Ask HN: Technical interviews went amazing but HR is not answering my emails now?

3 months ago I sent my resume to company X for the position of software engineer. (Company X is a very well known company that makes GPUs) It seemed like the perfect position for me given that they were looking for someone with good C/C++, Java, Perl skills (those are my strongest languages), knowledge of OO design patterns and machine learning was a bonus (I have talked about deep learning in many big ml groups).

I got contacted within a couple of days and went through 3 technical interviews, which went amazing! the interviewers pretty much welcomed me to the team and one of them even said: "wow you really know your sh*t so I will stop asking now"

The whole process was poorly organized and the interviewers all though they were the first person talking to me.

Nevertheless I felt pretty confident that I was getting the position (specially because the position was very Perl-centric and I happen to be very involved in the Perl community) but the HR lady who was helping me only contacted me to ask me if I would consider relocation (I said yes), then she said the HR manager was away, then she said the same thing and now she is not answering any of my emails.

I could just apply to another company, but I was really excited about that position and I have a lot admiration for the company.

A friend suggested me to email the head of HR, what does HN think I should do.

This is not a unique situation. Many things could have happened.

There could have been a better candidate that popped up.

There could no longer be no longer a budget for the job or the team decided to make a change that made this hire no longer needed.

People that interviewed you could have left the company.

A more senior person could have felt threatened by you and actually wanted someone less talented.

Those are things off the top of my head that I've been a part of in my career.

That is understandable, but after making me go through 3 technical interviews they could at least have contacted me to let me know they are not interested in hiring me, especially after I contacted her later on.

Well, there are lots to hiring someone other than just the technical skills of a candidate. The technical interviewer, sometimes misses a lot on the human element part of it which the HR are more apt in pointing out pretty quickly and accurately.

It has been a year every since I joined a friend's company which was acquired by Razorfish sometime back. I've been building and training a creative design and development (front-end) team. I might have interviewed north of 400 people so far in the last one year and I've so far built a strong team of 40+ people, missing my personal target of 50 by a few.

In that journey, there have been few instances where I really liked the person and would love to have them in the team. HR team rejected them and some of the interesting reasons I found were -- they won't fit in a team setting, they are likely to change really soon and won't stick, and other reasons which I totally overlooked.

Note: It is perfectly OK to get back to them and ask for the reason. Sometimes, things slips through the crack and candidates getting back to us really helped kicking back things into gear.

A lot of the trouble in interview processes is communication or an overflow of work that causes seemingly "closed" interviews to fall off people's priority lists.

For you, specifically, I'd recommend preferring the future regret of having contacted the head of hr later than is advisable than the regret of never knowing. After all, the worst thing that could happen is they say no, whereas all slightly less bad consequences are pretty rad.