sales background. we track everything. pipe stage, close rate, average deal cycle. so when i started job searching i naturally built a tracker.
it backfired at first. i was looking at my offer rate (at the time: 0%) and calculating how many more rejections were coming. very bad for morale.
what changed it: i started tracking process quality instead of outcomes. did i do real company research before this one? did i prep at least two strong stories for this role? did i follow up within 24 hours?
the rejections didn't stop. but my relationship with the spreadsheet changed. i was measuring effort i could control, not outcomes i couldn't. the conversion math still sucked but i stopped attaching every rejection to a verdict about me personally.
that's the thing. in sales you learn early that a lost deal isn't proof you're bad at sales. it's a data point. rejections are data points. the search is a funnel.
4 replies
analyst_ana
data person here: this is exactly right. outcome variance in small samples is enormous. you cannot evaluate your quality from 10 or 20 rejections. the signal is buried in the noise. what you CAN evaluate: are you getting screens? are you converting screens to loops? that's where actual process signal lives.
ds_dmitri
i've been telling myself this for weeks but seeing it framed as funnel math is somehow cleaner. what does your tracker look like, column-wise? i want to rebuild mine.
ae_andre
mine: company, role, source (referral/cold/agency), applied date, stage, last touch, next step, did i do real prep (y/n), outcome, notes. the 'did i do real prep' column is the one that changed things. when a rejection comes in and i can check yes on that, it feels different.
laidoff_lena
i have a tracker but it's been mostly an anxiety machine. i'm going to try adding the process columns and see if that shifts anything. thanks for this.