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  • Good morning, John,

  • I'm gonna tell you super embarrassing story about myself.

  • When I was right out of college

  • I applied for a job at the nonprofit where Katherine, my wife now, was working

  • and I didn't get an interview.

  • Then I went to go visit her.

  • This is kind of a weird situation.

  • There were a lot of people who lived on location at the job and I was there visiting,

  • Katherine was working and I was sort of like bumbling around.

  • And two of the people, who worked there, who have met before, are talking about

  • the worst job applications they've ever received.

  • And one of them starts talking about this terrible cover letter that he recently read.

  • He's a couple years older than me, which at this point seems like infinitely my superior.

  • He's tall. He's tan. He's handsome. He's fit.

  • And he is going into a lot of detail and it is becoming very clear

  • that it's my cover letter.

  • So I just stand there and listen to it

  • and suddenly, I'm feeling like I'm in the job interview that I was hoping to get,

  • except instead of them asking me questions,

  • they're just telling me all of the reasons

  • why they didn't even want to talk to me.

  • I'm obviously not gonna tell him what's going on.

  • It was one of the finest humiliations of my life.

  • He had no way of knowing it was me, so I didn't see it as a cruelty.

  • I was just hearing his very raw, unfiltered, somewhat mean dissection of my cover letter

  • and he went- he went in a lot of detail.

  • But also, no one ever tells you why you didn't get the job.

  • You might hear like, "We had a huge number of qualified applicants."

  • And that's true, as a person who hires people, that is often the case.

  • But the real reason, like the moment when we were like "Eh, let's not put that one in the interview pile"

  • you just don't get told

  • and there's two reasons for that.

  • One:

  • is because sometimes it's dumb and sometimes like you're just-

  • you have a lot of applications to go through and you don't have a lot of time to do it

  • and so you're making quick subjective decisions that might not be the right ones

  • but you have to make a call.

  • And two:

  • providing that detailed feedback to every single person who applied

  • would be a huge amount of work and managers have other work to do.

  • So despite the fact that this was one of the cringiest moments of my life

  • I think I actually came out a little bit on top.

  • Especially after Katherine told me that he was a jerk and she didn't like him,

  • so much so

  • that she would actually sneak into the kitchen sometimes

  • and squeeze his pears,

  • just a little bit.

  • If you listen to Dear Hank And John, you've heard this story before.

  • So at least I didn't have to be afraid of the guy stealing my girlfriend.

  • Maybe we don't talk enough about why people don't get a job

  • and maybe we should talk about it more.

  • So I asked on Twitter, "People who have hired people, what are some unexpected ways

  • a candidate has disqualified themselves from

  • /decreased their odds of getting a position they applied for?"

  • And then I made an AskReddit post with the same question

  • and have gotten a lot of good and interesting replies.

  • John, the most common one

  • is people who are rude

  • to like office staff or assistants before they meet the interviewers.

  • Like, 'Whyyyy?????'

  • And then there was a post from a guy who kept not getting callbacks over and over again

  • and he was getting really discouraged, until he realized that his gmail profile picture

  • was him doing a bong rim.

  • And similarly a lot of hirers talked about how people put like,

  • 'lazy procrastinator' in their social media bios.

  • PAUSE THE SELF-DEPRECATING TWITTER BIOS DURING THE JOB HUNT, Y'ALL!

  • Then you've got people not hiring someone because their handwriting is bad.

  • Like, I'm sorry.

  • Is this a calligraphy job?

  • It's 2018!

  • This is what computers are for.

  • And one person didn't hire somebody

  • because they said their favorite movie was Bridge to Terabithia.

  • It's got 85% on Rotten Tomatoes.

  • It's okay for somebody to like a movie that you don't like.

  • I feel like these threads are really helpful to read

  • if you're a person who might be or is looking for work.

  • They show me two things:

  • One: Is that the job of the applicant

  • is to make it very easy for the person doing the hiring to make the call.

  • Give them lots of signals that you understand the problem they need you to help solve

  • and will be good at solving it and will do so happily.

  • And second: It becomes very clear that you aren't figuring out how to get the job,

  • you're figuring out how to increase your chances of getting the job.

  • Because the dumbest little thing can be the thing that gets your application put in the wrong pile.

  • And you're never going to know what that thing was.

  • Unless you happen to be in the room,

  • when the hiring manager starts yucking it up about how bad your cover letter was.

  • John, I'll see you on Tuesday.

Good morning, John,

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