I am sure you must be very frustrated when you receive 100s of rejections to your job applications. When you receive the first few rejections, you are fine with it. You roll with the punches. After you receive 20 rejections, you think maybe you were under-qualified or over-qualified. After about 100 rejections, your confidence is completely destroyed. It’s bad. It’s really bad. I have been there… However, I need you to understand something important. All of these rejections have very little to do with your qualifications. It’s just the system that is rigged. Let me elaborate… Related: How To Turn Job Rejection Into An Advantage Before doing so, let me introduce myself first; I am Deniz Sasal. I am a manager with PwC Consulting in their strategy consulting department. I am not an HR but a Hiring Manager. You will soon understand in this article why I needed to mention that bit. I am also the creator of Landing Interviews Guaranteed and The Career Mastery. Ok, let’s continue… Right, about the rejections… So, as I was saying, it really isn’t about you. There are two primary reasons why you are receiving 100s of rejections all the time.
1. You Are Just Using Wrong Methods.
Have you been guilty of “click-applications”? Have you been secretly sneaking out of your bed to check Monster.com or Indeed.com for new jobs and making your applications even before checking out the job descriptions? Well, you are not alone. You are probably spending way too much time at those sites along with 10,000,000 other candidates! What are the odds of your resume standing out from 500,000 new ones being added to their database every single week? Pretty slim… As I said, you are just using wrong methods. We’ll get to the right methods soon. Stick with me, will you?2. Fake Jobs!
The second reason you receive all those rejections is because there are so many fake jobs that I suspect now outnumber the real ones. Yes, I just said it; fake jobs! I got in a legal trouble a couple of years ago for calling out those employers. But, hey, I no longer name names…There are many reasons why companies post fake jobs. First one is the fact that they want to trick financial analysts into thinking they are growing or not affected at all by any recession. See, financial analysts actually look at such metrics; number of vacancies posted online is one of them. I used to work for S&P so I do know a few things about metrics. Another reason for the fake jobs is because sometimes companies buy job space in bulk at the beginning of the year to get a discount. However, when they don’t grow as fast as they projected, they obviously can’t hire those number of candidates. So, instead of leaving the job spaces that they bought empty, they just put up fake job posts and tie them up to an e-mail autoresponder that automatically sends out a “thank you but no thank you” e-mail. Funny thing is they see this as a brand management campaign. It sure is funny… In preparation for my free course Landing Interviews Guaranteed, I actually went ahead and proved this. I suspected a major employer posting fake jobs. So, I went ahead and prepared 50 perfect resumes for 20 vacancies they posted. These resumes were literally perfect. They were not overqualified nor underqualified. As I said, just perfect. There was simply no reason for any of these resumes to be turned down. I was really proud of my 50 fake resumes. Any “real” employer would have been extremely happy to receive these candidates. So, the result? Oh well… All of these resumes received auto-rejections exactly 5 days, 3 hours, and 30 minutes following the submission of the resume for the jobs. What are the odds of that happening now? As I said before, pretty slim… Ok, I don’t want to create a very negative situation here. I am merely saying that if you are receiving 100s of rejections and your confidence is down, then please pick up your confidence, because you have a battle to fight. You just need different tools now. So, first things first. Let me tell you how the “real recruitment” happens at big corporations.
As you see from the chart above, at Step 1: we recognize the need to grow. If it’s a management consulting firm, then typically this is when the partner wins a major long-term contract.
Step 2: Look around for available internal resources.
Step 3: If no one is available, then we need to hire someone. So, the first thing a partner or a department head does is look at his own contacts and referrals. If you are a job applicant, and I am assuming you are as you are still reading my article, this is when you want to be remembered by that hiring manager. Either you have previously expressed your candidacy directly to him or someone who works with him.
Step 4: If there isn’t any available resource matching the job requirements. Then only we engage HR. Step 4 is very lengthy and time consuming. The partner has no luxury to wait for months for an available resource. He needs to start that project as soon as he can. So, knowing this, he is going to do all he can to find the resource at Stage 3.
I guarantee you that he has no time for HR to post the job online and wait for two months until we finish pre-screening, 1st stage HR interview, 2nd stage interview, 3rd stage interview until that candidate is presented to him.
This situation isn’t unique to hiring for management consulting. In my management consulting career, I have delivered projects to 100s of clients in 100s of industries and I have come across a very similar situation in most of them with a few exceptions.
The fact of the matter is, HR won’t even know about a job opening until it’s too late and the candidate is already found at Stage 3. This is very important. So, let me just explain this differently once more. Most vacancies will be filled way before HR even knows about them.
Ok, so what do we do? We leverage something magical. We use Letter of Interest to put our candidacy forward.
I will talk about this in my next article. So, please stay tuned and share this article with your friends so we spread the awareness.
In the meantime, I strongly recommend you sign up to my free 3-day training at Landing Interviews Guaranteed if you want to take your career to the next level and achieve a career with thriving multinationals. Did I mention it’s free? See you there.
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