> One of the biggest misconceptions I see from job seekers, especially younger ones, is to equate a job interview to a test at school, assuming that there is some objective bar and if you pass it then you must be hired. It's simply not true. Frequently more than one good applicant applies for a single open role, and the hiring team has to choose among them. In that case, you could "pass" and still not get the job and the only reason is that the hiring team liked someone else better.
This hasn't been true for the interviews I've given. For technical interviews I was given a question and rubrik of what they should say and a clear guide on how to grade them and give feed back about performance. Unless they did something truly bizarre there wasn't room for being subjective
> Unless they did something truly bizarre there wasn't room for being subjective
Without having been there, I have a sense of what you mean, but I do want to add:
1. Statistically speaking, there will misinterpretation and even outright errors on the part of interviewers.
2. As feedback gets passed up the chain, most processes I know about are not formulaic. People make judgment calls. They might be more or less consistent w.r.t. following some ideal, sure. A company might pride itself on consistency and that might be good. Another company might pride itself on adaptability -- changing a process to suit the current need, because maybe the old process wasn't that great.
3. There _will_ be differential treatment, as perceived by the interviewer, even if you behave _identically_!. Cultures are different, comfort levels are different, styles are different! Saying the same thing, with the same tone of voice, with the same timing might have different effects on different people.