How to stay confident in your job search
Reframing the rejection email, and of course, proven & practical methods that help you stay confident, from all of us.
Thanks to my Twitter friend Yuka, I spoke to a group of wonderful people who are looking to progress in their tech career. Among the many topics discussed, one stuck with me: how can one stay confident in the job search process?
I feel fortunate that I haven’t worried about my job in a few years. But the last time I did, the process was soul-crushing to say the least. As a foreigner applying to jobs in Germany, my life plans could go to a complete different direction at the click of a “reject” button.
Reframing the rejection
Indeed, writing our CVs and our cover letters require us to investigate every single value that we could offer to a potential employer, therefore each rejection email feels like a giant “no” in our face, denying almost everything that make us feel valuable.
But as a recruiter, I want to invite you to reframe what a rejection email means —
Every week I spend a few hours “clearing our pipeline”, which means moving relevant candidates forward and rejecting the rest. We usually create a few categories of rejection reasons and make sure to categorize each rejected candidate for future references or reporting needs. The common categories include:
Lack of experience
Overqualified
Location
Salary expectations
Team fit
Language skills
Unresponsive
Most of the rejections are typically categorized under “Lack of experience”, as it can mean any of the following:
We’re looking for a senior candidate with maybe 5 years of experience, but this person is too junior with only 3 years of experience;
This person has enough total years of professional experience across all jobs, but not in this very specific field or job we work in;
This person has the right number of experiences, but only at large corporates whereas we’re looking for startup experiences;
This person has the right number of experiences, at a startup, but the startup is in a different industry or has a different model, and they don’t have experience in our industry / business model;
This person might have done something similar but doesn’t have the title to match.
As you can see, most of these reasons come down to “this person lacks OUR kind of experience”. For most startups that don’t have a ton of expertise in recruitment, the level of familiarity in a candidate’s profile is the best indicator for how well they’ll do in the company.
This means, most of the rejections you receive are not “you’re good enough”; rather, they’re “we’re not used to this, we’re not sure how we can work with you”.
Methods that work
See? You might have wasted time on irrelevant or inexperienced companies that might just don’t know how to work with your skills. And for the companies, as long as they keep getting hundreds of applications for each job, they don’t really have to worry about changing their ways.
What you can do is, focus your search on the ones that are most relevant. Yasmine, who works at Remote, said this:
Yasmine is right. Imagine if you apply to 100 random companies, your rejection rate will be much higher than if you apply to 20 companies that you’ve carefully researched and decided on. This triangle graph I made in a previous post could be a good template to start with. The approach also helped Gabriela, who now works at Bearer:
If you already applied to 100 random companies, track your data and see which ones gave you positive responses, then find common traits among those companies (if possible, receive feedback to see why they liked your profile). Then apply to 10 new companies that are similar to those companies and see if your response rates improve.
Joe, who landed his first junior developer job after 1.5 months of search, resonated with the method:
Another method that helped me the most is to ask family and friends for feedback. It’s difficult to see your own strengths when they’re just a natural part of who you are, but others will see what you don’t see. When I applied to ACELR8 in 2019, I listened to the company’s podcast, and one guest shared his favorite interview question:
According to your best friend, what are your top three strengths?
I asked this question to my best friend in preparation for my interview, and realized the words they used were rarely how I’d describe myself. Another friend recently described me as “consistent” and I was surprised — I gave up on every music instrument I tried to learn as a kid and no one ever described me as consistent! My friend saw something in me that changed overtime and I never even considered.
Lastly, write a script for your interviews. A lot of us probably felt the same as my coachee here a few months ago:
She then mentioned that she’d like to follow up with an email for the interviewer and say the following:
If you’re also a naturally humble person that doesn’t want to brag, write down the most important answers to prepare for the interviews. Create a space for yourself where you feel most comfortable, and write in a confident tone and make sure you brag as much as you can. Then in the interview, know that you are performing the confident version of yourself and stick to the script you prepared. You can always practice with a friend beforehand, say those achievements out loud, again and again, until words like “I led” “I designed” “I achieved” no longer feel strange in your mouth.
As someone who grew up as the shyest kid around and now working in a job where I talk to many strangers every day, I don’t believe that confidence is a personality trait either you’re born with it or you’re not. Confidence is a learned behavior that anyone can pick up. Staying confident will always be a challenge in our career and I still struggle with it. But with this issue, I hope you can use the knowledge I gained, and go to places you deserve.
Photo by Mukuko Studio on Unsplash