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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

This exact thing happened to me today.

I applied for a Developer position back in the summer (not at Apple) and after a great phone interview I never heard back.

Today, more than 7 months later I got a call out of the blue saying the position was just advertised again and they were really disappointed I didn't apply (I didn't see it) apparently my resume was great and I scored really high on the phone interview (who knew?) so they've had me submit my resume today and have already started calling my references.

I'm very curious why it all fell in a heap 7 months ago, but I suspect internal politics or the budget dried up or some-such.

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Another anecdotal... I originally got rejected from my current position. It wasn't until a month later that they called me back and we're like, "um yeah, actually come back and let's talk about compensation." Found out that some political hurdles were cleared up for the extra headcount needed to bring me on. Apparently the whole interviewing candidates process was started a bit earlier than it should have.

At one job, I was hired pretty quickly after a couple of interviews. About a month after I started, another developer left, and they went thru the queue of people they had interviewed at the same time I did, and hired one of them. In that case turned out it was a guy I knew.

So instead of posting a new req, when they had just gone through a bunch of interviews, they hired someone from the previous round, since it was fairly recent.

Similarly, at my current position, I interviewed and was hired. After I arrived I found that I had to do some weird paperwork each pay period, but I didn't know much about the internal organization so just did what I was told. A few months later, my supervisor told me, "When we hired you, the budget for your position wasn't approved. We were hoping we could scrap together enough funding to pay for you until we could convince management to approve funding as a permanent position."

That's a pretty terrifying thing to not be told, especially because it sounds like it could've gone either way.

Another data point. We were hiring for a developer position and found a really promising candidate. The higher ups decided that we needed a hire for another team first which put a temporary (permanent.. ) hold on our new position. I found out much later that the candidate was never even contacted to tell them it was a no. This was a major breakdown of HR - but it shows that it's not always about the candidate.

Did they plan on making you an offer after just a phone screen and a reference check? If they still planned on doing an in-person I wouldn't let them go near my references until the very last step.

Something similar happened to me years ago. I later learned the hiring manager had left. But when they contacted me, I had already moved on.

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