A failed job interview is never a waste
Episode 161 - You did not get the job: How to move on and regain focus
Job-hunting is important to your career success. There's enough research to show that changing jobs every three years increases your chance of higher salaries and better opportunities and roles. However, job-hunting can be exhausting and affect your confidence and motivation. Read the blog and listen to this episode of The Job Hunting Podcast to learn how to keep yourself motivated when things don't go your way during a job search.
Job Hunting is vital for your career success. So don't give up when things get tough
When you're working full time and want a new job, you start your job search feeling very energetic, only to realize how hard it can be. Suddenly, there are not enough days in a week to do ALL the things you want to do. I know this feeling well; it took years of trial and error to learn how to manage work and career advancement simultaneously.
Also, it took me years to feel comfortable not having a job and using all my time and energy on a range of tasks, which together, like in a complex system, led me to new opportunities.
If you find yourself in this situation, this episode is for you!
Resources mentioned in this episode
Timestamps to guide your listening
02:41 - Learn more about your talents
06:41 - The importance of knowing where to invest your time and energy during a job search
09:13 - The importance of sleep and rest from job-hunting
10:21 - Failure is not a waste of time
15:42 - Be careful with the voices inside your head
Transcript of this episode
Renata Bernarde: I want you to remember that a failed job interview is never a waste. If you did not get a job in 2022, you need to move on and regain focus for 2023. If that's your situation, please keep on listening. This episode was designed for you.
Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Job Hunting podcast. This is episode 161, and look; I get it; if you're working full time and you also are looking for a new job, you can start this project with a lot of energy and feel really excited, only to realize that it can be very hard to do both things all of a sudden.
There are just not enough days in a week to do all the things that you want to do. There are not enough hours in a day. Right. I feel you. I've been there, and it took me years of trial and error to learn how to manage the work and my career advancement goals at the same time. Also, it took me years to feel okay and comfortable with not having a job and job hunting and using all my time and energy in a range of tasks, which I believe together build this complex system, this distribution of activities that led me to my new opportunity. So if you find yourself in one of those two situations, either you have a job, and you're finding it hard to find the time to job hunt, or you don't have a job, but you are very uncomfortable because you feel like the longer you don't have a job, the harder it will be for you to job hunt.
Please know that it's completely okay. It has to do with your confidence in yourself and your ability to keep yourself connected to your professional network that will lead you to opportunities. But before we go on and talk about all my tips and advice for you to deal with those situations and get yourself ready for 2023, let me talk to you about this wonderful news that happened a couple of weeks ago. You will be listening to this episode in the future. So Talent Predicts is an organization that I highly value. They have announced me as a global partner for their business, and I am so thrilled to be partnering with Talent Predicts. Talent Predicts is the power tool behind my service; find my talents.
So if you go to my website, https://www.renatabernarde.com , you will see there is a link on absolutely every page to that wonderful and very useful. Which I think is probably the best sort of entry-level investment that you can do in your career. It's a wonderful report. It has 19 pages of amazing information that you can use to really understand what your talents are, that you can build into strengths, what your career drivers are right now.
They could have changed, you know, career drivers. They change, especially after the pandemic, as we know, with the great resignation and people having different aspirations for their careers. Things have certainly changed in terms of career drivers. It would be nice for you to kind of investigate that for yourself with an assessment like talent predicts and also your personal values.
I mean, all values are wonderful. You know, when you get the report, you will see there's a list of values in the back of it, and they're all amazing. But what are those that speak directly to you? There are millions, hundreds of millions. Combinations of talents, career drivers, and personal values, and you are so unique, and when you get the talent predicts report, you will see what I mean.
Not only you will understand what your top talents are, but you will also understand how you can intentionally and proactively work on them to make your career better and make you a better person as well in understanding your strengths and working on them to support your career. There's such a great foundation to build a career based on your strengths, your career drivers, and your values.
So I'm super excited to be partnering with Talent Predicts. Very grateful to the team there; James Brooke and Paula Baetu have been interviewed on this podcast. I will put a link below to the episodes where I've interviewed both of them to talk about assessment. They're an important part of recruitment and selection, so if your job hunting, eventually you will bump into some sort of assessment, and also, if you are working with an organization, As a leader, you might want to invite somebody like me in to sort of do assessments for your team, or you might yourself have gone through an assessment, situation with HR or your manager.
