No news may not be good news, but it’s not personal
One of the most common complaints heard from job seekers (of any and all ages) is that after submitting a resume (or cover letter, or job application, or any combination thereof) they hear literally nothing back from the employer.
How rude! Yes it is. At the risk of sounding like we’re defending the practice – which we’re not – for many openings, employers are inundated with responses. Sometimes it’s not unusual for these responses to number literally in the hundreds making it somewhat impractical for them to respond to each and every applicant.
And truthfully, in such situations many of the applicants have no chance whatsoever of landing the job. Either they have no experience in that function area; they have no training in that area; there is virtually no connection between them and their backgrounds and the job in question. In some cases, because it is so easy to submit an online application (for example) to those applicants, it’s no more than just a numbers game. Phew.
So what’s the point of all this? It’s simple. Just because you didn’t hear anything back from an employer where you submitted an application (or resume, etc.) that doesn’t mean that you did anything wrong. Don’t take it personally.
It could be something as simple as your resume didn’t have enough of the keywords for which the ATS (automated tracking system) was searching. Even if you have at least some of the qualifications listed in the job posting, you don’t know what talent pool was like against which you were competing. Out of 100 applicants, if there were only three to five very strong candidates, even though your qualifications may have been adequate, they might not have been sufficiently strong to compete against those three to five strong candidates.
It could be something as bizarre as the person who normally would have responded to the applicants was leaving on vacation and just didn’t have the time to issue the responses.
The bottom line is you just don’t know. And not knowing is more than enough reason not take it personally.