What does it mean when you hear silence after a job interview

The most frustrating puzzles in job hunting often relate to what you, the job seeker, cannot control. You can bypass your resume’s automatic filtering systems, and you can answer any curious questions an interviewer asks you, but you still won’t hear anything back.

The longer that silence lasts, the more time you have to create stories about what that silence might mean. Are they working hard to match your salary? Have they forgotten that you exist?

Naming what the problems may be can provide reassurance about what may be happening. Here are some of the most common reasons you get radio silence from a hiring manager, according to career experts:

Before you launch into an anxious tumble about how the hiring manager must have hated you, consider how long it’s been since you got a response. If it’s been a week or more, don’t give up. Hiring processes depend on the company and can take months. Glassdoor, a job and recruiting site, found that the average hiring process in the United States took 23.8 days based on a 2017 study of more than 83,000 job interview reviews. site users. Glassdoor calculated that in the United States, the sectors with the biggest hiring delays were government jobs (53.8 days), aerospace and defense jobs (32.6 days) and positions in energy and utilities (28.8 days).

Josh Doody, a salary negotiation coach and former recruiting manager, said he saw the recruiting process take months with some of his clients. “These hiring cycles can take a really long time, especially right now just because there’s so much momentum in the job market,” Doody said. “It’s really important to be patient and not get frustrated.”

Sometimes it’s not you, it’s them. Unfortunately, the reason for a hiring delay can be a complete mystery to the job seeker, but behind closed doors there can be business actions such as hiring freezes, budget shortfalls, or reorganizations. that delay the decision to hire you.

“Sometimes we just tell them ‘hiring freeze, budgeting, we can’t hire you.’ Sometimes we don’t have the luxury of telling them that,” Doody said. “Some companies aren’t comfortable saying that because it might send signals about the health of the business. could hear the silence.

Unfortunately, a hiring manager’s silence can also simply mean you don’t get the job.

Candidates who do phone interviews may not get a response. “They just may not answer everyone on the phone. Some companies simply cannot afford to do this. They don’t have the staff or the time,” said Phyllis Hartman, founder of human resources firm PGHR Consulting.

But if you’ve interacted directly with a hiring manager and committed to an interview, a hiring manager should let you know whether or not you got the job, Hartman said. “If you spent time applying and interviewing, you deserve respect for getting some kind of information,” she said.

But sometimes employers ghost you and you never hear from them again. Too often candidates end up disappointed with the whole process. According to a 2017 CareerBuilder survey of 4,500 workers, more than half of job seekers say employers fail to set expectations for how hiring interactions will go.

Doody said he’s not a fan of ghosting. “Unfortunately, sometimes it falls on the candidate to take on this role to be proactive because the culture of the company they’re interviewing with just doesn’t encompass that proactivity,” he said.

Be professional despite the lack of professionalism you might feel due to a company’s silence. Write polite inquiries reiterating your interest in the position at appropriate intervals. Doody recommends sending a follow-up email immediately after your interview. After that, do a brief weekly or bi-weekly follow-up, he said.

If you get radio silence, see if there is anyone else you can contact. “Try to follow up one last time, perhaps with someone else in the company, in case the person you tried to contact is unexpectedly out of the office or otherwise indisposed,” said Brie Reynolds, head of the career development and coach at job search site FlexJobs.

But if you’ve reiterated your interest without any response, it might be time to move on. If you haven’t heard from them in four to six weeks – and assuming you’re not in a particularly busy or complicated time of year, such as the holidays – you should consider this a sign of letting go. , Doody said. “The most likely explanation for a 4-6 week refusal to respond to any of your communications is that they have decided to go in a different direction and are simply not going to tell you officially that they did,” he said.

Instead of creating a negative story about why a hiring manager hasn’t contacted you, focus on what you control to change.

“I always advise candidates to focus on the things they can control: performing well in interviews, asking for a timeframe for their hiring decision, emailing personalized thank you notes to each of the people who have interviewed you and follow up if you haven’t heard anything after about a week,” Reynolds said. “That way you at least know you did everything you could to be a great candidate.”

And in the meantime, keep applying and interviewing elsewhere for your peace of mind. “Until you have a job offer, you should keep looking for other opportunities that are available to you,” Doody said.

“You can’t really know what’s going on, so don’t necessarily give up, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t wait either,” Hartman said. “I would keep looking because you have no formal commitment with this company.”