Didn’t get promoted and am devastated - please help

[downcast]

I’ve been in my current role for nearly three years. An opportunity to apply for promotion came up recently as two staff left, and my manager strongly encouraged me to go for it, which I did. Given his encouragement and the fact there were two roles I felt I had a good chance. However, after not hearing back for several weeks after my interview I was told that both jobs went to external candidates and am completely devastated. I adore my job, felt ready for more seniority and opportunities like this come round quite rarely as it’s a smallish company.

My manager is now saying he wants to give me feedback as he wants to help me progress my career, but that doesn’t ring true when he’s just given not one but two jobs to other people. I know my experience more than matched the role - it was a small step up in seniority but not by much. I also believe I’m good at my job - I am experienced and consistently get excellent feedback from clients and managers. I put in huge amounts of effort and some unpaid overtime as I have a genuine passion for what I do.

I’m at a loss over how to respond, as I can’t face the sort of meeting he’s proposing when I feel so deflated and frankly heartbroken. Listening to him explaining why I didn’t get the role will just feel like another kick in the teeth and I’m not sure I’m strong enough mentally to deal with that right now. I’ve been on the verge of tears in the office for the last week and am struggling to feel engaged in my work. I also feel quite depressed. What would you do?

Classic MN fantasy land where people make wild statements despite knowing barely anything about the situation or people involved. Blows my mind 😂

I've been turned down for a couple of promotions. Different circumstances as bigger company where the hires were also internal, and public sector. But I found the feedback really useful and positive. I have ideas of what I would do differently in future interviews. One thing that was very clear was that they mark only on the interview answers you give, not on what they know about you from before. Your company may well have similar rules, particularly if trying to make it fair between internal and external candidates. So it had nothing to do with their opinion of me generally. Also, in both they told me I had secured highly enough to be suitable for the job, just the other candidates scored higher again. So I felt much better about my ability after the feedback.

Start looking for another job. I could never be happy again there if that happened to me.

It's a shoo-in, nothing to do with shoes! (I know this isn't pedants' corner but it jumped out at me!

Not read all the comments so apologies if someone else already suggested this...could you set the meeting in a week or two and ask for an email now with the feedback points? Gives you time to reflect and be ready to discuss, come up with your own improvement plans/suggestions (so you look proactive) for the different areas, and means you can deal with upset in private and by the time the meeting comes around you won't be surprised or caught off guard by any feedback raised. Hopefully it could change the tone of the meeting with your manager to more of a check-in, goal setting, professional development vibe which makes you look motivated and positive and gives you time to process things more privately.

I would go to a career councillor or coach, armed with the feedback from the manager. They can shed light on it in a different way and provide guidance in what to do for next steps. I did this and found it really helped to look at it all from a different angle.

I’m sorry to hear this OP. Please don’t internalise it too much. I’ve worked at organisations where the view was external = always better. And often it wasn’t. Perhaps you’re too good at your current role and it was easier to hire bodies into more senior roles and keep you in your place than recruit for your position. I agree with PP that when you feel up to it, you should take the feedback and act on it if you think it’s good advice. I worked for one huge household name organisation where one of the top bosses revealed that for every promotion she had gone for internally, she had been rejected three times and was only ever successful on the fourth attempt! Most people would have thrown in the towel but she stuck at it and is now near the very top…

Your manager is the one at fault here and you’re right to feel instinctively wary. He set you up to potentially fail and that’s his failing not yours.

I would be reframing this as someone set you up.

Quite possibly his intentions were good and not meant to mislead you but ultimately that’s what’s happened.

You trusted him and his advice and then he broke that trust.

He sounds inexperienced. Managers should not be encouraging junior members to go for jobs if the chances od getting them are low.

as I say, he sounds inexperienced himself.

i would go to the feedback session and try to be professional, no tears and as analytical as possible.

Listen to what he says but know that this person is somewhat out of their depth and may not manage your career with the attention it deserves.

no one is saying you should have got to the job. But he should have managed your expectations better. He’s a poor manager in my opinion. He’s killed off your motivation. It’s all a bit shit.

on that basis I’d be looking for another job. I would not mention this. Lick your wounds, know it’s not you and move on.

sorry but what a dick he is!

The manager may be inexperienced and could have managed her expectations better, but equally given the job market at the moment, the external candidates could have been much higher calibre than anticipated. If they already had experience at that level or even above it, they could have outscored the OP no matter how well she'd prepped. He should have let her know sooner though so she wasn't left hanging. Managers aren't perfect but I don't know how helpful it is to reframe him as a dick who set the OP up. It feels like she needs to attach less drama to it rather than more.

Have a meeting with him and listen to his feedback. How people react to setbacks and feedback is really important and a real indicator of future success 2 years is not a huge time to be in a role - it doesn't sound like you were bored and desperate to be promoted until these opportunities arose. He's not necessarily misled you it may be that the other candidates were much better /have different skills- in which case you can work out with your manager how to bridge the gap - you may also not have interviewed well so it would be good to know that.

Please don’t pay attention to those suggesting you flounce — that’s a silly move.

It’s important to hear the feedback. Once you’ve had a chance to reflect on it, you’ll be in a better position to make informed decisions about your next steps.

The job market is highly competitive right now. While your manager supported your application, it's entirely possible that exceptional candidates with more experience applied for these roles and were successful. If you flounce, you may have difficulty finding a similar role elsewhere as it is a competitive job market at the moment.

