Ever arrived at a job interview only to realize that you didn’t really understand what the company and job were about? I have.

No matter how qualified you think you are for a job, there are all kinds of reasons that you might not have been chosen, writes Alison Green in an interesting article, ” Why You Didn’t Get Hired,“  at US News.

Green writes people often miss out on jobs because they didn’t have an “accurate understanding of what the job is all about, and therefore your opinion of how well-matched you are is based on an erroneous foundation. ”

“This one (mistake)  is surprisingly common,” she writes.

“For instance, I had a phone interview recently with a candidate who really did have an impressive business background and who kept referencing examples from it–but the job he was applying for wouldn’t make much use of those skills. He picked out a couple of smaller aspects of the job description and focused on those, missing the larger picture (which is that the job was far more clerical than he realized).”

This really struck a chord with me. It is so true.

I’ve interviewed many applicants for writing and editing jobs over the years,  and have made this mistake myself.

I still squirm with embarrassment to remember how I completely messed up a job interview when I first arrived in the U.S. about 13 years ago.  It was for a corporate writing job with a N.Y. company that specialized in compensation.  In  Australia, compensation is often used in relation to workers compensation.  I got quite confused.

We were only five minutes into the interview, when the depth of my misunderstanding was revealed.

Even worse, I tried to lighten the situation by using a bizarre Aussie expression that I would never ever have used at home in Australia in any situation. The interview was bamboozled. I started sweating and blushing.

In my defense, it was with a headhunter who wouldn’t reveal other details about the company before the interview, limiting the research I could do.

This is your moms to work correspondent signing out to go hang her head in shame.

P.S. Anybody else like to join the hall of shame by sending their most embarrassing moments?