I got rejected from a job based on a trial task, and now I’m spiraling by Alison Green on July 25, 2024 A reader writes: I’ve been casually job searching since January. My current job at a nonprofit isn’t right for me, but things are decent enough that I can afford to take my time. I’m trying to stay within the nonprofit space but move out of my current type of work, which has been challenging. There was one job I was super excited about: it was entry level but paid WAY more than what most nonprofits do, offered interesting work that matches my strengths, and had an application process based only on compensated trial tasks until the interview stage. I much prefer that model to a resume/cover letter, especially since I’m trying to pivot — highlighting my transferable skills in a cover letter feels futile when there are other applicants with direct experience. I was excited to skip that step and show that I can do the work. I made it past the initial screen and submitted the first compensated exercise last week. I allowed myself some optimism, since the task seemed geared almost exactly to my strengths. But I also knew this job would get a ton of applicants with skills at or above my level, so I tried really hard to not get too attached. Today I got a rejection email, and I’m surprised by how devastated I am. It’s not like I made it through several rounds of interviews and am just now being let down — I didn’t even make it to the first interview! I feel silly for taking it this hard. I think the main issue is that I now feel inadequate. The one advantage of a resume/cover letter is that there’s always a chance a rejection was based on something subjective or logistical, but in this case it was my actual work that was evaluated and found wanting. There wasn’t a lot of room for subjectivity in the assignment — you either did everything on their checklist or you didn’t. (It was essentially finding errors in a work product, but it’s more layered and challenging than it sounds.) They hire for this job on a rolling basis, so it’s probably not that they filled the position. The submissions were all anonymized, so there’s almost no chance it was some other kind of bias — not that that would be better, but I could comfort myself by saying I dodged a bullet. The organization explicitly states that they never provide feedback on the application tasks, which makes sense, but also has me spiraling. In the absence of specific errors/shortcomings to point to, I’m second guessing whether I’m actually good at this kind of work at all. I feel like a case study in the Dunning-Kruger effect. I was just so hopeful — evidently more so than I realized — that my skills would carry me through the process. Now I just feel embarrassed to ever have been so delusional. It’s been hard to look for other positions after seeing this one. I really tried not to, especially so early in the process, but I became attached to my hypothetical life with this job. Every other posting seemed (and still seems) miserable by comparison. I know this is dangerously close to entitlement and I need to come back to reality, but it’s just. So. Hard. I tried looking for some perspective in the AAM archives, but most of the advice in the “rejection” tag seems to rely on the subjectivity and opacity of the “traditional” process; it was hard for me to apply it to this situation. Do you have any advice on moving on from a more clear-cut, work-based rejection? I think you’re looking at this as pass/fail — i.e., that the test would show either that you’re good enough to do the job or you aren’t — and so, since you didn’t move forward, you weren’t good enough. But hiring is never pass/fail. It’s always, always grading on a curve. If the employer had 10 candidates who got the assignment 100% right and 15 people who got it 99% right, any of those people could be excellent at the job but they might only move the first first group forward to the next stage of hiring. And that’s especially true because they weren’t looking at resumes and cover letters; if they’re relying solely on the assignment at this stage of screening, it’s reasonable that the 100% people would beat out the 99% people. (I frankly don’t love this as a hiring method! Even the absolute best person for a job will make a mistake now and then, which is why track record matters, and they’ve taken track record completely out of their screening. Plus, maybe some of those 99% people would have scored 100% with instructions that were worded slightly differently, and on and on. But so be it.) Is this work that you’ve been good at in the past? If so, there’s no reason to doubt your skills now. There were just others who performed better on this one specific test. In fact, you could have even been in the 100% group for all we know! Maybe 40 people scored 100% and they’re not going to move them all forward (and since they’re compensating people for each stage, they definitely need to pare down as they go) so they picked a smaller number from the group at random. Or they chose based on extras that don’t reflect on you at all — like you had the right answers, but candidates A and B went above and beyond in what they turned in, organizing it with beautiful color coding, or providing interesting extra context, or otherwise adding additional work that you didn’t know would give an advantage. In other words, the decision-making is still opaque from the outside — nearly as opaque as it can be with a more traditional hiring process. You just never really know, so it’s a bad idea to tie your self-worth to the outcome of any given job application. You may also like:my boss had his wife do my coworker's assignmentshould you do free work as part of a job interview?I'm stuck in endless interviews with a company that can't make up its mind { 103 comments }
KHB* July 25, 2024 at 2:12 pm Did I write this letter and not realize it? Almost the exact same thing happened to me a year and a half ago. I applied for a job, took a skills test that I thought played to my strengths (the trial task was almost exactly what I do in my current job), thought I aced it, but was politely rejected with no further explanation. And I wish I had better advice for you for getting over this, but all I’ve got is: Don’t try to guess what the employer was thinking, because only madness that way lies. For whatever reason, what they wanted happened to be something other than you. It’s hurtful and discouraging in the moment, but life goes on.
August* July 25, 2024 at 4:15 pm I also feel as though I could have written this EXACT letter — to the point that it feels surreal to read it! I really, really appreciate seeing the letter and Alison’s response here. I think after a couple of weeks of feeling really badly about this (it happened to me about a month ago), I decided to just believe that I got an A+ on the assignment, whereas they were looking for an A++. That perspective seems in line with Alison’s advice, which definitely makes me feel comforted!
gyrfalcon* July 25, 2024 at 4:25 pm Or that 50 people got an A+, but they only wanted to advance 25 to the next round.
fhqwhgads* July 25, 2024 at 6:36 pm Or frankly, 50 people got an A+ but they only wanted to advance 5 to the next round.
Stk* July 26, 2024 at 4:41 am Yeah this is my guess too – if it’s such a dream job, could even be 100 people got 100% but they only have interview space for 5, or something. so much sympathy, LW, i would absolutely feel awful in your situation too but I truly don’t think there’s any reason to believe this is you being bad at anything at all
RVA Cat* July 27, 2024 at 5:54 pm It could also be that they want the people who got a B or a C+ so they can pay them less.
LW* July 25, 2024 at 4:19 pm From reading the comments, it looks like my experience is much more common than I realized! I’m sorry that that’s the case, but glad that we’ve all now received some perspective and reassurance from Alison. I hope you (and all of us) end up somewhere amazing :)
Sybil Writes* July 25, 2024 at 4:34 pm I wonder if it might help to think of your disappointment more as an indicator that you are more motivated to move to a new job than you thought rather than focusing on the rejection as a referendum on your abilities. Alison’s response was right on and in your original letter you even mentioned that you anticipated a lot of people with more experience than you would be applying. Best of luck in your search!
