You Can Have A Great Interview And Still Not Get The Job

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You did everything right prior to your interview. Your experience and ambitions lined up perfectly with the job. You researched the company. Had pithy things to say about them and about yourself. You came home and told your partner it was just a matter of days before the good news came.

And then instead of good news, you got rejected! Everything was so great! You wonder what you could possibly have done better.

Sometimes it’s because of something you did or didn’t do, unfortunately, the answer to that is nothing. Not all great interviews lead to a job. Sometimes the situation has nothing to do with you or your qualifications. It’s them not you.

A change in the job description

There are times when you have a strong idea about the direction you see for a project. Then once you start working on it you realize things aren’t going to work out as expected and you have to change direction. The same thing can sometimes happen to a company. They put out a posting for a certain job and then something changes and they realize they need to fill a different sort of position altogether.

Experiences and qualifications of other candidates

If you felt good about your experiences and qualifications, chances are you were perfectly qualified to do the job. However, you don’t know what other candidates brought to the table. One of them may have experiences that while not directly related to the job, made everyone look at the position from another perspective. Someone’s experience of teaching abroad for a year might give them an up on the communication skills front.

They already had someone else in mind

It could be that the company already had someone in mind for the job before ever posting the position. Someone from inside. Or someone who had some sort of association with them. There might also be someone inside the company pulling for a specific candidate.

Personality clash

You probably don’t hit it off with every single person you meet. Through no fault of your own it could be that the interviewer simply didn’t get the warm and fuzzies during your interview. If that’s the case it most likely wouldn’t have been a good fit in the long run anyway. You spend too much time at work for personality clashes to be an issue.

On the bright side you had a great interview. Bring the confidence of that into your next one.

Stop Avoiding and Start Doing

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There are things I must do every day. Things I absolutely can’t avoid because my job depends on them. There are others that I should do – also because my job depends on them, but are less time dependent. Beyond those are things I should do to advance myself personally as well as professionally. Things in the second and third category can get passed along for days or weeks or sometimes months at a time.

Always putting out fires

So often it comes to pass that the only way things in the second and third category get done is because they have suddenly moved up to category one. At that point I often I turn into Chicken Little, running around crying, “The sky is falling. The sky is falling.” I’ve avoided things to the point where it’s do or die and it actually feels like the sky is falling.

Putting things off indefinitely always catches up to you

Putting things off indefinitely is not a way to get them done. Avoiding them also, unsurprisingly doesn’t work. Eventually we must, as they say, pay the piper. Rather than facing tasks or obligations or goals from a position of stress and fear, learn to deal with them before the sky starts falling.

Make yourself accountable for your distractions

We all have fall back methods for avoiding what we should be doing. We might check email fifteen times a day instead of the three we actually only need to get through the day. Maybe Facebook is your weakness, or the ten or so online sites you like to check in on regularly.

It doesn’t matter what you turn to for distraction, the key is noticing when you do it. When you find yourself drifting from what you know you should be doing, stop and ask. Why am I doing this right now? Recognize your tendencies and call yourself out on them.

What are you avoiding?

When we don’t want to do something on our list we automatically find anything else to focus on. When you find yourself tying up your running shoes, yet again, rather than face the task at hand, ask yourself why. Are you afraid of the difficulty of the task? Success? Failure? The time involvement? Once you define your reasons for staying away it becomes easier to break them down and get past them.

Take the first step

Once you’ve broken down the reasons behind your avoidance take one step forward. You don’t need to complete the entire task in one sitting, but you can certainly do something. Set yourself a time limit. Say I will work on this for fifteen minutes (or half and hour or two hours). Make a dent. Show yourself that you can get past the walls you’ve set around yourself. Eventually instead of looking at your Twitter feed you’ll look up instead. And see the blue skies, staying right where they are above your head while you are getting your work done!

People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily. –Zig Ziglar

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The Most Important Part of Motivation Is Maintaining It

You know how some days you feel like you could take on the world? You are inspired and motivated and can’t wait to get to work. You have no doubt about your eventual success and remind yourself that it’s just a matter of time.

When motivation wans

Then there are the other days when it even attempting to work on your goals seems completely pointless because success is something that only happens to other people. You’ve been working too hard and too long on this thing and it’s obviously just a waste of time. How could you have ever thought you could make a success of it?

Positive leads to positive, negative leads to negative

Although some days you truly do feel extremely motivated and other days you actually do feel distinctly unmotivated, most days fall somewhere in the middle. The thing that influences how motivated you will be is how motivated you were the day before. And that will depend on the day before that. Once you get into a groove it’s easy to keep going. As you see progress on your initiatives you are motivated to see more progress and you intensify your efforts.

The opposite is also true. A day of no progress is de-motivating, which leads to another day of no progress, which leads to a distinct lack of motivation.

If your motivation isn’t coming from the inside, find it on the outside

Whether you feel motivated or not you need to work on your goals everyday. Otherwise you run the chance of getting so stuck you will never get unstuck.

If your negative attitude is the stopping block that’s keeping you from getting back on track you need to find ways to re-inspire yourself. That might mean watching inspiring videos from people you admire. Or people who have succeeded in your field. Maybe it means looking at pictures of your goal in its completed stage. Perhaps you could write a letter to yourself reminding you of why you decided to pursue this thing in the first place.

Give your motivation a fighting chance. Accomplish a little every day.

Making The Transition From the Classroom To the Office

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You work hard, you’re ambitious, you’ve always done well at everything you set your mind to. You got into the school of your choice and you excelled. Of course, you had summer jobs and a part time job while you were going to school but all that is behind you now. It’s time to step into your first real job!

Excelling in a professional environment is different from excelling in an academic one. Here are some tips to help smooth the transition.

Turn on a cooperative mindset

It takes a lot of self-discipline and organization to do well at school.  You are probably used to setting your own course and deciding for yourself what needs to be done and when. To be successful you had to turn yourself into an independent thinker and achiever.

When your supervisor or the person who’s only been at the job a little longer than you tells you how to do things it might be a little off putting. Especially if you don’t see the point, or if you believe there’s a better way of doing things. There is a time and place for offering suggestions, but it’s not at the beginning of a new job. At the beginning your job is to learn the processes. To excel at the tasks you are given.

People like to work with people they like

You might think the most important thing about your job is doing a good job. And yes of course you need to do a good job. The best you can. But what you may not realize, how important the relationships you build at work are. People like working with people they like. People will want you on their team if they like you. They will go out of their way to teach you and offer you advice. If you make mistakes at work they are more easily forgiven if people like you.

Let your true self shine

As you go along doing your best work and being a likeable human being, you might be accidentally slip into a corporate self that is kind of a neighbor or cousin to your real self. In order to be happy in life it’s important to not lose track of the special characteristics that make you, you. If you’re a natural joke teller then tell jokes. If you are a Lord of the Rings expert, share your knowledge, if your wardrobe has a certain flair – then flair. Bring your unique perspectives and attitudes to the things you do. You will find your people, and who knows what you will accomplish together.