In this week's Aol jobs i wrote about a very personal story.
'Many Thanks': How To Deal With Rejection During Your Job Search -
Learn to let it slide off you
read the full story here
Here is some highlights:
Here's my advice for the rejected job applicant, which I'm in the midst of practicing:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Stay motivated and focused. Pick up the pieces and dust yourself off, follow these tips, and keep building toward your eventual success.
"Absolutely Abby" Abby Kohut 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."
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