About 18 months ago, after being made redundant, I applied for a job with a fairly large IT outsourcing company. Heard nothing but got a job with another company anyway. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago a HR person from the first company rang me up, out of the blue, and persuaded me to go for an interview with them. He said they were desperate for people with my skills in this area (fairly niche IT specialism), sent me a job description, told me the pay would be 7-10,000 more than what I'm on and that I could work from home and generally talked me into going to interview. I was a bit reluctant, took quite a bit of persuading but showed up for the interview anyway.
The interview took almost 2 hours, there were a set of technical questions, several of which I cocked up - but those I messed up were for the 'desirable' criteria not the essential - and having checked up afterwards several of my answers were correct and the interviewers were wrong. According to the 2 interviewers there were 2 vacancies, they were interviewing 2 external candidates and 2 internal - but they weren't keen on the 2 internal candidates as they had 2 people leaving and wanted to keep the full complement of staff.
Suffice to say, I didn't get the job,according to the feedback they had another candidate whose skills were a better match (really?). I am not really too bothered as I quite like my current job despite the commute, but I am angry at a) wasting a mornings leave, b) being taken in by the HR recruiter who was so desperate to get me in to interview. DH thinks it was all set up for me to fail from the start. So what was going on. Was I a victim of internal politics? Was I just ticking the HR recruiters boxes for his bonus or was I a poor candidate? Should I allow this to dent my confidence - which it definitely has?