Right school, right companies, right trajectory, exactly the years of experience the JD asked for. I was certain this was the close of the quarter. The hiring manager ended the interview at the ten-minute mark and thanked him for his time.
Her reasoning: he'd answered every question with what he'd delivered, never once with what he'd learned from what didn't work. For a role that required rebuilding a broken function from the ground up, that was the one signal that mattered more than the résumé.
Three months later we placed someone with a thinner CV and a much better answer to the question of what didn't work. He's still there. I think about that ten-minute interview every time a perfect CV lands in my inbox.