“When the horse is dead, dismount.”  — Jeb Blount
It’s no secret that when you don’t get the job, it stinks.
Many times you’ve put in hours of preparation, bought new clothes, and invested a full day of travel. You’ve taken time off to meet with the prospective employer that you could have spent on leisure. You’ve sacrificed time, money, and energy.
Often, when you don’t get the job, it seems as if it were all for nothing. There’s a better way to look at it.
1. Beware of Developing a Sour Attitude
Naturally, you’ll focus on all the time you’ve “wasted” on one opportunity or another. Instead, look at yourself as worth the time investment. It takes time to find the company that loves you back.
It also takes time to become good at interviewing, especially if you haven’t done it in a while. Good-paying careers don’t just happen to most of us. We have to work hard to make them successful.
So when you don’t get the job you want, practice being grateful for the chance to interview. Why grateful? Because the better you interview, the more money you’ll make. And if you’re getting every job you interview for, you should be interviewing for higher-level or more competitive roles.
2. Keep Looking for a Good Match
Notice I didn’t say perfect fit. There’s no such thing, and holding out for one is its own way of staying stuck.
A good match is a company whose problems you can live with, a boss you can work for, and a product you can believe in. Keep looking until you find that, and until you have an offer in hand.
The search has highs and lows. You can get all the way to the end of an interview process and find out you were the second choice. Sometimes you find out through radio silence instead of an answer, which stings in its own way.
I worked with a candidate who’d been laid off when his company shut his department off like a light switch. His experience was in SaaS, although fairly niche. To make things worse, he’d just had a new baby.
He came in second for a role we were recruiting for. Ouch.
But the following week, he was hired by a company where he had a connection from an internship 15 years earlier. They’d doubled in size, they knew his work, and they hired him nearly on the spot.
He went from second place on Friday to hired by Tuesday, by people who’d known him for 15 years. That’s how this works. The rejection wasn’t the end of his story, and the next chapter came from a corner of his network he probably hadn’t thought about in a decade.
Keep looking anyway. A good match is out there; a perfect one never was.
3. Remember, Everything Counts
Small things matter. Showing up late, forgetting to send a thank you note, executive presence: all the little things count.
It’s easy to dash off emails. It’s harder to slow down and make sure everything is spelled correctly.
4. Learn from Perceptions
You don’t have to change who you are to get a great job offer.
It does help if you’re open-minded about accepting feedback. Not all of it is relevant or 100% accurate, but most feedback has something in it worth hearing, and some of what costs candidates offers happens without them realizing it.
Adopt what applies, and use it to increase your chances of getting the next role. Present the best version of yourself, and you’ll improve your compensation and your career opportunities.
Keep the Pipeline Full
If you haven’t gotten the offer you’re looking for, check out the in-demand software sales roles we recruit for.
After all, until there’s an offer, shouldn’t you keep the pipeline full?
Set yourself up better for the next one with the complete sales interview preparation guide.
