In this career‑coaching video, the speaker addresses the emotional impact of a rejected job interview and offers a practical framework for turning the experience into growth. She first explains how many people misinterpret rejection as a personal failure, then outlines numerous external reasons an employer might not hire a candidate—such as internal hires, budget cuts, or organizational crises—emphasizing that the outcome often has little to do with the applicant. The speaker stresses the importance of maintaining a resilient mindset, viewing each interview as a step toward the dream job, and not letting past rejections affect future performance. She introduces an "interview debrief" exercise where candidates write down what went well and what didn’t, using the insights to improve. Drawing from her own experience, she highlights the need to assess job fit early by asking specific questions about day‑to‑day responsibilities, offering a free 35‑question cheat sheet to help candidates evaluate whether a role aligns with their goals. Throughout, she encourages viewers to redefine failure, give themselves credit for trying, and adopt a systematic approach to job hunting.
Chapters
So you were unsuccessful in a job interview. What does it mean? I get a lot of my students and coaching clients that come to me when they have failed a job interview, and it is just the worst thing in the world for them. And in this video, I'm going to share some tools on how to most effectively handle this. And by the end of our calls, my clients are normally excited and ready to get back out there. So stay tuned. What are you making it mean? Here's what my clients will mostly tell me. They're making it mean that they failed, that they are a failure generally as people, that the interviewers hated them, that they weren't good enough, that they failed their family, their fiancé, their kids, whatever. They sometimes, they make it really bad in their head. It doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you. It's not useful to beat yourself up over an interview that didn't work out. You didn't die. You're okay. You can just go to another interview and do better next time. Here's why it's always going to be better for you the next time you go. So you went to an interview. That's great. Most people don't even get interviews. You got one. That means that you can get another one, and you can get as many as you need to get the job that you ultimately want. Quite possibly, not getting the job had nothing to do with you at all. It could have been a thousand other reasons for why you didn't get the job. Say if it had nothing to do with you, it could have been one of these reasons. Maybe the CEO's son or brother or some family member inside the organization took the job instead. That happens. Maybe they did an internal restructuring and they hired someone from within. That happens a lot too. Maybe they were facing a critical incident. Something happened with their own internal systems. Maybe they had to put the hiring aside. Maybe they had budget cuts and decided to cancel the hiring or put it on hold. Potentially they could have been dealing with a legal issue and they had to put the hiring on hold. A lot of the times you'd be really surprised. I'll be coaching somebody and I'll get them to talk about what happened and they'll be like, yeah, you know, come to think of it, something didn't add up there or something didn't make sense or they did say something about that. And it turns out it had nothing to do with them and they're beating themselves up over nothing. Failure is part of the game. Accept it now and it won't come as a shock and you'll be good. No one nails every interview every time. The reason for this is because not everybody likes everybody. It's just not how the world works. So when that's the case, you can't possibly nail every single interview, and you can't possibly be successful 100% of the time. And you wouldn't want to be either, because it means you might end up in a job you don't even like. So if you want to get your dream job, and I mean your dream job that you are so excited about, you will have to accept that it will maybe take 1 or 2 interviews. Maybe it'll take you 10, but it doesn't matter. What matters is your commitment. Level and your ability to say, I'm gonna do whatever it takes until I get what I want. If you did let an interview that you didn't succeed in get you down, then what's gonna happen is it's gonna affect how you feel and it's gonna affect how you show up in your next interview. And then you might fail that one because you're thinking about the past ones. So don't let that happen. You want to take the lessons learned from that interview and move on. It doesn't mean that you're not good enough or whatever it is you made it mean. It just means you had a growth moment or it had nothing to do with you. So let's consider if you already knew that sometimes you were going to fail, but it's only a fail because of what you're making it mean. If you make it mean that it's just a blip in the road and you're going to be in your dream job, so it's not going to matter anyway, and blips in the road happen, then you're going to move on with no problem, right? How are you defining failure? So to be honest, I would not consider an interview where you didn't get the job a failure. It's not even a failure because first of all, you don't know if it had to do with you. Second of all, a real failure would be not even trying, not even going. Would be not even applying, not putting your resume forward, not showing up to the interview. That would be a real fail. So to be honest, how do you define failure? And does that need to change? Give yourself some credit for putting yourself on the line. Putting yourself in a position where you could fail, something that was hard for you to do, because I bet it wasn't easy going into the interview. That's the work that you really need to be doing, is just accepting that sometimes you don't always get the job. Harvest your lessons learned, use them, and move on. What I teach my students and clients to do is an interview debrief. An interview debrief is where you write down what worked well and what didn't work well in such a way that you can really utilize this result to improve for the next time. This exercise is a process that will help you improve yourself, and even if you did great and there was nothing better that you could have done differently because it did not have to do with you, then quite often this will come out in the interview debrief as well. And then you can start to realize that it wasn't about you to start with. If it was about you, if you could have done something differently, Then sitting down, taking that time to write up the process of what went really well and what didn't do really well, and consciously using that for next time will give you the confidence that you need. Another reason you may not have gotten the job was because you were simply not the right fit, and maybe you would have hated the job anyway. This actually happened to me. I took the job, I interviewed great, I was hired, but when I got in the job, I hated it, and I knew within the first day. So in my mind, I I was like, I need to do an interview debrief and figure out what I did wrong. So I learned that I needed to ask more questions, more specific questions to determine whether I would even like the job in the first place and whether I would even like the people that were working there. The big question that I decided that I would now ask was, what does a day in the life look like of the successful hire? What will they be doing from the time they get there to the time they go home? And that would give me insight as to what the position was really about. So I'd like to offer you today a free 35 Questions Cheat Sheet to discover whether you're the right fit or not. So this is 35 questions. You can download a PDF if you click the link below, and you can choose from these questions to see what you wanna know about the job before you get into it. They'll also make you sound really smart at the end of the interview, and you'll also be able to gather some information that you need to make sure that you end up in the right fit. Thanks so much for watching. That's all for today. If you wanna watch another video from me, Click here. Another video in the series, click here. Give me a thumbs up if you liked it, thumbs down if you hated it, and subscribe to the channel. Thanks so much. I'll see you next week. Bye.
