my interview was canceled because I was “rude and pushy”

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

After an eight-month job search in a second language, I finally lined up a great interview with a great company. It took them four weeks from my application (and a follow-up email) to get the interview but, at 9:30 pm on a Monday night, they asked me to confirm one of two time slots on Thursday.

Time slot confirmed, I sat back to wait for details of where I had to be, or how the interview would take place. By Wednesday, I was a little twitchy and sent another email asking for some details. Thursday morning, two hours before the interview was to take place, I still knew nothing. So I sent a Google Meets link and asked if that worked for the interviewer.

Ten minutes later, I received an email telling me the interview, and my candidacy, were cancelled on account of me being “rude and pushy.” I thought I was showing initiative and enthusiasm. I called to clarify and make things right and was told it was “no big deal, as you were our weakest candidate.”

I’m not sure how else I was supposed to handle that situation, so … was I rude and pushy? And how should I have done it differently?

You weren’t rude but you were a little pushy.

But not horrifically so, and not in any way that justified rejecting you over it.

Generally it’s up to the interviewer to determine what meeting software will be used for the interview and to set it up and generate an invitation. This is more about convention than logic, but it is very much the convention. (Partly it’s because as the candidate you don’t necessarily know exactly who will be attending and thus needs the link, whether they have internal procedures they have to adhere to, etc. — but all those things are also true of, say, vendor meetings and yet the convention that party X will always issue the invitation isn’t nearly as strong there.) But convention carries a lot of power and, rightly or wrongly, flouting it can make you look pushy or out of touch with professional norms or other things that don’t help you when you’re interviewing.

Now, should they have sent details to you earlier than Thursday morning? Yes! It’s rude to leave a candidate waiting like that, making them wonder if the meeting is even going to happen. But at the same time, it’s not terribly uncommon for people to only send meeting links right before a meeting time. And if that’s their regular practice, having you send your own link came across as Too Much.

With interviews, you’ll generally do better if you accept that you don’t have total control. Maybe your interviewer will call when they say they’ll call, maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll send you the meeting link the night before, maybe they’ll send it 30 minutes before. All of this is nerve-wracking for candidates (and none of it is right or anything I’d advise employers to do, just very common) but you can’t control it. Setting up your own meeting link and sending it to them doesn’t make it any more or less likely that they’ll be at that meeting. Either they’re on top of their appointments or they’re not; if they’re not, your meeting link won’t change that. Because of that, I think your action was partly about self-soothing — “now there’s a meeting link so I can relax and won’t need to wait for theirs” — but it’s not aligned with that reality, and it came at the expense of annoying them.

But to the extent that your meeting link was Too Much, it was a small thing, not something to reject you over. They could have simply replied, “Apologies for the delay — we’ll be using Zoom and here’s the link.”

And then telling you it was “no big deal” because you were their weakest candidate? That’s a rude and snotty response, which amplifies the snottiness of their handling of the situation as a whole.

I’m hesitant to say “bullet dodged” based just on this one thing — maybe they’ve got one crappy HR person but the rest of the company is great — but it’s not an awesome sign about them.