I’m Not the Best Candidate? At Least Get the Facts Right!

                                                                                      Photo by Resume Genius on Unsplash

The wonderful sting of rejection.

I’ve been looking for a job recently with an increasing stench of desperation. It seems that I can fail the interview process at any point, and each time I’m left waiting on tenterhooks for acceptance or (more frequently) feedback on what imperfection I revealed.

Today is a new experience for me. A professional rejection at first stage.

The Rejection

Last week I had a first-stage recruiter interview (chat) for a job. The details? It’s the same type of organization in which I currently work, and the job title is identical to my current one.

A rejection at this stage occasionally happens to me, and honestly, I might have answered the one softball technical question they asked more confidently.

So, the next working day after my interview, I receive the rejection email. It was professional, courteous and … total rubbish. 

“…the comments from the business were that they enjoyed the meeting…”

The truth (as the recruiter will well know) is that I’ve never met “the business”. So the rest of the feedback “other candidates had more direct experience than you do” was probably copy-pasted from a template too.

The Issue

I’ve a problem with this. It isn’t that I expect a personalized breakup letter after every interview, but part of the game is that employees pretend to be interested in a product and employers pretend to care about people and getting the best candidate for the job.

When you copy-paste a template answer at least get it right, please. It’s the attention to detail (they slapped my name into the template leaving a double-space as a prefix to my name). They’ve moved on, I totally get it. But just sometimes I’d like to feel that I’m treated as a person and not just an entry in a database to be deleted at will. 

What’s worse is I sometimes feel that recruiters might not even have sent to email to the right person — it’s a cookie-cutter rejection. Then it occurred to me that how might that recruiter be able to judge my performance in the interview? No wonder so many of these people end up ghosting candidates since they aren’t capable of sending the news professionally.

Conclusion

I’m telling myself that the moral of the story is to stop sweating on rejections. Of all people, I should know that companies barely care about you while you are on the payroll, and seldom are in a position to rate your performance when they see it day to day.

If a company has low engagement that’s a comment on them rather than your abilities. Move on and move up, there’s sure to be another job soon (I hope).