Job hunting 101: Dealing with the 5 stages of grief after a rejection letter

If I’m rejected for yet another job, I’m gonna crash out.

[Photo: Getty Images]

BY The Only Black Guy in the Office

When the email pinged in my inbox, I didn’t even bother to open it immediately. I already knew what it was. One glance at the subject line told me everything.

After enough time on the job hunt, you develop a sixth sense for HR language. The preview text—“Thank you for taking the time…”—said it all. It’s the standard soft intro to bad news: Your application was amazing . . . but not amazing enough.

The blow softens once you’ve received a few of these. But the emotions that follow resemble the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and eventually, acceptance. I ran the gamut of these feels when I got my latest rejection for a role that seemed promising all the way through the final interview. Here’s how I felt and acted after I opened that message and faced reality.

Nah, this can’t be right. I refresh my inbox three times, as if the letters in the message will magically rearrange themselves into a sequence that reveals a start date. Could it be a system glitch? Maybe they sent this to the wrong candidate? (Believe it or not, it’s happened to me before.) I mean, I was perfect for this role. Remember in the final interview when I gave that answer about cross-functional collaboration that made the hiring manager nod so hard I thought she had that new J. Cole playing in her AirPods?

I draft a response. “Thank you for your consideration. However, I believe there may have been an error . . .” I let it sit in my drafts folder for exactly 11 minutes before deleting it. Even my delusions have limits. But I do check LinkedIn to see if they’ve posted the position again. They haven’t. Which means they hired someone. Which means this is real. Which leads me directly to . . .

I’m in my feelings now. Who did they hire? I need to know immediately. I’m on LinkedIn doing forensics like I’m on The First 48. I filter the company’s employees by most recent hires. There he is. Brayden. Of course it’s a Brayden. His profile says he “thrives in ambiguous environments” and has experience with “stakeholder management.” My profile says the exact same thing but with better action verbs. Ugh.

Okay, let me think about this objectively. What could I have done differently? Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned I needed to check the start date because of a vacation I had already booked. Maybe that made me seem uncommitted. Or maybe I should’ve asked more questions at the end—did I seem too confident? Not confident enough? Maybe I talked too much . . . or too little. Should I have laughed at the hiring manager’s joke about “getting her ducks in a row?” It wasn’t funny, but maybe that was the test.

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