Finding a job may be an immense and prolonged ordeal: doing research about each company and the position, making sure you meet the employer’s expectations and vice versa. When it seems you’ve finally found the job of your dreams, you go through the whole process and get an interview, only to be rejected for god-knows-what reasons.

Well, a Reddit user sparked a discussion about random reasons employers sometimes refuse candidates – they witnessed a candidate being declined for playing video games after work, the boss going as far as calling them not “well rounded.”

More info: Reddit

Interviewers may decline candidates for the strangest of reasons, not even what you do in your private life may be off limits

Image credits: Nurudin Jauhari

The poster shared a story of how their boss declined an candidate because they said that they play video games in their free time

Image credits: u/John_TheZipper

The poster said that this was “messed up”, especially the boss saying they were not “well rounded”

Scrolling online, looking for reasons you weren’t accepted to a position, you’re bound to find reams of “top 1000 mistakes you made during your interview” and similar articles. But there have to be cases when people don’t get hired even if they do everything right, right?

For example, what if there was someone else who seemed like a better fit for the position? And maybe your performance during the interview task just didn’t cut the mustard that day? These things happen every once in a while, and while disheartening, they are not as difficult to swallow when you know why you were refused. They may even help you improve your attractiveness as a candidate.

But what if the reasons why you aren’t getting hired are more insidious? What if it’s something that you have no way of improving upon or doing correctly?

Blogger and entrepreneur Misha details 5 random reasons why your interviews aren’t turning out the way you’d like them to.

One interesting fact about job interviews is that according to a long-term study, most interviews do not predict job performance a year later. This means that picking out candidates at random would have had similar or actually better results for job recruiters. The criteria used to pick out candidates may not be up to snuff either, if the selected “best” candidates underperform in the future.

Another thing is that your interviewer may not have eaten lunch. Yes, that’s right, the reason you weren’t hired may be that your interviewer was irritable and hungry at the time and you were unlucky to get that time slot. This was actually corroborated by a study that showed Israeli judges were less likely to grant parole the longer they went without a meal break.

Furthermore, it may be a simple case of them not asking the “correct” questions of you, not allowing you the chance to reveal yourself as a person and an employee. Most of the time, employers don’t make the judgment based on something concrete, but rather a gut feeling.

It may also be a question of timing, Misha mentions. A person from a different department may decide to transfer to your position, which is cheaper for the company but not as fortunate for you. There are times when you can’t know or do anything about things like this.

Finally, a study showed that people looked more favorably at people who had a similar accent to them. Your accent, indicating some difference in your background when compared to the interviewers, may be the thing that makes you “unfit” for the position in their eyes.

What can we extract from this? One thing is that we have even less control over the interview process than we think. And we may not be able to make sure that our interviewer has had their lunch, but we can take these biases into account and either prepare for them or at least not get as upset when we aren’t chosen for some position.

Image credits: Gangplank HQ (not the actual photo)

Interview bias is a very real and present phenomenon. The employer may decide that you’re not a good enough candidate because your handshake wasn’t as strong as they had expected it would be or, in this case, because you relax by playing games after work.

Candidates themselves also often answer questions in ways they believe would please the interviewer, introducing even more bias.

This bias can appear because of many reasons, from your personal preferences to things like race and gender. According to Thomas, there are many different biases present in interviews, such as stereotyping, similarity (when the candidate appears similar to the interviewer), and non-verbal (when the interviewer prefers a certain kind of body language) biases.

As a candidate, you can do several things to avoid your recruiter being biased. It may be wise to remove your picture and other personal information from your resume, focusing only on things that are pertinent to the position, such as your education and experience.

Some companies actually use anonymous CVs to further reduce bias at the recruiting stage, asking for CVs with information that could lead to bias being removed completely.

If you notice that your interviewer is biased during the interview, Ascend has some advice. You should maintain your composure, as that could defuse the situation. If the interviewer persists, you wouldn’t be making a mistake by simply thanking them for their time and excusing yourself from the interview.

Know that you don’t have to answer sensitive personal questions about your family status or ethnicity. It’s also wise to deflect their questions with questions of your own, as it has been shown that asking questions is better than simply declining to answer.

Finally, if you notice that your interviewer is heavily biased, you may ask yourself whether you even want to work at a place like this and just finish the interview early. If your boss seems set against you during the interview, what’s going to happen when you’re actually signed on and working there?

The Reddit post gathered almost 16k upvotes and 1.7k comments in about a week. Comments shared their own stories and supported the poster’s view that refusing the candidate was nonsensical, even making fun of the boss for liking sports themselves. Do you have similar stories of troubled hiring processes? Share them in the comments. And if you feel hungry for more awful job application experiences, read some some job interviews from hell, right here on Bored Panda.

Commenters shared stories of their own, poking fun at the boss’ “rigorous” interviewing techniques

Image credits: Yan Krukau (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Remy Sharp

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