I cannot remember the last time I opened a job advert and allowed myself to feel genuinely excited about it. I still find roles that interest me, businesses I would love to understand better and opportunities where I can immediately imagine what I could bring, but somewhere between reading the description and pressing apply, I seem to deliberately switch that excitement off. After months of applications, silence and rejection, hope has started to feel less like something positive and more like another opportunity to be hurt.
I wrote recently about how job searching was beginning to change the way I see myself, and I wish I could say things have moved forward since then. In some ways they have. I understand more about recruitment, more about interviews and more about myself than I did when I wrote that article. I have reflected, asked for advice, changed my approach and tried to learn from every piece of feedback I have been fortunate enough to receive, yet emotionally I am still struggling in much the same place.
“I am not sure rejection hurts less when you expect it, I think you just learn not to hope in the first place.”
I feel numb, empty and deflated, and perhaps most frighteningly, I can feel myself gradually losing hope. I do not want to get excited about an opportunity because I do not want to experience the disappointment that follows when it disappears.
Trying to Change the Things I Can Control
One thing I have tried very hard not to do throughout this process is decide that everybody else must be the problem. If something is not working, my instinct is to understand why, pull it apart and work out what I can change, which is probably one of the clearest examples of how my autistic brain approaches problems. I struggle to accept an outcome without understanding what created it, so applications, interviews and feedback quickly become things for me to analyse.
Recently I spent time with my cousin, who works at a senior level in marketing for a FTSE 100 company, going through my CVs properly. We strengthened the commercial value behind what I had achieved, challenged some of the language I was using and looked much more carefully at the roles I should actually be targeting. Instead of applying broadly across marketing because I was frightened of missing something, I became more focused around senior marketing, GTM and growth, events and brand roles, where the combination of my experience seems to make more sense.
That process helped because somebody whose professional opinion I respect could look at twelve years+ of my career from the outside and see value in things I had started questioning myself. It gave me a little more confidence that perhaps the problem was not that I had nothing to offer, but that I needed to communicate what I had done differently.
My CVs are being viewed now, which should probably feel encouraging… Yet they still are not progressing. Before, I could wonder whether my application had disappeared into a system somewhere, whether I had used the wrong keywords or whether anybody had actually looked at it. Knowing that somebody may have looked creates a different question entirely, because now I wonder what they saw and why it was not enough.
Was somebody else more specialised? Did they have more like-for-like experience? Did they have stronger connections? Was my career too broad? Was there something missing from my CV that I still have not recognised? Or did somebody simply look at what I have spent twelve years building and decide they did not want to know any more?
Logically, I understand there could be hundreds of reasons and most of them say very little about my overall ability. Emotionally, after enough rejection, logic becomes increasingly difficult to hold onto.
When an Interview Does Not Show What You Know
One interview in particular has shaped much of my thinking about recruitment over the past few weeks. It was for a business I genuinely wanted to join, I progressed through two interviews and left believing I had represented myself well, only to discover through some incredibly thoughtful feedback afterwards that one of the areas I had failed to demonstrate properly was my strategic GTM experience.
During the interview I had been asked about go-to-market experience and my brain immediately connected the question to an Enterprise Summit I had delivered in Barcelona. I knew that project inside out, I was confident talking about it and it absolutely involved GTM, so in my mind I was answering the question… What I did not do was clearly explain the strategy behind it.
That distinction sounds obvious to me now because I have had time to think about it, but I did not know during the interview that I was answering a slightly different version of the question to the one the interviewer needed answered. I did not sit there struggling or feeling that I had given a poor response. I left thinking I had nailed it… That is what made the feedback so painful.
The experience was there, but they did not know it was there because I had not communicated it in the way they needed to hear it.
“Sometimes the experience is already there, but the way I answer means nobody gets the chance to see it.”
The business handled the rejection with an honesty and humanity that actually increased my respect for them, and I still regularly check their jobs board because I would love another opportunity to work there. There is no anger towards them and I completely accept their decision based on the interview they experienced.
The frustration is with myself because hindsight allows me to reconstruct the conversation perfectly. I can now hear the answer I should have given, which means my autistic brain has something specific it can replay, analyse and punish itself with.
Learning to Ask for What I Need
That experience changed the way I think about reasonable adjustments during recruitment. Where appropriate, I now know I can ask whether interview questions or themes can be provided in advance, not because I want an easier interview or scripted answers, but because having additional processing time can help me understand what is actually being asked and choose the experience that best answers it.
