That one time I was like a phoenix

Death by a thousand job interviews

Workin’ 9 to 5

“Mummy, why is daddy crying?”

My wife had just come home from a trip to the park with my daughter, finding me collapsed on the floor beside the couch, face buried in the rough fabric, sobbing intensely.

I was a broken man.

She came in, sat down and distracted herself with her phone. At the time, it felt like a profound rejection; we hadn’t yet realised it was autism, making it difficult for her to process my intense emotions.

My little girl recognised something was wrong. She toddled over and gave me the biggest hug in the world.

At the time, I was on my longest-ever jobless streak since the beginning of my Software Engineering career. Having been let go from a new role after a few months due to the strange psychology of the manager, with strangely unreasonable expectations, my self-esteem had taken a significant hit.

I was the type that always assumed what anyone said or thought about me was correct by default. Professional feedback has always felt so intensely personal, and this guy rained it down on me like hellfire and brimstone; I did everything I could to take it on board and be what he wanted me to be, only to be dropped like a dead weight in the end.

So I took it on the chin.

The job market was electric though, and I had no trouble landing interviews. My track record up to this point had been above 90% once I was brought in for a face-to-face chat: it was nearly certain that I would get an offer by the end.

I went in for an interview at a place that I felt real excitement for, and it seemed to go fairly well…

Rejected.

This was quite unusual for me, but there were heaps more recruiters reaching out, so I met with another place that looked perfect for me.

Another rejection.

I had never been rejected twice in a row.

So I began refining the way I was presenting myself, making sure to turn up looking as sharp and smart as possible, and went to interview at a 3rd place.

Rejected again!

This went on until I had been rejected from 11 different companies. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. I had all the experience, expertise, a proven track record, I was the complete package. I had even been applying for roles which were well below my usual level, and being rejected for those, too!

I was in total crisis.

I fell apart in ways I can’t properly describe here.

We were fast running out of money, and I had run out of my antidepressant medications because I was trapped in a sense of fear about our financial situation: something made me feel like I couldn’t go and fill my scripts, but I didn’t know why or how, and I didn’t tell anyone.

Months went by, and we couldn’t pay rent, so we had been packing up the apartment in boxes, getting ready to move in to my mother-in-laws tiny little flat. My wife suggested that I might want to spend some time in Canberra with my mum. At that moment, I was under the impression that this was yet another rejection: that my own family wanted me to leave. (They didn’t, they just thought it might help me to feel better.)

My entire mental state was in free-fall.

Then, I was referred for a role by someone I’d worked with before, a very exciting looking one that seemed right in my wheelhouse…

That was rejection #12.

Rock Bottom

I had just got off the call with the recruiter, letting me know I’d failed, when the girls got home from the park and found me, bawling my eyes out, in total and utter distress.

The feedback I had been receiving from these failed interviews was contradictory and bizarre. I answered the technical questions correctly, but something seemed… off? I was super friendly, as I often am, but somehow was coming across as disingenuous? Most places declined to give much feedback. Even they didn’t really know what was wrong. It was like they could sense my desperation underneath, and they did not like it.

I went through all the stages of grief, arriving eventually at acceptance.

I had to accept that this was the end of my career.

I had to accept that I had crashed and burned, that I would never fly high again.

I was a failure.

We would have to move, I’d have to go back on welfare, and all the promise I had shown up to now would be forgotten; I’d never be able to give my family the life they deserved.

Somehow, I don’t know how, this was the moment when I just stopped caring.

I had yet another interview scheduled in, for a role that was well above my usual level, at a very large global company about to undergo a complete digital transformation.

I decided there was no point in attending, as I would just get rejected yet again. I was about to call up the recruiter to cancel, when I had a bit of a change of mind.

“What if…”, I said to myself, “I just go in there for fun, and see how much of their time I can waste?”

Let’s turn this into a game. A game of rejection. Rejection was the goal. The extent of my failure was now my measure of success. The harder I failed, the greater the victory. Failure was already guaranteed, the only question was how bad would it be?

So I went in there, my obviously un-ironed white button shirt, ripped jeans, sneakers, backpack, scruffy hair, the whole deal.

I went as myself.

The self that I had always thought of as being unacceptable.

The self I had always thought was incapable of success.

I used that self as the vessel to achieve my intended goal: rejection, another failed interview. Instead of being desperate to please, my demeanour just screamed “I do not give a single flying fuck, I am who I am and that’s OK.”

The interview went on for almost 2 hours, and I left feeling good, but still knowing for certain that there would be some weird reason for rejecting me, most likely to do with the fact that I quite obviously was not desperate to please. I wouldn’t have even cared if they never got back to me.

Then I got the call.

They didn’t want to do a follow-up interview.

They offered me the job, straight up, that very afternoon.

It turned out to be the best job I ever had.

The Desperation Paradox

The lesson I learned from this experience was that desperation breeds failure. I don’t know the entire ins and outs of it, but most people seem to shun and disdain it; they can sense it in you, how much you need this job, how eager you are to please. In certain circumstances, people can be entirely unsympathetic. They think you’re hiding something.

Job interviews are one of those circumstances.

So, one way or another, I needed to unlearn everything I thought I was supposed to do. Everything I had been taught about job interviews was dead wrong.

The way I dressed didn’t really matter.

My hair didn’t really matter.

My enthusiasm didn’t really matter, either.

The only things that mattered were whether I could talk about what I knew and had experience with, and whether I was confident in myself and my abilities.

It’s funny, because at this moment, my actual self-confidence was at absolute zero. Something about not being over-eager for the role made it seem like I was oozing with self-confidence.

Prior to this experience, I also had a lot of trouble admitting I didn’t know something. I always saw it as an admission that I would not be up to the job. It turns out, some interviewers are looking for signs of humility, and admitting one does not know something is actually beneficial.

As someone with Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, it’s easier said than done to just “not care about being rejected.” Nothing is ever so easy.

It wasn’t enough to just tell myself “hey, it’s ok if I don’t get the job.” No, I had to say to myself, “the outcome is pre-determined, and you have already failed. So go in and be yourself, and see how much of their time you can waste.”

I thought about it and talked about it like a foregone conclusion. If I mentioned it to anyone I knew, it would be in the same terms: “I know I’m not getting the role, but I’m going just to waste their time because why not?”

For whatever reason, this activates the kind of mental state that other people see as self-confidence. I was able to look my interviewers in the eye, be at their level, be honest when I didn’t know something, be ready to call time on them myself if I didn’t think they would be the right fit for me (I’ve done this a couple of times now, cutting short the interview on my own terms, and yes it does feel awesome.)

I’ve also spent a lot of time in my career interviewing candidates, and I can tell you, it is possible to go too-far in the other direction. People who come across as hoity-toity are also unlikely to land the role. Acting as though you are above the position is likely to fail you. Not caring about rejection and not caring about the job are two very different things.

What’s interesting is that you can extrapolate this beyond job interviews, and sometimes it works (sadly not always, I don’t really know why.)

Performance Review time? Make it a game to see how bad it can be.

Meeting up with someone for a date? Assume they’ll ditch you, and hey, maybe you’ll just ditch them instead!

Publishing something deeply personal and off-topic to your substack? See how many views you can get without a single like! (That’s my plan for this one.)

If you think that being yourself is a recipe for disaster, make disaster the whole point.

Become your own supervillain: you might just end up saving the world by accident.