A reader writes:
I’ve been casually job searching since January. My current job at a nonprofit isn’t right for me, but things are decent enough that I can afford to take my time. I’m trying to stay within the nonprofit space but move out of my current type of work, which has been challenging.
There was one job I was super excited about: it was entry level but paid WAY more than what most nonprofits do, offered interesting work that matches my strengths, and had an application process based only on compensated trial tasks until the interview stage. I much prefer that model to a resume/cover letter, especially since I’m trying to pivot — highlighting my transferable skills in a cover letter feels futile when there are other applicants with direct experience. I was excited to skip that step and show that I can do the work.
I made it past the initial screen and submitted the first compensated exercise last week. I allowed myself some optimism, since the task seemed geared almost exactly to my strengths. But I also knew this job would get a ton of applicants with skills at or above my level, so I tried really hard to not get too attached.
Today I got a rejection email, and I’m surprised by how devastated I am. It’s not like I made it through several rounds of interviews and am just now being let down — I didn’t even make it to the first interview! I feel silly for taking it this hard.
I think the main issue is that I now feel inadequate. The one advantage of a resume/cover letter is that there’s always a chance a rejection was based on something subjective or logistical, but in this case it was my actual work that was evaluated and found wanting. There wasn’t a lot of room for subjectivity in the assignment — you either did everything on their checklist or you didn’t. (It was essentially finding errors in a work product, but it’s more layered and challenging than it sounds.)
They hire for this job on a rolling basis, so it’s probably not that they filled the position. The submissions were all anonymized, so there’s almost no chance it was some other kind of bias — not that that would be better, but I could comfort myself by saying I dodged a bullet.
The organization explicitly states that they never provide feedback on the application tasks, which makes sense, but also has me spiraling. In the absence of specific errors/shortcomings to point to, I’m second guessing whether I’m actually good at this kind of work at all. I feel like a case study in the Dunning-Kruger effect. I was just so hopeful — evidently more so than I realized — that my skills would carry me through the process. Now I just feel embarrassed to ever have been so delusional.
It’s been hard to look for other positions after seeing this one. I really tried not to, especially so early in the process, but I became attached to my hypothetical life with this job. Every other posting seemed (and still seems) miserable by comparison. I know this is dangerously close to entitlement and I need to come back to reality, but it’s just. So. Hard.
I tried looking for some perspective in the AAM archives, but most of the advice in the “rejection” tag seems to rely on the subjectivity and opacity of the “traditional” process; it was hard for me to apply it to this situation. Do you have any advice on moving on from a more clear-cut, work-based rejection?
I think you’re looking at this as pass/fail — i.e., that the test would show either that you’re good enough to do the job or you aren’t — and so, since you didn’t move forward, you weren’t good enough.
But hiring is never pass/fail. It’s always, always grading on a curve.
If the employer had 10 candidates who got the assignment 100% right and 15 people who got it 99% right, any of those people could be excellent at the job but they might only move the first first group forward to the next stage of hiring. And that’s especially true because they weren’t looking at resumes and cover letters; if they’re relying solely on the assignment at this stage of screening, it’s reasonable that the 100% people would beat out the 99% people. (I frankly don’t love this as a hiring method! Even the absolute best person for a job will make a mistake now and then, which is why track record matters, and they’ve taken track record completely out of their screening. Plus, maybe some of those 99% people would have scored 100% with instructions that were worded slightly differently, and on and on. But so be it.)
Is this work that you’ve been good at in the past? If so, there’s no reason to doubt your skills now. There were just others who performed better on this one specific test.
In fact, you could have even been in the 100% group for all we know! Maybe 40 people scored 100% and they’re not going to move them all forward (and since they’re compensating people for each stage, they definitely need to pare down as they go) so they picked a smaller number from the group at random. Or they chose based on extras that don’t reflect on you at all — like you had the right answers, but candidates A and B went above and beyond in what they turned in, organizing it with beautiful color coding, or providing interesting extra context, or otherwise adding additional work that you didn’t know would give an advantage.
In other words, the decision-making is still opaque from the outside — nearly as opaque as it can be with a more traditional hiring process. You just never really know, so it’s a bad idea to tie your self-worth to the outcome of any given job application.