And Talent Predicts is a brand new state of the art. You know, very innovative assessment that I'm very happy to represent. So if you want to learn more and you want to test it out, give My talents is on my website in every page. Click there to learn more. Within 20 minutes of, you know, receiving the report, you will be sold on this.
I'm absolutely sure. I personally love. Okay, so let's go back to today's topic. It's very chit chatty. It's basically based on information that I get from my clients, things that I remember, you know, for myself in my personal career, how I used to feel a bit more anxious at the end of the year when things didn't really turn out the way that I was expecting, or maybe I have overestimated my ability to reach my goals. But you know, if you look back, you know, I want you to see how much you have achieved and how much you can do ahead of you intentionally, and in a way that is. Probably more productive than you've done in the past.
This is all about learning. There's no right or wrong, and we can just improve every day, especially when it comes to job hunting. So here are my tips on how to manage your time and focus when you are job hunting in the future. So, first of all, I want you to know where to invest your time and your energy to make sure that you progress more quickly towards your goals. Be it a new job, be it a promotion, or something that you want to do for your career. Start by downloading my optimized job search schedule, it's free, and it has three different types of timetables or weekly schedules that you can choose.
One is for a full-time job search, one is for a part-time job search, and one is for a light job search. So something that you need to do on the side because you have a full-time job, for example. But even if you're not job hunting, even if all you want to do is to make sure you have a sustainable career, I would download the optimized job search schedule and use the light version, for example, because you want to make sure you are investing time and energy when it matters, and that you are not completely forgetting about putting effort in your career only to then find yourself in the future needing a job and not having done some of the activities that.
Recommend that every professional needs to do, right? So this idea of investing time and energy and the right things in a distribution of activities. So if you're job hunting, not spending all of your time sending job applications, and when you do send job applications, knowing how to do that intentionally and not just sending them out the doors.
If you were an assembly line, a factory of job applications, that won't work. You know, you have to learn from each job application that you send and spend time and energy in a way. That is not going to consume you, especially as we get close to the end of the year. If you're still job hunting, you want to find time for other things.
So doing things more intentionally and following maybe, you know, at least some of the advice that I offer with the optimized job search schedule might help you get a hang of, you know, time and energy you need to do to get your results. And I would start slow, you know, if you're exhausted or tired, or if you haven't job searched in a long, long time.
Do the light version that I propose and start slow. Just keep something bubbling along so that when 2023 comes, and you know you are ready, and the market is more sort of warm and ready for opportunities. You haven't just forgotten about everything over the summer or if you're in the Northern Hemisphere over the winter.
The second thing I wanted to say is relax, sleep, and rest. I understand that you're worrying your prospects and thinking about your job search and if it hasn't been successful so far, or as successful as you'd hope that you would be, you know, worrying about it and maybe trying to put even more effort into your job search and sending even more applications now because it's the towards the end of the year and you're getting anxious.
But you know that's not going to help you because anxiety and sleeplessness, and stress, it does gets in the way of you performing at your best. You may not send the best applications. You might start making mistakes, you know? I've been there. I've done it. And if I could go back in time and tell my younger self or, you know, Renata from 10 years ago, don't worry so much.
You know, it's better for you to be rested, to be relaxed. This is when the creativity in your brain allows you to make great cover letters, great, you know, conversations on phone, screen interviews, and so on. So make sure that you are not overstretching yourself. The third thing is not to think of failure in a job hunt as a waste of time.
You know, if you're going through recruitment and selection and you have applied and let's say you got an interview and then from that point on, once it didn't go ahead, that's not a failure. why isn't it a failure? Well, because you have made connections. You have tested the waters, and you know that your resume has converted to an interview. So, you know, anything worth having will come with risks. Right? So you will be out there, putting yourself out there in a job search. It's a competitive environment.
There will be other professionals just as good as you applying for roles as well. And when you get into an interview stage, you have already one big time, you know, you know that your resume is converting, so you need to keep going and understand what you've done well with that job search and what didn't work.
