Career coach Natalie Fisher explains that candidates lose job offers not because they lack skills, but because interviewers retain unresolved concerns. She outlines seven categories of typical concerns (e.g., work gaps, lack of experience with specific tools) and shows how unaddressed doubts lead to rejection. Fisher illustrates this with a detailed story about Alex, an extroverted software developer whose perceived mismatch with a quiet, Slack‑centric team was only resolved when he was asked directly about the work environment, revealing his adaptability and cultural contribution. She warns against the common but counter‑productive tactic of asking interviewers “Do you have any concerns about me?” and instead advises candidates to surface specific concerns through targeted questions. Fisher then promotes a free 90‑minute training that teaches four mechanisms for handling the interview pipeline and debrief rooms, helping candidates proactively address doubts and stand out. The overall message is that candidates must anticipate, surface, and resolve interviewers’ hidden concerns to secure offers.
Chapters
The real reason why they're not choosing you. People are gonna have concerns about you. They're gonna be naturally skeptical, and that is a good thing if we think about it, because you would be naturally skeptical of somebody too. You wanna put yourself into the interviewer's shoes and say, okay, I understand they have concerns and I'm happy to talk about those and address them. A mistake that a lot of people make is they don't really dig into the concerns that people have about them, and they don't really have a clear way that they're going to discuss them. So big concerns that people might have are about your work gap or about your lack of experience in a certain area or a certain software. There's actually 7 categories of concerns, and if one of those categories or if some of those categories are not addressed, then they're going to be left with that doubt if that concern goes unresolved. Then they are gonna have an easy time saying no to you and choosing somebody else who did address all of their concerns. I'm gonna share with you an example of somebody who wouldn't have addressed the concern that was on the table because it wasn't immediately apparent. Alex was a software developer and he came in to interview for the position at X Matters as a software developer. The concern that they had about him wasn't anything to do with his skills or his experience or his ability to do the job. He was a great candidate and he had everything. Their concern about him was that he was a bit too outgoing. He was a DJ on his off hours. He was very extroverted. He seemed to need a lot of social interaction or just thrive in an environment where people were louder and more interactive. And the environment that we had wasn't like that. It was very quiet all day. It was quiet and a lot of the communication was unseen. It was going on on Slack. And it was just a quiet space. So the concern they had about Alex was he's too outgoing and they weren't gonna tell him that. Like they weren't gonna outright say, you know, you're too outgoing. You might not like it here. You might get bored. You might get tired. You might get antsy if no one's talking to you. They were not gonna say any of that stuff to him. I was like, you know what? Alex is a really good candidate and I'm curious what he would say if we actually brought him back in and asked him how he felt about a really quiet environment. So they thought, that's a good point. Let's do that. Let's bring him back in. We'll have him meet the team and ask him that question. When we asked him that question, here's how he responded. And I want you to pay attention to this. He was like, oh, interesting. He's like, yeah, but before I answer that, let me ask you, what kind of communication do you use and how would you describe your interactions? So we answered with most of our interactions are on Slack. And we communicate quite frequently, just not very loudly or obviously. And he laughed and, oh yeah, that's totally fine. I communicate on Slack or on company messenger in my previous company. As long as I'm getting my questions answered, as long as it's collaborative and I feel like we're a team and we're working together, then I have no issue with communicating on Slack and I have no issue with the quietness. He then said, where I might have an issue is if people weren't collaborative or if the environment wasn't like a collaborative place to be where I felt like I could interact freely, then that might be a struggle for me. But if the communication's on Slack and it's really more about the people and how their attitude is towards collaboration and work, that's more where I think that the fit and how I communicate is relevant. We talked to him then about the same team aspect of collaboration that we had and some principles around the same team philosophy that we had as a company. He really liked that. He really seemed to fit in well with that philosophy. He seemed to be on the same page about that. And it just strengthened that trust, the thoughts in our head of yes, he would be great here. Yes, he would be great here. Yes, that would work, right? However, if we had never asked him, we would have just said, you know what? You were great. We loved meeting you, but we went with this other candidate named Andrew because he was more experienced in blah blah blah, or he was a better