During my senior year, I had a final round interview with one of the MBB. As it is close to nearly impossible to even receive an interview from these companies coming from a non-target school (only two students received an interview that year from my school), I really wanted this offer, and I had been preparing for weeks.
Yet on the day of the interview, I distinctly remember walking out of the office feeling uneasy about my performance — I didn’t click with the interviewers and I couldn’t drive the case forward. I knew beforehand all case interviews are presented with two exhibits (specifically for this company), but I ended up receiving only one so I knew I was heading the wrong way. Sure enough, on the same day afternoon, I got the dreaded rejection call. “Jason unfortunately, I hate to say this but…” It sucked.
On top of not landing the offer, something else happened. A friend of mine (the other person who was in the interview process) got the offer that same day. When he told me, I was initially extremely happy that one of us got the offer. But then I remembered him saying he wanted the offer, but not as much as the other firm he was interviewing for.
I missed out on landing this offer to someone who didn’t want it nearly as much as I did. That was one of the most frustrating rejections I dealt with during recruiting. It caused me to question my self worth with poisonous thoughts like “will any employer hire me if I can’t even get an offer over someone who doesn’t want it?”
As students, we are conditioned to compete with our peers from an early age. In high school, students compete for college admissions. In college, students compete for graduate school or jobs. Even after your first job, it’s easy to continue the “rat race” and climb the corporate ladder for the sake of competing with others. There’s also MBA and exit opportunities to shoot for.
Unfortunately, this competition does not end unless you condition yourself to stop thinking this way. The rat race is real. It started in high school, and is only amplified in college with recruiting. This causes students to attribute self worth and status to one’s job or internship. We often quickly categorize those with prestigious job offers as smarter than others. But there are two glaring flaws with this line of thinking.
There are many smart and successful people who didn’t follow the conventional recruiting path. And, intelligence is just a small portion of what it takes to land a top job offer.
Sure, being smart helps with some components of interviewing, but I would argue hustling is even more important if you want to succeed in the recruiting gauntlet. And of course, there’s a heavy dose of luck with each step.
Why does any of this matter? Because of failure! If you haven’t already, I guarantee you will face rejection at some point during the recruiting process. For many of you, this already happened so many times you’ve lost count. For a few lucky others, you feel on top of the world and have yet to experience this.
Most people only like to talk about the job offers they got — ignoring the ones they didn’t get. I probably got rejected from five times as many companies as I landed offers with. And that’s just the companies I actually interviewed with. The picture looks far worse if I include all the companies that rejected my application without even calling me for an interview.
Failure is a fact of life for everyone. You can only maximize your professional potential if you have a system for dealing with inevitable failure. What do you do when rejection knocks you down? In a perfect world, we would all understand that job offers are not a measure of our self-worth. Our inherent value is no different before or after receiving a job offer. But we’re all human … this is easy to say and hard to believe when you get slapped in the face by a company you wanted to work for.
What I like to do is to give myself a day to feel sorry. I grab a pint of ice cream, turn on my favourite Netflix show, and constantly think over what went wrong during the interview. I play back the same scenario multiple times in my head, considering what I could have done differently. Then, I bounce back stronger than ever before — motivated to crush the next interview. During the day after that big rejection, I also let myself vent to a few close friends about my frustration with the process. I let myself feel the full range of emotions. But on day 2, I put together a plan to move forward and crush whatever opportunities were left, and eventually ended up with six other consulting offers.
That is my system for dealing with failures — it’s like a muscle that requires training. And once you strengthen it, no individual failure will stop you. I thought I was ready for the full-time recruiting cycle after dealing with hundreds of internship interviews but I was wrong.
One of the absolute truths in life is that you will face rejection, and it will happen again, and again, and again … Being successful requires you to develop this muscle of bouncing back and learning from your mistakes. So take each rejection as an opportunity to train, learn, and grow.
Luck will only come to those who are prepared to grasp it.
Jason Oh is a management consulting enthusiast with past experience in helping F500 financial services clients with product management, go-to-market and distribution channel strategy.
Image: Pexels
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