Withdrawing from the interview process

Many people at one time or another have been involved in an interview process with which they later chose to stop their involvement and remove themselves from consideration. (I am referring here only to situations in which you were invited for an interview and you reached the second step or beyond.) Perhaps another opportunity was more appealing, or you were considering more than one job and had to choose one and stopped pursuing the others. Maybe you learned something about the position or company that changed your opinion and interest. Regardless of the reason, it is important to withdraw yourself from consideration and from the interview process.

Why is it important? Generally people are pre-occupied concentrating on finding a job or if they are so lucky, to be determining which job they want to accept. So it is easy to ignore or forget one opportunity while pursuing another. Likewise, a person might just think to themselves, “so what, I wasn’t very interested in that job anyway, and I haven’t heard from them a few weeks.”

It does not matter whatever the reason, you have an obligation to cancel your participation if you have no intention of going forward in a particular process. It is simple, after your interview you will have likely received a business card from the person you have met. The person with whom you most recently met is the logical point of contact. A few moments of extra effort could benefit you later.

The bosses’ Boss

There is another reason to properly withdraw from an interview process. The manager you were interviewing with has a boss. Everyone, right up to the CEO has a boss, someone they have to answer to. Hypothetically, if the hiring manager has told his boss he has a good candidate for the open position and it looks good and then, for whatever reason a candidate does not bother to notify the hiring manager who has likely by now stopped meeting other candidates, without meaning to the candidate has possibly screwed the hiring manager who might have to start all over again. Ask yourself what your chances will be next time when you want to pursue an opportunity and irony or fate will cause your paths to cross again. 

I have witnessed these situations, and when the manager learns the person they were gravitating towards didn’t even have the courtesy to call and say they were withdrawing themselves from consideration, their perception of you will be damaged. Ask yourself what your chances will be next time when you want to pursue an opportunity and irony or fate will cause your paths to cross again. Will the hiring manager say, “Oh yeah, this was the person I wanted to hire but the circumstances weren’t right at the time.” Or, will they say, “Oh yeah, this was the person I wanted to hire and they didn’t even have the courtesy to call and say they were pulling out of the interview process.”

When we look for a new job, most of us consider more than one job position which means we will likely be in more than one interview processes at the same time. When you reach a point when you know you will not any longer pursue one or more of the jobs because you’ve chosen another, have the professional courtesy to make contact with a company or hiring manager with whom you’ve met and tell them you have chosen not to continue. Call it Karma if you want but besides being the right thing to do, do it as a courtesy in consideration of the hiring manager. But most of all do it for yourself in order to establish a sense of goodwill now and for the future when you might possibly meet again.