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Developing career resilience
Developing career resilience

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4.1 Coping with rejection

Another aspect of resilience in the recruitment process is your ability to cope if you don’t get the job or promotion. TargetJobs (n.d.) offers the following advice for dealing with job rejection:

  • Rejection doesn’t mean you did anything wrong – another candidate happened to stand out more on the day.
  • Rejection isn’t personal – the outcome of a recruitment process isn’t about you as a person; it’s a ‘snapshot’ view of you according to how closely you have demonstrated a set of competencies, behaviours and values on a particular day.
  • Rejection happens to everyone – even current CEOs, world leaders, bestselling authors and other seemingly successful people will have experienced knockbacks in their lives.
  • Rejection means you’re still learning – the best way to improve your interview technique is to attend interviews; very few people are naturally good at them the first time around.
  • Rejection doesn’t mean you’ll never work for the employer – the recruitment process assesses you for a particular role at a particular point in time, and your chance of success depends partly on who else applies. The employer is not saying they never want you.

The best way to respond to rejection is to learn from it and use what you’ve learned to do better next time. This is resilience in action!