What I Learned After an Interviewer Forgot Who I Was

I am about to start my career as an attorney at the start of next week after spending six years as a special education teacher at an urban school district. The transition from teacher to attorney was a bit difficult because I had a hard time securing a job after law school.

The past few days, one episode related to the interviewing process has stayed with me. I went to a networking event towards the tail end of my last year of law school, and the stakes were lower than usual because I had recently gotten a job and didn’t necessarily feel the need to try that hard at networking anymore.

I ran into someone who interviewed me for a job I did not get a few months before. However, I figured that the interview went well because she was my initial interviewer, and I advanced to the next round of interviews, and I figured that talking with her was still a good networking opportunity. I approached her, said hello, and asked how everything was going.

This is the part where I tell you about how she said she wished they could have hired me and how strong a candidate I was.

Wrong — she was very polite and cordial and said hello back. Then she asked me what my name was and introduced herself. She made small talk, asking what I was interested in doing after law school and where I working, like she would any law student who approached her at a networking event.

I mentioned that we had met before — she interviewed me for a position at her employer. We talked for about 40 minutes during the interview. Even when I mentioned she had interviewed me, it did not ring a bell and she still did not remember who I was. She mentioned that her employer had interviewed hundreds of people for this position and that it was really easy to lose track of people. She also mentioned that it was a highly competitive position and highly selective, so I should not feel bad that I did not get that job.

Before we parted ways, she gave me her business card, and she told me to email her for us to grab lunch or coffee. I did reach out as a means of following up, and I forgot about it. I could not remember whether I did not respond or she did not respond, but I looked back to see that I was the one who had the last response until we went our separate ways in our personal and professional lives.

. . .

I was rejected from dozens of jobs and ghosted from hundreds of jobs I applied for before getting my current position with my current employer. The ghosting was a lot more common than the rejection, so I appreciated the generic emails that signaled they at least took a moment and effort to say no.

I took a lot of the rejections kind of personally and thought it was a reflection on my interviewing skills or some big deficiencies in myself as a candidate. Maybe I needed to delete my blog with over 26,000 followers because these interviewers saw something they didn’t like. Maybe I needed to dress better. Maybe I needed to seriously work on my interviewing skills, or add this to my resume, or take that off my resume.

Frankly, I had the worst thoughts possible about myself. Based on vibes and the connection I felt during the interview, I felt like I was interviewing pretty well. The results, of course, were suggesting otherwise. I was interviewing for highly competitive jobs where there were hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants, but I couldn’t help but wonder whether I said the wrong thing or came off as some sort of freak to a lot of interviewers to strike out as often as I did.

I would receive feedback that I actually interviewed well, a lot later on, with the job I got. Of course, there is a selection bias there — that position had four different rounds of interviews, a writing exercise, as well as other elements to get the job, so it wasn’t just the interview.

I previously wrote about how one friend told me that my demeanor and who I am on first impression does not necessarily reveal my go-getter spirit. On first impression, most people think I’m a very calm person who does not rattle and who isn’t very easily excitable. After someone knows me for a week, they realize that impression is not right when I dive deeply into an assignment.

It could say something about how judicious and cautious I am on first impressions, and how I won’t always let my full personality show through, which I might need to work on in terms of letting myself live a bit and let loose. It could also have been a reason why I didn’t stand out and why that particular interviewer I ran into at the networking event had no clue who I was.

What this encounter taught me was that, as well as the interview went, it truly wasn’t personal. It wasn’t personal to the point where the interviewer didn’t remember me, and had no familiarity when they saw me. Perhaps this says something about how I didn’t stand out in a crowd of over 100 people and was playing things too safe as to not distinguish myself from the rest. Perhaps it is better to put yourself out there to stand out and risk the interviewers not liking you, but I think, looking back, I did the best I could and still landed the best possible job I could find.

. . .

I think it just says something about the hiring process. There was no possible way of knowing what was going on or what was said about me or the other candidates behind the scenes. I didn’t know what the recruiting committee said about me or other candidates when they met, and I didn’t know what they cared about. Sure, there were some interviews I could have done better in or things I could have said differently, but there’s no way I could know that (I asked for feedback regarding this and was just told I was doing a good job).

The reasons I was given for not getting hired for some jobs made sense, but were highly specific. They were just not hiring for the practice group that I was going for, which was litigation. They may have been selecting more from certain law schools than others, and my law school was a more mid-tier school compared to the Harvards and Yales of the world. I may have just not had as good a GPA as some candidates, or not had the most publications.

All those factors were taken into consideration, and at the end of the day, it was probably a lot more of a numbers game for a lot of the employers who interviewed me than I thought at first. There were various ways I tinkered with making myself a better applicant. I started to market my language proficiency of being able to speak and understand Mandarin and read and write in Spanish, which I had neglected to mention before.

As an evening student who was working as a special education teacher during the day and attending law school at night, since it occupied a lot more of my time, I included a lot more of my professional accomplishments rather than my legal accomplishments. I had to reshuffle a lot of this resume around, and I also got feedback to shorten my resume so it didn’t look like I was packing so much onto one page and trying too hard.

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Some of it was timing. The summer after my first year of law school, I felt like my professional experience as an part time law student who worked during the day was a liability rather than an asset. I felt like for these positions, employers did question a bit more why I wanted to leave teaching, a field I was successful in, and I was also graduating a year early, which did not fit into their timelines. After I struck out with summer positions that segue into full time positions, I had much more luck with post-graduate positions. By then, the timelines of when I’d start my job matched up, and the timing made it more convincing when I stated I wanted to leave teaching to move to the next chapter.

But the interviewer not even remembering my name or who I was gave me perspective — that I was just a number and someone that was largely forgotten about. And that made the sting of all those rejections hurt significantly less than they had at first — and like the hiring process, there are a lot of things in life I took personally where people did not think about it much at all.

It happened various times I applied for jobs as a teacher. Beyond employment, it probably also applied when I applied to colleges or law school and didn’t get into a particular school. It was never, ever personal, even if I interpreted it as such. It applied to more personal parts of my life too — like losing touch with friends after college when we got busy and life went separate ways, or if a person lashed out when they were having a bad day.

For what it’s worth, if I interviewed hundreds of people for a competitive jobs many years down the line, there’s a good chance I won’t remember everyone I interviewed either. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but I am coming to a greater understanding that that’s just how it is.

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This post was previously published on Ryan Fan’s blog.

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