The Problem with Competence
It is possible to leave an interview knowing two things are true at once:
[1] that it went well; AND
[2] that you did not get the job.
The contradiction resolves quickly once you understand that competence is not rejected only when it is absent, that would be easy, but when it cannot be interpreted by the person assessing it. The problem is not that people are unable to recognise competence in the abstract. It is that, in practice, they can only recognise what falls within their own frame of reference. Experience that exceeds it (as is often the case if you work in technology, where less experienced individuals are often lumbered with a first assessment of those whose experience far exceeds their own), is not evaluated on its merits but translated into something else: uncertainty, overreach, or risk.
This can easily be perceived if one is attentive enough; a response seems to have been left floating, a posed question is really a non-sequitur, a pause that lingers into slightly extended silence, a stare that becomes blank… None of these, in isolation, amount to much but taken together, they form a pattern: not of rejection, but of misalignment between what is being presented and what can be recognised.
Occasionally, the misalignment is made explicit. A candidate may be described as “too intellectual”, “too experienced”, or “not quite the right fit”. I’ve had all of these and then some. These phrases suggest a deficit of your own making, but what they often reveal is something else entirely: an inability to place what is in front of them within a pre-set framework.
The result is a peculiar, and at times infuriating, contradiction. Organisations seek experience, but only up to the point at which it remains legible. Beyond that, it ceases to reassure and begins to unsettle. What is unfamiliar is not rejected outright, but reclassified as something undesirable or potentially risky.
What is being assessed, then, is not competence in itself, but competence as it appears to the person doing the assessing.
