Do I Have a Chance to Get This Job?

This is a question I got through Quora. I just want to read it to you so you can hear it exactly. I got this as a reply to my follow-up to my follow-up email after the interview. Is there a chance I might get the job. The letter reads, “Thank you for your follow-up. We are still the selection process. Only the selected candidates will be contacted.” He says, “ a day or two after this reply from the recruiter, I sent a somewhat similar email to my interviewer and haven't gotten a reply yet. Is it a bad thing to send a similar follow-up emails to the recruiter and the interviewer? Is this a polite way of being rejected or should I still keep my hopes up because I need to know soon because I have a flight to catch over the weekend that's contingent upon their decision.”

My, oh, my! I’ll simply say to you that they gave you a polite version of, “don't call us. We’ll call you.” This is the modern version of what you’ve received.

Let's take it at face value. They are still interviewing. You haven't made them stop in their tracks and go, “WOW! This person is phenomenal! We’ve got to get them! Let's move on them!” No, they are still evaluating people. So let's assume that that part is absolutely truthful. Then, from there, they said, “we can’t get back to everyone that we’re evaluating. We woke get back to the ones we are interested in hiring and go from there.

The one mistake that you made was not asking them when they are due to finish up their hiring process or their evaluation process so that, in this way, you have a sense of what their timeline is going to be like and whether or not it worked for you.

So, when push comes to shove, I wouldn’t hold out a lot of hope here. They didn’t want to reject you summarily. Maybe the recruiter is being, in their way, being kind or literally they’re in the middle their interview process not ready to make a choice and they are only going to get back to those people that they are interested in hiring.

You don't know when that's going to be. So, when you're looking at something, when you want to get a sense of when a firm is making a decision, you can just simply email them, just like you did in the way of follow-up, and when they respond back in this way, you can always say, what’s your timeline for making a choice? I understand it may not work out that way but I am just trying to get a sense of when you’re decision process is due to wrap up.