How to get a job after you've been rejected

I&#x27;m going to state an uncomfortable truth. As somebody who has seen more than a few horrible interview failures - how about you put in a 100 hours of work <i>before</i> you come to the interview?<p>Not for the company, but for yourself. And not doing fancy resumes with songs and pictures, but learning the basics of what you&#x27;re actually doing? Because I&#x27;m fairly certain that most interview rejections are due to the fact that your qualifications are insufficient, not because your resume wasn&#x27;t fun enough.

<i>So I put in my 100 hours. I made a custom resume that I illustrated with little Evernote-style animals. I got out my guitar and sang a song about why I wanted to work there. I designed a custom iPhone app for them.</i><p>Eww. Talk about trying way too hard.

WTF? But she never got a job after being rejected! She managed to get a failed college application reversed with her song and dance act, and that&#x27;s it. When she tries that on a real job, it fails, and she goes on and rationalises that as being for the best. Huh?<p>This post has no point at all. And as someone who does his fair share of hiring, it is terrible advice anyway. If you really, really want another chance, just ask. I&#x27;ll usually give someone a second shot if they seem to really want it, and give them an opportunity to explain why I was wrong the first time.

Job searching must be a nightmare if every application requires 100 hours of effort.

I think that the over all sentiment of this post is correct - hard work can pay off, and sometimes not in how you originally expected.<p>I also recently applied to a company, Blizzard Entertainment in Austin, that I have wanted to work for since 1999. In 1999 I didn&#x27;t program, but playing their games got me into programming (through reverse engineering the games) and I have wanted to work there ever since. I applied for internships through the years, and then after school I started applying for full time positions. I never once even got a response, other than the automated rejection emails that come 2-3 months later. A few months ago they actually called me though, and I had the opportunity to go through the interview process for a .NET position. I sailed through the technical phone interview and was given a take home project to work on, for a week. It had some requirements that involved some design patterns that I&#x27;d never used before, but I easily put in 60+ hours on the project after getting home from my current job. After seeing that submission though, they decided to not continue with the interview. It&#x27;s hard being rejected by a company that you&#x27;ve dreamed of working for for so long, especially when the rejection was after they looking at my code. As a coder, that code is all I am evaluated by during that phase of the project, so it&#x27;s rough. I couldn&#x27;t let it end there though. I researched the design patterns requested and completely re-wrote the project. In retrospect, my 2nd attempt was much better than my first. I don&#x27;t know if the developers I spoke with, from Austin, saw my 2nd attempt or not, because I was going through a recruiter of theirs from CA. The recruiter basically just cut off all communication, and I got no feedback as to what I could have improved on.<p>But, I didn&#x27;t stop there! That was basically 2 rejections. I decided to go around the recruiter and drafted up an email to the developers here in Austin - all I asked for was feedback on my code so that I could improve and apply in the future. I didn&#x27;t have any of their emails, but I had their names. I sent the email to various combinations of their name and magically one went through. The guy responded literally 10 minutes later. He seemed open to helping but was busy (this was happening during thanksgiving and blizzcon, so it was definitely busy for them). We emailed back and forth several times but each time he kept forgetting to respond, so I just let it go. I didn&#x27;t want to come off as pushy or annoying and ruin any future chances at the job.<p>No real moral to this, other than I kept trying and ended up with a real developer&#x27;s email here in Austin. Maybe next time around he&#x27;ll remember me.

You can tell it&#x27;s a good job market because being rejected for a job nowadays wouldn&#x27;t feel like a big deal in the slightest.<p>It would simply be onto the next one and you&#x27;ll probably have an offer for something equally good or better within the week!

Getting rejected from Palantir in late August was probably the best thing that could&#x27;ve happened to me. It was the first company that I interviewed at for a full time roll and it made me realize I wasn&#x27;t ready. I spent the next 8 weeks coding for three hours a day and preparing for interviews. Ended up landing a great job that I&#x27;d take over Palantir any day.

It&#x27;d be nice to know what the author of the post got out of trying even harder (!!) and joining Exec that way. Are we talking nice experience, multiple promotions, million-dollar exit, or other stuff?<p>I, honestly, don&#x27;t try hard at all for interviews. The only work I put in is in doing some quick research on the company and the people I will be meeting, but even that is not so important (because it&#x27;s usually better to hear from them directly)<p>I have had some very good success on face-to-face interviews like that, and it makes things equal between applicant and company; if a person has put in hours of work in creating something specifically for that interview, is he desperate for a job? is he trying to make up for a lack of talent? I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s such a positive thing as this article would lead one to believe.

