Rejection Recovery · Primly Community

how to keep applying after multiple rejections when motivation is completely gone

laidoff_lena · 5 replies

i have applied to 74 jobs since being laid off in january. i have had 11 phone screens, 4 first-round interviews, and 2 final rounds. both finals went nowhere.

this is month five. i am not okay.

not looking for "the market is tough but keep going" because i know that. what i want is the actual mechanics of how people maintain enough function to keep submitting applications when every part of you wants to stop.

because here's where i am: i open LinkedIn and feel nothing. i have applications open in tabs i can't make myself finish. i went three days last week without applying to anything and then felt guilty on top of everything else.

some things i've tried: scheduled "application hours" in the morning only. worked for about two weeks then fell apart. treating it like a sales pipeline with a spreadsheet. this helped my tracking but not my motivation. taking a full week off. helped short-term but the anxiety of "losing time" made it worse.

the part that breaks me is the final rounds. you prepare for weeks, you show up, you think it went well. and then silence, then the email. that's a different kind of drain than a rejection from a cold application.

i'm a senior data engineer, 8 years experience, not a niche role. the fact that it's taking this long tells me something about the market and about how this year is going, but knowing that doesn't refill the tank.

what worked for you when you hit the wall?

5 replies

mobile_mara

what got me through month four was switching from outcome-based to behavior-based goals. not "get a job this week" which i can't control. instead: "send 3 applications Tuesday, have one coffee chat Thursday." hitting the small goals felt like something even when the results weren't there yet.

hardware_hugo

74 applications in 5 months for a senior data engineering role and only 11 phone screens suggests the applications themselves may be the bottleneck before we even get to rejections. what does your application approach look like? cold ATS, warm intros, or mix?

laidoff_lena

mostly cold ATS. i've done maybe 8 warm intros total. you're probably right that this is the real problem. it's just that the outreach energy is the hardest part to find right now.

de_derek

data eng here. same market, same timeline. what helped me was narrowing to 10 target companies instead of shotgunning applications. less volume but more prep per application and more LinkedIn connection work beforehand. quality to quantity ratio matters more when you're running low on fuel.

quietquit_quincy

the guilt spiral after days off is real and it makes everything worse. some of those down days are your nervous system asking for a break that it actually needs. harder to recover from complete depletion than to recover from a day or two of rest.