Companies nowadays seem to have a fixed expectation that if they're not rejecting 99 candidates for every candidate they hire, they are somehow not doing it right.
Looking at it from the candidate's point of view: Being rejected is actually something that psychologically kind of sucks a lot. Even if at the level of higher cognition you are perfectly aware that it's just a numbers game, and that you shouldn't let rejection get to you in a psychological way, we are not vulcans but humans. Rejection means cognitive dissonance in a big way: You applied for the job, so that means you wanted it. But they rejected you, so that means that you're not getting it. It's also a threat to your identity, because you think of yourself as being pretty good, and now there's someone who thinks you're not good enough for them. It just sucks.
So what do you do? You engage in cognitive dissonance reduction. You look at that recruiter spam, and you immediately start looking for reasons not to apply. Because if you find any reason not to want the job, then they can't hurt you by not giving it to you.
Recruiting is broken in a big way: We need to find ways of doing it that causes much less psychological friction.
This is very insightful. I've personally gotten better at handling rejections, but it's still very difficult. The amount of effort individuals are expected to invest in each prospective job is mind blowing.
On top of my resume, you want me to fill out multiple text boxes with information about why I want to work at Random No Name Company, what I expect from my time there, what my personal ethos is... Then you ask me for a cover letter?! This is literally to just initiate a lottery where it seems the odds of the next step happening are less than 1%.
It's more brutal than dating. I do not envy any single engineers who are juggling both games.
I knew that someone was going to pick up on the scent of Bayesian fallacy here ;-) ...though I think there's probably an economics-style-argument that can be made here that a market where companies reject a lot of candidates won't be in equilibrium if there are a lot of candidates who seldom get rejected. -- Whether the exact number is 9, 99, or 999, and what kind of measure of central tendency that number represents, whether it's a mean, a median, a mode, or whatever, has no real bearing on the argument I was making.
Looking at it from the candidate's point of view: Being rejected is actually something that psychologically kind of sucks a lot. Even if at the level of higher cognition you are perfectly aware that it's just a numbers game, and that you shouldn't let rejection get to you in a psychological way, we are not vulcans but humans. Rejection means cognitive dissonance in a big way: You applied for the job, so that means you wanted it. But they rejected you, so that means that you're not getting it. It's also a threat to your identity, because you think of yourself as being pretty good, and now there's someone who thinks you're not good enough for them. It just sucks.
So what do you do? You engage in cognitive dissonance reduction. You look at that recruiter spam, and you immediately start looking for reasons not to apply. Because if you find any reason not to want the job, then they can't hurt you by not giving it to you.
Recruiting is broken in a big way: We need to find ways of doing it that causes much less psychological friction.