Resilience in the Face of Rejection: Lessons from Losing My Dream Job
Emily Thompson
Published on December 21, 2023
My company had a new internal job opening. It was a year-long role building up a tech academy to train new graduates so they could function well as junior software engineers.
A seed of interest was planted the first time I heard about it, and I started thinking more and more about the opportunities this job could bring.
For one, I was the Engineering Manager for the first grad cohort in my company and I had such a great time helping them during their first placement. I also enjoy helping people get into tech and realise their potential. Then there was the fact that this role didn’t come with the exhausting client politics that my current team were stuck in the middle of.
These are the types of opportunities in life that, if taken, could catapult your career (or other aspects of life) into a new and exciting direction you had never before considered.
The more I thought about it, the more I loved the idea of this as my future career. In fact, I couldn’t think of a role that suited me better — could this be my dream job?
So it was with those thoughts I optimistically dived head-first into a process that would inevitably leave me rejected and disappointed.
The interview process
I did the usual: updated my CV, and wrote a cover letter where I listed all the things I did currently that showed I would be great at this job.
An initial chat with an internal recruiter at my company went great, and I was told I would go through to the next/final round — a presentation and Q&A.
Despite a vague brief for this presentation (create a snippet of a session to teach the grads a new programming language), I dove in and produced something that I thought was pretty good. I didn’t go too deep in explaining the new language but instead touched on how I would go about teaching the grads so that they had the best experience possible.