Rejection a tough pill to swallow

"We will retain your candidate file in our database and may inform you of job openings that match your profile. We also invite you to visit the career section on our Web site regularly."

When I am lucky enough to receive the courtesy of a rejection letter from a potential employer, those are the words that the note often ends with. I guess it's an HR thing.

I have come to realize that those words are fairly empty. I've applied to companies and universities multiple times, for a wide variety of jobs, only to receive the same rejection letter or no reply at all. One local university that I won't name claims it is a champion of hiring mid and late-career professionals such as myself, yet I can't even get a phone interview for jobs that I am qualified for according to the requirements listed in the postings.

Rejection is rejection, I suppose. There aren't too many nice ways to tell someone they don't even merit a call. Still, I rather receive a rejection letter than to be left hanging. I would estimate that close 90 percent of employers don't respond to job applicants at all these days. I believe this is unprofessional and will come back to bite these employers if the economy improves. With almost everything being done electronically, it wouldn't take much effort for companies to automate their response systems so that applicants are left wondering if their applications were even received.

Most employers claim they are so swamped with applications that they can't respond to everyone who they reject. From my experience of dealing with well over 300 companies in the last 15 months, the employers receiving the most applications seem to be in areas like parts of Virginia, where unemployment rates are relatively low. A modest job opening here could produce hundreds of applications from all over the country. Thousands if the job is a higher paying one.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I recently talked to an employer in west Texas. She said her company, which is in a sparsely populated area, is actually having trouble filling jobs because of the lack of applicants. Seems most folks looking for work are focusing on the more cosmopolitan areas and better quality-of-life places.

It would be risky to relocate to an area where job opportunities are few. Even if someone were to secure a job in place like west Texas, there would be an uneasy feeling knowing that if that particular job or company were to eventually downsize or disappear, there would be no other options for work in that vicinity. You'd most likely have to relocate again, assuming you could afford to do so. It could get expensive hopping from state to state.

However, being in an area like northern Virginia also means intense competition for every job opening. Some employers have mentioned to me how wonderful it is having such a vast talent pool to recruit from in this part of the country. Yet for every super-talented person who is hired, there are a bunch of almost-equally qualified people who are rejected - intelligent people who in any other time in the last three decades would have been snatched up quickly by employers.

Being rejected month in and month out is a tough pill to swallow. Life's rejections usually come in smaller doses and sudden spurts, then it's over for awhile. A girlfriend dumps you. A bank turns you down for a car loan. You move on. For unemployed people who are desperately looking for work, rejection is an everyday occurrence. It has to be processed and managed without doing significant long-term damage to one's spirit. Unemployed people aren't just dealing with not earning a paycheck. They are coping with solitude, self-worth issues and a general feeling of being invisible. Society swirls around them, but they remain inside an eerie bubble that is clouded, disturbingly silent and alienating. Once proud and in possession of solid work ethics, they continually search for a way out.