Rejection

I’ve drawn parallels between job interviews and online dating in the past. Fundamentally, to achieve broad success in either of these endeavors, it comes down to your ability to market yourself and to give a convincing sales pitch before our date or our interviewer’s attention span or patience is depleted.

This quickly becomes problematic when you realize that for many individuals, this type of staged social interaction is an incredibly unnatural and unnerving ordeal; it could be that you don’t possess a baseline level of confidence, charisma, or social skills, but I would argue that this is often not the case. First dates and traditional job interviews do not simulate anything you’ll actually do while navigating the specific challenges you’ll encounter in your work or the nitty-gritty aspects to maintain long term relationships. All they do is test your ability to:

• Force yourself to socialize and maintain a smooth flow of small talk with complete strangers

• Monologue about yourself for an extended period of time

• Conjure up unnatural answers to equally unnatural questions that you will very rarely get asked outside this context—Tell me about yourself. What are your strengths and weaknesses? Tell me about your typical day. What are your friends like?

Why is it that we never challenge the efficacy of this process? If we understand that there’s little to no correlation between interview performance and job performance, or impressions of a first date and the health of a relationship, why do we continue to implement systems that clearly aren’t measuring what we care about and what we do?

When we haven’t clearly defined the purpose of these methods, the lines quickly become blurred. For almost everyone, the instinct is to feel shame, regret, or embarrassment in the face of rejection. The instinct is to hastily draw the conclusion that we’re irrevocably inadequate, that we could’ve done better, and that we just aren’t good enough. This all boils down to our presumption that these systems are valid ways of determining our individual competence.

But if we operate on the premise that you’ve been fairly judged, why is there so much shame in this act of rejection or separation, when it’s clearly beneficial for both parties involved?

When an employer rejects a job applicant,

When we decide to quit a job,

When we deny the possibility of a second or third date,

When we gather the courage to break up,

It’s just a way of saying, “it’s not for me.”

There’s no reason to remain in an unhealthy relationship if you and your partner have come to that conclusion together already.

There’s no reason to keep an employee that isn’t productive or motivated and has no more room to grow as an individual.

There’s no reason to fret over a lost job opportunity if both you and the company have discovered together that you likely wouldn’t enjoy the job or be able to contribute in a meaningful way.

The issue, then, rests on our ability to fairly judge. But is that the very point of these social filters—to weed out those that lack perseverance? The design and intention matters when we want to determine the efficacy of these social norms. Here are some questions worth asking:

• Is this process of artificial selection—the superficial exchanges that are characteristic of dating apps, the archetypal “let’s sit in my office and chat” job interview—effectively designed to seek the best of the best?

• Are one or two awkward dates enough? What types of interactions constitute the most effective methods to break the ice between two individuals?

• Does the forced process of probing candidates by going down a list of stilted, hackneyed questions measure anything that is actually relevant to succeeding in the position we’re hiring for?

• Do we recognize the cost of expunging so many individuals to the rejection bin and thus the cost of consigning both them and ourselves to an often exhausting, wearisome journey to find the right match?

• Is the shame and awkwardness truly too much to overcome? Is ghosting—the consequence of letting that shame and awkwardness consume our compassion and empathy—truly a necessary evil? Or is it just laziness, selfishness, or a lack of self-awareness on our part?

• Can we be more supportive when we reject others? Can we offer constructive feedback and the patience to aid another human being in their journey? Don’t we have a duty to guide one another, especially when we have the resources to do so?

• Because there's so much shame, we are so inclined to walk away, even if we know a friend who might be a better match. Most recruiters give up on us even if they can be given the capacity to direct us towards other companies that are hiring for the same position. If we choose to pay it forward by having the patience and commitment to understand others in this journey—the very attitude that dissolves this social norm—do we acknowledge how much we have to gain when they’re that much more willing to help us in return down the line?

If we cannot change the process, we can at least change our mindset.

We can together acknowledge that the average date and the average job interview is often a zero-sum game.

We can together acknowledge that finding just the right working environment and just the right level of challenge within a job is a painstaking, yet exigent ordeal.

We can together acknowledge that for virtually all of us, life is an unending, arduous, brute force process of trial and error to find out what works and what doesn't.

We walk a daunting path inundated with an endless torrent of possibility, but at the same time, it is what blinds us; it is what causes us to falter as we stumble over and over again in search of an elusive treasure—a grand outcome when we’ve finally discovered our counterpart and the place we belong amidst an uncertain world.

The least we can do for each other is walk alongside them while we still can, before we become distraught and lose sight of what the world needs us to do. It is about having the patience to understand who we are as individuals and where we each need to go; this is the only means by which we can fairly judge. It is about having the courage, not merely to point them in the right direction, but to lead them along into that path together.

We have no right to be complacent when countless individuals ceaselessly wander our world—often in desperation, often in despair—in search of a true love, in search of a meaningful contribution they can make in the places we live, in search of a reason to live.

We can choose to do better.