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Rejection letters have tale to tell



A man I respect once told me that if I really want to know where I was going in life, just keep track of where I wanted to go, but did not make it.

Travelers keep maps and photos, but in keeping with his advice, I kept rejection letters.

In my time in the professional ranks, I applied for many jobs I did not get.

Many.

About three-quarters of the companies I applied to – across 30 years – never responded, except with a silent refusal of employment.

I kept every rejection letter, postcard and printouts of emails from the ones with the courtesy to reply. Individually, I remember getting a lot of them, as I read through them, one last time.

I also kept the offer letters for jobs I did accept. Reviewing them was a more pleasant part of dealing with my papered past. It was definitely a trip down memory lane, at least the path on which I traveled.

The rejections tell other tales.

Seeing someone doubt your qualifications, in print – face-to-face was worse – was always a humbling and revealing experience.

I learned two things: I would have been great at most of the jobs, which is why I applied in the first place; and the cover letters I wrote to go with the applications and resumes, well, they were some of the best BS’ing I did ever.

I even talked my way into two jobs I was not immediately qualified for, but did well in after training. At one, I was replaced by a daughter of the owner; no stopping nepotism. I dated the daughter briefly after losing my job to her.

The other job lasted several years, until I knowingly trained a person who made less money than me to do my job, and that was that.

We did not date.

She had a young child and a husband who worked only sporadically. But I agreed to train her for my job, primarily because she was sharp. It was the right move. I was looking for a job when I got there, and she went on to retire from that company.

“No thank you” notes from a variety of branches of federal and state government agencies were in the folder. The ranks of communication professionals in government are where many journalists find out what it is like to work as a source.

Despite lacking a bachelor’s degree but armed with trade school credentials, I believe I showed what is known in job-search parlance as temerity.

Sometimes, it worked. Sometimes, it did not. I once applied to be communications director for a local suburban city, and no less than the mayor told me I would not be hired, primarily because there was concern I could not “turn off the reporter” in me.

This old news hound heard a compliment in there, somewhere. Woof.

Then, there was the large drug company in California that declined to employ me after I joked in my second interview about the then-new idea of a pre-employment drug screening.

“You allow employees to test drugs? That’s progressive.”

Finally, there is a small group of letters from a company here in suburban Columbus. That they bothered to write to me with their rejections (four times, before I actually went to work for the company as an outside consultant) was affirmation of how I have always liked to do business: with forthright determination, good news or bad.

After their review, the folder and its 30 years of contents were consigned to the pile of starter paper for our small, backyard firepit.

It was a poetic end to that papered part of my past.

Jef Benedetti is a regular contributor to the Spotlight.

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