Rejections

I was talking to a friend last weekend who made me a little more sensitive about the nature of rejection in a job search. If you look at my Job Statz, you'll see that I only hear from about 20% of the companies I apply to, split pretty evenly between companies that want to interview me and companies that say they aren't interested. The other ~80% clearly aren't interested because they never contact me again. But the fact that I never hear anything from them creates an air of anxiety: as the applications pile up, I build a general feeling that some company from my past applications may contact me at any time. It would be a little beneficial to my psyche to know which ones I don't have to worry about.

I can see it from their side, as my friend explained. The HR people doing the hiring get paid for hiring. It may not even be in their job description to tell unqualified people to go away. And they may get lots of applications, so I could see it taking a significant portion of time to contact everyone you definitely don't want to hire to tell them to try somewhere else.

It doesn't really bother me that much when a company does this, mind you, especially because I know there's not much I can do about it. I do appreciate it when a company takes the time to tell me they aren't interested.

After having this conversation last weekend, I got two letters in the mail from patent law firms saying that they aren't interested! I think that's really cool of them to send an actual letter to someone who emailed them an unsolicited job application. Maybe they only did it for legal reasons, but I'll believe that the folks at Marshall, Gerstein & Borun LLP and Leydig, Voit, & Mayer Ltd. are nice people.

The job update: companies from the career fairs are either taking some time getting their stuff organized (understandable, as two of the three career fairs were really busy) or no one is interested in me at all. But, I do have a pretty good lead from Monster. I've done a phone interview with them. This week, I'll be doing a skills assessment for them, proctored at the Evanston Public Library. If they still like me, they'll do an in-person interview.