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Please Tell Me Why I Wasn't Hired
Rejection hurts. You know how it goes. You go in for the interview and hit it off with all the lawyers. You get your hopes up, only to receive the "ding letter" a few days letter. Generally, the scenario ends there; most job applicants who've been rebuffed simply move on. But not this hapless federal law clerk mentioned by Mike Cernovich Crime and Federalism. He sent this e-mail to Vinson and Elkins, begging for reconsideration and asking why he wasn't hired. Cernovich lets the letter speak for itself, but there's some additional commetary here by Evan Schaeffer and his readers at the Legal Underground.
The e-mail made me question this clerk's judgment for a couple of reasons. First, given that a snide e-mail rejection earned this lawyer a permanent entry in Wikipedia, you have to wonder about a lawyer who's willing to commit to writing questions such as whether he wasn't hired because of his thinning hair or pink shirt. Second, why would anyone so desperately covet a job at a firm that's paying out $30 million to settle claims against it for its role in the Enron collapse.
On the other hand, I certainly can empathize with this lawyer's desire to figure out why he wasn't hired. After a while, a string of rejections from firms can make you wonder what you're doing wrong. It would be nice if firms could let candidates know if there were something tangible to correct; for example, perhaps the pink shirt was inappropriate, maybe the candidate didn't look people in the eye or seemed wishy washy. Law firms would never tell any of this to rejected candidates -- they're probably afraid of some kind of defamation claim. Plus, for as much as lawyers bluster, most lawyer-employers fear face-to-face confrontation. That's why so many associates can't understand why they've gotten the axe after a series of decent reviews; the partner never got up the nerve to tell the associate that he or she was performing poorly.
In the end, the federal clerk who wrote the e-mail will find a job that fits -- I have no doubt about that. And he'll either laugh or cringe or both about why he ever wrote that e-mail to begin with. That's perspective -- something that's hard to maintain when you're still suffering the pain of rejection. Because rejection hurts ... even lawyers.
Posted by Carolyn Elefant on July 5, 2006 at 06:40 PM | Permalink
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