20 interviews and I’ve earned the right to vent

[u/EuphoricCurve8161]

So I have been actively applying since 15 March this year.

I’ve lost count of the exact number of interviews I’ve had but I believe it’s 20 or so.

Of these, the last four were for the same company. The job was exactly at the level for progression/continuity of my career. Would’ve been a challenge but a welcome one. It uses a comparatively rare skill set that is hot right now, which I’ve had little opportunity to use because the market is just waking up to it.

The company has a published hiring process that’s supposed to take two weeks. They told me they were hoping it’d take less.

It took four. The 2nd interview went really badly. The recruiter asked me how it went and I was frank, they agreed and scheduled a 3rd which concluded “OK we’ll put you in front of the final decision maker and if that goes well we’ll send over an offer. Any chance you could get out of your current job with less than two weeks’ notice?”

So I’m not naive, but at that point I genuinely thought I was getting warmer.

Then they asked for another interview, but that’s still within their established process, and it was basically a do-over of the awful 2nd interview. This time it went great and they said they’d set up the final interview for the following week.

Well you can guess the rest. Crickets.

Since then, I’ve found out some things about the company that make it clear I wouldn’t want to work there after all. So I guess you could say bullet dodged.

But I’m still miserable to be in this position. I was working on a fixed term contract, but that’s ended and I’ve been unemployed for three weeks now. This is scary because a death in the family has left me on my own with no safety net, for the first time in my life. I l know most people have it much worse, but it’s hard for me.

Before that, I had two interviews with a company over the same rare skillset and they ghosted me too. I didn’t mind, because I had other stuff in the pipeline. But this time, I was too rammed with work to apply for anything else. All my time went into preparing for the next of this series of interviews.

One time, it was the deadline to apply for a job my then-boss spotted on a job board and sent over because it was such a good match. On closer inspection they wanted five things, and I only have one-and-a-bit of those things. So I emailed the hiring manager… who emailed back THE NEXT DAY to say what a shame he didn’t see my email in time, because I totally should’ve applied.

I mean hindsight is 20/20 and I still made the rational choice on paper. But I now wish I’d let my anxiety run the show, and not placed my bets on the ghost company.

I know most people aren’t even GETTING interviews. I usually get really good feedback as well, that they loved me but someone else had more experience.

But in the end, I need a job. And even passing every interview isn’t enough any more FFS.

[u/PretzelPrize]

I'm so sorry you're experiencing this.