Why Waiting for Feedback Destroys Professionals
In the service industry, there exists a strange and persistent illusion: if you understand why a client did not choose you today, you can supposedly fix the mistake tomorrow and increase your chances of success. But in twenty-five years of working with executives and shareholders, I have never seen this logic actually work.
The same applies to job candidates. An interview is essentially a B2B transaction: you are selling your experience, competencies, and potential, while the employer decides whether to buy. And the mechanics of rejection here are exactly the same as in any complex sale.
In the vast majority of cases, rejection is not about you, not about the quality of your work, and not even about price.
Decisions are made for dozens of internal, unformalized reasons: from budget constraints and internal politics to the preferences of a particular manager who once worked with "someone they knew." Or the hiring manager saw you as competition. Or HR decided you were too good and would leave quickly. Or the position was quietly filled with an internal candidate, and you were brought in just to check a box. The real motives are rarely stated — simply because they are not about professionalism, but about context, timing, and internal dynamics.
According to publicly available market research, the average conversion rate in complex sales is 5 to 20 percent. In the executive job market, the statistics are similar: out of ten final interviews, one candidate gets an offer, sometimes two. This means eight out of ten rejections are a statistical norm, not a professional verdict.
But it is precisely the expectation of feedback that destroys from within. You start looking for meaning where meaning does not exist. You mistake randomness for causality. You try to interpret silence as an assessment of your personality. A candidate who receives no response replays every phrase from the interview in their head, searching for where they went wrong. And there was no mistake — it is just that the CEO's wife once worked with another candidate, and her recommendation made the difference.
This destroys far more than any actual rejection.
The right strategy is different. A professional invests exactly as much time in a potential client or employer as the process requires, and no more. They complete the dialogue, switch off, and move on — without emotional loose ends. If an offer or a follow-up call comes, excellent. If not, it is not their problem but a feature of the market.
The illusion of "find out the reason, fix it" does not work in most cases. Because there is nothing to fix. Many decisions are made on parameters that cannot be controlled: shifting priorities, internal politics, personal connections, sudden budget freezes. Sometimes what you consider a mistake was actually your advantage — just not the right one for that particular person at that particular moment. For example, your management experience leading a team of 100 might seem insufficient to one person and excessive to another. Where is your mistake in that? Exactly. There was none.
There is one exception: when the same pattern of rejections repeats systematically. If you are told or hinted the same thing again and again — in interviews or in sales — that is no longer coincidence, and it is worth investigating. But such cases are rare, and they tend to be obvious.
Professional growth begins the moment a person stops perceiving rejection as an evaluation of themselves. The market is not obligated to choose us every time — neither as contractors nor as candidates. Our job is to perform at our level, present ourselves honestly, and move forward.
