No Stupid Questions

how do I accept I'll never know why any employer rejected me?

Ask yourself if it was ever a real job offer to begin with. Did you have the required skills? Were your pay requirements reasonable? (For YOU not them). Then you did fine.

try a DBT program xd

I think your expectations are too high. They DO indeed care nothing for you, EVEN if they DO hire you.

You cope with this by understanding that and doing your best to make sure you NEVER need them more than they need you.

Life is all about probabilities, you can do everything right and still lose (however doing everything"right" is nigh impossible). You lose if they have a better candidate, you lose if their department is suddenly not in need of the position, etc.

With that mentality, I don't bother with CVs, and just use the time saved to apply to more jobs or maybe some kind of relevant project.

As someone who's been on the hiring side there are some legalities involved on what to answer here. But I've always made a point of telling people who asked why. However I'm not in HR, so lots of people might get filtered before I even got a chance to interview them.

Also we asked candidates to do a take home and we talked about their solution during the interview, so most people got a good understanding of why they were rejected, but a couple of times people asked afterwards and I replied to them with the reasons we considered they were not at the level we were looking for, but that we would keep them in consideration for a more junior role if there ever was an opening.

Don't take it personally, applying for a job is a game of chance as much as a game of merits. It's simply a numbers game and luck whether your resume even gets looked at in the first place, even if you're résumé how all their keywords. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of other resumes also hit their keywords.

If you're lucky enough to get through the first sifting and get an interview with the hiring person (not an HR screener who doesn't know anything about the job), then you can ask and maybe get a response on how you could have improved. (Don't ask why you weren't hired.)

Answering you is a liability to them. They have no incentive to do so and legal liability if they do.

If you are based in Europe you could always try a GDPR subject access request to see the notes they've taken. Not sure if you can try something like that wherever you are though!

My current company makes the effort to at least tell whether you’re still under consideration but I don’t think they’re allowed by legal to give any details.

At least in the US, it’s fine to not give a reason but if you do give a reason you’re liable for it. What company wants to risk that?

There’s actually multiple questions here.

The hiring process has an application “filter” layer, a candidate selection layer, and THEN the interview with the person/people who actually want to hire you. Sometimes there’s an extra technical interview after that.

These days, the filter layer is mostly automated. Asking the filter why it didn’t select you is like asking a Machine Learning model why it chose to do something a certain way — you aren’t going to get a useful response.

So the only way to figure it out is trial and error: vary your application in terms of structure and content until you find the combination that makes it last the current batch of filters.

OR

Find a way to skip the filters altogether by finding someone on the inside of the company to flag up your CV to the people looking to fill the position.

Once past the filter, you get to HR, and if you get this far, asking questions about why you didn’t get selected to continue will actually be met with a useful response (unless it’s a company you don’t want to work for). HR will tell you the basic things they’re looking for in an application, and possibly how you compared in certain criteria to the stronger candidates.

Next you get to the manager. If you get this far, you can usually have this discussion at the end of your interview. They’re looking for fit for the role, and you can ask questions about fit as part of the interview process.

And finally you get to the technical interview. If you get this far and don’t get the job, the reason why is usually fairly obvious: either they had someone who was both a better fit AND understood the problem domain / demonstrated an ability to learn and reflect the team culture better, or you failed to prove technical ability in a key area.

I just was rejected from 5 jobs in a row. I straight up asked how I could have been a more competitive candidate. I got some specific feedback about software I didn't know (fair), an answer on a questionnaire that was milquetoast (also fair), but mostly kind things said. They're not going to drag you but it can be a productive conversation.

sometimes even if you had the best application in the world you’d get ignored. Lets say HR has limited resources, X work hours to find a suitable candidate. They post an add and get 400 replies. After reading 100 of those, they are running out of work hours, and have already shortlisted a bunch of good candidates. So they toss the 300 others in the bin.

This happens all the time sadly.

This is something that, as long as you ended up getting a job, you should really just not give a fuck about.

They probably had 1 position to fill, but got many times more applications than that, maybe 10, maybe 20, maybe 50, maybe 100. That means that they had to reject 9 or 19 or 49 or 99 people and they have better things to do with their time than to explain this to all these people, however many they may be.

Oh God it was such an onslaught on my self image and psychology. I believe humans aren't equipped to handle the amount of rejection you have to receive during that grind. I certainly wasn't.

I straight up ask any job I apply and interview with why they didn't proceed. One time they were actually taken back and ended up hiring me (after some convo).

If a company cannot communicate to you why you didn't make the cut, they're a shitty company and not worth working for. I realize that's easier said than done to swallow, but it's true.

I make sure to always assume it was nepotism and my confidence remains sky high no matter how long I stay unemployed. It just works.

the good news is it's very easy to get some practice

Shiit so many comments here.

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment

Giving you feedback opens them up to liability if you sue.

You don’t get “rejected”, they just hire someone who isn’t you.