Learning From Rejection

by Chaz Bennett, Healthcare Career Consultant, Acclivity Healthcare

One of the most important skills that you can learn while hunting for a new job has nothing to do with how well you interview. And it has little correlation to how well your resume is formatted or how many extra-curricular activities that you had in college. Instead, the single most important skill that you need to work towards honing as quickly as possible has more to do with how you deal with rejection. Anyone who has been looking for a job for any length of time will tell you that rejection is a big part of the game. You can choose to let it get you down and discourage you, or you can choose to take it for what it really is: an incredible learning opportunity just waiting to be taken advantage of.

Rejection is Going to Happen

The first thing that you need to learn about rejection is that it is rarely, if ever, personal. When we’re rejected, we have a tendency to take it as something of a direct assault on who we are, either as people or as employees. This isn’t the case. Sometimes the job just wasn’t the right fit for the type of employee you are. Other times, you lacked certain core experiences that the position required.

In both cases, it has nothing to do with who you are as a person and, as a result, isn’t something you should dwell on in any type of negative way. In fact, the reason why you were rejected probably didn’t even have anything to do with you as an employee and likely had a lot to do with external factors you aren’t even aware of. The sooner you get comfortable with the fact that the reason you didn’t get a job had nothing to do with what the interviewer thought of you as a person, the sooner you’ll be able to use it to actually improve your chances in the future.

What Rejection is Really Telling You

Consider the example of a job that just wasn’t a good fit for you as an employee. Maybe your personality didn’t necessarily mesh with the existing corporate culture at the business you interviewed at. Maybe you’re more comfortable working alone and the position required a huge amount of collaboration. What are these things trying to tell you, aside from the fact that you didn’t get the job?

Perhaps the lesson is that you need to learn how to narrow your focus and identify certain positions that you ARE an appropriate fit for before you actually interview for them. Maybe you’re being told that collaboration is more important than you thought it was and that it’s something you should focus on getting better at in the future.

Now, think about the example of a position you didn’t get because you lacked experience. This is an obvious one: the interviewer has just given you objectionable advice that you can use to open up a whole new world of job opportunities. If you’re lucky enough to be told exactly why you weren’t selected for a position AND it’s something that you can improve in yourself (be it by taking a class or getting more hands-on experience), you now have a very real goal that you can set for yourself in order to improve as an applicant. We should all be so lucky to get that type of advice. The fact that it came in the form of getting turned down for a job is beside the point.

Rejection can be tough, but it should never be debilitating. By recognizing rejection as a learning opportunity, you remove much of the negative aspects of its power. What you’re left with is a road map that you can use to make yourself more attractive to potential employers, giving yourself a much better chance at landing that position you’ve always wanted in the future.