“Dear Niall…After further consideration, we regret to inform you that we will not be proceeding with your candidacy for this particular role.”
Whether you are a final-year student applying for graduate jobs or a second-year student looking for internships, you may have received each company’s own generic response to rejection. To those sending those automated emails — get a life!
This time of year can be intense due to the pressures of deadline season, and applying for these roles makes life even harder! These applications are so time-consuming and at times demoralising. Completing endless assessments that claim to be ‘getting to know you’ and after spending hours completing an array of tests, getting that rejection a few days later can be a real setback. However, it’s time to take power back from these employers and realise it’s their loss and not ours (that’s what I’m telling myself anyway…)
The new mantra: redirection and not rejection. It’s what is getting me through this season and reminds me that if a certain company does not want me, then it doesn’t mean the world is going to end or I won’t achieve my dream career. It just means that right now I am not the right fit for that role, and that is okay! I have recently reminded myself any application that involves me doing loads of maths assessments isn’t for me. Sometimes these applications remind us that we should go and follow our dreams and not pretend to care about a fake scenario designed for a recruitment process.
“The new mantra: redirection and not rejection”
For those second years, any of you who do secure an internship, congratulations! You are killing it! Yet if any of you aren’t quite getting there right now, that too is okay. In my second year, I got to the final round of my dream internship and got rejected at the last hurdle. I had begun to plan my life all around this one role and when I didn’t get it, I thought the world was going to end. It didn’t end; hence I am now writing this. As a result, I worked at home then fled the country and travelled around Europe for a month. I am not saying this is the answer, but I was very fortunate, and it did in fact help me…
What I am trying to say is that these rejections are not an indication of your self-worth or talent. If a role rejects you, dust yourself down and get back up again (which can be so hard, I know) and be reassured the dream career is waiting for you! And for us final years, if we graduate and the dream job isn’t there waiting, this could be the perfect time to reassess on what has been an incredible few years and work out what we truly want from life.
Finally: if this was the start of the biopic of your life, we need to see the struggle. No one wants to watch a film leading to greatness that encounters no setbacks! It’s all for the plot…