MassMatt* July 25, 2024 at 5:13 pm Pretty much everyone has faced rejection for a job or promotion at some point, it’s always painful. In addition to the excellent points Alison made, I would say that it sounds from your description (interesting work, paying significantly more than other equivalent non-profit jobs) that this was a job likely to draw a lot of interest i.e. competition was probably stiff. I have been a part of hiring people for competitive jobs and I can definitely say we could not interview everyone that could probably have been a good fit–we simply didn’t have the time. Try not to dwell on it, treat yourself well, and work on getting more experience and skills they were testing for so you can do better next time. I feel for you, I’ve been there, the best thing to do is try to move on, though I know that’s easier to say than do. Good luck!
fhqwhgads* July 25, 2024 at 6:48 pm I’ve posted this on similar threads before, so sorry to people who always read all the comments if I seem like a broken record, but I think it’s relevant here. At all my jobs in the past 10 years, we’ve generally received at least 200 applications for each job, usually 400, and a couple times 600 (tho we usually try to turn off the posting if it gets that high). This is regardless of seniority, department, role. We just get TONS of applicants. Always. Generally, at most 25 are actually qualified in some way. No more than 12 will get a phone screen. No more than 6 will get an initial interview – unless it turns out they’re really dissatisfied with all 6 (and sometimes they start with only 4). But at the end of the day, it’s still numbers. And there’s still only one job. If in your situation this exercise were more like the phone screen in my example, great, you were in the top 12/200. But possibly not the top 5. Like Alison says, it doesn’t mean you’re not good. It just means someone else convinced the hiring humans that they’re better.
londonedit* July 26, 2024 at 5:31 am I always think of it like the Olympics – the three people who win medals in the 100m are absolutely superhuman, they’re the top of the top of the tree in their sport, they’re most likely all record-breakers. And yet only one of them can win the gold – the other two have to settle for silver and bronze. Or even worse, the one who comes fourth and misses out on a medal by probably 0.5 of a second. They’re still phenomenally brilliant athletes, but there’s only one gold medal (apart from that time the two high-jumpers shared the gold, but you get my meaning).
What’s In a Name* July 25, 2024 at 2:15 pm I was in the exact same situation a few months ago, OP. I submitted the compensated task, felt confident, was rejected, and then felt completely inadequate and began questioning all of my skill sets. It took a long while to remind myself that there are many reasons why my submitted task did not move me forward to the next phase, and that it didn’t necessarily reflect badly on my skills or on me as a person. Remember that they only saw a small segment of what you can do, and that you are much more than this one task. It may sound silly, but I always try to tell myself that if one opportunity didn’t work out, there’s a reason for it and something that fits me better is in the pipeline. It’s been my experience so far, and I hope something better comes your way soon!
Timothy* July 25, 2024 at 2:16 pm Ugh — that’s rotten. I had something similar happen to me a few years back, and I was cross with myself about how badly done my solution was. I later learned that this exercise weeds out just about everyone — so I could just shrug my shoulders and move on. I’m good, but I’m not top 2-3%, so that’s fine. I know that I’m good enough at my job that I’m able to find work. I can highly recommend going for a walk if you feel like you’re spiraling. Getting some fresh air and sunshine, along with some exercise, is always a good thing. Good luck!
Slow Gin Lizz* July 25, 2024 at 3:13 pm I recently learned that a change of scenery is amazingly effective at getting out of a spiral like this, for the same reason that when you go into a different room to get something, you forget what it was you wanted to get as soon as you get into the new room: your brain needs to adapt to a new space and take in the new environment, so it stops doing some of the other tasks that it was doing when you were staying in the same place for awhile. Apparently perseverating is one of the tasks that it’ll back burner as it adapts to a new place. So this is why going for a walk (or drive, or bike ride, or whatever) is even more effective (and traveling is especially great), because your brain will be getting new input the entire time. Brains are fascinating! And if exercise or traveling isn’t your thing, going to a movie, museum, reading a book, doing some kind of fun activity with a friend (and not talking about your job search) could all be helpful too.
Rainy* July 25, 2024 at 4:58 pm My first job out of grad school was not in my current field and definitely not in the field my degrees are in, and the manager had hired for this role a few times as it tended to turn over every few years–it was entry level and designed to be a road to promotion. The last thing you did at the on-site was a super brief task–a set of calculations related to the job that included info you needed to set the parameters for the calculations and allowed you to use a calculator. I set up and worked the calculations and then walked out of the conference room and handed her my sheet. She scored them immediately and said “Thanks, we’ll be in touch”. I was like, oh carp, they seemed easy but were they easy because I got them right or easy because I didn’t understand and got them wrong? I got the informal offer the next day. Once I started, I asked my new boss about the task, and she said “You were the candidate I wanted anyway, but you made it easy for me to decide because you aced the test and everyone else got the calculations wrong.” In all the time she’d been hiring for the role, she said, basically there’s always one person who reads the problems all the way through, reads the supplemental policy info that tells you what to take into account when making the calculation, and gets the right answer.
I should really pick a name* July 25, 2024 at 2:17 pm I’d love to know more about how they handled the compensated tasks. It sounds like there’s an initial screening, and then people get the tasks. How do they whittle them down from that initial screening call? How many move on to the first task? How many are they budgeted to compensate? Are the tasks easy/quick to review? Do they get a lot of applicants?
Zephy* July 25, 2024 at 2:33 pm I bet the setup is something like, the initial screen verifies that you’re a real human person (reducing the applicant pool from potentially thousands to maybe hundreds at most), and then all the real human people complete the task that shows they can actually do this kind of work. The top X number of applicants who pass the task move on to the next stage. Which, like Alison said, doesn’t have to reflect on you as an applicant at all! If the next stage of the process has room for 50 people and you were just the 51st applicant to ace the task (chronologically, alphabetically, whatever sorting algorithm they use), well, unfortunately there is just no room at the inn.
I should really pick a name* July 25, 2024 at 2:59 pm But what’s the limit on X, the number of people they have to pay to do the first task? Is it just the first X people who get past the initial screen?
Anne Shirley Blythe* July 25, 2024 at 2:33 pm My guess–and that’s all it is–was that it was an automated screening and not a call. Maybe it was just answering questions about one’s background or taking a brief skills test.
JFC* July 25, 2024 at 2:44 pm I think this probably varies a lot by industry and company. I had a compensated task when I applied to one of my very first jobs right out of college. I had an initial phone interview with the hiring manager about a week before. Then they brought me for a combination in-person interview and a compensated task. I had to do the task in the office, which I think was their way of assessing my skills on the final product as well as how I worked with the other employees and handled the process in general. The task took probably 2-3 hours total. I did end up getting the job and staying there for more than a decade. I don’t know how many other applicants they had, but I learned later that I was their top candidate. The task might have been more of a formality, but I don’t think I would have gotten an offer if I had bombed it.
LoraC* July 25, 2024 at 3:05 pm I was applying to a pretty well known content creation site. I submitted an application and a work sample. There was a screen call and they sent me a topic to research and create within a time limit. I was paid $15 USD (this was back in 2013), the task probably only took about 1.5 hours. I didn’t pass, so they just sent me a check and moved on. I assume they got a lot of applicants.
