I'm gonna tell you super embarrassing story about myself.

When I was right out of college

I applied for a job at the nonprofit where Katherine, my wife now, was working

and I didn't get an interview.

Then I went to go visit her.

This is kind of a weird situation.

There were a lot of people who lived on location at the job and I was there visiting,

Katherine was working and I was sort of like bumbling around.

And two of the people, who worked there, who have met before, are talking about

the worst job applications they've ever received.

And one of them starts talking about this terrible cover letter that he recently read.

He's a couple years older than me, which at this point seems like infinitely my superior.

He's tall. He's tan. He's handsome. He's fit.

And he is going into a lot of detail and it is becoming very clear

that it's my cover letter.

So I just stand there and listen to it

and suddenly, I'm feeling like I'm in the job interview that I was hoping to get,

except instead of them asking me questions,

they're just telling me all of the reasons

why they didn't even want to talk to me.

I'm obviously not gonna tell him what's going on.

It was one of the finest humiliations of my life.

He had no way of knowing it was me, so I didn't see it as a cruelty.

I was just hearing his very raw, unfiltered, somewhat mean dissection of my cover letter

and he went- he went in a lot of detail.

But also, no one ever tells you why you didn't get the job.

You might hear like, "We had a huge number of qualified applicants."

And that's true, as a person who hires people, that is often the case.

But the real reason, like the moment when we were like "Eh, let's not put that one in the interview pile"

you just don't get told

and there's two reasons for that.

One:

is because sometimes it's dumb and sometimes like you're just-

you have a lot of applications to go through and you don't have a lot of time to do it

and so you're making quick subjective decisions that might not be the right ones

but you have to make a call.

And two:

providing that detailed feedback to every single person who applied

would be a huge amount of work and managers have other work to do.

So despite the fact that this was one of the cringiest moments of my life

I think I actually came out a little bit on top.

Especially after Katherine told me that he was a jerk and she didn't like him,

so much so

that she would actually sneak into the kitchen sometimes

and squeeze his pears,

just a little bit.

If you listen to Dear Hank And John, you've heard this story before.

So at least I didn't have to be afraid of the guy stealing my girlfriend.

Maybe we don't talk enough about why people don't get a job

and maybe we should talk about it more.

So I asked on Twitter, "People who have hired people, what are some unexpected ways

a candidate has disqualified themselves from

/decreased their odds of getting a position they applied for?"

And then I made an AskReddit post with the same question

and have gotten a lot of good and interesting replies.

John, the most common one

is people who are rude

to like office staff or assistants before they meet the interviewers.

Like, 'Whyyyy?????'

And then there was a post from a guy who kept not getting callbacks over and over again

and he was getting really discouraged, until he realized that his gmail profile picture

was him doing a bong rim.

And similarly a lot of hirers talked about how people put like,

'lazy procrastinator' in their social media bios.

PAUSE THE SELF-DEPRECATING TWITTER BIOS DURING THE JOB HUNT, Y'ALL!

Then you've got people not hiring someone because their handwriting is bad.

Like, I'm sorry.

Is this a calligraphy job?

It's 2018!

This is what computers are for.

And one person didn't hire somebody

because they said their favorite movie was Bridge to Terabithia.

It's got 85% on Rotten Tomatoes.

It's okay for somebody to like a movie that you don't like.

I feel like these threads are really helpful to read

if you're a person who might be or is looking for work.

They show me two things:

One: Is that the job of the applicant

is to make it very easy for the person doing the hiring to make the call.

Give them lots of signals that you understand the problem they need you to help solve

and will be good at solving it and will do so happily.

And second: It becomes very clear that you aren't figuring out how to get the job,

you're figuring out how to increase your chances of getting the job.

Because the dumbest little thing can be the thing that gets your application put in the wrong pile.

And you're never going to know what that thing was.

Unless you happen to be in the room,

when the hiring manager starts yucking it up about how bad your cover letter was.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.