Honestly, I still did want to work there and they said they would reach out next time a position opened up but this never happened or got lost in the shuffle. I probably should have taken it upon myself to reach out to them and that's a failure on my part for sure.

The "we'll reach out to you" is almost never true in practice. It's just a nice way of saying "goodbye."

Agreed that this is usually true.

Oddly, my wife interviewed with Facebook (~7 years ago), got the “no, but we’ll reach out to you if something comes up“, and 2-3 months later they did. She’s been working there ever since.

So well 99% of the time I would say don’t expect to hear back… my n=1 experience says it’s not impossible.

Big companies could handle this so much better. They are going to hire thousands of $role in any given year. Once an applicant gets routed to a particular team, they might not get picked in favor of another candidate, but that doesn't mean they would be a fit for any of the other hundreds or thousands of open positions.

It seems like something an ATS startup could fix, though it also seems hard to address, since your customer would need to be an enterprise which is a hard first-niche for a product.

I recently met the founder of Eightfold.ai at an HR Tech conference, and was surprised to learn how big they are. They solve almost exactly this problem as a “layer” over existing ATS systems.

Super true!

Circumstances change. Switching jobs isn’t easy. If you find another gig that seems to work, it seems alright.

I also want to argue with the framing of pursuing a job at a company just to work at a company. When I interviewed with startups and I wanted to join, it was not just the company but also where they were at. The same company will change drastically when it goes from 10->100->500->1000 employees etc. The problems they need to solve are different, and so on.

Basically it may not be the same company that originally excited you.

That's why I asked the question, "Why not try again?"

I didn't just assume it was because the OP just gave up, even though they admitted so above.

It is disheartening, especially if you get to the latter stages. Many moons ago, it always felt weird when I met someone from HR or Engineering at a company I interviewed at in a conference or a talk and they wave like -

hey Vagrant! How are you doing? How's life? You got around to launching that project? We were so intrigued by it...blah blah blah

It just felt...patronizing. Maybe it's made worse by the fact that the city is tight knit and you're bound to bump into people from the industry. But I can't stand it.

I hear you, it certainly is. Similar is asking a someone out. The people who realize it is just a numbers game, usually end up getting more dates. =)

Some people take this as an opportunity to grow a thicker skin and change their game so they have more chances for success.

Is it a thick skin thing? Maybe. Rejection still hurts even though my reaction now is little more than a shrug.

What was your reaction before?

Of course rejection hurts. Some people shrug and let it roll off never to think about it again. Some people get mad. Some people use it as motivation to do bigger things.