You the candidate, did not get the job because they did not like you ( e.g. you had a voice similar to the kid in school who was bully to your interviewer etc.). For most software positions out there, a relatively mediocre level of skills is sufficient. No fucking need to hair split on a person's technical skill.
If you truly care about the candidate first judge him on the 'cultural' fit. If he has crossed that barrier then the following advice from the article is a great one:
>Give candidates a heads-up about the attributes or topics the interview will cover and any other information you can reasonably share upfront.
All other advise in the article like paid assignment etc. are also great.
Usually you have 3-6 interviewers. It seems unlikely they would all "not like you" as the reason for not getting hired. Now sometimes a single very strong no is enough, but IME a strong yes can easily override that. I myself have interviewed 400+ people and have definitely had cases where I got people hired over objections because I thought they were really good.
I would say it's more common to not get hired because you didn't have a strong yes. Maybe everyone thought you were ok but none of the interviews really wanted to argue for your case. There are also cases of people that are just obviously not qualified, like every single interviewer says 'no hire'.
>I myself have interviewed 400+ people and have definitely had cases where I got people hired over objections because I thought they were really good.
You brought up (perhaps inadvertently) a good point here , most interviewers in the field are young, and their callowness is obvious, often you need senior people with the vetoing power to override their shallow analysis of a candidate.
FWIW, we’ve passed on (what turned out to be) the same excellent candidate(s) multiple times because the other candidates were seemingly stronger.
If you have two almost identical candidates, but the other has better credentials, it’s difficult to turn them down - if you have some HR guidelines to follow
You the candidate, did not get the job because they did not like you ( e.g. you had a voice similar to the kid in school who was bully to your interviewer etc.). For most software positions out there, a relatively mediocre level of skills is sufficient. No fucking need to hair split on a person's technical skill.
If you truly care about the candidate first judge him on the 'cultural' fit. If he has crossed that barrier then the following advice from the article is a great one:
>Give candidates a heads-up about the attributes or topics the interview will cover and any other information you can reasonably share upfront.
All other advise in the article like paid assignment etc. are also great.