I used to believe a long time ago (when I was younger) that anything is possible -- so long as you work hard. But the reality is it&#x27;s more complicated than that. Some people have pure talent; no matter how hard you work, you can never achieve their level of talent in a lifetime. Some people have access to the proper network effects, i.e. genetic lottery. It all comes down to analyzing your situation and making the best out of it. Who cares about some shitty programming job that&#x27;s 9-5? That&#x27;s overrated. Build something you&#x27;re passionate about, that you love to show others. It can be something simple at first, but slowly you&#x27;ll gain insight into what you really want to do.

Ok, sorry, but 100 hours to apply to a single job is just silly. There are tons of factors that you could make you an unfit candidate for that position that you couldn&#x27;t possibly know about, and even putting a solid year of work into a resume won&#x27;t help you get around those problems.<p>&quot;So I put in my 100 hours. I made a custom resume that I illustrated with little Evernote-style animals. I got out my guitar and sang a song about why I wanted to work there. I designed a custom iPhone app for them.&quot;<p>Perhaps they were a little creeped out by someone singing a song to them on YouTube without knowing them at all? This just gives me weird vibes... and furthermore demonstrates nothing of clear value to being a designer (presumably) at Evernote. Those 100 hours would have been better spent honing skills or learning a new one.<p>I think you should pump the brakes a little on your job application strategy. Most of the time, a well-crafted, personal email and solid resume is the best way to go. A bunch of the time not being hired is as simple as &quot;they found another person first&quot;, &quot;you were one of 100 resumes and they accidentally skipped yours&quot;, or &quot;they were looking for a person who would be more adept as skill y whereas you&#x27;re best at skill x&quot;. That&#x27;s why you should concentrate on a couple companies you&#x27;d like to work at, and not be devastated if the most likely situation happens (not being picked).

At a minimum, thanks for the reminder about keeping failure in perspective. It is so easy to fall into failure aversion mode and not even realize it can hold you back.

This was a great read, especially as our startup gets closer to launch and we need to keep in mind both the value of rejection, and the philosophy of always trying as hard as we possibly can. The 100 hours specifically can be debated for job applications and etc., but the idea behind it is hard to argue against.

I see you didn&#x27;t get into YC. How did you apply this technique to that process? If you didn&#x27;t, why not?

I&#x27;ve got 2 stories which may or may not contradict this idea:<p>1) I interviewed a candidate for a junior position. He seemed qualified and came with a recommendation from someone I trust. But during the interview with one of the managers in our group, he indicated that something on his resume was not accurate. He didn&#x27;t directly say that, and he tried to squirm around it by saying he really meant it in this way, etc. etc. The manager took this as a big red flag that this person was not trustworthy or at least not a good match for our group. He was later told he didn&#x27;t get the position. At that point he started emailing me constantly asking what he could do to get in our good graces. I had to tell him that since I wasn&#x27;t the hiring manager there was nothing I could do, and that he had really blown it because it basically looked like he was lying during his interview. Now every time there&#x27;s an opening in our group he emails me looking to apply for the position. This has made me 10x less likely to consider him in the future. (Granted, he didn&#x27;t do his &quot;100 hours&quot;.) But being a pest is not going to get you anywhere. Just suck it up and move on. (I wish someone had taught me how to do that when I was younger. I often got the advice, but wasn&#x27;t able to implement it, much to my detriment.)<p>2) At an earlier job, we had a candidate apply. I thought he was pretty good, but the boss was unimpressed. During the interview I asked him if he&#x27;d read some programming books that I had found useful. He hadn&#x27;t heard of them. The boss rejected him and we hired someone else. A year later we had another position. He applied again, and this time he told me he had read the books and explained how he had put some of the ideas into practice. He didn&#x27;t pester us for a job and he didn&#x27;t act like a psycho or a douche. He just did the hard work of learning what he was missing. We hired him. Later I left that job and started my own company and hired him again. He was a good employee and good at what he did.<p>I can&#x27;t imagine trying to work with the guy from #1 above on a daily basis after seeing him be so persistent and annoying. I would definitely not hire #1 even if he were the most qualified candidate because of how annoying his persistence was.

&gt; <i>By rejecting me at first, college admissions taught me the most valuable lesson of my life. It doesn’t matter if you’re told no. Everything’s negotiable.</i><p>I&#x27;ve learned to appreciate this over the years. However, I think this is very much an <i>American thing</i>. I lived for 4 years in Europe and people are much more willing to bend the rules in America, whereas people in Europe tend to &quot;follow the rules&quot;. And thus, the people that support the systems are less willing to bend. Any European natives agree?

How does this get on here?<p>Why is it acceptable to use HN as a platform for shameless self-promotion? And if it absolutely has to be why can&#x27;t it at least be worthwhile?<p>HN&#x27;s filter needs to be overhauled. Particularly any post from a site with the same name as the poster. Those are rarely good.