I would interpret that as a face-saving way for the HR person to say: you're too good to work here, and will feel alienated and alone surrounded by comparative mediocrity and incompetence. Then, as a cherry on top, they demonstrated the truth of the implicit assertion.

In the end, I'd say that HR person did your brother a solid.

Based on the story it's also entirely possible that the HR person just disliked the guy for some unrelated reason, or had someone else in mind for the role, and came up a plausible excuse for the rejection.

I'd interpret it differently as well - that the HR person realized that the compensation they could pay would not match what was required and they didn't want to deal with woo'ing the candidate only to offer a lowball offer they would refuse.

I've interviewed people before and thought "I'm going to reject you, and you should thank me".

To be clear, not all of the jobs I've hired for sucked. But there was one project that was designed to chew up your soul (mine included), and we had very specific requirements- and people that had "extra" skills weren't qualified. I learned A LOT from that project.

Really wish you'd been on my last hiring panel. (Quit after six months.)

What design can chew up your soul? Never heard that before.

I was working for a small department inside of a large company. The large company was migrating databases (it was a 2 year journey), our department was TRYING to get sold.

In our area, we had 2 teams racing VERY FAST to 2 different objectives:

1) migrate ALL code and data to the new system (because it needs to be available on the new system) AND

2) archive everything (because we might sell all of our stuff and be unemployeed)

It was gut wrenching to look at code that I put my heart and soul into and know it would never run again. Or to look at code with comments like "I just threw this garbage together - it needs to be fixed, circa 5 years ago" and know it would never be fixed.

I imagine writing software that IDs people so a drone can drop a bomb on their head would make one feel terrible.

Or those automated gun turrets?

Working for doorstep lending or payday loan companies that prey on poor people.

I would interpret it as HR excluding him due to something else, possibly for random reason and then making rationalization/excuse.

Probably thr HR representative wanted to hire their friend or family. Lots of companies dont screen for hiring family members that and dont have any policy against it.

I had a similar personal experience. I was hired by the technical team at a very big company(after 6 interviews; 3 face-to-face and 3 remote), but the HR was not sure. All my experience before that was working for smaller companies. The argument the HR made was that I will not survive in the big company as most of my experience was with smaller companies. The HR was right. In a year I just could not stand the inefficiency and waste of talent at the company. I moved to another division within the same company. The same story repeated. I left the company after 2 years. Interestingly I was not the only one. This was a major problem at the company. But the company is so big that it does not even care if people leave as there are a lot of engineers knocking at the door every single day to get in!

"Hungry" sounds like "salary wouldn't match".

Why did not the recruiting person and their peers not informally / formally complain about HR.