LW* July 25, 2024 at 3:14 pm Hi! It was mostly a basic form (name, email, how did you hear about us, etc) but there was also a 20 minute mini-task used to move people on to the next stage. I can see how a lot of people would be screened out on that task, as it also seemed simpler on the surface than it really was – there was one spot to put in the final number you came up with, and another to provide context for your answer if you felt the need. They don’t give hard numbers on how many move on to the compensated trials, unfortunately. It’s one of the things I’ve been wondering about. I don’t think the review would necessarily take that long; it’s mostly something that could be accomplished with a checklist, but I could also see them using a scoring rubric for a couple aspects of it. As far as the number of applicants: I went down a Google rabbit hole after the rejection (early last week) , and I think I remember seeing that they get at least a few thousand every time they post? I’m not super confident in my memory around that, but given that the job is basically a unicorn in the nonprofit world it makes sense that it would be a ridiculously high number.
I should really pick a name* July 25, 2024 at 3:37 pm there was also a 20 minute mini-task used to move people on to the next stage Thanks, I think that’s the missing piece my brain was having trouble wrapping itself around.
Zircon* July 25, 2024 at 9:51 pm If they are getting a few thousand applications, or even a few hundred or even one hundred applicants who get on to the stage you did, they might have a policy of taking the first 10 who successfully completed the stage you stopped at. You could have been applicant #11. With huge numbers like this, I’d suggest that getting rejected is no comment on you or your skills!
HonorBox* July 25, 2024 at 2:20 pm I don’t love this form of evaluation before the resume stage. While it does remove some opportunities for bias, there are pitfalls. Let’s say you were in the non-100% area, but your one error was something minor, or was influenced by poor instruction. A look at a resume would perhaps give the objective metric some additional data to mitigate the error. As it stands, OP, I feel for you. It is difficult not to take things personally, especially when you’re not able to get some specific feedback. But if you can convince yourself to do so, I’d strongly encourage you to think about this the same way you might if you’d submitted a resume/cover letter and weren’t advanced for whatever reason. You didn’t do something wrong. This isn’t a judgement on you as a person or worker. It is another example of how job searching sucks and how hiring practices aren’t a perfect science.
ferrina* July 25, 2024 at 5:19 pm Unfortunately a job application process can really come down to luck. If you happen to apply when the hiring manager is looking at resumes vs when they are on vacation. If you happen to use the exact right phrase (instead of a synonym that has the same meaning). If you happen to apply when 100 other people are applying vs when 10 other people are applying. Whether the hiring manager’s computer crashes when they were looking at your resume and now they forget to look at it. Or so many, many other things. Job searching is stressful, and it’s comforting to believe that we have a certain degree of control over it. This is where self-blame becomes a symptom of feeling out of control. If I am to blame, then it means I have control over the situation and I can do better in the future. But if I did everything perfectly and still didn’t succeed, that’s a much scarier thought because it means our lives hinge on something that is out of our hands. Our brains prefer self-blame rather than facing the cold impersonal luck of the universe. Our brains want to look for patterns so we can better set ourselves up for success, but sometimes there are no patterns to see. So our brains make irrational connections, like wearing the lucky socks to support our favorite team. Of course, always do due diligence so that you can be ready when the opportunity comes, but when and if the opportunity comes is often completely out of our control.
Plebeian Aristocracy* July 25, 2024 at 2:26 pm OP, I noticed in your letter that you see this type of appraisal as not being “subjective,” but all forms of appraisal are. People tend to rank earlier options of similar quality as substantially better–maybe yours was at the bottom of the pack. Maybe the day they were looking at yours, their eyes were unusually critical, and on another day you would have gone through. It really sounds as though whatever happened was on your interviewers, not on you, because they were that ubiquitously subjective creature known as “human.”
Antilles* July 25, 2024 at 2:58 pm Exactly. There’s also plenty of subjectivity likely buried in the test itself. Finding errors in a work product sounds very subjective, but there’s often plenty of things which can vary based on context or even personal style. Particularly if you’re not just reviewing straight calculations/equations but reports.
Butterfly Counter* July 25, 2024 at 3:07 pm Oh goodness, yes. As I’ve said on here before, I teach. I really do try to guard against this, but I grade essays somewhat differently based on my mood. (Especially when my bad mood has been triggered by a student in that class.) I’ve gotten to the point in my career that I’ve figured that my students would rather me wait an hour or a day or more to finish grading so that I can do so in a better frame of mind. That’s not a flexibility that a hiring manager might have.
Plebeian Aristocracy* July 25, 2024 at 5:21 pm I also teach, which I think is where this is coming from. No matter how clear I think my rubrics are, there’s always some surprise that gets me.
Irish Teacher.* July 26, 2024 at 6:15 am I will sometimes go and compare one of the earliest papers with one of the later ones to see if my grading has changed in the interim, because as you go on, you start judging by comparison – it’s not as good as the one before, so it looks bad by comparison, even though I gave good grades to others of that level, or vice versa.
frenchblue* July 25, 2024 at 2:34 pm Uhg. I can’t speak to using a task as a first-round determinant, but I can definitely speak to the 100% vs 99% situation that Alison mentioned. With cover letters, interviews, and tasks alike, I’ve been on so many hiring panels where 1% was really the difference. And often, it was something the applicants wouldn’t ever think about or know from the outside. Things like, Applicant A’s work clearly shows they have a background in Topic B and we just happened to lose an employee in Topic B, so that would be super helpful even though we never mentioned Topic B in the description. For what it’s worth, I don’t like the idea of using a task as the first round either. Just like Alison said, a track record is much more telling than a one-off assignment. Maybe one applicant submits amazing work, but it took them way longer to complete than what would be doable in the office. Or maybe they’re impossible to work with, and they lose reports left and right. All of this would be more evident in a resume or cover letter.
A Book about Metals* July 25, 2024 at 2:45 pm I don’t think a resume or cover letter would show if the candidate was impossible to work with or lost reports. Those things might come out in an interview or reference checks. I’m not sure if the task is a good first round exercise or not, but it sounds like after that they enter a standard interview process.
frenchblue* July 25, 2024 at 3:46 pm A resume or cover letter won’t be completely obvious, but it can certainly be telling. I was once on a hiring panel for a manager, and the favorite applicant had left both of his first managerial positions within a year of starting. When we asked about it, his answer was vague, and alluded to high turnover. I was against the hire, but they proceeded anyway, and he turned out to be a pretty terrible manager that we had to let go. Again, it’s not completely obvious, but I think it’s more helpful to have that context up front.
