Tag: dream career

Didn’t get the job? Fix These Mistakes to Feel Better

Photo by Raj Eiamworakul vs Unsplash

Ever have your spleen with cut out with kindergarten scissors? 

Anyone who’s lost a bid for a dream job may consider the above statement a minimization of how they feel.  Exaggerating aside, we’ve all been there and never want to experience it again.  And, an endless stream of recruiter listicles (ie. The Seven Must-Do’s Before Your Next Interview) do little to prevent the pain. To retain our sanity, let’s disregard them for now.  Instead of gaming the decisions of fickle hiring managers let’s focus on what we can control – our own thoughts, feelings, and actions.  

The following are common mistakes we make during and between interviews, and after the process ends.  Avoiding them will not guarantee us the job. Then again, that may not be what we want anyways.  Read on to learn why.

Mistakes DURING the Interview Process:

Missing Negative Signs

For a hiring manager, the purpose of an interview is to measure our worthiness for the job. It’s a problem when we, the candidate, rely on the interview for the same thing.  When we only seek validation, we often fail to catch negative signals because too afraid to see them.  Did the interviewer give us positive verbal and nonverbal cues?  Did he proceed with a head-down, list-following approach or did he show real interest?  Managers hire people they trust. Often this equates to someone they know.  They tend to bypass formality for candidates they really like and follow procedure for interviewees who are placeholders (additional candidates used to make the interview process appear legitimate when a target candidate has already been selected).  Sadly, any of us can fulfill the placeholder role at any time in the interview process. 

Mistaking Friendliness for Approval

Surprise! We may not be the only person in the room looking to be liked.  That’s right, hiring managers want validation as well. And, there’s no easier way to win someone’s favor than praise. Some interviewers are looking simply to get through the process unscathed.  Making everyone feel like a viable candidate may be their way to accomplish this.  Isn’t the ego are marvelous thing?  Outwardly, it may be difficult to distinguish between an interviewer’s false approval and real interest in our candidacy. Enthusiastic praise in an interview should trigger our focus to sharpen. At this point, we should ask the interviewer for specifics on how our the skills they just complimented apply to the job itself. Any vagueness or hedging in the interviewer’s answer should hint that their praise is hollow. 

Mistakes Made In-Between Interviews:

The Neverending De-brief

Did they like my answers? Did make sense to tell that joke?  Was it a positive sign when the interviewer said _________?   MAKE IT STOP!  In-between interviews, we often analyze our situation into oblivion.    In truth, we know we had one or more interviews in the past and little more. What they really thought of us and our answers is likely to remain a mystery – even if we get the job. Instead, we need focus on what we learned about the job and our prospective manager and how both stand to change our life moving forward.

Choosing Fairy Tales over Nightmares

Wouldn’t it be great to be the chosen candidate and live happily ever after?  Too often, we lose ourselves in this fairy tale and, in doing so, fail to consider the prospective job’s potential to suck. It’s the job search equivalent of love at first sight.  Don’t know the benefits?  No worry, they’re probably good!  And, surely the manager will always be as friendly as she was in the interview! How easily we chose to create the architecture of our careers in crayon.  In an alternate reality, aka the REAL one, we can chose to look at the downside of a potential job MORE than the upside. Until we have a formal offer, the default answer to our candidacy is always NO.  Accepting this reality frees us to make an objective comparison between the shiny and new possible job and our horrible, boring, current one.  Making friends with the nightmare of not getting the offer is always the better path.

Mistakes Made Post “Dream Job” Loss:

Never Deciding Whether or Not We Truly Wanted the Job

This is the post-mortem result of fairy tale fantasizing.  If we never decide whether or not we want a job, we risk forever mourning it’s possibilities.  In reality, the position may have made us miserable.  Denying this is futile. We know, without question, winning the lottery brings life-changing riches, yet we don’t beat ourselves up over losing.  Why should we persecute ourselves over jobs we never have wanted?  There’s no universal law that dictates that we must win every job offer, good and bad.  Having the courage to formulate an opinion ahead of getting an offer releases us from the grip of hubris.

Neglecting to Find Closure

Recruiter wisdom often lacks the sensitivity we require after not winning the perfect job. Typically they recommend thanking every one under the sun and casually annoying them over time to “stay on their radar”.  If we’ve already decided we don’t want the job, why bother?  Isn’t our time better spent on the lost jobs we really do want?  In the rare cases when the job fit and opportunity are superb, staying in contact with the employer and fighting to work for them is the right course.  Suffice to say, if we don’t want the job now that we’ve lost it, and had some time to reflect, it probably wasn’t right for us in the first place.

