[Ologn]

With regards to what they're saying, the first thing to do is reverse the perspective. The applicant is hearing a yes or no, so if it's a no they want to know what they did wrong to improve themselves.

From the interviewer's perspective - we get someone who is average, then another person who is average, then someone who has trouble with basic questions, then we get this person who may be as average as the first two, then we get someone who answers every question correctly, and has a deep knowledge of the domain if you drill down, then you get an average person again.

There's nothing really wrong with the person, they did as well as four other people. It's just that someone else came in who was a standard deviation above the majority of the people in the bell in the normally distributed Gaussian curve.