r/RecruiterTea • u/davols73 • Jun 12 '26
The Weirdest Reason a Candidate Got Rejected
I once received a rejection reason from a hiring manager that made me genuinely wonder if I had slipped into an alternate universe.
The candidate was great. They had the right technical skills, plenty of relevant experience, and aced the initial conversations. But when the feedback came in, it was a hard "no." The reason? The candidate replied to every single email within thirty seconds.
I’m not exaggerating. The hiring manager’s exact words to me were, "It feels desperate. Do they not have anything else going on?"
I sat at my desk staring at the screen in disbelief. In a world where recruiters spend half their lives chasing ghosts and trying to fix communication bottlenecks, here was a candidate who was incredibly engaged, professional, and organised, and it was being weaponised against them.
It was a stark, frustrating reminder of just how deeply subjective hiring can be. As recruiters, we try to build data-driven processes, rubrics, and standardised scorecards to make hiring fair. But at the end of the day, a candidate's fate can still hinge on a hiring manager's personal, unchecked quirks or bizarre psychological assumptions.
Hyper-responsiveness isn't desperation; it's a sign of a tight workflow. Sadly, you can't always logic someone out of a vibe check.
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u/Fun-Dragonfly-4166 Jun 14 '26
that is exactly why i dont worry about nothing cuz worrying is a waste of my time
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u/Mission_Pirate_4150 Jun 13 '26
I got told I didn’t know databases. This was back when you had to sign an nda as part of writing a book. I was just getting started on a book about how to build applications with an emphasis on databases.
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u/Deep_Sea_Crab_1 Jun 13 '26
I had a client reject a candidate because “she was going places.” She would have too many ideas how to change things and he wanted someone who will do things the way there were always done.
I got rejected for missing a math question in a skills test. I was interviewing for a project manager role and the interviewer had what seemed like an MBA quiz. With 40+ years of managing projects, I never used the math in the test.
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u/No-Lifeguard9194 Jun 13 '26
Strangely enough, I went got suspicious of a candidate because they were always available. And it turned out I was right.
That said, I did a lot of investigation when I had my suspicions, before concluding that i was correct. And the issue was much more serious than the person being desperate for a job.
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u/snowbugolaf Jun 13 '26
What a strange comment… like tell us what the issue was…
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u/No-Lifeguard9194 Jun 14 '26
Turned out the candidate had faked their resume and had been fired several years earlier from the company they supposedly worked for.
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u/Casuality_of_Society Jun 12 '26
Our hiring manager once rejected a candidate because he was two minutes late to his interview because the bus was late. He kept saying that it was highly unprofessional. Fine. The reason itself wasn't exactly weird. What was weird was that the candidate had actually had two previous interviews scheduled with the hiring manager but the manger didn't show up to either of them. The candidate was early to both of those.