“We’ve decided to move forward with another candidate.”
I’ve read some version of that sentence twice in two years. Last year I made it to the final round of an engineering manager search, one of two people left, and they chose the other person. This year I was one step from the final round when the role was filled.
I’m between jobs right now, and I want to write about what that feels like from the candidate’s chair. Not because I think I was wronged. I’ve sat on the other side of the table for years, and I suspect many managers reading this have too. What surprised me is how different the process looks from here.
The search is the job
When you’re between jobs, the search becomes your full-time work, and most of it is invisible.
First you source roles. Finding one with a genuinely strong match takes hours of reading postings, researching teams, and tailoring your story. If you’re lucky, you get selected into a small pool for screens.
Then you wait. A week or more between rounds is common. Each wait ends in preparation: researching the people you’ll meet, rehearsing stories, thinking through the system design or leadership scenario you might face. Some processes run five to seven rounds. That’s weeks of focus pointed at a single outcome you don’t control.
I know how the decision gets made
Having run a lot of interviews, I know how much rides on the interviewer’s impression. By the final rounds, you aren’t being measured against a bar anymore. You’re being compared with other strong candidates, and the difference can come down to one detail: a domain they’ve worked in, a story that landed at the right moment, a gut feeling someone on the panel couldn’t fully explain.
That means you can do nothing wrong and still lose. You can ace every round and still read that email. Late in a process, there’s often as much luck in play as skill.
Knowing that helps a little. It doesn’t make the investment feel any smaller when it ends in disappointment.
I’ve been part of the silence
Most companies won’t tell you why you weren’t selected. As a manager, I know the reasoning: feedback creates liability, and one careless sentence can become the basis for a claim. So we say nothing.
Here’s the uncomfortable part. I’ve done this too, and not only because of legal risk. When you have many candidates and a team waiting on a hire, saying nothing is easier. It protects me and it protects the company.
The cost doesn’t disappear, though. It moves to the candidate, who invested weeks and walks away with nothing to learn from. From this side, it can feel like the human element was engineered out of the process to protect everyone except the person going through it.
Thinking out loud about the gap
I don’t have a playbook here. What I have is what I’ve seen from both chairs, including a few moments I’m not proud of.
Hiring managers rarely control how many rounds there are. That’s usually set by the company. What we can influence is how much candidates know going in. In my experience, most recruiters are upfront about the process: how many stages, what each covers, roughly how long it takes. When that’s missing somewhere, it’s worth raising. A candidate who knows there are six rounds can plan around it. One who finds out round by round can’t.
I remember having two candidates in a pipeline. One had finished their interviews, and I liked them. The other was delayed. Rather than tell the first candidate what was happening, I left them in the dark while I waited for the second to finish. I felt bad about it at the time, and I understand it better now that I’m the one waiting. An honest “we have another candidate still interviewing” would have cost me very little. That communication usually belongs to the recruiter, depending on how a company runs hiring, but managers can ask for it to happen.
Then there’s how the news gets delivered. I’ve had quick phone calls that amounted to “we went with the other person,” and emails that said the same thing. I’m honestly not sure one is better. A call feels more human, but a thirty-second call can feel as hollow as a template if nothing real is said. Maybe the format matters less than whether the candidate walks away knowing their time was respected.
I keep coming back to what we could share without creating risk. Not why we chose someone else, but maybe that the decision was close, or what stood out in the candidate’s favour. I don’t know where that line sits for every company. I suspect most of us draw it more conservatively than we need to, myself included.
Most of us have been the candidate at some point. The longer we spend on the hiring side, the easier it is to forget what the waiting feels like. I didn’t fully remember until this year.
What I want to remember
I’ll be on the hiring side again. When I am, I want to remember that every finalist has rearranged weeks of their life around us, and the one we don’t choose deserves more than a form letter.
We should keep selecting carefully. Getting the hire right matters to the team you’re building. But careful selection and basic empathy aren’t in conflict, and I think we’ve let the fear of liability convince us they are.
If you’ve found ways to make hiring more humane, as a manager or a candidate, I’d like to hear them. And if you’re in the middle of your own search right now: the other candidate getting the job isn’t a verdict on you.
