I was in the room.
She wasn’t.
I was on the hiring panel, and she made the final cut because she nailed how to explain her background for this role.
She’d been a director. She took two years off for her family, and when she came back, she intentionally chose a Project Manager job—not a leadership role—because it fit the life she was building right then. She spelled all of that out clearly, in her own words, during the interview.
We didn’t hire her. In our debrief afterwards, the word that kept floating around was “overqualified.”
Whatever she was told afterwards, she wasn’t in the room for the conversation I’d just heard. What she received was a rejection—something short, telling her the decision without telling her the reasoning behind it.
I knew what we actually said about her. She only knew the outcome.
That gap is what sticks with me. Not how she handled it—I have no idea, and I won’t pretend I do. Just the plain unfairness of the setup. I had heard the conversation behind the decision. She just got silence where a reason should have been.
I think about how easy it is, when you’re in her shoes, to fill that silence yourself. Nobody tells you to, but a blank space like that feels impossible to leave open. So you start working backward from the rejection, searching for an explanation. And because you’re the only person in your own head, your guesses start to feel like facts you’ve uncovered about yourself.
I don’t know if that’s what she did. I just know how tempting it can be to fill that silence yourself.
To me, here’s the difference that actually matters: what you were actually told, versus what you’ve added to explain the gap.
One is what you know you were told. The other is what you may have added because you’re trying to make sense of what you weren’t told. And once you’ve built that story, it can be easy to stop seeing it as a guess and start treating it as a truth about who you are.
If you adjust how you approach things because of clear, real feedback—that’s growth. But if you change who you are just to make sense of an unexplained rejection, that’s not humility. That’s just guessing. You can end up trying to correct something about yourself that was never established as the problem.
I’m not saying you should ignore feedback. Sometimes you get real, specific notes, and the right thing to do is take them on board. But this isn’t that. This is about what happens in the quiet space where you’re given nothing at all—and you have to figure out what to do with the unknown.
So the next time you get a rejection that tells you nothing, ask yourself the simplest question first: What was I actually told?
Not what would make it make sense. Not the story that wraps it up neatly. What were you actually told?
Then notice what you may have added to fill the quiet.
If the honest answer is that they didn’t tell you enough to know why—let that be the answer. Don’t treat it like a puzzle you’re required to solve.
It’s the exact same position she was in.
She wasn’t in the room.
“I don’t know why” isn’t a failure on her part. It’s just accurate.