Someone in your network tells you about a job that would be a perfect fit for you. You meet all qualifications for the job, so you apply. You put in the time to research the company and prepare for the interview. You show up 15 minutes early, dressed for success. You shine in the first round interview and are asked to come back for a second one. You meet the President and the hiring manager, the person you would report to at the job. You pass the second round and are told you are a top candidate. You get references from highly-respected and accomplished people who support your fit for the job. And now you wait.
A week goes by yet you hear nothing. Then it is Friday afternoon at 4:01pm you get an email (edited for confidentiality):
Subject: Many thanks
To: John R. Fugazzie
Sent: Fri, Mar 14, 2014 4:01 pm
"I want to thank you for being such a terrific candidate for the Director position. You have a diverse set of skills and I think your deep commitment and enthusiasm is infectious and inspiring on several fronts.
Unfortunately, we are not able to offer you the position. It was a very difficult decision, but I am hopeful that there might be a way that we can work together in another capacity in the future. I'll circle back to you in a few months to see what's going on in the hopes that we can make something happen.
Keep up the impressive work and I look forward to checking in soon.
Warm regards,
Hiring Manager
I founded one of the largest job search networking and support groups in America back in January 2011 during our last recession, Neighbors-helping-Neighbors USA (www.nhnusa.org) with over 1200+ success stories in ten years since our founding, we held weekly meetings up until COVID19 hit us and we them transitioned to virtual based video conferenced meetings. We have a network well in excess of 4,500 members in our LinkedIn group, and an award winning job search portal. I found myself in the same state of rejection that I often advise our members and coach them on how to handle it.
After I spent a short time in disbelief that I was not going back to work soon,
I had to apply the advice I gave on an almost daily basis.
I had to have the same conversation with myself regarding how to deal with being rejected, again, for a job that I strongly believe I should've landed.
Here's my advice for the rejected job applicant, which I practiced myself:
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Accept it and move on. Put full steam into the next best opportunity you are working on. Hopefully you are working on multiple job possibilities, since today you just can't sit back and wait for one job to process at a time. This is a market where you have to be juggling multiple opportunities at once because of how challenging it is to secure any one of them.
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Don't get angry. You are likely to feel angry, since you're human and it's hard to not take rejection personally. However, the reason you didn't get the job was probably the result of a variety of factors and not just a fault of yours.
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Thank your interviewer for their time. Saying thank you might be the last thing you feel like doing, but if you see in my rejection email the door may still remain open for future work, so you never want to slam that door shut. You may even impress people by handling the rejection with class and maturity.
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Network the interviewer. If you did impress your interviewer he/she could possibly recommend you to someone else in their network. Connect on LinkedIn with the hiring manager and anyone else you met in the interview process to make them part of your LinkedIn network.
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Ask the hiring manager to give you feedback. Find out what you could have done to be a stronger candidate. In my years leading NhN, I have rarely heard of an interviewer receiving feedback, but it's still worth the try. Another NhN member, in his own words, "blew an interview," but still got a pretty nice and detailed email on how he could do better next time. If you don't ask you will never get this feedback and when you do get it, you can learn valuable information about how you can do better next time.
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Reach out to the references you used for the job. The five references I was able to get from key people in a short time will be very helpful even for future jobs.
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Stay motivated and focused. Pick up the pieces and dust yourself off, follow these tips, and keep building toward your eventual success.
Abby Kohut "Absolutely Abby" a nationally known recruiter and job coach shared this advice with me when I shared my rejection with her. "If you get rejected from a job, it wasn't your job to have. I can think of countless things that I was disappointed about in my career that turned out to just be blips. Right after the rejections something even better lurked around the corner. Keep your head high and get back on the horse as fast as possible.
"Also, even if you love a job and are sure you are the perfect candidate, you need to have other opportunities in the hopper. It won't sting as much if you have possibilities waiting in the wings."