B* July 25, 2024 at 6:22 pm And at some point, you have to throw up your hands and acknowledge you’ll never have perfect information and there is never going to be a perfect candidate or a totally objective way of comparing different candidates. You remove bias to the extent possible, proceed as fairly as you can, and make the best choice you can. But for every job I’ve ever hired for, I think it’s quite possible we didn’t make the optimal choice.
not nice, don't care* July 25, 2024 at 2:36 pm I was on a hiring committee for 4 open positions and there was a task involved in the process. We had hundreds of well-qualified applicants and many who did very well on the task. It was extremely tough to narrow the field down, and everyone on the hiring committee worked hard to be open and objective, but with so many applicants there’s a point where people are almost throwing darts at resumes to make choices. Definitely not a commentary on any one person’s work, just one of those things.
Alan* July 25, 2024 at 5:42 pm Oh yeah. We used to hire only 7 % of intern applications and that always seemed like a crapshoot. In a couple cases I had applicants contact me discouraged and I had to tell them that it really wasn’t a meritocracy. The number of applications was simply overwhelming so we just had to pick a few people and hope for the best.
LadyAmalthea* July 25, 2024 at 2:37 pm I just took a set of assessment tests for internal promotion and everyone who took them has been struck by how impossibly hard the numerical reasoning exam was and how impossible it was to do in the suggested time frame, after which you would get marked down. we know the civil service is using this as an efficient way to weed out thousands of applicants, while also knowing passing one year can have a different standard every other year. I think pretty much everyone would try again if we failed and blame the test, not ourselves.
The Unspeakable Queen Lisa* July 25, 2024 at 3:54 pm This reminds me of the bar exam. Hardly anyone passes the first time, so when you don’t pass the first time, you don’t blame yourself. You already knew it was likely and you just do it again.
MsSolo (UK)* July 26, 2024 at 4:29 am I’ve done the numerical one a few times as well! Ironically, the better you are the longer it takes, because if you do terribly it cuts you off early so you don’t waste your own time, whereas if you do well it gives you more questions so it can tease out the 98% from the 99%. (numerical I do fine with – it’s the Judgement tests that always scupper me, because I want to answer the questions based on how real people behave, not imaginary ideal civil servants who love getting negative feedback and adapting to change!) One of the other things with the CS tests is the pass rate is influenced by the number and quality of the applications. One year you might get through with the equivalent of a score of 60%, then next it might be 97%. A colleague recently failed to get an interview with an application that scored 6 out 7 across the board, when normally 4s is enough for interview; it’s been so wildly competitive recently.
Anne Shirley Blythe* July 25, 2024 at 2:38 pm I’m biased as a proofreader/copyeditor, but I’m not as put off by the initial screening. I’m also impressed it was compensated. I sincerely hope, though, the company would want to see a resume and assess soft skills in a formal interview. If not, red flag for sure.
LW* July 25, 2024 at 3:52 pm I was also impressed that the tasks were compensated! It’s almost unheard of for most nonprofit jobs (at least that I’ve seen). The organization does say that they review resumes after all of the work trial stages and before the interview stage.
Irish Teacher.* July 25, 2024 at 2:44 pm Not sure if this will be any help to you or not, but college applications in Ireland (for most courses) depend 100% on your Leaving Cert. results. Basically, your exam results for your six best subjects are added up and then everybody who applies for the course you did is looked at and however many places there are on the course, the top than many people get in, so if there are 120 places and 119 people did better than you, you get in. If 120 people did better than you, you don’t. No room for subjectivity. It’s also all anonymised. But sometimes…there will be a case where 115 people did better than you and 15 got the exact same results as you and then…it’s basically a lottery out of the 16 of you for the last five places. (Covid saw the exams being cancelled two years in a row and replaced by predictive grading, which basically meant teachers made their best guess at what students would have gotten had the sat the exams and predictably, they tended to round up and points went through the roof which meant for the courses that required maximum points, there were more people making that than places and again…it became a lottery.) It’s possible that this is similar, that say 100 people applied and they were only moving 10 to the next stage and if more than 10 excelled, then it really became luck. Or maybe you were just the 11th best. While I think our exam system does cut out bias, it also means that there are plenty of people who miss out on courses they would be a great fit for just because one too many people got higher grades than them. I guess what I am saying is that the fact you didn’t get chosen this time doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t good enough for the job. It may just have been luck or you may have made a tiny slip somewhere that went against you. If you’d found the task completely impossible, I think it might be worth questioning if you need to improve your skills, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Hiring is always about comparing candidates rather than about “is x good enough?” It’s more “is x in the top y number?” and often that is quite arbitrary. Like if they are only moving 20 to the next round, there is no reason to assume the top 20 are good fits but the 21st would be no good at all.
Georgia Carolyn Mason* July 25, 2024 at 2:45 pm I’ve never had this exact situation, but I’ve been a grant writer/proposal manager for years and I will say, based on similar experience: taking this stuff personally will TEAR UP your mental health. Please be kind to yourself and try not to ruminate. I’ve gotten rejections on proposals that should be a slam dunk — they’ve been funding my org for years or our work is right in their wheelhouse — and I spent tons of time ruminating about how I must’ve screwed up and whether I actually should even be doing this work. Every second of that was a waste of my time, bad for my mental health, and not great for my physical health either (anyone else either stress-eat until they burst or completely lose their appetite?). Particularly because this employer won’t tell you how they made the selection — and because Alison and others have come up with many reasons your product could’ve been great and still not selected — definitely put it behind you. Easier said than done, to be sure, but you’ve been clearheaded enough about it to reach out to Alison, which suggests you’re on the right track. (Also, work tasks before the interview seems super backwards to me. At least they paid!)
Jiminy Cricket* July 25, 2024 at 2:46 pm OP, I will also add: Don’t beat yourself up for spiraling! (Don’t spiral on your spiral?) That’s also a natural function of the optimism and hope you need in order to be a strong job searcher. Lots of people feel this way after a rejection. Feel your feelings. Acknowledge that’s what’s happening. And give yourself some love.
A Person* July 25, 2024 at 4:02 pm This is such an important callout! You need to both give yourself grace for the test specifically AND for your feelings. You’re human!
Someone stole my croissant* July 25, 2024 at 6:55 pm Yes, I’m applying for jobs. Two interviews, more rejections. I’m really feeling down in the dumps today, so remember, you’re not alone, OP!
Isabel Archer* July 25, 2024 at 2:52 pm OP, I don’t know if this will boost your self-esteem at all right now, but for real: the self-awareness in your letter and the eloquence with which you expressed it were both impressive.
LoraC* July 25, 2024 at 2:59 pm That’s the thing I’ve run into with compensated tasks. If I submit a work sample that they pay $20 for and they have 50 applicants, they have to pay $1000. They’re strongly incentivized to pare down the applicant pool at every step to reduce the number of people they need to pay.
Lacey* July 25, 2024 at 3:10 pm The thing a lot of people don’t realize is how weird</i< the hiring process can be on the inside. One employer I worked for was hiring an additional person to work alongside me. I was horrified to find out that they just took 10 resumes off the top, went through them, called anyone who looked good and put the rest back in the drawer. If the interviews with the people who made it from the first 10 didn't result in a hire, they went on to the next 10 and so on. We had a TON of applicants, so plenty of people had to be crushed that their experience wasn't good enough. But no one ever even read their resume. Obviously this is a different scenario, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something just as weird going on that has nothing at all to do with the OP’s skill level.
