Interview Rejection – What you can learn from it?

We all learn lessons in life. Some stick, some don’t. I have always learned more from rejection and failure than from acceptance and success”– Henry Collins

Interview rejection can be a bitter pill to swallow. While some people take rejection in their stride, others take quite a few days to come out of their post-rejection depression. But is rejection such a bad thing as it’s made out to be? Is it really the end of the world? Experts believe that rejection can be used to build a better career and can be a blessing in disguise. As the popular saying (and a song by Kelly Clarkson) goes, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.

Your selection in an interview is contingent upon a lot of factors which might range from your performance in the interview to something as trivial as whether the interviewer liked your dressing sense. The beauty of an interview process is that you are never sure how the person on the other side will perceive your performance.

An interview rejection can give you numerous insights on your strengths and weaknesses. An introspection of why you were rejected would bring to light your weak areas on which you can act accordingly. Your weak areas might vary from poor communication skills, lack of technical knowledge to a lack of confidence. Whatever the reasons are, you can turn them into your strengths by acting and improving upon them so that you are ready for the next interview.

Brian Acton, the co-founder of Whatsapp, was rejected by both Facebook and Twitter. The same Brian Acton later sold Whatsapp to Facebook at an estimated $19 billion dollars. It was termed as one of the biggest hires missed. There is an anecdote about Amitabh Bachchan that when he auditioned for All India Radio, he was rejected as a news reader for both English and Hindi news due to his ‘unsuitable’ voice.

There is so much to learn from the above two examples. Failures didn’t make these people weak. In fact they came back stronger and more informed about themselves. Rejection made them realize the areas they had to work upon.

The key realizations from an interview rejection should be:

1. What are my weak areas?

2. How do I make myself better now that I know my shortcomings?

3. Whether it is really the job I want to be in?

4. Is my resume not reflecting what I want to convey?

The job market is flooded with opportunities. One rejection is not the end of the world. But not acting on your mistakes won’t make things any better. So the next time you are rejected in an interview, don’t be saddened but rather analyze your interview and work on your improvement areas. Following this mantra would surely land you a job and who knows it might be the best thing that could have happened to you.

Most of the times, one of the main reasons that your interview doesn’t go well is that you yourself were not too sure about the job or you lacked the basic skills (other than your qualifications) required for the position. Most companies do not have a prescreening process to identify the right candidates for interviewing and this leads to a lot of rejections during the interview phase.