IT’S A NO, THEN

It’s a genuinely downbeat experience. You’re up for a job that you are excited about and you feel well equipped to undertake. You’ve done your homework, prepared successfully for the interviewer’s most likely questions, and pitched in some good answers. Sure, there is always something extra you could have done, but you had a pretty convincing interview. And yet you get the same rejection letter as someone who did no homework and did all the wrong things: Thank you so much for your application. Unfortunately ...

BEGIN WITH WHAT IS WORKING

Any ‘no’ which is about you, personally, has the potential to knock you back, and some people find that rejection has a knock-on effect on confidence.

Reflect on what you said, and also why you might have failed to get the right evidence across at interview, but don’t become entirely wrapped up in the things that didn’t go well. Rethinking an interview answer after the event is natural and may help you to phrase things better next time. However, it’s possible to get totally bogged down in the negative aspects, constantly reliving past interviews, especially as the uncomfortable moments are the ones you will remember most. Sit down with a good friend or a career coach and go through the interview, point by point. Try to remember the exact words of both the questions and your answers. Agree the things that worked. Perhaps you gave thoughtful answers and strong evidence, perhaps a story went well and got you past a difficult issue. Zero in on what went well, because that’s where your next interview begins – you will always achieve more by building on success rather than failure.

Think about learning to drive. The first few times at the wheel you will make mistakes, forget which is the windscreen wipers and which the indicators, time things wrong, stall at the junction – loss of dignity is lesson number one. However, you will never learn to be a better driver by beating yourself up. You get better by observing the times you get things right and saying ‘That’s how it works, I’ll remember that’, or ‘What can I do to stop repeating that mistake?’

You learn in a variety of ways, including experiment. Sometimes you get a breakthrough by doing things completely differently and sometimes by thinking about what you do very differently. There are many ways forward, even if you think you’re not making any progress at all – you just need the right feedback, practice, or a new way of thinking.

THEY SEEM DISAPPOINTED WHEN IT’S ME TURNING UP

Ever had that experience? The person greeting you looks slightly confused, and probably looks you up and down. You’re not what they expected. This is good news in one way – your CV, covering letter and initial phone conversations have worked well enough to get you short listed. However, your first impression is not what you should be aiming for (perhaps on paper you are ‘top saleswoman’ but at interview you come across as ‘harassed mother of three’).

Again, distinguish between gut feel and genuine feedback as it’s easy to jump at shadows and begin to build a whole set of theories about how people react. However, if you get the same feeling on several occasions, corroborated by feedback from those who know you well, you are probably sending out conflicting messages – one on paper and one in person.

THE REAL REASONS YOU MIGHT NOT GET A JOB OFFER

Understand the difference between results and feedback. There are all kinds of things going on under the bonnet in staff selection.

Reasons to do with you

• You are a poor match for the role. This may sound obvious, but see the paragraph below on ‘inner ring statistics’. If it was a long shot, it remains a long shot even if you have got to the interview.
• You failed to get across the minimum key messages needed to take you to the next round. This is a failure of preparation: you don’t need to focus on everything, just the messages that count.
• You broadcast on the wrong wavelength at interview. This could be about the way you speak, dress or behave. Feedback in this area may help generally, or may simply reflect why your approach didn’t work on one occasion.
• You showed lack of interest in the job. This could be about preparation, looking in depth at the organisation, but could equally be about enthusiasm. Remember that employers buy into energy before they buy into hard facts.
• You talked yourself out of the job. The job was a good match, you were a strong candidate, but your interview technique let you down. That’s useful feedback, because it shows you are getting close to your target role but need to do some work.
• You communicated superiority and frustration because the interview requires you to go through a process you see as pointless – surely it’s obvious you can do the job?
• You take yourself far too seriously, perhaps believing that your personality or background are ‘complex’. You may feel you’re a mystery wrapped inside an enigma, but to an interviewer you may sound like someone who finds it difficult to adapt.

