"Pursuing Other Candidates"

"...we're pursuing other candidates..."

If I had a dime for every time I received an email with a line like that, I wouldn't need to be applying for jobs at all anymore. Some 100 rejections later, and that line somehow stings the same way it did the first time.

Let me be clear, this isn't to hate to any hiring departments or any companies I've applied to work for at all. I realize they can't hire everyone! But why can't they just hire me?

I'm sure everyone reading this has faced a similar rejection at some point in time, so you probably know how I'm feeling. I can't help but admit that my spirits are a little low. After getting my real estate license, I thought all my problems would be solved, and my job journey would come to a halt, as I sold every multi-million dollar property in the Omaha area, one-by-one. Boy, was I wrong...

Though I have my license now, real estate isn't an easy business to get into (an entirely different struggle that I can cover another time). Because of this, I have decided to begin assessing all future career options for myself, including those that allow me to apply the degree I will officially have in 3 short months. As exciting as it sounds, it has been just as difficult as my real estate journey so far. Possibly as a result of the pandemic, the workforce is saturated with qualified and experienced candidates. As qualified and experienced as I perceive myself, when I remove my own biases, I don't seem to hold a candle to some of the competition. For these reasons, I've faced a lot of rejection over the past few months. As the girl who made every team she ever tried out for and went on to become captain of them too, my recent rejection streak feels foreign to me, and I can't say I am fully equipped to handle it gracefully. There have been unprecedented numbers of tears fallen from my eyes and a grotesque amount of self-pity over the past few months. It's embarrassing, to say the least.

As silly as it sounds, I wish I could go back in time and cut myself from the 8th-grade volleyball team or give myself a failing grade on all the tests I didn't have to study to get a high score on. That would've shown me! It definitely would've been less life-altering to sit out a season of sports as a child than it will be to sit out a season of work as an adult.

Alas, as I've grown older, things just don't come as easily as they once did. Because of this, I have to learn to work a little harder, grow skin a bit thicker, and take rejections a little less personally. I may not be getting handed job opportunities, but the opportunities I am being handed are those to better myself in the wake of my rejections.

I am thankful for the opportunity to learn from these experiences and grow as a person. However, I think I speak for an entire colony of childhood overachievers when I say...

...please quit pursuing the other candidates.