Yesterday I stumbled across a perfect job posting for a tech writer. I updated my resume to match their requirements, wrote an elegant and concise cover letter, and hit “send”; confident that they would be delighted at my sheer awesomeness and want to offer me untold fortunes within minutes.
Instead, I was utterly rejected. Not just form rejected, but a personal rejection from the department head saying “It is well known that you are completely incompetent and also a fraud, so it will be a cold day in hell before we hire you and also you suck.”
I might be hyperbolizing there a little bit, but I did get an email saying “lol, sorry, no”. I had a bit of back and forth with the guy to address his reasons for my consummate and rapid rejection, but the end result remains that I don’t have the skills they’re looking for to such a degree that it warranted a personal email of “no thx”.
Logically, I know that rejection is 99% of the game. I know that I’m lucky that I not only got an immediate response from my application, but had someone willing to answer my questions about why I was turned down – it’s a far cry from the waiting game I’m playing with companies I applied to last month. I know that my not being what this company is looking for doesn’t mean that I don’t have skills, or that there isn’t another company out there that would be thrilled to have me. I KNOW all this.
.. but that didn’t stop me from spending most of yesterday afternoon in a serious funk, convinced that I will never be employed again. There is very little room for logic inside this glittery unicorn head of mine, least of all when I am busy wallowing in my own crapulence. I feel slightly better about things today, but I am still full of illogical woe when I think about it (like when I write updates all about how much I suck).
I HATE job hunting.
And relentless logic.
delicious juice dot com 
an email saying “lol, sorry, no”. really? that’s a little insensitive and unprofessional, non?
i know it might not make you feel better but on average, it takes about 2-4 months to land another job (managerial level) and about 4-6 months (executive level).
i was unemployed for 9 weeks (!) before landing my current EA gig. and in that time, only had 3 face-to-face interviews and one phoner interview. i too thought i’d never be gainfully employed but then it happened.
hang in there, kimli. something superb will come your way.
The email didn’t actually say that; I just summed it up :) It was actually really helpful, and pointed out a couple things on my resume that could have been done better (which I’ve since fixed) .. but it still sucked. I don’t like rejection!
So sorry to read this. I can absolutely relate. Enough said.
I was unemployed for 8 months and got flushed from jobs I was convinced I was right for, got ignored for jobs I thought I would kick ass at, and got rejected after interviews I thought I nailed. Then I applied for a job that I thought was a stretch, didn’t even get an interview the first round, wrote off, then got called in when they didn’t like their first round candidates and figured, “What the hell, let’s look at some of the rejects.”
It’s a big bin of LEGO out there, you just gotta leave yourself open for the right piece to fit.
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