ask a boss
By Alison Green, the Cut’s workplace-advice columnist who has run her own career-advice website, Ask a Manager, for 15 years. Green is the author of Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work and Managing to Change the World: The Nonprofit Manager’s Guide to Getting Results.
Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
It’s happened to all of us: You had a great job interview, nailed every question, and left feeling optimistic about your chances of getting an offer. Your interviewer told you they would get back to you either way next week, but now it’s been two weeks and all you’ve heard is silence. Should you follow up with them? Is their silence supposed to communicate their answer? And why won’t they just get back to you with a response as they said they would!?
Since I started writing a workplace-advice column more than a decade ago, I’ve probably received more letters from frustrated job seekers about this experience than any other. It’s incredibly common for employers to assure candidates that they’ll be back in touch within a specific time frame and then end up overshooting that by weeks or even months. And that’s if they get back to you at all; many of them don’t and instead just ghost applicants completely, even after multiple rounds of interviews.
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Why do employers leave candidates hanging?
An awful lot of employers simply don’t bother to contact candidates until they have something definite to say, even when they’re well past the timeline they laid out for you. That’s not a great practice, of course — ideally they’d write back to say, for example, “Things are taking longer than we expected but I should be in touch in another week or two.” But realistically, hiring managers are busy and often pulled in a bunch of directions, and hiring can end up lower on their list than more pressing projects with deadlinesnow. (Since this is a common point of confusion: “hiring manager” means the person who will be managing you once you’re hired, not the person who’s in charge of all the organization’s hiring. So they often have other, higher priorities.)
Plus, you never know what’s going on behind-the-scenes. Maybe the hiring manager is out sick, or unexpectedly had to go out of town. Maybe a last-minute candidate emerged and they need time to interview them. Maybe the CEO announced at the last minute that she wants to sign off on the hire, and they’re debating whether to bring people back in for final interviews. Maybe a key person on the team resigned and now they’re thinking about reconfiguring the role. Maybe they’ve had a project explode spectacularly and that’s all anyone over there is dealing with right now. Who knows. It’s really impossible to tell from the outside what might be going on that could massively mess with their recruitment plans or timeline.
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A job is never a sure thing.
What that means for job-seekers is that no matter how well your interview seems to go, you should never, ever assume a job is a lock. You could be perfect for the job — someone who leaves interviewers confident that you’re the one they want to hire — and it still wouldn’t be a sure thing. Someone internal could emerge who is stronger, or the boss could decide to hire her cousin, or they could realize late in the game that they need to hire someone who speaks French. Or the organization could implement a hiring freeze or restructure the team you’d be joining, and suddenly that “guaranteed” offer disappears. That’s just how it goes sometimes.
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Okay, but what’s up with ghosting?
It’s one thing to take a little longer than planned to get back to people, or to have to reject someone who thought they’d nearly clinched the job. But it’s another thing to just never get back to them at all — and it’s far too common.
Employers who ghost candidates like to say that they don’t have time to get back to every applicant, but that stretches belief in the days of electronic applicant management systems, which will send rejections with the click of a few buttons. (Frankly, it was also a pretty ludicrous claim before those systems.) It’s incredibly rude and inconsiderate not to get back to people after interviews — in all cases, but especially after someone has taken time off work, maybe bought a new suit or traveled a long distance, and invested time and energy preparing for the interview. It’s even ruder when companies do it after putting candidates through multiple rounds of interviews and exercises, which is increasingly the case.
Unfortunately, it happens frequently, so if you don’t hear back for a long time after your interview, there’s a good chance that’s what’s going on.
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So what are you supposed to do in the face of silence?
The frustrating thing about not hearing back after an interview is that you can’t know for sure what’s going on. Maybe you’re being ghosted and will never hear from the company again, or maybe you’re going to hear back later this week, or maybe in two months, long after you’ve given up hope. The most important thing to remember is that if an employer wants to offer you a job, they’ll be in touch. If you’re their top candidate, they’re not going to forget about you over the next few weeks (or even over the next few months) just because you don’t keep checking in. So you don’t need to worry that you need to keep nudging them or find ways to stay on their radar.
It’s fine to check in once when you’re past the point when you would have expected to hear something. Wait about a week past their stated deadline and then send an email saying something like, “I’m still very interested and wondered if you had an update on your timeline for next steps that you could share with me.” But beyond that, there’s not a lot of use in continuously following up. If at some point they want to move forward, they’ll let you know.
Meanwhile, the best thing you can do for your own peace of mind is to assume you didn’t get the job and move on. Otherwise you’ll be stuck in an angst-filled limbo, wondering if you’re going to hear from them today, or maybe tomorrow, or what all this silence means, and did you offend someone in the interview, or maybe your skills aren’t as impressive as you thought they were, andagggghhhh. It’s so much simpler to just decide that you didn’t get the job and put it out of your head. Then, if they do contact you at some point, it can be a pleasant surprise, rather than the thing that you have been pinning all your anxious energies on.
Find even more career advice from Alison Green on her website,Ask a Manager. Got a question for her? Emailaskaboss@nymag.com.
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