MissFancypants* July 25, 2024 at 3:18 pm This is actually very helpful to me. The same thing happened to me and it shook my confidence so badly that I stopped applying for jobs altogether. And made me doubt I’m any good at the job I’ve been doing successfully for the past x number of years. I had resigned myself to working here until I die or until they figure out I’m not any good, whichever comes first. (LOL-ish) Not sure I’m ready to dip my toe in again but I’ll keep this advice in the back of my head until I’m ready.
LW* July 25, 2024 at 4:13 pm I’m so sorry that you’re going through something similar, although I’m glad my question was helpful to you! Once you are ready to dip your toe back in, I’ll be honored to have had a small part in that :)
Cat Lady in the Mountains* July 25, 2024 at 3:25 pm I use a layered error-catching task to vet candidates for a few roles on my team (it’s not the first/only step, but it’s fairly early in the process). I regularly see candidates self-assess as extremely strong at this task, have experience doing it, and underperform during the exercise. we need >90% and they score like, less than 50%. over time I’ve realized the way this task manifests in our context means a ton of people who are good at it in general are missing one small twist on the skill that is essential to succeed in this role. (Think something like “we’re looking for a proofreader, but they need to be able to catch errors in both text and quantitative data embedded in the text” – and a lot of our candidates catch all the text errors but miss a bunch of the numerical errors.) Someone could easily fail our test and end up thriving in a similar role with small but meaningful differences. You just can’t see that nuance from the outside.
The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2* July 25, 2024 at 3:34 pm Through my decades in the IS/IT industry, I was oft-rejected for positions…. I learned, at around the age of 25 or so – not to take rejections personally. If I went through an interview cycle and was psyched about the job, fine – but my attitude after the interview processes was “OK, wait and see.” And as long as I was already working, and collecting a paycheck, and paying my bills, the philosophy of “que sera sera” would put my mind at ease. If, on the other hand, I was out of work, that’s a different story.
theletter* July 25, 2024 at 3:41 pm I once worked with a theater director who told me that sometimes they narrow down the list of available performers by tossing half of the headshots on the floor, because they didn’t want to hire anyone who was unlucky. Was he joking? It wasn’t clear.
LW* July 25, 2024 at 3:44 pm Hi! I’m the letter writer – thank you, Alison, for responding, and thank you to the commenters for your reassurance and encouragement. This happened last Monday, and while it still really stings, I think the worst of my spiraling is over. But I did want to address a couple points, just to show how my mind was working at the time. I understand logically that it’s probably better to consider track records, but in this case I would probably have been screened out based on my resume alone. I’m good at the kind of work the job would have entailed (at least from what I saw in the JD/the trial task), but the majority of my professional experience has been centered around other skills. The organization itself acknowledges that the work itself can be done well by people from a whole range of professional backgrounds, including many where these skills aren’t necessarily highlighted. That’s why they opt for this process. As far as the pass/fail vs. curve mindset, or the 1% making the difference…I think that’s where the majority of my spiraling was happening, and where I think I was starting to creep into entitlement. I knew it was a curve and was probably overly optimistic that I’d be at the top end of it. I thought I’d gotten over my addiction to academic validation/being the “best” about a decade ago, and this made me realize that I unfortunately hadn’t. Looking back, I think at least some of my excitement for this process stemmed from the opportunity to be “graded” again- to confirm that I haven’t lost my edge in the more analytical/academic realm that this job falls into. Obviously that’s not healthy, and even if it were, a job application would be the wrong venue to prove that to myself. It’s somewhat embarrassing to admit these things, as I’m well past the age where craving that kind of validation is expected (if not exactly “normal” or healthy). I do have a therapist and have been working through those underlying beliefs with her.
sleepy tortoise* July 25, 2024 at 7:42 pm Oh my goodness this is so me and my sister. Also way past the age when being graded, validated, quantitively proven to be The Best: but it does get better. I recently took a class and decided not to redo an imperfect assignment because I was still getting an A. It was hard though – wouldn’t change my grade, but what if the instructor thinks I’m dumb! p.s. community college instructor for online classes with hundreds of students per term? That person isn’t thinking anything about any of us! Funny to celebrate a badly done assignment, but it was real growth.
Jon Connington* July 25, 2024 at 3:45 pm Oh, I’d love to provide a little comparison here that might help. I work in theatre (I actually sent in a letter that got published a while back, which I’m reaaaally hoping to have a good update on soon). My current job is marketing-based, but I’ve had other roles in the theatre world that had me at the casting table. There’s a perception in the acting world (similar to the perception in the world of job interviewing) that all you have to do to get a role is be a good actor. But ultimately, that perception rests on the idea that the vast majority of actors/job applicants suck and all you’ve gotta do is be better than them… but that’s just not true. Out of the literal hundreds of auditions I’ve seen, I can only remember thinking “Wow, this person is really bad at acting” maybe 3-4 times. Overall, I’d break the actors I saw into roughly the following categories: – 0.5% were genuinely just bad actors who I could not see myself ever working with – 30% had some good core skills and raw talent, but needed more practice/training before they were ready for the type of role they were auditioning for. A lot of these actors actually ended up coming back for future auditions with more skill under their belt and ended up getting cast – 60% were really great actors who I’d love to work with… but just weren’t right for that particular role – Maybe ~9-10% of actors hit the sweet spot of being both great actors and being a good fit for this role. Out of these, depending on how big the audition pool was, all of them might end up getting callbacks—or, if this group was still too large, we’d have to narrow it down further based on stricter criteria In my (more limited) experience, job applications are often broken down among similar lines. I think you’re assuming that since you didn’t make the cut, you must be in that 0.5% of people who just suck… but it’s a lot more likely you’re in the 60% or 9-10% groups. I think this is especially true given that you described this role as both entry-level and unusually well-paid, so there were probably a LOT of applicants. I know how hard this can be, but please try not to let it shake your confidence too bad. You didn’t get this one role at this one organization. That doesn’t mean you suck or that you were delusional for applying. It also doesn’t mean that this is guaranteed to happen in any future role you apply to. Every job is a little different; even jobs with nearly identical job descriptions can end up, in practice, having different required skills (e.g. one marketing job could be willing to hire someone whose writing skills are a little meh if they have truly stellar graphic design skills, while in another job the opposite could be true). You will get a new job. All of us are rooting for you!
