By Eli Gunduz, founder of Careersy AI, Careersy Coaching and current Principal Tech Recruiter with 13+ years experience shortlisting, interviewing and hiring.
Everybody who hands you job search advice wants to talk tactics. Fix the CV. Optimise the LinkedIn banner. Rehearse your STAR stories until you hate the sound of your own voice. Almost nobody tells you the part that actually decides whether you make it out the other side, which is this: a real job search will spend the next three months kicking you in the teeth, and you are expected to keep smiling and hitting Send while it does.
We don't talk about this enough.
Here is what it actually feels like. You send fifty applications into what is functionally a black hole. Say forty never reply at all, not a no, not a bounce, nothing, just silence that you will personally interpret as a verdict on your worth as a human being. Of the ten that answer, six are polite rejections, three ghost you after one call, and one strings you through four rounds over six weeks before hiring the internal candidate they were always going to hire. Do that math on your nervous system. You put in twenty, thirty hours of hope, and the market hands you back a form email that opens "After careful consideration."
I've spent enough time on the other side of that silence, the one reading the applications, to tell you what it usually is. A headcount that froze. An internal candidate who was always going to win it. A role pulled back overseas. Or you landing as CV 180 of 300 for a job that closed early. I could see the reason. You couldn't. That gap, between what the person reading knew and what you were left to guess at, is where a lot of the damage gets done.
And it is worse if you haven't done this in a while.
If you've been heads-down at one company for five or eight years, the last time you job searched the world was different, you were different, and your brain has filed "I am employable" under settled facts. Then you hit the current market and every silence pokes that file. It's not that the rejections are so brutal one at a time. It's that there are so many of them, they arrive with no explanation, and there is no natural end to the process to tell your monkey brain it's allowed to stop scanning for threats. (More on the monkey brain in a second. It's basically the whole ballgame.)
So. Three things you can actually do. Not "practice gratitude." Not "trust the process." Things with a mechanism behind them.
They're really one move in three forms. Each one takes a scoreboard you can't control, the offers, the replies, your own worth, and swaps it for a scoreboard you can. That's the whole trick, and it has a name: the scoreboard swap. Here is what it looks like in practice.
Set a number. You need forty noes. Not forty applications, forty actual rejections, and you are going to keep a tally, and each no earns a tick mark, and you are not allowed to feel bad about a tick because the tick is the thing you are farming. One condition. They have to be noes from roles you had a real case for. Spraying gets you to forty faster and teaches you nothing.
This sounds like a mind game because it is one, but it's a mind game that fixes a real problem. The problem is that a job search asks you to control the one variable you can't (who says yes) and completely ignore the only ones you can (how many conversations you start, how fast you follow up, how many shots you take). So you flip the scoreboard. You stop scoring on offers, which are rare and mostly not up to you, and you start scoring on noes, which are common and entirely within your power to collect. Now a rejection isn't a wound. It's a point. You wanted the point. Go get thirty-nine more.
The bonus, and this one is not small: to collect forty noes in a market this cold you have to be in so many conversations that a couple of yeses fall out of the pipe almost by accident. Every time I've watched someone genuinely hunt forty rejections, something has shaken loose. The quota does the work whether or not you believe in it.
There's a thing psychologists call the Zeigarnik effect (fancy name, it just means unfinished tasks stay more available in memory than finished ones, which feels like your brain refusing to shut up). An unfinished task stays live in your head, running in a background tab, eating battery. You already know this feeling. It's why you can't stop thinking about the one email you haven't sent.
Now count your open loops. Twenty applications you never heard back on. Three "we'll be in touch" conversations. That recruiter who said "let me check with the team" nine days ago. Every single one of those is a tab your brain is holding open, refreshing, waiting on a reply that is never coming. That is where the drain actually lives. It is not the rejections that exhaust you. It's the ones that never resolve.
So resolve them yourself. Make a rule: if you haven't heard back in, say, fourteen days, the thing is dead, and you kill it in writing. Move it to a "closed" column. Closed is about your attention, not a decision about the role. If they surface on day thirty, take the call. Say "that one's over" out loud if you have to. You don't get to control whether they reply. You do get to control when you stop waiting, and the second you formally call it, your head hands you the battery back. (I run a version of this on my own inbox and it is faintly ridiculous how well it works. Screw it. Ridiculous and working beats dignified and drained.)
I'll be upfront about the bias here, because this is close to why we built the tracking the way we did inside Careersy AI's Guided Job Hunt. Your head is a terrible place to keep twenty open applications live, so with the board it doesn't have to. Every role sits in a column, Saved to Applied to Interviewing to Offer, and a dead one gets moved to closed where it stops pinging you. The waiting sits on a screen instead of in your nervous system. Five years of running this with coaching clients taught us the exact thing this section is about: the open loop is the drain. So we made the search hold its own state, instead of asking your brain to be the database. Put your search on the board instead of in your head.
When you get the fourth rejection in a week, your head does not say "that role wasn't a fit." It says "I'm unemployable" or "I've lost it" or "everyone can see I'm a fraud." And because it's inside your own skull in your own voice, you treat it as a fact instead of what it is, which is weather.
The move comes out of a therapy called ACT. I'm borrowing one technique from it, not prescribing anything. And it's the opposite of positive thinking: you don't argue with the thought. Arguing loses. You will not win a debate against your own monkey brain at 11pm. Instead you bolt four words onto the front: "I'm having the thought that I'm unemployable." Same words, but now there's a gap. There's you, and over there is the thought, and you can look at it instead of being it.
That gap is the entire point. Rejection hurts so much because it doesn't feel like a scheduling event, it feels like an identity attack, the market reaching in and telling you what you are. The four-word trick doesn't make the thought kind. It makes it a thought. And a thought you can watch is a thought that can't drive. (Does it feel stupid the first few times? Yes. Do it anyway. Feeling stupid is a lot cheaper than believing you're a fraud.)
One thing before the close, and I'd rather say it than not. If this has stopped being a job search problem and become a sleep or getting-out-of-bed problem, tell someone: Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, or 1737 in New Zealand.
None of this makes the job market kind. It isn't, it won't be, and anyone selling you a job search that feels good is selling you something. What these three buy you is the one thing the market works hardest to take: a little bit of the steering wheel back. You farm the noes so rejection turns into a score. You bury the dead loops so your head gets its bandwidth back. You put "thought" in front of the sentence so a bad Tuesday stops being a referendum on your soul.
The search is a thing you are doing. It is not a thing you are. Keep those two straight and you come out the other side with most of yourself intact, which, more than the offer, is the part that has to last.
Because it rarely arrives as information. It arrives as silence, or a form email, with no reason attached, so your brain fills the gap with the worst available explanation: something is wrong with you. From the hiring side, the real reason is usually mundane and has nothing to do with your worth, a frozen headcount, an internal candidate, a role that closed early. You just never get told which, so it lands as an identity verdict instead of a scheduling event.
Stop scoring the thing you can't control. Offers and replies aren't up to you, so measuring yourself against them guarantees you feel like you're losing. Score what you can control instead: conversations started, follow-ups sent, noes collected from roles you had a real case for. Motivation follows a scoreboard you can actually move.
Close the open loops on purpose. An unfinished, unanswered application stays live in your head and keeps draining you in the background (psychologists call it the Zeigarnik effect). Set a rule: no reply in fourteen days, the application is dead, and you mark it closed. You can't control whether they reply. You can control when you stop waiting.
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