The True Confidence Breaker OR Maker

A lot of people speak about how sending out your resume and getting no response will break your confidence.  BUT, that same lot of people will neglect to mention how the interviewing process can break your confidence even more.

At my last position, I knew the environment wasn't a good fit for me.  That's not to say that anything was wrong with the company - but just how you should be a good fit for a position, a company should be a good fit for you.  With my immediate realization that it wasn't a good fit, I restarted my job hunt.

Job hunting in its entirety can be a confidence breaking undertaking, but for me, sending out sometimes hundreds of applications and hearing nothing back is par for the course.  What does bother me, however, is going on countless interviews and hearing nothing back.  I just left the interviewing process behind and let me be the first to say, many days interviews had me questioning my skill set and my ability to interview well.

Whether I felt like I kicked ass or like I did horribly, more often than not, I got no follow up.  Not even a 'thanks for coming'.  When I felt like I did poorly and heard nothing, I'd be like okay - maybe I deserved that.  But whenever I felt like I did an amazing job, I'd be crushed by the complete silence that followed.  I remember feeling so confident following some interviews that I would start to come up with concepts I could present should I be offered the position.  And after jotting down ideas, I'd literally never hear from the interviewer again.

I can't even tell you how many interviews I've been on between last year and now.  My parents recently asked me which companies I had interviewed with and I rattled off a fairly expansive list of companies spanning several different industries.  It got to the point where I started sending "thank you for the interview" notes afterward just to get some feedback and I would still get nothing.

I started to voice my concerns to a few close friends and some would reassure me - confirming that job hunting is a confidence killer - while others would say they wish they could be a fly on the wall during my interviews to see what I was doing wrong.  While I don't necessarily think I was doing anything wrong, I would have been open to interviewers giving me negative feedback or telling me my interviewing downfalls, rather than giving me straight silence.

Despite feeling pretty confident in my interview skills, I started reading interview tips to try to improve anyway.  I found this amazing thread on twitter with HR professionals and working people in general giving tips on how to ace an interview.  I started preparing more questions to ask interviewers and taking out my big book of questions during interviews.  After the work I put in to improve the way I interviewed, I had an interview where the panel told me that I was the most refreshing candidate they had interviewed with all day.  They told me that they liked my ideas and could see how they could give them a fresher perspective.  I thought they gave me bomb compliments by the time the interview had concluded.  But guess what? I still heard absolutely nothing back.

I can bounce back from sending out tons of resumes and hearing nothing back - just keep sending out more.  But getting to the interview stage and getting positive feedback then being ghosted is in some ways worse than having an amazing first date then never hearing from the guy or girl again.  I eventually got out of the interview game, but trust me when I say - it's hard out here for a pimp.