RCB* July 25, 2024 at 3:52 pm I have never heard of this type of hiring and I did hiring for over a decade, so it’s surprising to me. Based on some of the comments it does seem like this is a legit thing that is sometimes done, so I’ll take it at face value, BUT the conspiracy theorist in me immediately had my suspicions raised about this because I can totally see it being used as a cheap source of labor. Say I write a blog like Buzzfeed or something like that (HuffPo, etc) and need content. It would cost me hundreds per article to hire someone to write those pieces, but if I pay someone $50 as a “hiring task” to write a piece for the blog that I then own and can publish myself, that saves me lots of money and I make money off of it. Each “interviewee” gets a different writing prompt so it’s not like I am paying 10 people to write the same article. Before everyone goes nuts responding to my comment, obviously I know that this is unlikely to be the case, and it would be exceptionally hard for the company to pull off successfully, but what the letter describes is just weird enough that it seems possible. (especially the no feedback ever portion).
LW* July 25, 2024 at 3:58 pm Hi! I think this kind of hiring is much more common in tech, where that kind of exploitation is a real problem. I think in that case, though, people are actually creating new work products that the company can use and the tasks are not compensated. I hope tech people will correct me if I’m wrong, though! In this case, the task was very obviously not meant to benefit the organization – I don’t want to go into too much detail, but there was basically no way that our application materials would be relevant to their current work. That’s another reason why I’m so impressed that they compensated us – we weren’t really doing work “for” them, but they offer it in acknowledgement of the unusual amount of time this process takes compared to most others.
Paint N Drip* July 26, 2024 at 11:00 am LW I wonder if you have it in you to brush up the skills (however one might do that, including possibly shelling out some cash for tutoring or a class) and reapply next time the job opens? This company seems cool, you seem to respect them, and now that you have gone through the rejection and processed it maybe you’re ready to ‘take the bar again’ when the time comes. I’m also in the process of changing fields and it is SO easy to get discouraged, but it seems like you’ve done the hardest parts already (getting the skills/knowledge)
Katie Impact* July 25, 2024 at 10:05 pm I work in a field where this kind of skill-based test is common, and generally the tasks given out are based on old drafts that were already professionally corrected and published, so they’re real-world tasks but there’s no risk of the test candidates’ work actually being used (because it’s work that’s already been done). I can imagine less scrupulous companies doing the kind of thing you’re talking about, though.
Emikyu* July 25, 2024 at 3:59 pm This is not exactly the same as a skills test, but I have some experience directing plays and have seen actors have similar spirals after an unsuccessful audition (“I thought I was perfect for that part! Why wasn’t I good enough?”) I’ve also been on the actor side of things and done that myself, so I get it. The thing is, though, maybe you would be amazing in that role – but so would several other people who auditioned. No matter how good, how experienced, even how PERFECT all of them are, I simply cannot have 15 Hamlets (or whoever). That’s just chaotic and expensive. I realize auditions are far more subjective than the test you described, but my point still stands. Maybe you did everything perfectly and so did everyone else, so they had to use some other metric. Maybe they didn’t even do that, and they just picked some of the perfect ones at random. There is no way to know – which is frustrating, yes, but also not necessarily a commentary on you at all.
Irish Teacher.* July 25, 2024 at 4:40 pm Now I want to see a play or film like this. And Hamlet would work perfectly because he is so indecisive. A version where he kills his stepfather right away, a version where he kills his mother and stepfather, a version where he decides the ghost is an evil spirit and ignores it, a version where he fails to intercept the letter and is killed in England, a version where he declares his love for Ophelia…
Proud Feminist* July 25, 2024 at 4:55 pm Not a film or play, but there is a Choose Your Own Adventure Hamlet, done by Ryan North in 2013 (if I recall correctly, it was crowdfunded). He also did Romeo and/or Juliet (same idea). And I have heard of (although not seen) a production of Hamlet where a different actor played Hamlet in each act. I have no idea if it was any good. Maybe the motivation behind that production was that the director couldn’t choose just one actor!
Alan* July 25, 2024 at 5:36 pm Great analogy. I heard a casting director interviewed on Fresh Air a number of years ago and she talked about this. She would have four A-list actors audition for a role, and she’d need to call three of them (or their managers) to tell them that they didn’t get the part. She said it was her least favorite part of her job, and even these A-list actors would agonize over the phone about why they didn’t get it. They’re still terrific actors and people that other productions will kill for, but they weren’t right for this particular role.
Nightengale* July 25, 2024 at 6:07 pm I once saw a Twelfth Night where there was one Viola and then three “Violetas” following her around and echoing some of her words. It did not, in my opinion, add anything over the single Viola called for in the script and considered sufficient in most productions. But it was a fancy experimental theatre college thing and I’m a traditionalist who doesn’t even like lines cut so what do I know. . .
Immature Advice Columnist* July 25, 2024 at 4:08 pm Wow, Alison’s answer is obviously professional and a great way of looking at it, but even you asking the question OP seem very mature and self-reflective. I swear I too can be mature and self-reflective and honest but also — in this situation my knee-jerk reaction is just “eh, screw them, that was a dumb assignment anyway and they’re terrible employers and a horrible company and now I hate them!!” See if you can summon that kind of immaturity from deep within your soul, OP, for at least a few hours or days. Then you can be more honest when you look at your situation – it’s definitely not all one side or the other. You’re doing great and you’ll find a great next position
LW* July 25, 2024 at 4:27 pm I’ll be honest, I did start googling the company to find some evidence that they are a terrible employer, etc…but alas. But you’ve convinced me to not bother looking for evidence next time!
E* July 25, 2024 at 4:36 pm I’ve heard a story that in publishing, they get so many manuscripts that after culling for all the technical stuff, and then for narrative/story structure, and THEN having ten editors all pick the best two from their piles… They organize a competition where they throw the manuscripts as far as they can and the five that reached the furthest are the ones for final consideration. At any point in a hiring process a company might get so many applications that the only way to decide who moves forward is to take a random sample.
E* July 25, 2024 at 4:39 pm Also, they might not have looked at/graded your task at all! If they have a high volume of applicants and not an automated system for grading, it’s possible that they pick a random sample to grade and move on.
Decidedly Me* July 25, 2024 at 5:12 pm LW – I recently applied for a job where I met or exceeded ALL of their requirements AND bonus point qualifications, which I never do. They had an applicant guide with info on what they look for in general, tips for what they want to see in a cover letter, etc. I read and followed all of it. I thought that I was a shoo-in for at least an interview…and I was rejected outright. It really shook my confidence and made me concerned that I wasn’t as strong as an applicant as I thought for what I was looking for. That was a few months ago and I’m currently about halfway through the hiring process for a job. It’s really hard when this stuff happens, but it’s not the end. I know it can feel that way, but don’t let it get you down. Just keep applying and something will come of it. Good luck!
Alan* July 25, 2024 at 5:32 pm LW, please try not to take this personally or invest any more emotional energy in this. If you do a bunch of these and there’s never any employer interest, then maybe *maybe* this isn’t as promising a field for you as you had hoped. But you’ve literally got a sample of one. It’s like a bad date. Yeah it feels crappy, but it’s a failure of the match, not you personally. Keep plugging. I bet you’ll find something.
