Contents:
- What is resilience?
- Why is resilience important?
- The key elements to resilience – with a recruitment focus
- Simple strategies to apply to your job search
What is resilience?
“the ability to withstand adversity and bounce back from difficult life events” When stress, adversity or trauma strikes, you still experience anger, grief and pain, but you're able to keep functioning — both physically and psychologically.
There are always hard times and challenges that can appear in our daily lives. Not everything goes to plan, and events can take a sudden, and sometimes disappointing turn.
The crucial question is how you react when you are faced with difficult challenges.
If you respond proactively, put your best effort in, despite all the odds, then you are resilient.
If you shut down, give up, quit, then you are likely to face even more challenges along the way, as your options may become limited.
Being resilient doesn’t mean that you never feel stressed, worried or defeated. What it does mean is that you create space for these feelings, and for moving past them, so that you can move forwards even when things are really tough.
Why is resilience important?
Having resilience means that when we are faced with failure, disappointment and rejection, we can bounce back (or more positively bounce forwards), to see how we can learn and grow. It’s not magic, it doesn’t guarantee that we can rise above everything, and it doesn’t always mean we’ll be successful. But it does mean that we keep trying.
Being resilient is important as it helps us to be:
- agile,
- adaptable,
- practical and put coping strategies in place,
- to not give up hope!
Why is having resilience important for the recruitment journey?
- Recruitment can cause a huge amount of stress and anxiety, especially if there is a need to get a job and get a job soon.
- A recruitment process is often littered with failure and disappointment.
- Rejection is an unfortunate, but common, component of any job search. Not everyone can get the job. It’s how you deal with rejection that helps build resilience.
- Our mind, and how it navigates through the cycle of job searching, applications, interviews, and the emotional strain that can occur, can be our biggest challenge.
- Sometimes we don’t realise that worry about failure, and its impact, can be perceptible to others. Rejection can make us lose confidence and impacts our self-esteem. This can come across when we talk to others, leading us into ‘a self-fulfilling prophesy’ cycle.
- Remember though – we only have to succeed once! Finding resilience through our recruitment challenges are a precursor to success. There is joy in recruitment, especially when that offer comes through.
To be successful in our job search, we want to set ourselves up in the best way, so we are putting our best self forward, to be on our ‘A’ game, and for that to shine through.
Fortunately, resilience is a skill that can be developed and strengthened over time, and by doing this, and applying a resilient mind-set and attitude to our job search we can gain a multitude of benefits:
- It can help us to nurture and develop our marketable skills;
- Understand our strengths and weaknesses so that we can overcome them;
- Think differently;
- Overcoming setbacks helps us to gain confidence and maybe pursue alternatives;
- Become more focused and make constructive decisions: knowing what we need, what we want and what we don’t want.
The key elements of resilience are:
Financial
Wellbeing
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Meaning & |
Physical health |
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purpose |
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Mental health |
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Staying |
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interested & |
Relationships |
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community |
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Rest, recovery |
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& sleep |
Let’s look at each of these elements:
Our economic situation can cause us stress and keep us awake at night! We might have bills, rent/ mortgages to pay and mouths to feed.
The worry only gets worse the more rejection we get. It feels easy to be resilient when you know you have enough money to get through each month. But there are things that you can do:
- Is there an immediate way that the financial worry can be reduced? o Payment holidays
o Dip into your savings
- Casual or freelance work, be open minded
- Be very clear about how much you actually need!
- Talk to a trusted professional
- An IFA will work with you to identify your options: savings, withdrawing from pensions etc
- Talk to friends and family – they are usually willing to help or just lend an ear.
By reducing your immediate financial worry, will allow you to approach your job search with a clearer mind and more deliberate intentions.
A job search requires energy and effort, so taking care of yourself is essential to be able to maintain this effectively:
- Breath: Go outside, move away from your computer and take a deep breath.
- Maintain a healthy work/life balance: develop a daily schedule. It is easy to think that you should spend every waking hour on your job search, but this can be all-consuming, and you won’t necessarily be productive. You will also quickly burn out!
- Set your job-search parameters – dedicating key times during the day for LinkedIn, job applications, speaking to Recruiters. E.g. between 10:00 – 12noon and 2:00 – 4pm.
4 hours is enough time. This also ensures you have time to do other things that are equally as important.
- Get physical/get moving, preferably outside when you can: whether that’s going to the gym, going for a walk or just running errands.
- Taking these breaks will clear your head, help shift your energy and your perspective
- Stay hydrated
- Eat well!
The key thing is getting away from your computer and doing something that brings you joy, whatever that is!
Self-care is not about taking you away from the job search, or the interview prep, it’s about keeping you well, so you can land that perfect job.
Talk to your closest people, whether that’s your family or your friends
- Ask for help, it’s not a bad thing and you may be surprised by the support and understanding you get
- Sometimes another person’s perspective helps to re-set
Give yourself permission!
- Take sleep seriously so you are getting enough. This may mean having a sleep plan and putting personal disciplines in place
- This may mean taking a week off from job hunting. It really won’t hurt; you will feel refreshed and re-energised
- Do something that gives you joy!
- Read the news, industry publications, listen to podcasts, curl up with an interesting book. All of these things give you ‘opinions’ which others may be interested in.
- Volunteer: meet people in your area, you never know who you are going to meet and the introductions that could come out of it.
- Network and connect! LinkedIn is a powerful network, post – so you’re engaging, it’s about reciprocity so you’ll reap the rewards! Share your story, share your insights. Start having conversations with people and create your own opportunities.
- Refresh your skills
- Consider new career paths or a new industry. Our skills are often transferable!
- How positive are you about what you do?
- Take the time to think through what you really want, be clear about your career goals.
- What skills are needed for your dream role, start creating what this might look like
- What companies are you really interested in and why?
- Do your research
- If you got a job there what would it give you?
These things will help you to decide what roles to apply for and when. Help you to focus and to tailor your CV and your experience when you are applying.
Our mental health is as important to us as our physical health; and we can underestimate how crucial it is.
So how do you manage it – it’s the link with all the other elements! The key thing is, that if you manage all of the other key elements, then you’re managing this one. If you make the tiniest of moves in just one of the segments then you will move forward, you will feel better, and this is perceptible!
If you were to do this your energy and your mental state will shift. You might not feel it straight away, keep going, it will come. And that’s what resilience is all about, keeping going and knowing that it will come.
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