Been Rejected? Unsure of what to do now?

Written by Ellen

Being rejected might be one of the worst feelings in the world, but it can help you improve and grow if you handle it correctly.

So, you’ve been for a job interview and have just been told that the company won’t be giving you the job. You feel down heartened. You feel a bit upset. You may go and binge eat some cake, and that is okay!

It is completely normal to feel any sort of emotion, when you receive bad news. The most important thing, is to use this opportunity to develop yourself and find out what went wrong.

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Firstly, can you ask for feedback?

This is the best way to find out the reasons why you weren’t offered the job. It might be frightening and much easier to not request for feedback, but if you don’t, the experience of the interview process is worth almost nothing. Most employers will send you direct feedback from the interview; however, some of the larger companies are a bit harder to contact so you may have to persevere with contacting them to get your feedback.

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What should you do with the feedback?

Depending on the feedback provided, it may be hard to not feel angry at the company. If that is the case, take a deep breath before reading the next point and maybe have someone else read them to you in a softer manner. For example, the feedback will mention that you didn’t show that you’d researched the company enough or that you didn’t have the correct qualifications. In these cases, you know for your next interview to fully read the qualifications that are required to make sure that you match the criteria, and to research the company’s values and projects that they have been involved in.

The feedback may include points such as, not giving good evidence to your skills, not being involved in team assessments or not being as motivated as they were expecting. Again, in these cases, a reflection on how you think you did in the interview is a good start. Do you agree with the feedback? How can you do better next time? If you didn’t do well in team assessments, maybe you need more experience of doing them, or you should apply for jobs that aren’t as reliant on team skills.

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How to improve?

Experience of completing interviews is the best way to get better at interviews! I know this isn’t always possible, you can ask friends and family about their experiences or come and have a mock interview with us in the Career Studio.

If you have an obvious skills gap, how can you fill it? Volunteering is an amazing way to gain skills for your CV but also give you experiences to talk about in an interview.

Research the company’s values. Find out if they are family focussed or prefer people that can work more independently. You can then talk about your skills in relation to this during an interview.

Change the negatives into positives.

Let us know in the comments if you found this blog post was useful!

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