to take the transfer/wasn't interested.  I got the job.

Getting face time with people who can hire you is almost always a good thing.  And if I'd been told that before I went on the interview trip -- I would still have gone.  Admittedly, I was unemployed at the time, but if it was a job/company I was interested in (and I was actively looking for opportunities), I'd still go.  I've also done an internal interview for a transfer where I knew there was a favored candidate for the job (not me) and my chances for getting the job were slim.  But my chances were zero if I didn't apply (and I didn't get the job).  But, it helped me make a connection with someone else in the organization, which later turned out to be valuable. 

I do agree that the hiring manager, in this case and based on the way the conversation was presented, handled it somewhat differently than I'd prefer.  I would have (and have) waited until after a decision was made and accepted with the internal, then called the candidate up to say that the job went to someone else, but that I wanted to look at other opportunities for that individual.  I have brought people in for an interview knowing that the chances of hiring the person for that position were slim, but wanting to get a better measure of the individual and get the individual in front of people who might have a better-fitting opportunity. 

mtietel's picture
Training Badge

and would have done it differently.  However, it does give insight into how the hiring manager communicates.  I think Clembm and refbruce have the right approach - let it go and see what happens.

Back to an earlier comment about not "wasting their time if you don't know that you can actually make them an offer."  I've done some interviews for "Green Card" application's labor certification.  We have no intention of hiring the candidates, yet have to treat them like any other interview.  I've always closed with, "We're evaluating other candidates and will let you know if we'd like to schedule a second interview."  Then followed up a few weeks later to let them know that they didn't make the second round.  In many instances I've received compliments for following up - apparently that is rare these days...

cruss's picture
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Mtietel, you say "We have no intention of hiring the candidates". Is this a statement of policy or a pattern built from disappointing candidates?

Put a different way, If the candidate really blew you away, was a real top performer, had all the experience you were after, and seemed to be a perfect fit, would you still not offer them?

Canyon R

mtietel's picture
Training Badge

It's for green card purposes, so there is no open position for which to hire.  That is, we have an employee who is a foreign national with an H1-B visa who we are sponsoring for citizenship.  It's an expensive process and companies don't do it lightly and without reasonable certainty of approval.  However government regulations require proof that there are no qualified citizens willing to perform the job.  For that one must post a postion and interview respondents who might be qualified.  Then one must demonstrate that each candidate is not qualified as part of the process.

Your question is hypothetical and I've not run accross the situation yet.  However, if I did run across a candidate who "blew my socks off", I still could not make them an offer (remember, there is no open position!).  I'd have to put them on my "bench" and work to get an open req.

TomW's picture
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There are some positions that companies are required to publicly post before they hire someone. They post an ad and interview a few people just so it looks like they did due diligence before they hire the person they want to hire.

It sounds like you landed in one of those.

ashdenver's picture

TomW: There are some positions that companies are required to publicly post before they hire someone. They post an ad and interview a few people just so it looks like they did due diligence before they hire the person they want to hire.

... was what I was trying to say with both "check off some boxes on the HR form" and "where external candidates are interviewed to fulfill HR requirements to confirm a show of good faith that the best candidate was selected, that the group isn't terribly in-bred, if you will" -- he just said it MUCH better than I did.

And I've been in those interviews before - I believe it was a small town's civil service payroll job I was interviewing for.  On the one hand, I could completely tell by the time I walked out of there that it was an HR form they were checking off for propriety's sake and it was sucky to have the gut feeling that I wasn't being taken seriously / didn't really have a shot at the job but on the other hand I would have been outright livid to have been told to my face that I stressed about the interview, put in the prep time, took time off my paying job, lied to my boss to get the time off, took extra special care to make myself look professional & presentable, came prepared with reference lists, extra copies of my resume, leather portfolio, high-end pen, etc.  It would have been a blatant slap in the face rather than the snickering behind my back.  (Yeah, I know - I'm taking it to the extreme and making it personal for illustrative purposes.)

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jhack's picture

Many job seekers would love a chance for a "practice interview" that was much like the real thing.  

Maybe you just played an exhibition game.  OK, it didn't count, but you scored!  Keep at it... and let us know how it turned out.  

John Hack

clembm's picture

Yes I would considered it a great practice interview. I noted a number of things I needed to change including. I spoke to much about my personal accomplishments personally rather than how my teams accomplished goals with my leadership. I also noticed that I need to work on my summerizing my leadership and management experiences.

The last thing I need to catch back up on is personnel metrics.  Looks like alot of companies are movie towards using metrics for measuring performance rather than subjective performance reviews which I'm used to. 

I'm staying positive and will use this experience, like I do everything as a learning experience.

CLEMBM

kmtone's picture

Any feedback is probably a sign he did well