When you see famous developers in the industry, you tend to think highly of them.
Somehow you think that you are the only person who is facing job rejections.
They are always able to get whichever job they want, and it was always like that. When we take a closer look, it cannot be further from the truth.
1. Remind yourself that you are not the only one
First of all, it can happen to anyone. There can be coding challenges that you may not be able to solve at the time of the interview due to stress, or that you made a mistake, or forgot something as you haven’t recalled and used it in a while.
If you look at the data, it is hard to find someone who never failed, or was never rejected. This also includes people who you can look up to today and that have already faced plenty of rejections.
2. Look for ways to get better
After the rejection, try to learn the reason why that happened.
Try to take as many notes as possible so that you get to keep this log that you, later on, want to look at. Treat rejections as potential bugs that you are trying to debug. Do not start to feel bad about yourself. Everyone can experience failure here and there.
Consider this failed interview as a way for you to get better at handling stress another time and stay calmer. Consider it as a source of data, a reflection of your current weaknesses that you need to address.
Please remember that failing an interview does not necessarily mean that you are not a good software developer, or that you lack the expected skills and experience. Maybe there is a lack of culture mismatch or value mismatch, or someone else is just a little bit better than you are and the company has decided to take that person instead.
3. Keep applying
During these days it’s pretty common to see many companies offering the opportunity to work remotely from home. This means that we can apply to many remote jobs all around the world.
This is also true for others.
Many people from around the world can apply for the same exact job that you are trying to apply for. They can have more job experience or can simply be more experienced. As such, you may have already seen that it can be quite tough to get a job in such fierce competition.
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Earlier we may have hesitated to apply for certain jobs, simply because we weren’t willing to do a relocation. Even if we fail to get a job, it doesn’t mean that we aren’t good software developers. It can be that we are not that good at interviewing due to lack of expertise and not being part of many job interviews before.
We should also remind ourselves that despite having plenty of rejections, we still don’t know whether the next application is going to result in us getting the job. Moreover, if we really do the math, we can understand that our chances are not that low despite facing plenty of rejections along the journey.
4. Do your research
Don’t just go to an interview without prior preparation no matter how much experience you have, or have many previous interviews you have been at before. Try to spend at least a few minutes researching about the company and find something interesting that they are doing and that you pay attention to especially during the interview.
Check closely what they are doing and try to come up with questions that you can mention when they ask, Do you have any questions for us?
Here is alist of 105 questionsthat you can ask your recruiters.
5. Practice as much as possible
Probably one of the biggest enemies of software developers during interviews is stress. The stress of not being able to answer every technical question, not having experience with a particular technology, nervousness while negotiating the salary, or simply the fact that you feel anxious about the next questions that can come up.
One of the most important things that you can do to help with that is practicing as much as possible.
This includes practicing answering both technical and nontechnical questions.
Practice with a friend. Practice coding challenges that you can find in LeetCode, HackerRank, or AlgoExpert. Find as many questions as possible in Glassdoor or other places that you can find and come up with a plan to master answering those types of questions.
The more you practice the more you are going to increase your chances of getting a job. If there is just one thing that I want you to take from this article is the fact that it is okay to fail an interview here and there.
As long as you keep on improving and getting better each time, you are good to go. Everyone may not have a good initial experience in an interview, or at anything else.
As long as you keep on improving and learning, there is no such thing as failure. Everybody fails at a seemingly trivial question in tough time pressure, but do not let that discourage you.
Keep applying, keep getting better.
