You’re Laid Off, Now What? Part V — REJECTION!
By: Tony Pagliocco
Tags: Leadership, Careers, Agile, Tech, Product Management

For our new guests, welcome! Here are links to the previous posts in case you want to get caught up to speed. I can give you a quick synopsis.

Welcome back friends, followers, and curious folks. I’m still blown away by the amount of support and visibility people have helped me get, this is why #payitForward is so important to remember! Let me say it bluntly, I appreciate it greatly.

So last post we went over interview prep and how it matters when you are going up against the best for the best. It’s never fun, but it’s the work that needs to be done.

Today, however, we have a difficult topic to discuss — rejection.

What happens when you put in the work, you put in the sweat, and you fail.

You pick up the pieces and move on. Simple? Not even remotely.

Here’s a hard truth— the best person doesn't always get the job. Sometimes you are turned down because you didn’t deliver the goods, and sometimes, you could be the victim of a stubbed toe your interviewer got and unintentionally isn't focused. I’m not saying it’s A or B, I’m saying ANYTHING could be the reason. The same answer on a different day could mean something totally different. You can only control what you can control!

I have two stories that I hope will open your eyes and help you refocus your passion when you are turned down for a position you know you could be successful in.

Story 1

Here’s a story that will snap you back to reality I hope.

My daughter was 17, walking home from school and she didn’t even know that would be the last time she would walk.

She was hit by a car driven by an opioid addict, severing her spinal cord.

Sitting in the hospital room with the medical staff to tell her that she would not be walking in the near or far future, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

The doctors told her, she cried, she wiped her face and said,

“This is the hand we’re dealt, let’s play it”

You have to do the same thing, you have to look at the hand you’re dealt and play it, no matter how tough it is, you can still WIN!

If you ever watched poker on ESPN, you see people playing hands that are statistically favored to lose but yet, they win! Why do you think that is? It’s because they are playing with the optimal % of execution and know when to move on to the next hand.

Story 2

Google turned me down the other day.

I was upset for 20 minutes, swore I’d only use Bing the rest of the day, quit out of chrome, opened Firefox, forwarded all my Gmail to my old AOL account, and THEN and ONLY THEN…..I sat down with my Ipad and sketched out the following. The following is a self evaluation after the fact and after the anticipation/disappointment had filtered out.

my post call notes

Now, what did I learn from an immediate retrospective?

I choked under pressure, I had done the work but did not deliver. Most of my “losses” came from self-infliction I had improved considerably on estimation/strategy questions which were a weak point in my last google interview in 2018.

After that I went to my “job search” spreadsheet, marked Google as “No” in the status column, then I did the most incredible thing.

I moved on.

You cannot let one rejection lower your spirits. You have to build the fortitude and strength that comes with being in product management. In deep product work, you get rejected plenty of times and what do you do then? You don’t just throw it all away, you iterate, you learn, and you come back twice as ready to deliver.

I found that by doing self-retros, you can be honest and find ways to build lists of traits you need to improve on, and you can then consult with close confidants who will give you the level of honesty you deserve and they can advise you if yes, these are things you need to work on.

Empathy is key, not only for the recruiters and interviewers you engage with, but also with self-empathy, so you can manage the load but push on, see the end game, and realize what I said in the very first post, rejection is ALWAYS an opportunity.

Say it to yourself one time.

Rejection is ALWAYS an opportunity.

Luckily for me, I’ve been honored to have so many people on LinkedIn, Slack, Facebook, and more helping with providing support, resources, words of encouragement, and more. I feel there’s one truth to remember:

You are your own product, if you can’t manage it, how can you manage another?

Also remember, there’s also dealing with the other rejection. When the role you first thought was for you, the feeling just isn’t there and you have to be the rejector. Think about it from that angle and you realize, it’s all part of the loop that is our job search.

Thank you all — I’ll have another post out soon and it’s going to be a collection of more “free flowing thoughts that Google docs accumulated over the week of recruiters, phone calls and such”. Some will be funny, some won’t make sense, but it’ll be authentic and hopefully through user testing, deliver a great experience that brings you back, you know..like a product. ;)