In the past six months, I experienced one of the hardest periods of my life. Job hunting was destroying me in every aspect. I earned almost zero credits and gave up writing papers in the last semester. I lost my part time job at a shrine which I cared about a lot. My savings was cut in half. The worst part is that I became a liar.
To be honest, I didn’t take job hunting seriously at first because I couldn’t imagine how I could fail. You see, I have one of the best resumes in town and several valued certificates. I was even recruited by Chinese National Security. Inevitably, my pride soared to its peak. However, I failed almost from the beginning. I found myself never passing the first interview. People around me might be stuck in a second interview or final interview, but no one like me had trouble in the first interview. Certainly, no HR representative would tell me the reason except one from a consulting firm gave me a lot of hints. “You are smart. I have no doubt you will be hired by someone eventually but not our firm.” He told me sincerely. He also shared with me a story about how he forged his experience to get his first decent position.
Unfortunately, his words faded out my mind quickly. I thought the reason why I couldn’t get a single offer was because I am not a Japanese until I noticed Chinese students who don’t speak Japanese as well as me started to get offers from great companies. I felt as if all of society was rejecting me. The pressure I was facing became even greater than when I was in China, which is an issue I never expected. I became extremely paranoid. Every single thing started to cause me to become angry. I was messing with Japanese students that were out there seeking jobs. I was blaming my parents frequently for things that happened years ago, and even threaten to beat my father.
Investment banks, big 4 consulting firms and the central government, most of my classmates made their dreams come true through these. On the other hand, I couldn’t even get offers from small companies. I was desperate and begging them to tell me what I should do. They game me some suggestions and one of them was really important. “If you don’t know what you want to do in that company, you shouldn’t apply there in the first place.” Indeed, I never mentioned what I want to do in the interview.
I planned to repeat a year in school in order to continue my job hunting. Then, I started to think about how I should explain this to interviews. I made up a story about studying in the US in my third year which was far from reality. Suddenly I realized that since I can fake why I need one more year, why can’t I fake the rest of my life? I began making up stories for every question that might be asked. For different industries, I would prepare different scenarios. Guess what? It works! The second and final interviews started to show up on my schedule.
In the interviews, what I should do is not to try to show off the real me, but to say what interviews want to hear. People like the stories I never experienced and the career plans in which I am not interested. “Our company needs you!”, “You are exactly the one we want”, they told me. Some companies even let me go to the final interview without a second one. Since my resume is already good enough, all I need to do lie about the experiences and thoughts that others can’t prove. Job hunting suddenly became really easy to me.
This is not the end of my job hunting. I am still working on it and heading to a company I really want to be a part of. Since I have the right strategy for job hunting now, I am really confident about the future. I became a liar and I will continue to lie to live.