The email hit my inbox at 2:47 PM while I was sitting in that overpriced coffee shop on Brigade Road, nursing my third espresso and pretending I had my life together. Two lines that felt like a punch to the gut:
“We’re terminating the project effective immediately. Invoice for work completed.”
No explanation. No phone call.
Three months of design recruitment work vaporized in thirty-two words.
I closed my laptop and stared at the barista making someone’s elaborate matcha creation, watching normal people live their normal Tuesday while my freelance world quietly collapsed. The woman at the corner table was video calling someone about dinner plans, completely oblivious that I was having a minor existential crisis six feet away.
That’s when the spiral began.
I rewound every client interaction like a crime scene investigation.
Had I been too aggressive in my candidate recommendations?
Was I wrong when I pushed back on their unrealistic salary expectations?
Maybe I’d completely misread their hiring needs and been too confident about my ability to deliver the right design talent.
The internal courtroom opened for business, and I was both prosecutor and defendant.
Evidence A: The hiring manager’s responses had gotten shorter over the past two weeks.
Evidence B: They’d cancelled our last strategy call.
Evidence C: I’d clearly overestimated my recruiting abilities and underestimated how badly I could mess up what seemed like a straightforward design leadership search.
By evening, I’d convicted myself of professional incompetence and sentenced myself to a future of ramen noodles and career uncertainty.
Then my husband called and demolished my entire theory in one sentence.
“Did you think maybe their company is imploding and this has nothing to do with your recruiting skills?”
I hadn’t. Not once.
I’d been so busy analyzing my own performance that I’d completely ignored the possibility that their sudden silence might be about their situation, not my work.
My years in recruitment had taught me this lesson repeatedly, but apparently I’d forgotten to apply it to myself.
When candidates suddenly ghost during hiring processes, there’s usually drama happening behind the scenes that has nothing to do with the role itself.
Companies don’t just fire recruiters for fun—they fire them when budgets get slashed or priorities shift or someone’s having a corporate meltdown.
I started asking around in my network.
The startup had lost their lead investor three weeks before my termination.
Their co-founder had quietly started interviewing elsewhere.
The hiring manager who’d been so enthusiastic during our kickoff was basically watching his company die in real time while trying to keep everyone calm.
My firing wasn’t a performance review—it was financial triage.
The brutal email suddenly made complete sense.
The guy wasn’t rejecting my recruiting approach; he was probably writing termination letters to half his vendor list while simultaneously updating his own resume.
The short responses during our final calls weren’t signs of dissatisfaction—they were symptoms of someone drowning in problems I couldn’t see.
This hit me like ice water. I’d spent weeks torturing myself over perceived professional failures when the real story was happening in spreadsheets and emergency board meetings I’d never know about.
That realization cracked something open. I started remembering every other time I’d absorbed someone’s harsh reaction as proof of my inadequacy.
Back when I was still designing, the creative director who called me “too precious about feedback” had been getting daily pressure from clients threatening to pull their accounts.
The client who micromanaged every design iteration had been facing board questions about his marketing spend.
After I switched to recruiting, the hiring manager who seemed perpetually frustrated with my candidate pipeline had been dealing with impossible pressure to fill roles while his own team was falling apart.
None of their behavior had been about me. They’d all been broadcasting their internal weather patterns, and I’d been standing in the storm convinced I was causing the rain.
People treat you based on their capacity, not your character.
This changes everything once you really absorb it.
- The client who keeps changing requirements mid-search isn’t questioning your recruiting process—they’re panicking about making the wrong hire because their last design lead was a disaster.
- The candidate who suddenly becomes difficult during negotiations isn’t rejecting your guidance—they’re terrified of making another career mistake after their previous company laid them off unexpectedly.
- The hiring manager who takes forever to give feedback isn’t dismissing your work—they’re paralyzed by decision-making because their own job security feels uncertain.
Understanding this doesn’t mean accepting poor treatment or making excuses for people who consistently fail to show up. It means recognizing that difficult behavior usually stems from internal struggles rather than external judgments of our worth.
Their reaction is their emotional GPS—
it just tells you where they are, not where you stand.
I used to think managing client relationships meant constantly adjusting my approach to keep everyone satisfied. Now I understand that other people’s emotional states are information about them, not instructions for how I should feel about my professional capabilities.
The startup founder eventually reached out months later to apologize and explain the chaos that had been happening behind the scenes. By then, I’d already internalized the lesson his crisis taught me:
when people treat us poorly, they’re usually fighting battles we can’t see rather than judging battles we think we’re fighting.
This shift didn’t happen overnight, but once it settled in, everything got cleaner. I stopped contorting my recruiting strategy to manage other people’s moods because I understood those moods weren’t my responsibility.
I started responding to difficult interactions with curiosity instead of defensiveness because their reactions were revealing their capacity, not reviewing my competence.
Your worth isn’t variable based on someone else’s ability to recognize it.
My current work in design recruitment reinforces this lesson daily.
Design candidates who seem rude during initial conversations almost always apologize later, explaining they’d been burned by previous recruiters who ghosted them or oversold opportunities.
Hiring managers who appear demanding are usually under pressure from their own leadership to make perfect decisions with imperfect information and impossible timelines.
Nobody wakes up planning to be difficult just to mess with you personally.
They wake up carrying whatever weight they’re carrying, and sometimes that burden spills onto whoever happens to be in proximity.
This understanding doesn’t make us pushovers or excuse harmful behavior—it makes us clear-eyed about what’s actually happening so we can respond from strength instead of confusion.
We can set boundaries without taking things personally. We can walk away from toxic situations without carrying other people’s chaos home with us.
The people who consistently treat you well are operating from emotional abundance. The ones who don’t are usually running on emotional fumes.
That cancelled recruitment project became one of the most valuable experiences of my career transition from design to recruiting, not because of any placement I made but because of what I learned about human behavior and my own resilience.
The hiring manager’s harsh email wasn’t evidence of my recruiting inadequacy—it was evidence of his desperation. His inability to communicate respectfully during crisis wasn’t about my approach—it was about his complete overwhelm.
Recognizing this distinction made me a sharper recruiter and a clearer-thinking human. When someone treats me poorly now, my first instinct isn’t self-analysis—it’s situational awareness.
Instead of asking “What did I do wrong?”
I ask “What are they dealing with that I can’t see?”
Most of the time, the answer has everything to do with their current capacity to handle life and nothing to do with my performance in it.
The right people will recognize your value without you having to perform for it. The wrong ones wouldn’t see it even if you came with subtitles and a highlighter.
Understanding this difference has freed me from the exhausting habit of taking other people’s limitations personally. Their behavior is their autobiography, not a review of my character. Their reactions reveal their bandwidth, not my worth.
And once you really get this—not just intellectually but in your bones—you stop giving other people’s emotional weather patterns the power to determine your forecast.
Because your worth was never up for debate.
Not when you were designing and your creative director was stressed about losing clients. Not now, when you’re recruiting and hiring managers are panicking about team gaps. Not ever, when someone’s projecting their unhealed places onto your perfectly adequate professional existence.
Their capacity to see you clearly says everything about their prescription and nothing about your picture.
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