Reasons (largely) outside your control

• The chemistry was wrong. While you have some responsibility for warmth of response in the room, some people’s interactions just don’t work. If it felt uncomfortable for you and the interviewer, that may be a sign that you are not a good fit for the organisational culture.
• Employers regularly make decisions which are highly subjective, for example based on non-verbal behaviours, personal prejudices or pure instinct. There is even evidence to suggest some interviewers are subtly influenced by physical attractiveness, believing that attractive people are more socially competent. Some interviewers are highly influenced by quality of voice or regional accents.
• Job descriptions are often far from accurate. You may be trying to match yourself against something which is a long way from the real job, which is why you need to undertake research beyond basic job information.
• Recruitment is often inaccurate. Employers don’t always know exactly what they are looking for or how to spot it.
• Recruitment is a fluid process. Some organisations reinvent the role half way through once they have seen some candidates.
• Recruitment occasionally goes off the rails. Employers suffer hiring freezes, encounter delays, or change their minds about if, when or how a job will be filled. Sometimes a senior manager decides that the job needs filling in a different way.
• Your prospects may be shaped by the last person who did the job. If there is a question about whether an organisation really wants an external, dynamic candidate and the last person they appointed was exactly that but only stayed three months, you are tarred with the same brush.
• The job may already have someone’s name on it. Don’t be depressed by this fact – it could be a hiring pattern that one day works in your favour. However, if the job is already earmarked for a favoured person, internal or external, your chances of being anything more than interview fodder were always very slim.
• The market is tight, and the employer is overwhelmed with top-notch candidates. You might make an impression, but in a tough field it’s difficult to be the number one choice. However, getting shortlisted does show that your strategy is working.

INNER RING STATISTICS

I am indebted to advice from my colleague Stuart McIntosh. We all love statistics and hit rates, he suggests, and it is easy to proudly count up rejection letters or applications that failed. We need to be careful about the way we count ‘failures’. Reviewing your job search effectiveness it’s easy to say, for example, ‘I applied for fifty jobs, got four interviews, and only got to second interview once; no job offers.’

That might sound like a ratio of 50 to 1, but you’re allowing junk statistics to drive an emotional response: my CV isn’t working ... I don’t interview well ... I’d better lower my sights ... That voice in your head that says none of this is working can easily persuade you to rewrite your CV or radically adjust your interview technique, but if you count every rejection as a failure you will repeatedly make random adjustments without necessarily improving anything.

See Chapter 20 for ways of discerning the difference between random feedback and solid information. As this chapter shows, there are all kinds of arbitrary reasons why you might not get a job offer, and most of them have nothing to do with you.

Look dispassionately at your job search (enlist help if you find it hard to be objective). Divide your applications into the four categories in your Job Application Dartboard:

Job Application Dartboard

• Inner ring – jobs close to or within the bull’s eye of your dartboard. In other words, jobs you are able to do and would be interested in doing.

• Outer ring – jobs some way off the bull’s eye. You might be able to do the job but you are not sure if it’s really you, and other people might have more obviously appropriate skill sets.
• Holes in the wallpaper – shots that didn’t even hit the dartboard – jobs that you have little interest in or jobs for which you have little if any matching experience.
• Floor shots – jobs that you definitely didn’t want but you applied for them ‘for the experience’. A long way off target, and probably not good for your confidence anyway (see Chapter 6 on applying for jobs for ‘practice’).

Look again at your inner ring job applications. How many of them have you actually managed to identify? If not many, rethink your job search strategy, not your interview technique. You just aren’t getting in front of the right people. If you find that you have made a genuinely large number of inner ring job applications (this is rare – most people shoot all round the dartboard) and you are getting the same results, that’s feedback. You may be aiming at the wrong target, or (more probably) you need to fine-tune your technique.

What about the rest of the dartboard? These will always be long shots. Do continue to apply for outer ring jobs, but don’t count them or wallpaper or floor shots in your statistics. They are your wild throws, and any feedback you get from those interview experiences is not much help. It will generally be a variant on ‘we had many candidates who were a better match for the role’, and no surprise at all.

Job applications as a game of darts? It’s a pretty good analogy. Clients often have a tight set of requirements: job type, salary, nice people and a good location. If their initial job search doesn’t get results they usually introduce phrases like ‘lowering my sights’ or ‘being more realistic’. The question I put to them is this: If you’re not getting close to the bull’s eye, do you want a bigger dartboard, or do want to learn to aim better?

REPEATED, CONSISTENT REJECTION

If you really are doing well at interviews (how do you judge that?) but not getting the job, what can you do about it? Do try to get valid feedback, as Chapter 20 suggests. Assuming that you are not ignoring the obvious (e.g. you lack a significant piece of paper, yawn through every interview, or always say ‘really, I’m looking for a quiet life’), the answer may be difficult to hear. Be clear – we are only talking about repeated rejection for inner ring jobs as defined above. It would be nice to simply write this all off as one of the mysteries of the universe, but any experienced recruiter will give you a straight answer to this puzzle.

In the absence of alternative hard evidence, what remains is the distinct possibility that you are just not getting the relationship right in the room. As you realise, getting this right every time is hard work (see in particular Chapter 17 on personality-based questions) but if you repeatedly fail to get the job because you’re told you don’t demonstrate sufficient ‘fit’, you need to look at what you can change. With repeated rejections at the final stage, an experienced career coach would put money on the reason falling within these top six:

1. first impressions;
2. chemistry;
3. appearing personable;
4. body language;
5. saying too much;
6. underplaying your achievements.

You may have problem areas outside this list, but it’s unlikely.