Ifstagnating at the application. You know that that's where you need to work on in the future. If your application is not converting for interviews, that's your bottleneck. So, reflect and be very unemotional about it and think, okay, that's my bottleneck. What do I need to do to make better applications in the future?
Because you know that that is a great job for you, that's why you applied. Why couldn't they see it? So you need to learn how to do that better in the future. So that's all learning. So failure is never a waste of time in that sense. There's no guarantee when you go into a job search that you are gonna get the job.
That's why understanding each job search and each job application as an opportunity to learn and get better at the next one that you, you'll do, is really important.
The fact that you've done a job application in itself is already a great success in my books because so many people self-select themselves out of the race. So, for example, you might see a job advertised, and then you get really excited about it, and then a day goes by, and the voices in your head start telling you, you know, things that could go wrong, and you know, the fact that you know, it might, it might be more work for you and you're not ready because you don't have experience in this or that.
And then, next thing you know, too many days have gone by, and you didn't apply. And the opportunity is over. Sometimes you even actively decide that you're not going to apply. You know, you say, well, in fact, you know, I'm too young for this role, or I'm too busy. Raising my kids, I can't take up more responsibility.
So you're actually self-selecting yourself out of the opportunities that's so common. Just think about it. there could be points in your past when you have done that. I know that; I see that all the time in my job as a career coach. And the other reason why it's never a failure when you are applying for a job, and you don't get it, it's because you are learning something new.
You know, you're gathering data, information, and intelligence about a new company, a new sector. You're making new connections. If you are going from interview to interview, and you know, you're meeting different people, and they're progressing. You. Those people are on your side. They see you as good candidates.
Even if you don't have a job at the end of that process, chances are they have a high opinion of you, and it's up to you to nurture those new connections and people that you meet along the way. So, I see that happening all the time. Just the other day, one of my clients was feeling quite upset because she had applied for a job and she didn't get it.
And I saw the application, and I saw the job ad, and I could see why she wanted that opportunity. It really suited her, and she went from an application to a phone screen to an interview. Now that is already two wins, right? The job application to a phone screen that's one win. The phone screen to an interview that's a second win.
So what I explained to her, instead of being upset that you didn't get this job, think how wonderful it is that now you know that you can get this far with another organization with a similar role, and there are plenty in her area of expertise. There are plenty of opportunities that she could be applying for in the future.
She knows that her resume is converting, and she knows that her phone screen is converting. What does she need to work on now? It's her interviewing skills. So just knowing that knowing how to focus and know where to spend your time and energy and then moving forward and feeling confident in applying for roles like that again is really important.
And sometimes people that are applying, like my my client, have very different views from people that are on the other side of the table, the employer. So my client was seeing it as a failure. For the employer or the recruiter, that's a great candidate right there. The fact that she didn't get the job is probably because there were other two or three people that you know were equally qualified, and they probably performed better at the interview, and somebody got offered the opportunity.
So now it's time for my client to work on her interviewing skills, and that's what we're going to focus on in the future. The other thing you need to be careful with is the voices inside your head. , I mentioned them before, in self-selecting yourself out of opportunities. But it's really easy to listen to negative voices, especially when you're a job hunting or you're very interested in a promotion. I'm thinking of an example of a client that was told by her new boss that he was thinking of her for an opportunity, and instead of being really excited about it and telling him immediately that that was excellent, that she was ready for it. She took a step back because she has been burned in the past; who hasn't.
I mean, so many people that I talk to, you know, if you're in the corporate sector, nonprofit, public sector, of course, you've been offered things, and then those things didn't happen. So you start to let confidence not in yourself but in the process. And I corrected her when she spoke to me the next day.
I said, look, no. Every time somebody else engages with you for a new opportunity, it resets everything that has happened in the past. Goes away. You start from zero, and you need to showcase your interest and your motivation because I know that this client is very ambitious and she runs a promotion.
She's been wanting it for a long time. In fact, she was looking outside of her organization. So we finished our coaching session, and she contacted the employer straight away, and we've hopped, you know, what she would say and how she would progress with that conversation, and how she would take the next steps to guarantee or at least ensure that.
