How Not to Land a Job (2/3)

|| Planes, Trains, and Rented Cars ||

This is part 2 of a three-part article. If you haven't read part 1, you can read it here.

Six months in, a dozen or so of my connections had promised job opportunities in the future. Some of them were friends, some of them were family friends; but with time, you learn not to put a single ounce of hope on anyone’s promises of a job. In March of 2017, I moved in with a childhood friend in the city of Leamington Spa near Birmingham. For a whole month, I traveled around England visiting a big number of cities including London, Manchester, Oxford, Cambridge, Northampton, and Bristol. I’d get up early in the morning, take a train (or several) to the destination city and attend one or more career fairs and/or networking sessions before hopping on the last train back home towards Leamington Spa. I was surviving on a diet comprising of Pret A Manger sandwiches and Starbucks coffee on the go.

In these events, I would scan a company’s booth with a long gaze and decide who looked like the most approachable person there. It was never about talking to the most important person at the booth, it was about getting introduced to them by someone else who worked there. So I’d approach that person, have a nice 5-minute chat about a relevant topic, and then they’d introduce me to “the decision-maker”; a manager or an HR personnel who has the ability to put your CV at the top of the stack. I’ve found this to be a good strategy to maximize my chances at such encounters.

LinkedIn and Eventbrite were my strongest tools for finding out what was happening where. I was making most of these trips with my friend since we were both fresh grads looking for jobs. On the days we didn’t leave Leamington, we’d sit for hours on end in a coffee shop emailing the people we met the day before and applying for new jobs online. I was getting better still, but hadn’t been invited for a single interview. Just as I was ready to give up, I struck gold – okay, perhaps it was copper. A local self-storage firm called me up to schedule an interview; we had met at a career fair in London a week earlier. I ended up rejecting the offer because the graduate program paid next to nothing and I felt like I can do better elsewhere. Nevertheless, it was a job offer, and it was my first! A real job offer that meant there was hope.

-      Oh, so you turned down a job offer? That was silly. You should always take the job and then search for something better later.

-      I already had a job. Job hunting is a full-time job done faster and so much more efficiently when you don’t have another 9-5 one.

In order to attend my graduation, I traveled back to Saudi Arabia. Having spent a month abroad, it was almost like someone hit the reset button; I was promised an interview by a trusted friend and I fell for it. Weeks went by and nothing was materializing. Acting like I was not panicking, I started door knocking – this is also known as cold knocking. I started printing CVs and knocking on doors of random companies, or ones that I’ve looked up online. First, I started in the city of Dammam; I visited hundreds of companies in the industrial city and was usually rejected by security guards at the front gate. I then decided to rent a car and try my luck on the other side of the border in the Kingdom of Bahrain where cold knocking was a little more forgiving; I was able to make it to a couple of HR departments. Nothing still. The psychological cost of rejection after days of door-knocking outweighs the slim potential of actually making it to an interview. This is because I was used to getting rejected at the rate of 1-2 companies a day via e-mail; but when you’re rejected by 30 companies a day, face to face, it gets to you.

Around September of 2017, the hiring cycle was picking up again and I received a call from one of the HR personnel at one of the two firms I had previously interned in. She was inviting me for a “final interview”, a mere formality at that specific company which is usually the equivalent of a job offer. It was a great offer, but the job was in a country I didn’t want to work in at the time. For that reason and a couple of other personal reasons, I turned the offer down. But this was job offer number 2, YAY! Hope still exists, very slim, spread far and wide, but it exists.

-      What an absolute snob! You turned down an offer from a huge multinational company because it was in a different country?

-      When evaluating a job at a different country, you think of political and economic stability, whether or not you can start a family there etc, etc. And yes, at the very end, it comes down to a take-it-or-leave-it situation, and I reluctantly turned it down.

After turning this offer down, I doubled down my efforts and started reaching out once more to the people around me for references. A friend recommended me at his company and I interviewed for a sales engineer position selling firewater systems to factories an hour away from my hometown in Saudi; I believe I did very well in that interview. The interviewer told me that he would get back to me in a few days. He didn’t.

After 13 months of being on the hunt, I haven’t found what I’m looking for. I therefore started working on what many people consider to be “Plan B”, graduate school applications. I hated the idea, but I would rather find myself in graduate school than stuck in a job I’m not interested in, getting paid less than my worth. I studied, sat the GRE twice and got accepted in a graduate program at the University of Texas at Austin. This meant that I would be moving out of Saudi again; my plan to stay in Saudi had failed twice. However, I was still trying to find a job, applying left and right. After attaining my visa and buying my ticket to the States, I received a call from the manager at the firewater systems company – I got an offer. I turned down the offer because it came at the eleventh hour, less than a month from my travel date. But this was job offer number 3!

We’re about to leave to the United States now, where a completely new chapter unfolds. More on that in the next part of this article.