It’s happened to me, it’s happened to you, it’s happened to all of us. You apply for a job opening, get the interview and then after what feels like some good solid communication you discover the job went to someone else.
Well, you could do some yelling and screaming and run about the house tearing your hair out. I don’t recommend it, but you could. You could also send off a nasty email cursing the buyer and all their family to the seventh generation.
Guess what? I don’t recommend that either.
If they were nice enough to inform you they were going with someone else then I recommend a polite thank-you note and move on.
Nothing you can do is going to get you this job so there’s no reason to worry about it. However, the fact that they put the time into the original discussion means that they are perfectly willing to consider working with you in the future.
So don’t do anything to mess that up.
One of the most common reasons that this happens is that the client found someone else who was better for this job.
It doesn’t mean they found someone who was better overall, just better for this job. It may be that when their next opening comes up they’ll immediately think of you and fire off an email.
In the meantime, pick yourself up and work on something else.
Networking and patience are two of the keys to a successful freelance career.
Here’s an example of what I mean by patience. As many of you know I don’t just work on oDesk, but I use other freelance sites as well. I recently got my first job at one of those other sites: after only five months of trying.
I admit I wasn’t spending all day every day looking for work on that site: there were times I had more than enough work and stopped looking on new sites. However I was looking fairly frequently and while there weren’t a lot of jobs that caught my eye, there were some that I would have liked to have done that I didn’t get.
So I spent time polishing my profile and figuring out the ins and outs of the site. I tried a few different methods of bidding and finally won a job.
Yes it took a while, and more than I would have liked, but since I wasn’t depending purely on that site I had the time to spend getting it right and not ranting and raving about the injustice that meant I didn’t get a job there until now.
It would have been just as pointless as any of the other rants I mentioned at the beginning of the post.
You need to look forward not backward.
As Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam goes:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Freelancers need to live by that dictum. You can’t change the past, only the future.
In other news: I’m now writing for another blog as well as this one. If you’re interested in technology why not come over and see what’s going on at Gizmotechnet. Hopefully I’ll see some of you there.
I’d be evil like Bill (who better watch out on his next post for a snarky comment) and say that I always get the jobs I apply for, but I’d be lying.
Instead, I’ll say, “Good post, D-Funk!” and tell all the folks out there to keep their chins up if they don’t get the dream job they applied for. There’s new stuff every day, so keep applying!
I had some real heart-breakers too when it comes to applying for jobs. In these cases, the employer wants to stay in touch so that they could hire me on some future project. After all this time, they never have. So to me that line’s the equivalent of “let’s just be friends.”
But yes, suck it up and move on. What else CAN you do?
Good luck on the new blog!