The hiring process troubles me.
At one company, I learned after I was hired that a person assigned to sift through resumes simply stopped after a while, rather than go through all the resumes and find the best candidate. I was just lucky that my resume happened to be near the top of the pile.
This bit of good fortune doesn’t imply any virtue on my part, like being especially prompt to apply for the job. For all I know, the resumes piled up as they came in, which would mean that the first applicants were on the bottom.
Another company — one where I had worked for several years — posted a job that combined elements of my previous position there with those of my previous boss. I could have done the new job easily, but the hiring manager didn’t pick me.
I learned later that she hired a friend of hers with less experience than me — and that she had probably planned to hire her friend from the start.
I’ve been on the other side of this problem as well.
As an editor, I had to find freelancers for a publication I was launching. My boss asked me whom I had found; I said, “I’ve got [NAME] and [NAME], and they’re very talented, but I don’t know if they’re right for this particular job. I want to keep looking.”
My boss said that we didn’t have time to keep looking, and he told me to hire the freelancers. I did — and their work didn’t please the company. Everyone ended up unhappy.
That sad situation was not the freelancers’ fault. It was my fault for not finding more appropriate people sooner.
This is just the way that things are when we fallible human beings are involved.