I'm writing this article thinking about all the times when I've gotten an angry email or angry feedback from a candidate after being rejected. At this point in my career I've conducted about 1350 interviews, so this has happened more than a handful of times.
The last time I applied for jobs I got offers in 3/4 places. That one offer I didn't get really stung. At one point, I was an unemployable recent grad too, so most of what I got was rejections. I can't decide what stung more; getting rejected by 1/4 companies after 18 years of experience and in spite of being a voraciously fast-learning engineer, or getting rejected 24/25 times as a new college grad barely capable of adding value.
In any case, rejection stings for sure. I wanna remind people of a few things which will hopefully help them frame these rejections in a more positive manner:
- Nothing that happens in an interview process reflects on you in any intrinsic way. There are many factors why you might fail to?solve an exercise. Things like a bad night's sleep, an overly heavy meal, dehydration, or simply not hitting it off with your interviewer are all things that can cause you to perform worse than usual. Job interviews are imperfect and if you get unlucky with one of these things, it increases your likelihood of failing the interview. The important thing to remember is that failing an interview does not mean you are a bad developer and it's not a personal attack against you.
- The job requirements might be more specific than just needing a good, capable engineer. A capable engineer can learn anything if given the appropriate time. However, from the perspective of the company,?it usually doesn't make sense to invest in people that way. This does not reflect on you as a person at all. It's simply a mismatch between the skills you possess and the ones the job is looking for.
- Unless you are applying at a hyper-growth newly minted unicorn or at a MAANG company, your application is never viewed in isolation. Instead, your performance is compared against the other available applicants. Even in the case of MAANG, the psychological phenomenon of anchoring is a real thing, so if the last engineer that your interviewer saw was super-impressive, that makes it harder on you to be the follow-up act.
- None of the above means that you should completely ignore signals from the market and the interview process. If you're an engineer with 5+ years of experience and you're still getting rejected by more than half the technical phone screens or on-sites you do, that means you probably lack something. You may lack soft skills, or you may lack core in-demand knowledge (I'm thinking about all the AndroidAuto engineers who basically can't pass an interview anywhere but other car companies because their skills have no transfer to web systems or even real mobile dev).
I have a book, which I co-authored with my friend Zack Burt, on how to do better at interviews. You can get on the waitlist for its release here: https://ub.millionairecodersclub.com/
HR Technologist | Leader who cares | World and Time Traveler | Advocate of Meaningful Work
2 年Nice article! Very balanced view. Don’t let the rejection defines you but in the meanwhile, don’t ignore the message. Take every job interview as a learning opportunity to test yourself against the job market as well as your interview skills. Matter of fact, getting the job interview already proves your success in your resume.