Crazy Reasons that People Have Received and Missed Out on Job Offers

4 min readMay 29, 2022

Hi everyone! For those of you new to my profile, I’m Daphne and I write about life as a recruiter in the tech industry. I’ve been recruiting in the tech space for a few years now, during which time I have seen some truly wild things. I’ve recruited for many different types of roles (both technical and non-technical) and met and interviewed thousands of candidates. Likewise, I’ve worked with many different types of hiring managers who have all had different criteria for candidates. Today, I wanted to share a few stories with you that I’ve witnessed about the reasons candidates received job offers and the reasons they didn’t. Believe it or not, everything in this article really happened.

Disclaimer: ultimately, the hiring managers were the ones who made the decision not to move forward with the candidate, not me.

Received a Job Offer

The candidate was the only one of five candidates to send a thank you letter after the interview. Despite not getting great initial feedback, this candidate spent time crafting the perfect thank you letter selling the manager on why he was the one for the role. It worked!

Didn’t Receive a Job Offer

Took the (video) interview shirtless from his bed with a blanket wrapped around him. The interview team was not impressed.

Received a Job Offer

Looked up her interviewer on LinkedIn before the interview. The interviewer liked that the candidate cared enough to do some background research into who they were meeting.