She came to us to be interviewed for a job. She had reasonable details in her answers but was very nervous and her answers were quite weak. No examples of competence. The other interviewer was very rude, looking bored and uninterested and checking her phone throughout. This clearly made the woman nervous but she did soldier on. I actually liked her and was considering giving her a job. I felt the interview went badly but I could see she was just nervous.
Anyway, the decision came that there were stronger candidates. You could tell she was upset on the phone but she thanked me for interviewing her. I felt particularly bad afterwards and it never really left me as she seemed a very genuine person.
A year later she got a job on an adjourning team. To cut a long story short she is probably the best worker I have ever met. She is extrovert, confident, assertive but kind and honest. She is a pleasure to be around. She is just about the perfect employee and her boss always talks about how it's a pleasure to work with her and how he will never know how we did not select her and gave the position to the dishonest employee who lasted a matter of weeks before his bullshitting ways were found out. It honestly haunts me because after speaking to her I found out she was nervous as the position was her absolute dream job and she was so desperate to get out of unemployment she had considered suicide.
She had been unemployed a year and just couldn't even get a job interview so when she got one she was almost paralysed with nerves.
But we never helped her, tried to encourage answers or give clues. We just let her give poor answers. I realise now just how rubbish interviews are for choosing candidates and we now have an entire assessment day with written and group exercises.
I see her a lot now in my day to day life and for no reason that I can logically understand, it plagues me that on that day, I chose not to employ her. I never feel like this about other rejected candidates. I don't really understand it. AIBU?