Alan* July 25, 2024 at 5:40 pm LW, one other thing. Is there any possibility that you have social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, something else) that they also could have viewed without your knowing? One hiring manager at work told me that he always looked for people with hobbies that aligned with the work, and we did check social media. Just a thought.
Rainy* July 25, 2024 at 6:14 pm That guy is awful at hiring, then–he should not be basing his hiring decisions on whether he can stalk candidates enough to figure out what they do in their free time which is–wait for it–none of his business.
allathian* July 26, 2024 at 5:29 am Yes, this. Just as well I’m not on social media. That said, I’m in Finland and here it’s illegal to google people’s social media when you’re hiring. Or not illegal, but you aren’t allowed to base your hiring decisions on what you see there, so reasonable hiring managers don’t do it, just like they don’t ask your family status or if you have/want kids. Hiring managers are only allowed to look at the social media accounts that candidates link to in their application, usually LinkedIn.
Irish Teacher.* July 26, 2024 at 6:20 am And people use social media differently. I have facebook friends whose pages tell me nothing about their hobbies because they just use it to share photos or to discuss things like politics. So they could even have a hobby that aligned and just…not have mentioned it. Or not have mentioned it recently.
It seems I need a name to comment here...* July 25, 2024 at 5:53 pm This sounds similar to failing a technical interview, which is also not an objective measure (even if it seems otherwise). I have definitely gotten really hard on myself for this until I realized that this specific tech company: (1) does not use people from the hiring team to conduct interviews, (2) does not ask technical questions relevant to the specific position being hired, (3) has a policy/culture that is biased towards rejecting candidates, (4) has mistake prone HR who forwards candidates to the wrong job class (meaning of a mistake is made the questions are *especially* unrelated), (5) will never ever provide any feedback. Not to mention (6) I knew I had all the traits they said they were looking for at their own recruitment events, and no one there could tell me what I should be doing differently. It turns out the only thing I should have done differently is not waste my time interviewing for them. And so I haven’t. Eventually they removed me from their recruitment list entirely.
Bookworm* July 25, 2024 at 6:38 pm Been there. Taken assessments that pretty much match up with work that I’ve done before, only to be rejected. No idea why, no info. It is sometimes likely that it was just a numbers game. I choose for others to see it as a sign that it is not a place to work. I understand the purpose of theses assessments, but I do think it’s also a sign of organizations DO NOT want to train someone. They DO NOT want to invest in someone. They want someone who can slip right into the role with minimal work. And I get it, sometimes (especially in a nonprofit space!) you don’t have the time or money, etc. But on the flip side, employers shouldn’t be surprised when people move onto the next thing because they don’t feel the organization has any interest in them beyond their output. I am sorry and it sucks.
Disappointed Australien* July 25, 2024 at 7:41 pm If it’s any consolation I’ve been through a similar process with the opposite result. Part of the process for one job was a weird technical test written by the company owner, and I scored the second highest mark ever on that test. Once I started I met the person with the highest mark ever. Neither of us were a good fit for the company, both of us quit within a year. It was almost cliche “bad cultural fit” – turns out the owner and many staff shared a religious niche, they had a ‘culture of unpaid overtime'{cough} and both of us high scorers were also “alternative lifestyle” compared to the very narrow path preferred by the religion. In a normal interview process that stuff would come up, likely early on, and they’d filter people like me out if we didn’t withdraw voluntarily. But “The Test” overrode whatever common sense they had.
El l* July 25, 2024 at 8:11 pm I’m not convinced by the stated anonymizing that you should rule out normal hiring frustrations. Like: The Internal Candidate The Boss’ Nephew We’re Not Hiring Anymore Hiring Team Are Idiots or Hiring Rubric Sucks You’re taking their word for it too much, and you keep thinking it’s a Just World in who gets hired.
Mr. Mousebender* July 25, 2024 at 11:07 pm Thank you; I was reading through the comments before posting my own, to see whether the Internal Candidate had been mentioned. There are organisations – many, I imagine – which are required either by law or by their own rules and regulations – to ensure that all positions are advertised externally. So they will do this, and interview external applicants (the cynic in me says this is to avoid being caught out by an audit of their processes), but they will have had an existing employee firmly in mind for the role all along. I hate this, and it is a complete waste of everyone’s time, but it happens. OP may well have been the perfect candidate if the process was actually conducted in good faith, but as it is, they committed the unforgivable sin of not being [existing employee].
Pescadero* July 26, 2024 at 10:03 am “you keep thinking it’s a Just World in who gets hired.” Bingo. Just remember that hiring is capricious, random, illogical – and NO ONE is good at it. Literally randomly choosing among candidates who have the necessary qualifications is just as successful as all our interviews/tests/hiring panels. People involved in hiring have fooled themselves into thinking they have some skill at picking candidates – but it’s all an illusion that just wastes time and energy.
curious mary* July 25, 2024 at 8:32 pm “It’s been hard to look for other positions after seeing this one. I really tried not to, especially so early in the process, but I became attached to my hypothetical life with this job. Every other posting seemed (and still seems) miserable by comparison.” Please don’t think like that! Dream jobs don’t always pan out. The job might not have been as great as you expected if you had gotten it. And another job might be a much better fit for you in the end.
Festively Dressed Earl* July 25, 2024 at 8:42 pm Not a work thing, but similar. Writing has been my strong suit from the day I learned to scribble the alphabet, so I expected my 1L legal writing course to be a sure thing. To my utter horror, I got a C+ my first semester. You want to talk about spiraling? I was practically a tornado. So in my second semester, I did everything I could to improve – I took supplementary writing workshops, I practiced citations, I read supplemental guides, I asked for feedback during the writing process. After all that hard work, I pulled my second semester grade up to a C+. And then I gave up because I was obviously horrible at everything I thought I excelled at. To this day I only emerge from my bedroom to comment on the internet or to get a bowl of cereal. You’re still here? Still reading? Fine. After the initial panic, I realized that I’d done my level best against a group of very smart people who tend to have excellent verbal skills, and I passed, which was enough. Over the next two years, I kept working on my writing, but I also discovered I had strong suits that I hadn’t suspected. In my last semester, I was chatting with my former writing professor and mentioned how devastated I’d been about my grade. She told me “You’re an excellent writer, it’s just that your section had an unusual amount of other strong writers as well. Did you notice how many people from that class are on law review? Normally you would have gotten a B+ or A-, but the curve was brutal.” My gob was thoroughly smacked. In hindsight, I’m glad I did the extra work; shoring up my skills gave me a concrete way to deal with the disappointment and gave me an edge in the rest of my classes. But judging myself so harshly on that one metric caused me unnecessary angst. This was one interview. One class. You were up against a ton of other applicants who are good at the same things you are, and you didn’t make the top 10% this time. That doesn’t mean you suck. If you want, find some extra training in the areas you want to pivot to in order to rebuild some confidence, but don’t forget that you’re still a badass. Dust off your cape and try again.