fit blah blah blah. But really, the reason would have been. Because he was more introverted and he was more like us. And that happens in debriefing rooms all the time. But the truth is, hiring Alex was the best decision we could have made because his differences, his ability to be more extroverted, his personality actually added something to the culture that wasn't there before. He added board games at lunch. He added a more, a more social connection with people that didn't wanna come outta their shells. He would bring them out and he ended up DJing our Christmas party. It was a lot of fun and he added a lot to our culture that he wouldn't have been able to add if we had just made the assumption, oh, he's not gonna like it here. He'll be bored. It's too quiet. That is what's happening in a lot of debriefing rooms when things are not addressed. So it's not that you, that your work gap is actually a problem. It's how you address it. It's how you think and how you feel about it, and then how you speak about it. It's not that your lack of experience in a particular software is actually the problem. It's how you think and feel about it and how you actually speak about it. So if you're not getting the job offers and they're telling you it's because you weren't a good fit or because you didn't have a certain amount of experience that someone else did, it was simply because you didn't do a good job of addressing that. And that's something you can fix because you're never going to be the perfect unicorn candidate that checks every single box. And if you are, then the job's probably too easy for you, and they'll tell you that you're overqualified. So it's not really about things that people would have us think. The real reason people make decisions is they didn't get a concern answered or addressed, and they were left with a doubt. Your job is to make sure that all those doubts are addressed. Now, there's a caveat here. Something I would absolutely not recommend, which I know is widely recommended, but I am against it and I'll tell you why, is asking them at the end, do you have any concerns about me, or is there anything in my background that concerns you? I would not ask this. The reason is because I have asked it before, and when I have asked it, it has just made the situation awkward. It has felt Weird. It hasn't been a good interaction. So what happened when I asked it was the person looked at me and said, "Well, I don't know you well enough to know if I have concerns about you or not." Even though we had just spent an hour interviewing, from my experience, they are not going to tell you to your face. If Alex had asked us at the end of that interview, if he had said, "Do you have any concerns about my candidacy?" We would not have said, "We think you might be too extroverted and you might not like it here," because. We didn't even know that yet. We had to go to the debrief room and discuss it and see what the concern really was. And a lot of the times, the concerns, they just get made as an assumption. If somebody has a work gap, for example, which is a big one, and the hiring manager is concerned about that, they're concerned about specific things. It's not just, oh, we're concerned that you won't be able to do the job or that you won't be able to ramp up quick enough. We're concerned about a whole bunch of different things. So you need to be able to ask a specific question to be able to get the information that they're specifically concerned about so that you can address it. If you want to learn more how to do this, I have a free training. The free training talks about the 4 mechanisms that we discuss in the interview room. So the first mechanism is when you're not getting interviews at all. A lot of people that come to me are at this stage. They're not getting any interviews and they need help to create opportunities. That's the first mechanism. The second, the second, third, and fourth are all about what happens in the debriefing rooms. So I have a lot more stories like this one because I was in hundreds of debriefs. So I can tell you what was happening behind the scenes, and I've developed the process that actually shares with you what was going on and what you need to do to get ahead of it and address these things. So when you address their concerns, When you use the other 3 mechanisms that I talk about on the free training, you'll wanna hit the link below and sign up for it. You can watch it on demand. When you have these 3 mechanisms in place, you essentially stand head and shoulders above other candidates simply because you know this stuff. This is not stuff you could know unless you were actually in a debrief room 100 times over and saw the patterns and saw what people said and saw what they said repeatedly. Saw what worked, why people got hired, why people got passed over or turned down. When you have that information, you can start putting together an insider perspective, and then you can go in there with much more solid confidence because you know what to do to find out exactly what they're looking for. Sign up for that now. It's a 90-minute training. It'll be worth your time. If you're applying for jobs right now, signing up for that 90-minute training will be worth more than applying for however many jobs you could apply for in that time. I promise you, I've gotten so much feedback on how eye-opening this training has been, and it is yours completely free. So go ahead and sign in for that.
