Get Rid of Cant Get A Job Once and For All

Jan 18, 2023

Foreword

Hello!

Over the past years, I have accumulated a huge amount of experience in participating in interviews for completely different positions in completely different fields of activity. I have been a technical support engineer, project manager, web developer, data analyst. Someday I will write a post about this, but for now it’s just enough to understand that I have changed a lot of positions in search of myself and what interests me.

So, despite the wide variety of positions and activities, there is still one common detail between them. This is a detail that I really regret. I regret that I was so wrong once, and I want to share this so that you never repeat it. This skill, which I recently learned, has helped me overcome failures more easily, learn new things more easily, and even made me more sociable (nevertheless, I still remain an introvert and a silent one).

I will not create intrigue. This skill is perseverance. I know that many expected to hear something else, something like a programming language that is versatile enough to find a job in IT everywhere and under any circumstances, but believe me, nothing even comes close to perseverance.

The article was written at a rather hot time, when smart specialists all over the world lose their jobs due to the crisis, when there is confusion in the labor market, and it is almost impossible to find a job worthy of your head. I think that in this case it is stupid to rush about and relearn. It is foolish to switch from Frontend to Backend only if a good vacancy has been vacated. It is foolish to quit working as a programmer and retrain as a project manager if an AI has appeared that writes code for a person (I mean Chat GPT).

Self-esteem

I believe that all it takes in a job search environment is perseverance. Perseverance, firstly, is not to lose self-esteem. Again, I want to share my experience. During the next job change, I could not find a job for about a month. Within a month, my self-esteem dropped below zero. Here are my approximate thoughts at the time: “Maybe I’m not good enough for this position”, “In any case, among the 200 candidates there are specialists better than me, I won’t apply”, “Maybe I can find a job easier, maybe I can find a job for a junior position faster” and so on.

In a job search environment, losing self-esteem is normal, but wrong. After all, you are who you are. All your way up to this particular moment you have passed on your own, you yourself have received all the skills and knowledge that you freely operate now. What you are now, you owe only to yourself. I don't want this to sound like a motivational speech. I just think it takes persistence to maintain your self-esteem.

Laziness

I will give one example from personal experience, for which I am ashamed, but if I tell about it, I think it will be easier for me.

When I was looking for a job on LinkedIn one day, everything got so mixed up in a heap, I became so disgusted and irritable filling out these millions of identical forms that I put in the search filter - "Simple application" to send more applications. If in this example you have found yourself, then congratulations - you are human. But seriously, this is absolutely normal, but what is not normal here is the compensation for the quality of submitted applications by their quantity.

Homer Simpson doing sport

Statistically, yes - it works. You increase the total number of experiments, while increasing the likelihood of a positive outcome (sorry for the boredom). But that doesn't work. With this attitude, you might find a job faster, but definitely not one that you want to stay up late because you lost track of time. With such an attitude, it is impossible to find a job to your liking, at best, for at least some kind of income.

Uniqueness

In the modern world, there are so many talents and geniuses that it is so difficult to compete with. Perseverance helps to stand out from the crowd. This is hardly possible, but still let's imagine that there were ten stages for the selection of candidates (although if there are so many selection stages somewhere, I would not be surprised). You can be a genius, a mega brain on an interplanetary scale, but if you don't have the tenacity to fill out an application for the first qualifying round (Hi, Microsoft), then what's the use of your big brain.

In my experience, I meet a huge number of such people (probably I am very lucky) and when communicating with them, I understand that they do not have the patience and perseverance to remove the back cover from the laptop. Not because they are incapable, or they have crooked hands, but simply because halfway through, they decide that - "Okay, I will not change the battery. 15 minutes of work without charging is enough."

I don’t judge such people, I myself am sometimes like that (especially when it comes to cooking), but I, and I hope that you, will fight against this. Uniqueness is an amazing character trait. For me, uniqueness is the perfect balance between a technical mindset and a creative streak. There are really not many such people, but most of them do not have patience.

My conclusion

For the past few weeks, "perseverance" has become my word of the day. I don't consider myself a genius, I'm an ordinary guy, a young IT specialist, an aspiring entrepreneur. I can't play four-board chess with my eyes closed or count cards in blackjack. But little by little I become a persistent person who does not give up halfway to achieving his goal (who does not give up only when he starts his own business).

Now I understand perfectly well that I’d rather do something for a week, when it takes others one day, but I won’t burn out like a spark in a year. Now I understand perfectly well that in order for it to be as you want, for it to be as convenient for you, you need to concentrate on quality, not quantity. Now I understand very well that despite the numerous rejections and ignorance from companies hr, my self-esteem is unshakable - I will continue to do what I am good at and what I like, and even more so, I will not rush from one opportunity to another just for the sake of a vacancy having no idea about it.

It was quite an important and personal article for me. It is important for me to write about the fact that I made similar mistakes and that I am now working on them in order to avoid them in the future. Thank you very much if you have read it up to this point!