Experience v. Direction

You ever have that feeling where you know something is wrong and though you can name several of the symptoms, you can't quite pinpoint the obvious cause?

"Lack of experience" is often a cop-out that company recruiters often use as an excuse to reject potential candidates when they apply for open positions. The problem in fact is likely to be an expressed confusion on the applicant's part of their career goals. If the applicant seems fickle-minded about how what role they want to play in their professional life, the company writes them off as too risky of an investment. They don't want to hire someone that will only stick around for a year or two, they want to believe that all entry-level employees are going to stick around for many years to come. That might not be true of certain companies where business thrives on the energy of young hires to come in, be relevant to a young target audience, and then move on after only a couple of years on the job.

In my case, I do not have enough experience in the "real world" to feel secure about anything I might be doing in 5-10 years. I simply just don't know enough about these jobs. And so the longer I interview with a company, the more and more I learn about them and what they do and the more excited I get. Unfortunately, the interviewing process generally ends before the company recognizes my growing sense of "I want to do this" which recently has resulted in many "thank you but" letters arriving at my door.

So... next time you go into a job interview, make sure you at least *pretend* to be very certain about how much you love the job for which you are applying. For people like me that hate politics and "fake" personalities, it will be particularly difficult.