One last thing, believe it or not, it can be extremely helpful to find out who actually won the job.  Often the answer is only a quick LinkedIn search or grape-vine conversation away.  Doing so can open a window into the hiring manager’s decision process.  Sometimes the “other candidate” is truly more qualified.  Other times, you can breathe a sigh of relief.  You just avoided working for a manager not competent enough to recognize how wonderful you are!

Sincerely,
Meaning2work.com

For More Advice on how to prepare for job interviews, check out my earlier post “5 Reasons to Colossally Fail at Your Next Interview“

Here are a some other post-Interview/post-mortum questions to ask yourself.  Can you think of more?  Feel free to comment:

  • Would I have gotten along with the boss? 
  • Was the interviewer in a hurry? Did she really seem to care about answering my questions?
  • What did I find out about the previous person in the role?
  •  Did I fact-check the story I was told?
  • Was the salary and benefits truly better than what I make now?

Can I Sell You a Lifeboat? The True Cost of Dream Careers


Perhaps the line between empowering guru and charlatan isn’t as clear as we think? We needn’t look any further than the hucksters of dream jobs that typically involve being your own boss and working from home. They float on the fringes of our ship-wrecked careers selling what else? Life boats.

Their sales pitch is success. After-all, look at what they accomplished! Here’s the problem. Sellers of quit-you-day-job, become famous, be your own boss type courses are smart enough not to make promises that legally make them liable. They make NO gaurantees that following in their footsteps take you to the same destination. They rely on our frustration with current circumstances and need for relief to drive our decision to purchase.

Then, after we’ve bought, we instantly become to them a liability. For most unethical gurus, teaching us is merely an item on a to-do list that needs to get done. Unless we can be sold something more, every minute spent on us is seen as a necessary expense.

Good Intentions – Poor Vision

One can’t broadly implicate all marketers of ineffective advice as wolves-in-yuppies-clothing. In many cases, they may truly believe in the knowledge they impart. After all, look what they accomplished!

Unfortunately, they may have one or more blind spots that cloud their decision-making. One blind spot may be the fact that lucky circumstances played a role in their success. Another could be that the marketplace that made them successful has changed to being less favorable to people following in their footsteps. A more concerning blind spot would be a success guru’s lack of awareness that their own achievements are tenous and based on short-game thinking. This refers to a hyper focus on short-term success over long-term goodwill, Seth Godin (an example of an ethical purveyor of advice), summed it up well in his blog.

A guru can have one or more blind spots and still have the best of intentions. Although they truly want to help us, they are, at times, misguided in their execution of that help.

Our Responsiblity as Advice Seekers

This is where we, as advice seekers, can benefit from caveat emptor or buyer beware approach. Wouldn’t most people be gainfully working for themselves if a single book or online course was all it took? This problem isn’t limited to infomercials or the online marketers either. Universities accross the country, from the local strip mall to the Ivy League offer courses in fields where success is statistically unlikely.

Perhaps, in some cases, the way training courses are marketed is all that needs to change. A more honest approach may be to promote some careers as side gigs or even hobbies. Do we want a world where the value of knowledge is measured only by return on investment? Shrinivas Rao recently conducted an interesting interview with William Deresiewicz on the Unmistakable Creative podcast on this very topic. A class on septic tank clean-up may impart skills that are quite marketable. Why can’t it exist side-by-side in a college course catalog with Selfie Photography 101?

Let’s not fail to ask ourselves, why we’re looking for advice in the first place.
Beyond the solving the problems of our current situation, what are we really looking for? An escape from stress? A feeling of legitimacy? To feel happy again? If so, click here to take my miracle course! (Just kidding! I had to do it.)

Seriously, what we really are seeking may be found in another source. That could be advice from a therapist or coach. By all means, we can quit the day job if we want. It may help first just to see if that’s the real source of our problems.

For me, no quick decision to quit my sales job was needed. What I found a couple years ago was that my perspective needed adjusting. As a result, I was able to grow from needing a quick career escape to patiently planning a career migration. No, things haven’t all gone perfectly for me since then. However, I can confidently say I feel much happier about myself and my work than had I not made the change.

As for anyone selling advice, yes there will the charlatans selling us inflated and false hopes. Reading uplifting stories sometimes focuses us too much on results. See my last post on measurement for more thoughts on this. We buy their courses because want the same happy ending they had. I’d like to see the tellers of miracle, David-and-Goliath-like, success stories give more consideration to how realistic and repeatable their success actually is.

Therefore, we can all benefit from tempering our expectations of the people we pay to teach us and question any story sounds too Cinderella-like to be true. We can choose instead, to keep our day jobs, for now, and measure success in joy not dollars.

Sincerely,
Meaning2work