Member-only story
Apparently, Rejection Isn’t Always a No
The strangest hiring experience I’ve had — and I still don’t know what happened.
A few months ago, I applied for a role and received a rejection email. Nothing unusual there. The position eventually disappeared from the company’s careers page, so I assumed it had been filled and moved on.
That’s how the process works, right? You apply, they decide, and everyone goes their separate ways.
Then I received an email from a scheduler asking for my availability for the interview.
Not whether I was interested in interviewing.
Not whether I was still available.
The interview.
I stared at the email for a moment because I genuinely thought I had mixed it up with another application. After a while, the jobs start to blur together. Different companies. Different recruiters. Different job titles that somehow all start sounding the same.
So I searched my inbox.
Sure enough, the rejection email was still there. Same company. Same role. Same application.
The position had even been marked unavailable.
As far as I knew, that story had already ended.
