Resilience in the Face of Rejection
By Sarah Scudder, VP Career Management
Discover proven career transition strategies through The Bear’s ‘Napkins’ episode. Learn how Tina navigates job loss with expert tips for networking and success.
An episode of the Emmy award winning show The Bear struck a chord with so many of us here at Keystone Partners. The episode, “Napkins”, featured Tina pounding the pavement as she faces a sudden layoff after working fifteen years with a candy company. The episode provides insight into Tina’s backstory and journey to working at The Beef as a line cook.
We see Tina handing out paper resumes at random places. We watch as Tina gets hopeful about a job that she applied for and when she shows up to the job, she’s greeted with “There’s no job” by the receptionist without even looking up. The narrative poignantly captures the struggles of middle-aged women in the workforce, highlighting Tina’s feelings of worthlessness and invisibility as she competes with younger job candidates. It was a painful episode to watch as it vividly portrayed the isolation, despair, and rejection of job hunting after a significant job loss.
We know firsthand that the job loss experience can be a deeply personal journey, especially for those who have invested many years with a single organization. Here, we offer a few strategies for helping individuals cope with job loss and prepare for their next career move.
Create an Exit Statement
How are you going to talk about the job loss. That is one of the first things that helps people process through what happened to them.
For many employees, when they suffer a job loss, their first question to their employer is, “Why me?” and often they are not given a clear answer. Left to our own thoughts, we often feel deeply hurt, especially when we have contributed many years to an organization.
Asking questions to help guide her to answers that make sense and supporting her with framing up what to say regarding job loss helps the person move forward. It allows her to process the change thoroughly so that her emotions don’t surface unexpectedly during job interviews.
The goal of career transition is to help Tina reach a place where she can approach her job search with a positive mindset. For someone like Tina who has 15 years of history to process, it is like peeling an onion and it’s important to help her work through those layers gradually. By doing this, we can assist her in framing the experience in a healthy way.
Focus on your Ideal and be Targeted
Experiencing an unexpected job loss can significantly impact your self-esteem and confidence, regardless of your position or background, as illustrated by Tina’s situation. For people like Tina who have worked at companies for a long time, they often question whether they will resonate in the job market.
Talking through her accomplishments at work, likes, dislikes, favorite projects, values, skills and interests, and then taking time to really think and identify ideal roles (and why!), can allow her to see this as an opportunity and bring more positivity to the process. Aligning all of this when developing your resume and communications is what we see bring success.
Often people think that casting a broader search net will bring them quicker results, but we find having more focused search messaging brings more success. What you put out there is often what you get back.
Leverage your LinkedIn network
When you’ve worked at the same organization for a long time, it’s not uncommon for people to say that they haven’t done much external networking. Their network within the organization is strong, but not outside, and they frequently feel limited by this. You often have more tentacles out there than you realize and using LinkedIn to identify and reconnect with old colleagues can bring you much needed positive energy.
The key is to do it strategically, staying focused on the long-term relationship and not just on the short-term gain of finding your next job. Be sure to optimize your LinkedIn profile and align to the roles you are targeting, and this will also help you be found by recruiters.
This episode resonated with us as it showed how hard the job candidate’s experience is and the impact that this transition has on individuals. The reality is that it’s hard for employers to do it well. It’s not a positive experience for most job candidates. And we find that an employee that is impacted by a sudden job loss when they have been out of the job market for a long time will often feel lost because so much has changed, making it hard to navigate on their own.
Getting up to date support is important, as is having someone to go to who understands, listens, and supports you emotionally though the ups and downs of the process. Tina’s journey reflects broader themes of resilience and adaptability during the job-hunting process, making her story relatable to viewers who have faced similar challenges in their lives. And in the end look at where she ended up… in her dream job!
Contact Keystone Partners today to learn how we can support your organization through empathetic RIFs.