Dubin & Lee Blog

Why You Did Not Get The Job Offer, Even If You Were Qualified

  

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You went through the job interview process, you had all the required experience, you illustrated your capabilities and still, you did not get the job.  To make matters worse, you got no feedback.  If this has happened to you or someone you know, there might have not been a problem with the hard skills requirement but possibly with the intangibles. 

Because an addition to head count is not done frivolously these days, companies go the extra mile to screen for anything and everything that can make or break a new employee’s success.

Consulting firm LeadershipIQ monitored hiring effectiveness and employee engagement at 1,500 companies across many industries and tracked 20,000 new hires over a three-year period. Among the 46% of hirees who failed within their first 18 months, only 11% failed because of technical incompetence. The other 89% failed in attitudinal areas: coachability, emotional intelligence, motivation, and temperament.

Here are the top 5 soft skills that job interviewees lack which prevent them from receiving a job offer.

1. Communication skills:  So many people state they have excellent communications skills on their resume but so few actually do.  Fresh graduates have less developed verbal communication skills than any new graduates had in the past.
2. Coachability: This includes listening (really listening), taking constructive criticism and an enthusiasm to learn regardless if your boss or mentor is your favorite person in the world.
3. Self-starter: Yes, this is another overused phrase used on the resume and usually is not descriptive of the job applicant.  Being a self-starter means that you look for ways to add value even you will not be recognized.  You do it because you can’t help yourself.  Your purpose in life is to troubleshoot, solve problems, improve processes for efficiency, and no one needs to give you permission or ask you to do it.
4. Insecurity:  If you are not convinced of your capabilities then odds are you will not be able to convince anyone else.
5. Arrogance: From what I have observed, arrogance is just another manifestation of insecurity. Your job in an interview is to sell yourself, but if you don’t know how to do that without coming off arrogant, you really need some coaching.  No matter how qualified you are, unattractive personality traits like arrogance will destroy your chances at getting a job offer from any company that has a great employee reputation.

One of the ways employers judge a job applicant is by the quality of the questions that the applicant asks and by how well the candidate listens and responds to the answers.  If you have been fine tuning your communications skills (verbal and non-verbal), and you are ready to put them to use for going after that ideal job opportunity, download the Top 14 Questions to Ask an Interviewer.