The fifteenth rejection email showed up while I was eating cereal straight from the box at 2 PM. Three months into my switch from design to recruiting, and I’d basically become a professional disappointment collector.
I remember staring at that email for way too long. Not because it said anything particularly brutal—just the usual “we’ve decided to go with someone else” fluff. But something shifted in me that day. Maybe I was too tired to care anymore, or maybe I’d finally hit that weird place where rock bottom starts feeling solid under your feet.
Either way, I stopped expecting this whole thing to make sense to anyone else.
Nobody Tells You About the Stupid Parts
Career change stories always sound so clean when people tell them later. Like they had some grand epiphany, made a vision board, and everything just clicked into place. That’s not how it happened for me.
My design skills turned out to be weirdly useless in ways I didn’t see coming. I thought understanding users would translate perfectly to understanding what companies needed in candidates. Turns out, those are completely different muscles, and mine were embarrassingly weak.
I spent weeks trying to sound like other recruiters, using their language, copying their approach. It felt like wearing clothes that didn’t fit but pretending they looked great because that’s what everyone else was wearing.
The worst part wasn’t being bad at something new. It was remembering what it felt like to be good at something and having no idea if I’d ever feel that way again.
Learning to Sit in the Mess
Three months in, when I was starting to wonder if I’d made a massive mistake, I did something that felt completely counterproductive. I stopped trying so hard to fix everything immediately.
Not in a giving-up way. More like accepting that this was going to suck for a while and that was probably normal.
I started keeping track of rejections differently. Instead of adding them to my mental pile of evidence that I was failing, I treated them like data points. This one told me I was positioning myself wrong. That one showed me I was talking to the wrong companies entirely. Another one revealed that my pricing was completely off.
“Sometimes the thing you need most is permission to be bad at something while you figure it out.”
The shift didn’t happen overnight. But slowly, I stopped feeling personally attacked by every “no” and started getting curious about what each one could teach me.
The Loneliness of Going Solo
Freelancing meant no colleagues to complain to when things went sideways. No one to validate that the client who wanted “rockstar ninja unicorns” was being ridiculous. Just me, my laptop, and a growing understanding of why people stay in jobs they hate.
Some days I’d go hours without talking to another human. Other days I’d have back-to-back calls with people who clearly had no intention of hiring anyone but enjoyed wasting my time anyway.
But somewhere in that isolation, I started figuring out what actually worked for me. I learned I was sharper in morning calls than afternoon ones. That I could read between the lines of job descriptions better than most people could read the actual words. That my design background helped me ask different questions that revealed what companies really needed versus what they thought they needed.
The clients who got it really got it. The ones who didn’t were never going to anyway.
Paying Attention to the Wrong Things
While I was scrambling to land my next client, I kept noticing patterns that seemed completely irrelevant at the time. Companies would post job descriptions that made no sense. Startups would claim they wanted “senior” designers but offer junior salaries. Hiring managers would reject perfectly qualified candidates for reasons that had nothing to do with the role.
I started taking mental notes, not because I thought it would lead anywhere, but because it was the only thing keeping me sane. At least if I was going to fail spectacularly, I could fail while understanding why this whole industry seemed designed to waste everyone’s time.
Six months later, those random observations became the thing that set me apart. Companies started coming to me not just to fill roles, but to help them figure out what roles they actually needed. Founders began asking my opinion on team structure before they posted anything.
Turns out, paying attention to what everyone else was ignoring was exactly the right thing to do. I just had no way of knowing that at the time.
The One That Really Hurt
The rejection that broke me came from a startup I’d spent three weeks courting. They loved everything about my approach. We had great conversations about their hiring strategy. They seemed genuinely excited about working together.
Then they hired an agency that promised to fill their roles in half the time for twice the price.
I ugly-cried for approximately twenty minutes, then felt embarrassed about ugly-crying, then got mad at myself for feeling embarrassed. It was a whole thing.
But after I was done being dramatic, something crystallized. They didn’t want thoughtful hiring—they wanted fast hiring. And those are completely different services provided by completely different types of people.
“Getting rejected for not being what someone wants is actually getting selected for being exactly what someone else needs.”
That loss forced me to stop chasing clients who wanted shortcuts and start focusing on the ones who cared about getting it right. It took longer to build that pipeline, but when I did, everything else became easier.
The Slow Build
Nine months in, I landed a client who changed everything. Not because the project was huge or the money was life-changing, but because they hired me specifically for the things that made me different, not despite them.
They wanted someone who could think like a designer about their hiring process. Who would push back when their job descriptions were terrible. Who could spot the difference between someone with the right experience and someone who could actually do the job well.
That project led to another, then another. Not because I’d suddenly figured out some secret formula, but because I’d finally stopped trying to be like everyone else and started being aggressively myself.
The setbacks weren’t punishment for doing something wrong—they were course corrections pushing me toward where I actually belonged.
What Nobody Tells You About Changing
The person who started this transition feels like a stranger to me now, but not in the way I expected when I began.
I thought I’d just learn new skills and do different work. Instead, I learned I could survive months of uncertainty without losing my mind completely. I discovered that working alone, while terrifying, was actually better than working in environments that never quite fit.
Most importantly, I learned that breakthrough moments don’t announce themselves. They look like ordinary Tuesday afternoons when you finally stop fighting what isn’t working and lean into what is.
“The space between who you used to be and who you’re becoming is where you find out what you’re actually capable of.”
That space is uncomfortable and confusing and makes you question everything you thought you knew about yourself. But it’s also where the interesting stuff happens. Where you discover strengths you didn’t know you had and let go of limitations you didn’t realize you’d accepted.
If you’re somewhere in your own messy middle right now, wondering if you’ve completely lost your mind, that discomfort you’re feeling isn’t evidence you’re on the wrong path. It’s evidence you’re growing into something that doesn’t exist yet.
The only way to find out what that something is involves not quitting before you get there.
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