Didn’t get promoted and am devastated - please help

I think you should say yes to the chat and that you’d like some time to reflect on the experience yourself first - and schedule for a couple of weeks/a month off. You’ll feel differently in time - less raw and likely to cry - and your boss may have some good advice for you. Give yourself time to be in the right mindset to hear it.

I always respect people who go for opportunities whether they get them or not. I’m a hiring manager and it’s worth remembering that not getting a job is more often about the other candidates than you. Your boss will have been thinking about the skills and personality balance across the whole company - the externals bring something you can’t bring; a new outside perspective, and perhaps your boss thinks that’s what the company needs now. It doesn’t mean you’re not brilliant at your job!

The other thing to consider sadly is that your boss may have preferred a new person because promoting you means replacing you and in a small company recruitment is a huge resource burden.

Given you feel ready for new challenges, looking for other opportunities seems a good plan, too. But frame it positively: you’re excellent at what you do and this disappointment has shown you how much you want to progress. There are always options and opportunities for hardworking people like you.

A

Take the feedback - You need it

He is offering the feedback as a sop to make himself feel better about his decision, which is a poor one. Put a meeting in the calendar for a few weeks time so you have time to process. You call the shots. You let them know professionally that you are surprised that your efforts are not valued and you are questioning your place in the company and long term opportunities. Don't say any more than that - leave them to stew.

its absolutely normal to feel how you’re feeling but I wouldn’t rush to leave the company
listen to the feedback and create a development plan so you’re ready for the next time a role comes up
if your interview finished early I would assume (I do lots of recruitment, but am making an assumption of course) you may not have answered questions fully where perhaps others did. Did you ask lots of questions at the end? How was the general rapport in the interview and was it just your manage interviewing?

You could have been the ideal candidate however the external candidates had more experience or additional quals that made them more experienced but don’t let that put you off.
learn from them and focus on how you can improve your skill set so you’re ready for the next interview whether at this company or somewhere else.

you are fortunate to enjoy your job, so many threads on here people hate what they do. So don’t rush to leave just take some time to process the disappointment

I agree with this. Being a bit cynical, they probably realise that you are a big pair of shoes to fill at your grade. Promoting you would have created another vacancy which might be harder to fill.

Take the feedback but start looking elsewhere. Manager talk is cheap.

It wouldn’t have been a promotion strictly speaking though if you had to interview and there were external candidates. Promotion in my world is where you just get offered it. The fact that they external at the recruitment stage should have told you that they had doubts in you and that you would really have to pull it out at interview. If you just went in the interview and didn’t pull out anything above and beyond what they already know of you/ what you are delivering then the other candidates would be stronger.

you need to retain your professionalism, look for another job externally/ hope another role comes up internally and learn from the feedback.

I would go and listen to the feedback. Although you feel let down. Treat the feedback as a positive thing. You need to hear their reasons, and find out what they see as a reason not to choose you for the job. Ask as many questions you need Maybe one of them will leave, and they will see you as some one prepared to take feedback onboard, and offer you the next vacancy.

If your company uses competency questions and a ranking system in interviews, as many do, internal candidates can really lose out.

This is because you go into the interview knowing the people who are interviewing you, knowing they know you, and so you assume that they will draw on that knowledge of you when making the hiring decision. So you often don't mention that big project you did or all the support you've been giving to the more junior members of your team because you know the interviewer already knows that. Internal candidates therefore tend to give less detailed answers and to be less specific about their experiences and achievements, and even though the interviewees may know full well you have the competencies they're ranking, if you don't explicitly say it, they can't score you for it.

Then the external candidates come in and give a brilliant interview that ticks off the competency boxes - and they get the job over you because on paper they're better. Even if the hiring interviewer knows you'd be brilliant for the job, HR wouldn't let them give it to you if the paperwork shows you rank lower than the other candidate.

It's not fair, but it's how things work these days.

See your manager and get the feedback. It may well be that you didn't interview very well and there's some really simple techniques you could learn to improve for the next time there's an opportunity. The company has to be fair to all candidates who apply and they can't favour you just because you're internal and a known entity.

If the feedback you receive is vague or unhelpful and you feel that you've been shafted, then at that point, I'd be looking elsewhere.

However, for now, I'd chalk it up to experience, hear what my manager had to say, and be open-minded about the fact that perhaps after only three years there is still more I can learn in my current role before getting promoted. If you really enjoy your work and love your team, I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet.

I'm sorry for your disappointment - I've been there and I know it hurts.

It is perfectly possible that you are good at your job and appalling at interviews. I can think of two people I have worked with closely who were excellent workers (I was their line manager), but atrocious at interviews so got “stuck” at one level. I couldn’t understand why until I did some mock interviews with them and was absolutely shocked by how bad they were - you would never have known working with them day to day, and it didn’t reflect their abilities at all.

The feedback might be really helpful. You can ask your manager to defer it until you are in a better place to take it in, but I would take them up on it.

Have the feedback session! I got knocked back twice for the role I'm in now, and after a feedback session, I knew exactly where I needed to improve on my interview questions/demos and was third time lucky. Sometimes, it's such a simple thing, such as needing to expand more.

