Maezawa from the president’s office here—I’ll answer this too.
> If even this wasn’t good enough, do you think it really came down to my looks?
Hmm…that’s a tricky one, but maybe the interviewer happened to be a woman?
Female staff members sometimes scrutinize surprisingly minor things. Men may be naturally more lenient toward women and let certain things slide as unimportant, but women can be much more detail-oriented.
For example, I once interviewed a woman, and we got talking because she said she liked cars. She told me she had ridden in a Lamborghini and a Ferrari, so I said, “That’s amazing,” and we got excited talking about it.
Then a senior female staff member told me, “That has to be a lie. There’s no way someone like her has done that.” She instructed me, “She’s a no-go. Reject her.” Since I was new, I couldn’t go against her and ended up rejecting the woman.
She actually knew quite a bit about cars, and it’s perfectly normal for a car enthusiast to hit it off with another car-loving woman and offer her a ride. But apparently, the reasoning was:
“There’s no way a woman like her would be invited out by a man, so she must be lying about everything.”
There are other cases too, such as:
- Her attitude is bad.
- She talks down to people.
Among women, even minor things can stand out. If a staff member gets that impression, the applicant may end up being rejected.
I’ve also heard staff say things like, “Her skin is bad,” even when I thought it looked perfectly fine.
I feel like women’s standards may be different from men’s, but since that’s just my impression, I can’t say for sure.
So I think it may also come down to luck—namely, which interviewer you happen to get.
> I wanted someone who wasn’t type A.
If you wanted type B, you could just write “B,” and if you wanted type C, write “C.” When someone writes “not type A,” I can’t help wondering why they felt the need to phrase it that way.
I’m Kazu, a male member.
I think one reason women don’t pass is that they don’t have any particularly strong points.
I’ve made offers to several women whose coordinators told me they’d been unsure whether to let them pass the interview.
The feedback wasn’t that there was anything wrong with them—it was simply that there was nothing in particular to say about the date.
I made those offers knowing they were right on the borderline of passing the interview, so I wasn’t especially disappointed. But if I’d made the offers without knowing that, I probably would have felt like I’d wasted my time and money.
In other words, it’s not enough just to have no obvious flaws.
You need to make the staff member conducting the interview feel that a male member would be glad to meet you, even after paying the setup fee.
And I don’t think that necessarily comes down to looks.
