**Summary:**

Why do companies make up an unknown skill to reject a candidate?

**Long version:**

The job application process goes like this: a recruiter submits me for a software developer position with a company. I have a good phone interview with the HR manager, I get an in-person interview with the department manager and lead developer, I do well on their technical test, and everything seems to go well. They talk about my skills and I explain how my experience will fit the position.

Then a few days later, the recruiter calls me back to say the department manager now wants "multi-media experience", which they never mentioned during the interview process. I also had a good interview process with "Hilton Hotels" (not their real name) and they later said they wanted someone with "entrepreneurial experience", which again, they never mentioned before, any time during the interview process. And this time, the recruiter said this completely caught her by surprised because they never mentioned it to her either!

The issue is: if these skills were so important that they're rejecting me because I don't have them, how come no one mentioned it to the recruiter before the interview process? And how come no one on the team, mentioned it *at any point during the interview process*?

This happened to me three times, and in two of those cases, the recruiter said the manager never mentioned these skills to her!

My question is: is rejecting a person for having a skill that was never mentioned actually a real reason for rejecting a candidate? Or is there something else, that the manager can't say, such as they won't hire me because I'm a white male and they're looking for diversity? Or the opposite- perhaps during the in-person interview, they saw that I'm a black woman and they think I can't do the same job as a white male? Obviously, it's illegal to discriminate like this, but it's perfectly legal to claim someone has a missing skill that was never brought up during the interview process.

But if a company doesn't want me, why not use the standard generic response of "We're looking at candidates whose experience better fits the position."?

And is there anything I can do to overcome this kind of objection? Or is there nothing I can do, since I don't know what skill that's not on my resume, they'll ask about?