Deep breath, professional head on and take the feedback when you're ready. Your reaction is very strong and likely completely inaccurate - you're not a failure. The most likely reason is that the other candidates were a stronger fit and it will be helpful to know what areas they exceeded in so that you can work on those and your manager can support your development, whether you end up progressing in your current company or elsewhere. To have gone to pieces so much perhaps shows you weren't as ready as you thought. It's not all about swotting for interviews and being told you're the best (not a criticism of you, often women are taught to judge their worth by this kind of external validation), it's getting your capability to the next level so you can cope with more stressful senior roles. The first step is getting past these tears from the hurt and the imagined reasons and getting to grips with the actual reasons and real situation. However invested in your career you are - and I'm deeply invested in my own - it's still only work and it's good to get some healthy perspective so you can be more strategic about your next steps and start feeling more positive about it all.

This is your catalyst for change.
it doesn’t feel like it now but this is a good thing.
Update your CV and get interviewing.

similar has happened to both me and my DH.

i was overlooked for promotion and the man they gave it to was a lazy odious toad… I found out he got the promotion because he had a counter offer. I interviewed and got the counter offer job he rejected and it changed my life…
Like you, I was also over invested in my job at the time and it hit me very hard. I was a bit of a mess looking back.
A year later I was so happy it happened. I actually got promoted again 9m in so my salary went up 40k (doubling in ONE YEAR)
I’d still be rotting in that shitty place with the rest of the team (a decade on most of them are still there)

re: your boss
turn up and nod and smile. Play the game…
he’s had 3 fucking years to develop you into the next role up….take any external courses that are useful but beyond that I wouldn’t pay much mind to what he has to say

Feedback gives you a better chance next time, you have to take it. Just listen politely and try not to be upset. It's likely that you were seen as a good candidate but the external candidates brought something you didnt have. That might be more experience, a different perspective, just better presentation. You need to find out.

Turn up with a plan to get the promotion. You sound very defeatist. They will be noting how you deal with setbacks.

When I was trying for a promotion, it was noted that I kept up my work and enthusiasm despite the promotion taking longer than I wanted.

They want you to stay in that role as you’re a safe pair of hands. chances are you’ll be expected to support the two new members of staff to get up to speed. I’d listen to feedback but scrutinise its quality.
the ‘I want to see you progress in your career’ is a platitude.

Get the feedback and use it for helping you to get a job with a different company. When you leave, explain the excellent feedback helped you succeed in achieving the new post.

Try to avoid tying up your self-worth with work. External validation won’t make you happy.

Yep. This. Totally agree. OP milk the feedback for all it’s worth, take it on board and use it to move on to a better role - maybe with a competitor ? It sounds like you do a great job where you are and you’re being gaslighted into staying put because your experience and application to the work would be difficult to replace.

It might he something as simple as interview technique, OP. There may have been something they were looking for you to say that you didn't.

Having said that, I have worked somewhere where internal candidates were strongly encouraged to apply with a bit of a nod and a wink that the job was theirs when it came out afterwards that they had no intention of hiring internally but had/wanted to be seen as being fair.

I'd listen to the feedback and go from there. You'll know if what they're saying is accurate or not.

Leave and tell your manager your looking for another job and will be working to rule and wont be working unpaid overtime, life is too short, when i was young this happened to me and then they would expect me to train the new people who got the job, i handed in my notice and the top man said no you cant leave we wont be able to cope and we will promote you, i said no im leaving

Sorry OP. Going for an internal promotion can be tough as you can have all the skills and demonstrate potential but all it takes is an external applicant who is actually doing that job. This happened to me. It turned out the external applicant was doing the exact job somewhere else and wanted out of their company. Impossible to compete with. I agree with a previous PP who said this style of interview scoring makes it harder for internal candidates to move up.
In the end I left. I found it much easier in interview to ‘sell’ myself to people who didn’t know me and I got a higher paying role this way. I was gutted to leave, like you I thought I never would.
I was glad I got the feedback, as it helped me understand that it wasn’t my poor performance but someone else’s greater experience. The feedback will hopefully give you positives too so it may make you feel better.

Feedback is a gift @downcast and you can choose what you do with it.

The other candidates were stronger than you - it's important to find out why. It may be that the selection panel felt they needed new blood - so you can be that new blood elsewhere.

But first, get some feedback from your manager to help you in your new job search.

This happened to me twice in my last job. The first time I felt I could have maybe prepared better for the interview so took it on the chin and learned from it.

The second time I resigned as soon as I was told I didnt get the job . It became very clear that it suited the organisation for me to stay in the same role. I was reliable, worked hard, trained up new staff frequently and did the job really well. The person that got the post had only been with the company 3 months (I had been 5 years). They ended up being very unreliable as they went of sick so often.

It never occurred to my manager that I wouldn't want to stay in the same role any longer. Get the feedback and if its nof fair move on to a new role.

this.

Listen to the feedback also be honest with yourself, how did the interview go, really?

Take feedback on board and then yes, use that to go elsewhere. Also, stop doing unpaid overtime! they don't derserve your loyalty.