Applicant rejection letterApplicant rejection letterThere is a time in the life of every job seeker when they get the dreaded rejection letter or email and it can get under our skin and cause a disturbance but I submit that it can be a useful tool. Let’s look at a typical rejection letter that looks like this:Thank you for your interest in ABC Company, while your background is impressive we have selected another candidate whose qualifications more closely match what we are looking for. We invite you to check back with us to see if we have other opportunities in the future. This is a relatively simple statement and doesn’t seem specific enough to bother taking personally…yet anytime we are confronted with a rejection it is our natural reaction. I prefer to save these emails when they occur and group them together for further review. The power is in the numbers…if I take them one at a time I miss something very important…the pattern. Individual emails read one at a time are a minor nuisance…I see they are not interested..feel inadequate temporarily and don’t give it too much thought…if so, then I am making a big mistake… When I look at 10 of them or 5 of them I can see something else…am I routinely applying for jobs in an industry that demands something I can’t offer? Can I go back to the job description and see that they required specific software experience? Am I too lazy to customize my resume? Am I plastering the job market with a bland resume that causes me to blend in with the woodwork? In my experience I can see a pattern emerge with rejection…it can be a weapon or a tool depending on how I look at it. Job hunting is either an exciting period of discovery wherein you can go out into the job market with a shopping cart and fill it with all the jobs you always wanted to do…sometimes you get a little over confident and put a dream job in the cart even though there is a small chance you are actually qualified for it…and other times you may fill it with jobs that are nothing to get excited about…you are just feeling desperate and lunging at anything. The seasoned job seeker knows how to blend a little of both types of activity so they can get the phone ringing…but we can hardly be surprised when we start to get responses reminding us that we applied for something we were ill suited for. I believe it is best if I sharpen my focus and improve my aim by being a little (or a lot) more careful in how I spend my energy. If every resume or every contact counts why would I waste time wall papering job search websites? People that post their resume on random websites while passively waiting for others to do the work are quite possibly doomed to inactivity. It is called a job search for a reason…you must search! The next time you get a rejection letter see if you can determine what you might have done to create the cause and effect. Applicant rejection letter written by Ken Bownes Applicant rejection letter SponsorsMost read articles - Applicant rejection letter Home |
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