Why you didn't get THAT job

What behavioural science (and experience) can tell you about decision-making

I’ve been having a lot of career conversations recently. Mostly because the design market is extremely competitive right now, so even brilliant people are struggling to get hired.

One topic that comes up repeatedly is why people aren’t getting jobs for which they are seemingly ‘a perfect fit’.

Why ‘the perfect fit’ isn’t always what you think

In my career I have been hired, I have hired people and I have been on interview panels. The conclusion I’ve reached is that reason you do or do not get hired is only somewhat related to whether you have the career or craft skills they are ‘officially’ looking for.

Think back to that job you didn’t get when you thought you’d absolutely nailed the interview and had everything they were (allegedly) looking for. I bet the rejection came as a total shock.

Since then you’ve spent at least some time wondering… why?

Did you say the wrong thing? You had every skill and experience on the job spec, you got on well with the interviewer - but someone else got the job.

Why?

The reason could have been this. What they were really looking for was not stated in the job ad, and probably not during the interview process either.

Life’s a pitch

A recruitment process is often like an agency pitch process - i.e. the process a company runs when hiring a new creative or design agency.

(I’ve worked in a lot of agencies, and on a lot of pitches).

In both cases, what people say they are looking for, and how they end up making decisions at the end are often two very different things.

It’s good old System 1 and System 2 for those who are fans of behavioural science.

A pitch process starts with a logical set of decisions (System 2) because it has to. Procurement are involved and they dictate best practice and associated legal constraints.

So all the stakeholders get together with Procurement and write down all the things they want from their ideal new agency - relevant industry experience, case studies, people with certain skills and experience, processes and ways of working… and of course costs.

Procurement then help them write a brief which gets signed off internally, and the brief goes out to agencies or to a third-party pitch consultancy.

The first screening of agencies is very sensible and is made against strict criteria. Only those agencies that meet the baseline criteria (usually around 4-8 agencies) are going to get through to the next round of the process.

And then people meet people.

And then the pitch process becomes all about feelings, emotions, internal corporate politics and all the other things that people are really looking for that they haven’t mentioned so far.

Just like when you design a service or multichannel customer experience - everything can be controlled when it’s digital and process driven. But everything breaks when you hand over control.. to humans.

• Does one of the client stakeholders know (or is even married to) someone on one of the pitch teams?

• Has someone had a bad experience with one of the agencies before?

• Is the company’s day-to-day way operation slow and boring, so they want an agency to entertain and excite them

• Was their last agency out of control and they just want a group of people they can control to ship assets as fast as possible?

There are a thousand reasons why one agency gets hired over another and it is rarely (in my experience) a rational process from end to end.

Rather, the decision is made for emotional (System 1) reasons and then post-rationalised (System 2) after the fact when feeding back to those agencies who didn’t get the gig. And many of those agencies have often thought, like you with your job interview, that they absolutely nailed the final presentation.

The reason most people don’t know this is because the winning agency doesn’t interrogate the client team as to why they were chosen - they are usually too busy celebrating.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Back to your job search

The hiring company probably started out with System 2 - the rational part of the process. The HR department made them justify the hire, write a job spec, decide a salary in line with some formal benchmarking, and post it on LinkedIn (or wherever).

You probably made the cut for interview based on HR (or AI) screening, but then everything changes once the hiring manager gets involved in actually meeting people. Enter System 1.

So now let’s think about the last time you did get that job.

Go back and take a look at that job spec.

Did you have everything they were asking for? Were you logically and rationally the stand-out best possible candidate for that role of probably 100s who applied?

Probably not.

Or did any of the following apply at time of interview, or in the first year after starting the role: