don't be overconfident....

Lesson learned (or relearned) today about job hunting -- don't get overconfident.

I've had a couple of very good interviews this month. In both cases, I had very good reasons to believe that I would get called back for second interviews. In fact, in one case, a friend of mine who has an internal contact assured me that I would be hearing about the second interview any day now.

I didn't get the interview. The recruiter was kind enough to call and let me know that I didn't make the short list of candidates. If, for some reason, the first bunch of candidates don't work out, then they would reconsider my application. The chances of that are slim to none (although it has happened to me before).

I'm disappointed. More than I thought I'd be since I was not totally convinced that this company was a place where I wanted to work. BUT, I was confident that it would be a good Plan B job in case my Plan A didn't work out.

Now, I don't have Plan B. Plan A is still in progress as I DID get called back for a second interview there. But, geez louise, competition is tough. The Plan B company had a really, strong bunch of candidates and while I did well on my interviews, apparently other people did better.

Now, it all depends on me really amazing the Plan A folks. I'm feeling very anxious all of a sudden. I'd really love to get the Plan A job, but, I don't know what my competition is at this point.

And while I seem to be doing well on my interviews, I'm not doing well enough. I need to figure out what I need to do better. I'm going to spend some time doing some research that I can use to wow the technical team at the Plan A job.

In the meantime, I'm back to responding to recruiters about contracts and next week, I'll start poking at the recruiters again. Confidence is good, but really, I must learn to not get over excited about any one possibility. Two many variables and a lot of them are not under my control.