Confidence – An Important Factor for Job Search Success

Faced with the need to find a job, most professionals have a pretty good sense of how to prepare themselves. They polish up their résumé, update their LinkedIn profile, and freshen up their professional wardrobe in preparation for interviews. Some go further, ordering personal business cards and reaching out to refresh contacts in their personal network. But few job-seekers pay much attention to one of the most important parts of preparing for a job search: establishing and maintaining a mindset of confidence and resilience that will enable them to overcome the many setbacks they are likely to encounter in the search process. Without that mindset, a job search can enter a negative spiral full of rejection, poor interview performance, frustration, and hopelessness.

Ironically, the confidence that is so important for a successful job search can be one of the first things to disappear as the search encounters obstacles.

Why is Confidence So Important?

We can look at confidence from perspectives of candidates and employers:

Candidates need to have confidence in themselves in order to perform well in interviews, and to convince interviewers of their ability to handle the requirements of the job.

Employers need to see confidence in candidates in order to feel confident that the candidates would work out well in the job if hired.

Without confidence, the dominant feeling is doubt on both sides. Unless doubt is dispelled, it tends to grow, and that leads to poor performance by the candidate and rejection by the employer.

How Can You Project Confidence When You Don’t Feel Confident?

If you have superb acting talents, you can project any emotion effectively, even if you’re not really feeling it inside. But most actors have to get themselves to feel an emotion before they can project it convincingly, and the same goes for the rest of us.

In order to project confidence, it’s important to FEEL confident. Achieving that feeling in the midst of conditions that could shake your confidence is the key.

What Can You Do to Increase Your Confidence?

Getting your confidence up is an inside job – it’s all inside your head. Much of it is driven by what you tell yourself, so monitor your self-talk carefully.

Negative self-talk (“I always seem to mess up when under pressure”) can quickly erode confidence, so nip that in the bud any time it starts, and replace it with self-affirming statements (“When I make a mistake, I correct it quickly and learn from it”).

Beyond monitoring your self-talk, here are some specific actions you can take to help build and maintain your confidence:

Take Stock of Your Assets

Make a list of your educational achievements, talents, and skills, including as many as you can think of. Of course, many of these should be on your résumé and LinkedIn profile, but you probably have others that wouldn’t fit those formats.

Think about how those assets can provide value for employers, and recognize that you have significant contributions to make to their success.

Review Your Accomplishments

Reflect back on your career, and note times that you made significant accomplishments. Examples could include creating a noteworthy document or product, achieving a challenging sales target, solving a problem that had vexed coworkers or customers, or aligning a group to accomplish a goal.

Practice Your Stories

Using your list of accomplishments, start building a library of stories that will help you convey the value you have created. Don’t worry about getting them all done at once; that could feel too daunting. Start by choosing a few of your most important accomplishments, and write out a short story for each, so that you familiarize yourself with the general content and flow of each story and can tell it extemporaneously. For more tips on creating and using a story library, see my article How to Prepare Yourself for a Successful Job Interview.

Get Help from Your Friends and Former Co-Workers

Ask your friends and former co-workers for their thoughts on your skills and talents. Consider asking them to be part of a 360° feedback exercise, in which they can anonymously share perspectives on your strengths, as well as opportunities for improvement (for details, see my article What’s the Right Career for You?).

Practice telling them your accomplishment stories, and ask for their feedback. They’ll help you identify what is most impactful, what parts of your stories should be tightened or deleted, and how to optimize the flow of your stories so that you can tell them smoothly and keep your audience engaged.?

Create a Vision Board

A Vision Board can be a great tool for keeping focus on your job search goal, and reminding yourself frequently of what makes you a compelling candidate for the job. Because it’s very visual, you can just glance at it to imprint in your mind some key concepts that will help reinforce your confidence.

A Vision Board can be a cork-board, a whiteboard, or just a piece of cardboard; the important things are that you post it in a place you’ll see it at least a couple of times a day, and that you can easily add content to it. Clip pictures from magazines or print images from the Internet, and include words and phrases that capture key elements of your ideal job and what makes you special. Rearrange and update your vision board as often as the whim strikes, so that it continues to stimulate and inspire you.

Help Other People

One of the best ways to keep yourself from becoming obsessed with your mistakes, deficiencies, and shortcomings is to take a break from focusing on yourself, and directing your energies toward helping others. Helping others feels good, and can provide clear evidence of how your talents can produce value. In many cases, the efforts you put into helping others can form the basis of accomplishment stories that can give you something current to talk about with prospective employers.

For more on the benefits of helping others, see my article Moving Your Thinking Beyond 'What's In It for Me?'

Expect Setbacks, and Remember That You Will Succeed if You Persist

Finding a job rarely involves a linear path. You’re almost certain to be faced with false starts, dead ends, rejections, unexpected reversals, and other setbacks. You might get lucky and land a job within a month or two, or circumstances beyond your control could keep you unemployed for a year or more. Seek to reach a level of acceptance of this reality, so that your confidence and motivation are not dashed every time you are faced with a setback.

Keep in mind that, to some degree, finding a job is a numbers game in which luck is a significant component, and that your chances of landing a job increase the more opportunities you pursue (assuming that you don’t spread yourself too thinly). If you persist in your efforts despite inevitable setbacks, and keep your confidence up, luck will eventually favor you, and you’ll land a job.?

Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Confidence?

If confidence is so important, you might wonder if too much of it might be a problem. Yes, a potential employer can certainly get turned off if you come across as cocky, arrogant, smug, and self-centered, or if you seem oblivious to — or dismissive of — real challenges.

In projecting confidence, you need to make the other person feel confident that you are capable of handling the challenges well, without sounding like you think you’re overly impressed with yourself or invincible. A good way to do this is to tell not only stories of your greatest accomplishments, but also to share a story or two about when things didn’t go so well. Ideally, these will be “recovery” stories in which you faced a setback due to something beyond your control, and you took an action that brought things to a good outcome. Show some humility and some openness to learning, and you should be able to mitigate the risk of coming across as overly confident.

Increase Your Chances of Landing a Job by Investing in Your Confidence

I hope this article has helped you recognize the important role that confidence plays in the job search process, and has given you ideas on how you can build and maintain your confidence. Make confidence-building a formal part of your job search preparation, and you’ll probably land your next job more quickly and painlessly.

Jim Schibler leads product management teams that deliver software experiences customers love, and he coaches professionals on job search and career management. He writes on a broad range of topics; see more of his articles at his website.

Image credits: Photographer courtesy Matheus Bertelli at Pexels.com; Self-Talk courtesy Wikimedia Commons; Dragon Slayer courtesy Piotr Siedlecki at publicdomainpictures.net; Two Women Meeting courtesy George Milton at Pexels.com; Vision Board courtesy Debra Roby at flickr.com; Helping Hand courtesy Leticia Bertin at flickr.com; Rejection courtesy KnowYourMeme.com; Overconfident Business Hero courtesy Kues1 at freepik.com.

Copyright ? 2023 Jim Schibler — All rights reserved