Indie* July 25, 2024 at 9:04 pm A couple of years ago a recruiter called me about an “amazing opportunity”. I wasn’t actively looking. After a brief call, they said that I would have pass a screening test. I said sure, technical screening tests are pretty standard in my field, I’ve even designed one or two. Instead they sent me an IQ test. After which they sent me an automated rejection. It was especially funny, because when I was young and naive, my parents wanted me to join the “smart people’s organization” (MENSA). They took me to a testing center and told my parents that I was indeed MENSA material, with an IQ in the high 140. I haven’t had an IQ test recently, but I think I’m at least as smart as I was back then. So yeah, tests and the subsequent rejections can be based on any number of reasons, and none of those about you.
Paint N Drip* July 26, 2024 at 11:04 am You’re a freaking rockstar!! The way an IQ Test>Rejection pipeline would _destroy_ my sense of self… lmao
NyaChan* July 25, 2024 at 9:40 pm If it is any consolation – I once applied to a job where they told me they usually don’t consider people who’ve graduated so recently and didn’t want to distract me from studying for my licensing exam, but they were so excited about my resume that they’d let me do the timed practical exercise. 25 minutes after I sent my sample in, they sent me a reply thanking me for the attempt and rejecting me lol Can’t lie, it definitely stung. I kept quiet about it until the next day so I didn’t have to admit to my friends and parents just how quickly they noped out. Hang in the OP!
BigLawEx* July 26, 2024 at 4:31 am This just happened to me a couple of weeks ago. Someone invited me to do a brief short-term job vetting AI-generated contracts for an app. I was like a few hours a week for a good hourly fee, why not? I spent an hour vetting the sample contract. Thought I did a good job. Crickets. For a moment, I was like…c’mon. I hadn’t thought about it again until I saw this. I can see on the surface how the rejection seems more personal, but without more knowledge, how can one take it personally?
Blue Pen* July 26, 2024 at 8:44 am I completely agree with the advice that you must disengage from the hiring process. But we’re all human. And I sympathize with the LW because, sometimes, no matter what you tell yourself, you really do just WANT that job. And when it doesn’t go your way, the impulse is to turn inward in a negative way: blaming yourself, racking yourself over the coals, feeling inadequate, etc. I think this is some kind of a holdover from when we were in school: for the most part, grades are objective—you either got it right or wrong, and that was that. Like Alison says, though, there could a gajillion different reasons you didn’t advance—many of which are completely out of your control and have no reflection on you, your skills and abilities, and what you could contribute to the role. Even if others got further than you, only one person (presumably out of many) will get that job. And you have no idea who that person is, if they’re internal or external, what experience they bring, etc. Who they are is not a strike against you or your abilities. It just swung in their favor this time, just like any position you were offered swung in yours over others in the hiring pool. For example, my current position is one where I’m working again with a former colleague (who is now my manager) after a couple years. I have the skills the position was looking for, but I had the secret sauce this time around in that I worked with this person in the past, they knew what they were getting with me, that we work really well together, and I needed minimal training to hit the ground running. Could someone else without my background also do well in this position? Of course! But I had the advantage this time. As hard as it is, when you’re feeling this strongly about a position, I think it’s OK to feel disappointed! Expected, even. But I would try to reframe your reaction in such a way where it’s now become abundantly clear to you what you want (and maybe don’t want) in your next position. Channel that reaction as a way to help you regain your footing in your job hunt. Good luck!
Hyaline* July 26, 2024 at 10:03 am One other thing–especially after your update–as a high-achieving kind of person, it can be hard to separate out the sting from “I didn’t Achieve The Thing!” from “This was a Thing I actively and passionately wanted for Well-Articulated Reasons.” There’s something missing in your letter–glowing and unabashed enthusiasm for the job itself. You say the work would be interesting and it paid more. Ok! That’s fair! And maybe you were really enthused about the work, the workplace, the culture, the mission and just didn’t include that here. Still, it caught my eye because I am a person who holds myself to high standards for Achievement…even in things that I don’t actually want that badly. (Just this week: Did I actually want that award I got nominated for? Not much, I actually don’t respect the organization much and it comes with a stupid amount of work. Am I still stung I was passed over? Hell yes.) I think it’s vital to ask yourself, are you upset you didn’t get the job because you Did Not Achieve the Thing, or because you are truly disappointed that THIS THING didn’t work out for you? If it’s the former, I’m agreeing with everything here about letting it go. But if it’s the latter–no, really, THIS KIND of work at THIS KIND of organization just jazzes you up like nothing else, well…achievement doesn’t just happen, despite what school might have taught many of us high-achievers. So if this really is the pivot in your career you want to make, it might be worth digging into how to improve at this kind of task and where to look for additional opportunities. Telling yourself “it’s so random, I could have been rejected for a hundred reasons not related to me” might be true, and it can cushion the sting of rejection, but if you really want to invest in a new career–this particular new career–then some strategy surrounding how you’re going to do so beyond “I will Achieve The Thing because that’s what I do” is probably not only helpful to your mental health, letting you build some resilience against the inevitable rejections because it’s all part of your larger plan, but necessary to eventually getting a YES and advancing.
Paint N Drip* July 26, 2024 at 11:05 am +1 Always a good thing to parse out! Especially for us ‘Former Gifted Kids’ out here
ijustworkhere* July 26, 2024 at 10:24 am Job Hunting is such a vulnerable task. it’s very difficult not to take any rejection personally. It is probably akin to how actors feel about auditions. Just remember that they know absolutely nothing about you–all they saw was a work product that maybe didn’t align with precisely what they were seeking. And, for all you know, they were just “sanity checking” a candidate they already favored by soliciting additional work product just to be sure they weren’t missing something. And….if they met you in an elevator they probably could not line you up with the work product you sent in. wishing you well.
xrunnerx* July 26, 2024 at 12:18 pm I was once rejected in the midst of an interview process — for a job that represented a major career goal, a leadership position at a very well known organization — after they asked me to take a personality test. It was a very dopey Meyers Briggs type test (which i took perfectly seriously) and they told me that as soon as I completed it, they’d get in touch to schedule the next, presumably final interview. They never got in touch, and the search consultant would only say they went with a different candidate. This was not even a skills test! To say I spiraled after this experience would be an understatement. It took me many months to get over it. This was one of a few frustrations that drove me out of my chosen career field.
Safely Retired* July 26, 2024 at 1:31 pm Hiring is hard work. This can make any means of cutting the field down to a manageable number look attractive to those doing the hiring. Those doing the hiring may not care much if qualified candidates are eliminated if they winnow it down to a group from which they can find someone good enough.
VL* July 27, 2024 at 11:17 am I had an interview with a trial task. I was rejected. About a month later, a recruiter reached out to me about the same job and we had a wonderful chat about how all of the recruiters in the area have been trying to fill that position for over a year and how all their amazing candidates have been rejected. Sometimes they are just looking for a unicorn.