If it wasn't successful, it wasn't because she didn't show interest, right? If it wasn't so successful, it was for something else, but she needs to be ready and have, have the right attitude and narrative to support his belief in her that she can take up a new promotion. So I love working with these sort of situations with my clients because how you react, what you say, how, you know, you position yourself will showcase that professional presence that the employer or the recruiter wants to see in you.
And, yeah, so that's a really exciting project to do together with a client. So, look, I hope that this short episode has helped you. Be okay with the situation that you find yourself right now. Be ready to take risks next year or even at the end of this year. I don't want you to feel like you need to slow down only because it's almost Christmas.
Just to give you an idea, at the beginning of this year, 2022, I dunno, when you're listening to this episode, it could be years from now, but at the beginning of this year, I think I had a client who had a job he was applying for in the deadline for the application was the 6th of January.
Renata Bernarde: So we worked together during the holiday season to get his application ready. I had another client with a deadline on the 21st of January, so you really never know. I think the pandemic has really shifted the way that we work, and ebbs and flows are not as easy to understand as they were before.
If you are keen to continue looking, you can do it full-time, full-on. You can do it part-time or a light version using my optimized job search schedule. So don't forget to download it on my website. It's https://www.renatabernarde.com . There will be a link to it in the episode. Show notes as well. And look, if you are looking for a new job, here's how I can support you.
Renata Bernarde: Really funny. The other day, somebody contacted me and asked, do you know any career coach that could help you and help me? And I realized that maybe I feel like I talk about it all the time that I am a career coach. And I'm like; I can help you . So it was really cute and funny. But here you go.
Like, first of all, if you are looking for a new. Absolutely download the optimized job search schedule. The first time I developed this free download in the masterclass was during the festive season. So yeah, just so you know, this is the right time to download it. The second thing that I truly believe you can do is, you know, a new use resolution is to subscribe to my
newsletter for job hunters and ambitious professionals. I send a weekly email. It goes straight into your inbox. It has the new episode of this podcast, and it has articles that I think are important, reading news from me, and so on. So, you know, try it out. If you don't like it, you can unsubscribe it.
Renata Bernarde: But, I get, I have a very low unsubscribe. I'm like, even when I think, oh my God, I'm sending too many emails. There are a couple of times a year that I send a few more emails because I'm promoting, let's say, group coaching, and I think everybody's going unsubscribe. Nobody does. And my open rate is like, Crazy, it's like 45% open rate, which is crazy for somebody who's worked in marketing all her life.
You know, I've never had that in the past with my previous business and corporate newsletter, so I'm very excited to know that people love reading my newsletter. And if you're ready to invest in your career, go to my website, learn more about my services. You know, like I said, find my talents is such a wonderful tool.
It's a small investment. If you've never invested anything in your career, it's a good—place to start. And then I have, you know, consultations. I do a lot of consultations around this time of the year for people that are feeling really exhausted and want to just quit their jobs. And then somebody says, oh, talk to Ranata first, which I find really lovely.
And also, when people have lost their jobs sometimes, these things happen at the end of the year. I help people negotiate salaries over the consultation period. last week I helped somebody put together a job application for a promotion, in fact, so you can have that 60 minutes with me to work on a variety of things.
I have LinkedIn audits that I do, which is a separate service, and of course, private coaching, which is ongoing. And then I can support you in doing what you are looking for work. So have a look, and I will see you next week with another episode. Bye for now.
About the Host
Hello, I’m Renata Bernarde, the Host of The Job Hunting Podcast. I’m also an executive coach, job hunting expert, and career strategist. I teach professionals (corporate, non-profit, and public) the steps and frameworks to help them find great jobs, change, and advance their careers with confidence and less stress.
If you are an ambitious professional who is keen to develop a robust career plan, if you are looking to find your next job or promotion, or if you want to keep a finger on the pulse of the job market so that when you are ready, and an opportunity arises, you can hit the ground running, then this podcast is for you.
In addition to The Job Hunting Podcast, on my website, I have developed a range of courses and services for professionals in career or job transition. And, of course, I also coach private clients.
Contact Renata Bernarde
I’m determined to help you! I want you to feel empowered, nail your next job, and have the career you want.
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My free resources for job hunters: The Optimized Job Search: Weekly Schedule & Masterclass.
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