I need to partner with a team that rejected me for a job

A reader writes:

I need to partner with a team whose manager rejected me for a job, and I’m struggling to have a positive attitude.

A year ago, I applied to an internal role for which I met 90% of the criteria on the nose. It was a team doing the same work as I did but in another part of the company, and the gap in qualifications was akin to having experience grooming llamas but not alpacas – it’s highly transferrable. I have great performance reviews, scoring the elusive 5/5, and I had completed an internal leadership program that is supposed to highlight me as a candidate for internal roles. I didn’t expect to be handed the role but I did think I was a strong internal candidate and expected, if not an interview, maybe a note from the recruiter or hiring manager about why the skillset wasn’t a fit or what might make me more competitive if another opening came around.

I got crickets. Not even a form rejection. I just happened to see on the site that I was “not selected” and that was that.

Fast forward and I am now working in that business unit, but not on that team. And I’ve learned I will likely be tasked with working with them to create new processes and systems because I have a skill and experience that they do not. The team, manager included, has been perfectly polite and fine to work with. The issue is on my side – every time I provide useful information, help troubleshoot, suggest improvements … a bit of me thinks, “Why should I help you? You didn’t want me before!”

I know it wasn’t a personal affront, but I do feel snubbed and am not sure how to get past it.

Hiring isn’t pass/fail! You could have been entirely capable of doing the job well but someone else was just stronger. Maybe they had more directly applicable experience or an additional skillset that the manager thought the team could benefit from, or it might not even be related the job description at all — it could be something like the person they hired having the right sort of thick skin to deal with some of their difficult customers (or direct experience with a particular customer, or a particular kind of tact, or all sort of other traits that you wouldn’t necessarily know from the outside they cared about). Or they might have already had a candidate in mind who they wanted to hire — like someone who they’d worked with before or who they knew through networking or had interviewed for another job previously.

Ultimately, you can’t really know. There are so many possible reasons for why they didn’t interview you that it’s not very useful to speculate. But when it’s an internal role, you can ask! Realistically, it’s probably too late now since a year has gone by, but ideally when they didn’t interview you last year, you could have contacted the hiring manager and asked for feedback on how to be a stronger candidate for their team in the future. Who knows, you might have heard “we’ve been trying to hire this candidate for years and they were finally available and realistically we weren’t going to pass them up so we didn’t want to waste your time” or “it wasn’t emphasized enough in the job description, but we really wanted skill X for this role” or all sorts of other things that might have left you with a much better understanding of what happened.

Since it’s a little late for that conversation now, the best thing you can do is to just figure that there’s some explanation along those lines that would make sense — or at least makes sense to them — and that it wasn’t an intentional slight or a devaluing of what you offer.

And for what it’s worth, it’s not out of line for them to seek help from you now! You work for the same company, you presumably have useful skills that are relevant to what they’re doing, and the fact that they recognize that and want to collaborate with you doesn’t mean they clearly made the wrong call earlier. It means that you have things of value to offer — but that’s not the same thing as being the best hire for their very specific set of circumstances and needs last year.

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