For me, this is what an adjustment means in practice. It does not change whether I have the skills or experience required for the role, it changes whether the interview gives me the best opportunity to communicate them.
Research into autistic people’s experiences of hiring in the UK has found that recruitment processes can create particular barriers for autistic candidates, while research specifically examining employment interviews has found that adapting questions to make them more explicit can improve autistic candidates’ ability to communicate relevant information. The National Autistic Society also explains that reasonable adjustments can apply during recruitment as well as once somebody is employed.
I wish I had understood that properly before the interview I wanted so badly, but I cannot change that experience now. What I can do is learn from it. The difficulty is that learning from rejection does not stop rejection hurting.
Are We Always Seeing the Best Person for the Job?
The longer this process continues, the more curious I have become about what recruitment actually measures. I am not a recruiter and I do not pretend to understand the pressure involved in reducing hundreds of applications to a shortlist. Businesses cannot speak to everybody, hiring managers have limited time and ultimately somebody has to make difficult decisions using the information available.
But I keep coming back to one question… Are recruitment processes always identifying the person who will be best at doing the job, or sometimes the person who is best at getting through the recruitment process?
A CV measures how effectively we can compress years of experience into a few pages. An application may require us to understand what language or keywords will make that experience visible. An interview asks us to interpret questions quickly, retrieve the right example, communicate confidently, build rapport and understand what the person opposite us is really trying to discover.
Those are skills, and some of them are important in many jobs, but they are not necessarily the same skills somebody will use every day once they are actually employed.
“Are we always measuring how somebody will perform in the role, or sometimes how well they perform at getting the role?”
This is particularly interesting to me through the lens of neurodiversity because traditional interviews can place significant weight on communication and rapid interpretation. Research from the University of Bath has shown that clearer, more specific interview questions can help autistic candidates give more relevant answers, with adaptations such as breaking questions into explicit components helping candidates understand exactly what information is being requested.
That does not mean autistic people are inherently bad at interviews or that neurotypical people find them easy. Autism is far too individual for statements like that. I can only describe what happens in my own head and ask whether there might be other people whose actual ability is not always visible through the way we traditionally assess it.
When Self-Improvement Starts Turning Inwards
There is a familiar piece of advice around job searching that every rejection teaches you something, and I understand the sentiment because I have genuinely learned a huge amount from mine.
I have improved my CV, strengthened the commercial language around my experience, narrowed the roles I target, reflected on interview feedback, learned more about reasonable adjustments and become much clearer about how I describe my GTM and strategic experience. I have asked people for help because I know I do not have all the answers, and I have tried to turn an incredibly difficult period into an opportunity to understand myself better.
But there is another side to constantly looking for what you can improve… Eventually, when you keep changing things and the outcome remains the same, you start running out of things to blame other than yourself… That is where I am now.
When the CV was not working, I could change the CV. When I was applying too broadly, I could become more targeted. When interview feedback showed that I had not communicated something properly, I could learn how to communicate it better. Each problem gave me something tangible to work on and, perhaps more importantly for my autistic brain, something I could control… Then I make those changes and still nothing happens.
“There comes a point where trying to improve everything about your job search starts to feel dangerously close to trying to improve everything about yourself.”
I know I have experience. I know I have delivered things I am proud of and I know there have been people throughout my career who valued what I brought. Yet every week without progress chips away at that knowledge, until evidence from over twelve years of working in this area starts competing with the emotional weight of a few months of rejection… That is probably why I have stopped getting excited.
Hope creates a version of the future, and I know from experience how painful it can be when my autistic brain has started building that future before somebody else tells me it is not going to happen. So now I try not to build it at all.
I apply, I learn, I adjust and I keep going, but somewhere underneath all of that effort I am still waiting for somebody to give me the opportunity to become more than a CV, more than an interview answer and more than another application in a system, because I know there is a person behind all of those things who desperately wants the chance to show what he can do, even if right now he is finding it increasingly difficult to see that person through my eyes.
References and Further Reading
National Autistic Society, What are reasonable adjustments and when can they be requested?
National Autistic Society
Davies et al. (2023), Access to employment: A comparison of autistic, neurodivergent and neurotypical adults’ experiences of hiring processes in the United Kingdom
UCL Discovery
Maras et al. (2021), Adapting employment interview questions: Ameliorating the disadvantage for autistic job seekers
University of Bristol research record
University of Bath, What to do when interviewing an autistic person for a job
University of Bath guidance