Please don't follow some posters' advice to go into a huff and threaten to leave! You'll just look unprofessional and unable to deal with setbacks, which isn't really the image you want at work.

Use the feedback, learn from it, and take it forward to your next interview, whether that be internal or external.

Perfect!

This goes to show while some organisations have good intentions, some will just continually sell you down the river.

Id go to the feedback session after reading all these experiences OP much wiser to the fact that humans are good and bad and a mix of the two.

He may have your best intentions at heart or he may not.

The big learning from this is to separate your self worth from your manager’s opinion of you. some will treat you fairly and responsibly, others won’t. And it doesn’t matter how much you work, they’ll still take the piss if they’re a piss taker.

I can count on one hand the good managers I had in my career. Honestly I think they’re rare and you need to be on the lookout for yourself !

This happened to me in March 2021. Found a new job august 2021 with a 5.5k payrise.

When I told my manager I was leaving he said would I stay if they paid me more. I laughed and said if I’d been promoted I’d have had the exact same payrise as I’m getting now in my new role.

I too like you was completely broken as my manager had also bigged me up for the role to then be told I wasn’t promoted. He told me on Teams and once he told me that I had to ask to leave the call as I couldn’t stay on the call and not be in tears.

But now I’m still in that new role I applied for and loving it! So as rubbish as it feels now a new role somewhere else will come up that’s even more perfect.

Have the feedback meeting and if you don’t agree with any of his reasoning and comments say so! Don’t be rude or aggressive but point out how he encouraged you to apply (you could add at this point ‘did he want you there to simply increase the numbers). State how disappointed you are to not get the promotion you had worked so hard for and felt was a good fit for you.
I did this with a previous manager and he was like a rabbit caught in headlights…..it was quite a nice feeling watching him squirm when I asked questions that he clearly wasn’t expecting.

I feel so upset and almost like I have to do something. I don’t really want to meet with my manager because as I say, I don’t feel up to it mentally

I wonder if this is something they've identified and want to support you with so that you can progress - though if so it might have been best to suggest before encouraging you to apply for the promotion

Of course your disappointment's natural and leaving's always an option, but is it possible you could feel equally crushed by a setback elsewhere?

I totally agree with this. It is an extreme reaction and you need to learn to be more resilient. Book the meeting with your head held high and make it very clear that you love your job but that you're ready to move onto the next stage of your career now. This gives them the opportunity to over you either a promotion or a path to getting that promotion, if they value you and want to keep you.

This is ridiculous. Not everybody will get the promotion. Do you always throw your toys out the pram when you don't 'win?'

you're not always going to get what you want OP. This is a really extreme reaction. Disappointing, yes, but you can't go through life expecting to win every time. Listen to the feedback, hear the manager out and take it on board. You don't even know what they're going to say yet!

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'd suggest this as well.

Even if the advice isn't good it can be telling one of DH female colleges had been doing role for 18 months and they went with less experienced outside man - the feed back was she needed more expeirence. She took it as a sign and left doing much better for herself.

Guy who came in didn't stay long and was a lot of work - he was using it as a stepping stone in his career. The concensus was it was because she was female - not many women in field and office and they'd all had similar - and she's just had kids in last few years- her DH was main carer but that didn't seem to matter.

It's perfectly possible you just came up against unexpectedly strong outside candiates - I think the feed back could be useful to work out what happened and if you'd be better off looking elsewhere.

Yes and also this.

some posters on here must be incredibly unprofessional and entitled to expect to win everything. It's jarring to manage those types of people.

Your boss is offering you valuable feedback on why you didn't get the job. Take it! Wait until you are a bit more on top of your emotions, and then thank him for the offer of advice and mentorship. Come ot the meeting with a notebook. listen, take notes. Let it sit for a few days as it's normal to feel defensive and dismissive of criticism. Then process the advice. If it is sound, act on it. If it is word salad platitudes, look elsewhere for a more senior role. Or take his advice and apply it, to get a more senior role elsewhere.

Just a thought OP - maybe you did very well at interview, and your manager has you in mind for a slightly bigger step up than you originally went for? Worth going for the feedback I reckon, while keeping in mind that it is now up to them to make some effort if they want to retain you. Good luck.

I had a situation where I was part of an interview panel and we had an internal candidate who was good at her current role and thought she would be a certainty for the promotion to a vacant role. We had reservations on her capability in a key area of this role that would have been a big step up for her. We focused a lot of her interview on this and could tell she didn’t fully grasp how much of a step up it was.

We hired external and our internal candidate was devastated, crying, etc. We really wanted to explain why, but she didn’t take up any offer of feedback from multiple people of varying seniority.

We would have fully understood if she’d said yes she wanted feedback but wasn’t ready yet, but not even wanting to know our feedback didn’t come across well and backed up another lesser concern we had on how she doesn’t tend to take feedback onboard.

My suggestion is to give your manager an idea of when you’ll be ready to have the conversation and maybe take a day of leave in between to process and think about your next options.

Yes feedback is essential but it’s no good if you’re not in the right headspace. If it were me, feeling so devastated and imagine almost a little ‘betrayed’, I would definitely need some wind down time/processing space. So I’d just ask to have the talk a little later as you want time to note down some personal observations/Qs of your own relating to the interview - to ensure the talk with him as meaningful an interaction as possible.

@pinkdelight but this is what we see time and time again.

When I see people as flawed themselves it helps me move on. A little anger for the OP might rev her engines to look for another post which is exactly what she needs to do to regain her self worth and belief in herself.