Interview Rejection

You receive the rejection email. Now what? Get angry? Decide you didn't want the job in the first place? We've all been there, but is there anything else you can do?

A job interview is your chance to convince someone of 2 things:

1. You are capable of doing the job
2. You are better than all the other applicants

A tall order at the best of times!

Whether you fail at the paper sifting phase or the interview, the answer is the same. You did not convince the interviewer of the 2 points above.

For the paper sifting phase, let's take a look at your CV or the form you filled in for the application. Are the skills required for the role detailed and in plain sight? If so, does it show when you last utilised these skills? Does it show how long you've been working and honing these skills?

Put yourself in the place of the interviewer. Reading your application, do you see a person not only skilled in this field, but also passionate about it? Listing your skills will get you so far, but what the interviewer really wants is to find someone who can take a problem away from them, so that they don't need to think about it any more. Now they have you! If someone worked with the skills that the role demands but it was a few years ago, what does that say? Have they moved on? Are they still passionate about this field?

To put some passion back in to the application, consider talking about the challenges you faced. The mistakes you made, the pitfalls of the technology and how you overcame them.

If you're at the interview stage then the chances are that your CV does show the skills required. Now it's your chance to put some meat on the bones. Talk about your experience, but more importantly, your passions. In most interviews the interviewer will talk for 10 minutes about the company, the history and hopefully, the values. I would encourage you to be able to talk for 5 minutes about yourself, your career and it's direction. This direction part is important. I'm not talking about the classic "In 5 years I want to be a manager" speech, but if you want to pursue a career in AI then you should be able to talk endlessly about what attracts you about it, what problems you'd like to resolve and what steps you've made towards breaking into the field. If you cannot, what does that say?

In my view, we spend too long pondering the technical questions we got wrong and studying the answer for next time. I would argue that this rarely delivers any value. It's more likely you simply didn't show enough of yourself, whether that's your skills or your passion and direction.