Fear, excitement, stress: How to ride the job search roller coaster

The road to that leads to an exciting new job is full of twists and turns, from those first days spent updating your resume to the final act of signing the contract. What’s more, it can be an emotional roller coaster too. It’s all there: stress, excitement, joy, sadness and more. With each challenge, our lives feel like a scene from Inside Out as our emotions fight it out. These tumultuous feelings can affect our behavior, too. So, let’s look at the emotions you’ll likely encounter during a job search, and get advice on how to handle them from a psychosociologist specializing in emotions and mental health.

Fear

You start your job hunt with incredible motivation, scanning offers, ready to whip out a freshly updated resume. However, by the time you hit the fourth page of results, nothing is catching your eye anymore. Worse still, the jobs that interest you require more experience than you have or don’t meet your expectations. Your heart sinks, your stomach tightens, and you break out in a cold sweat. A voice in your head says, “How am I supposed to find work if there aren’t any good jobs out there? What was I thinking when I quit? I should have negotiated a better salary.”

Fear paralyzes you. Even though you’ve barely begun your job search, fear makes you imagine the worst and zaps your motivation. “If job hunting is starting like this, I’ll burn through my savings before sending my first resume. I might as well close the Welcome to the Jungle job page and go to REI to buy a tent because I’ll have to move to the forest soon!”

Christèle Albaret, a psychosociologist and expert in emotional and mental health, explains that these negative emotions affect our behavior. “Fear is an emotion that tends to inhibit us. It can make us lose our cool and affect our ability to function,” she says. “If we can’t contain our fear, it may also cause us to procrastinate or become aggressive.” This isn’t ideal during a job search, where the whole point is to let your qualities and potential shine through.

At the same time, some fear avoidance tactics can be counterproductive. “To escape the fear of ending up with nothing, some people are tempted to apply for as many jobs as possible to reassure themselves, even at the expense of submitting subpar applications,” Albaret says. “This can make it hard to find a good match and negatively impacts your job search. In the long run, this will increase your feelings of fear and make the situation worse.” It’s a vicious circle that should be avoided.

Excitement

Luckily for you, the fear was short-lived. It only took one emailed resume and an invitation to an interview to chase away those dark clouds. A tech unicorn with lots of perks is thrilled with your credentials and wants to meet you ASAP for an upcoming position. Now you’re in a completely different headspace: Winner! Even though you haven’t met HR yet, you’re already picturing yourself in the role. You’re thinking, “I’m the best! As Julius Caesar said, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ This dream job is mine, the $10K salary bump is mine and a four-day workweek is mine! Oh, maybe I could take pottery classes on the fifth day.”

While the above scenario is exaggerated—who bothers with pottery classes?—you get the idea. Be careful not to count your chickens before they hatch. This doesn’t mean you can’t celebrate your victories, Albaret says. “Enjoy the moment. Joy is a positive emotion that can keep you motivated, but keep in mind that job hunting is a marathon with stages, each with its ups and downs,” she adds. Take that well-deserved break to savor your success, but don’t forget you’ve still got work to do. “You need to make sure your joy doesn’t turn into overconfidence that could backfire,” Albaret says. “If you think it’s in the bag, you might be tempted not to do enough preparation for your interview. Or you might ask for a higher salary than expected and damage the trust you’ve built with the recruiter.” There’s no need to be pessimistic, but try to tone your excitement down a notch to prepare yourself for what’s to come, which won’t always be positive. “The more you picture yourself in the job as if it’s a done deal, the greater the disappointment will be if it falls through,” Albaret cautions.

Frustration

A few weeks later, excitement has given way to doubt and frustration. The job hunt that seemed like it could be wrapped up quickly is taking much longer than expected; it’s seemingly endless. Three interviews, two technical tests, a meeting with the team, and it’s still not over. “Next thing you know, they’ll ask me to meet the manager’s best friend,” you think. “It seemed so good at first, but now it’s starting to smell fishy.” You’re mentally fried too.

With each painstaking step, a bitter taste rises in your throat, and then, disaster strikes. After weeks of frustration, you explode during yet another interview, but this time it’s in front of the CEO, right after he announced that the interviewing process would soon be over. A sharp, “It’s about time” escaped your mouth faster than a sneeze before you could catch it. The CEO’s awkward laugh and the goodbye that followed were mortifying.

According to Albaret, frustration is a complex feeling to manage because it’s difficult to get rid of it without showing aggression or withdrawing. “We close ourselves off, we want to give up, and this prevents us from moving forward,” she says. “This frustration can also be felt in your interactions with recruiters.”

So how can we prevent frustration from taking over? We have to shift our focus. “If you have a few recruitment processes moving forward at the same time, you’ll be better equipped to manage the waiting times between stages and the frustrating events that occur,” Albaret says. However, there’s an often overlooked element. “You need to be aware that the recruiter’s timeline is not the same as yours. They aren’t in as much of a hurry as you are and want to take the time to be sure of their choice.” Put yourself in the recruiter’s shoes and try to understand their point of view. What seems slow or frustrating to you isn’t necessarily so from another angle. “Try to avoid imagining worst-case scenarios, or you will just feed your own frustration,” says Albaret.

Disappointment

You got lucky. The outburst in your last interview didn’t affect your relationship with your potential employer. They’re still impressed by you and your experience and have just sent you an offer. However, the salary doesn’t match the numbers you mentioned at the beginning of the process. That voice in your head pipes up again to express its disappointment. “Goodbye, mortgage. Goodbye, vacation in the Bahamas. I”ll have to pretend again that my environmental convictions are the reason I don’t fly to sunny places on vacation.”

“Disappointment hits us when the reality is lower than our expectations,” explains Albaret. The higher the expectations and the more you picture yourself in this future job, the longer the healing process will take. “It’s like grieving,” she says. “You have to go through several stages before you fully recover.” So, should you ignore your feelings and move on?

“Disappointments tell us something,” Albaret says. “Just because you’re at the end of the job hunting process doesn’t mean your desires don’t matter anymore or you should sign any contract they offer you. If you accept something that doesn’t meet your expectations, there will be a debt to pay in your mind.” After starting your new role, you may feel that the company owes you something, such as a quick promotion or a raise. However, since your future employer doesn’t know how you feel, this is unlikely to happen. So your disappointment will gradually turn into frustration or anger, jeopardizing your progression at the company. Albaret says, “Prepare yourself in advance and know your wants and limits. Create three columns on a piece of paper: what you want to achieve; what you’d be willing to take; and what you’d never accept.”

Stress

Since the beginning of your job search, you’ve felt an unwanted presence. Whether you’re working on job applications or not, you constantly feel like someone is breathing down your neck. The more you feel it, the louder the voice in your mind becomes: “I really need this new job! Instead of watching motivational videos on TikTok, I should get to work and write my cover letter.” Sometimes this presence comes back in full force during an interview when a question catches you off guard and you try to dodge it with a verbal somersault. Negative thoughts prevent you from thinking clearly. “I’m struggling too much in this interview. I don’t even know what to say anymore. I must look more like a suspect being interrogated than a job applicant.”

More consistent than other emotions, stress accompanies us throughout our job search. When stress lasts for a long time or peaks, it can turn into fear or anxiety and paralyze us. However, most often, it’s an ally in the fierce battle that is job hunting. “Stress stimulates us by making us aware of what’s at stake and what matters to us,” Albaret says. It’s that pressure that pushes us into Terminator mode throughout the recruitment process. Without it, we might not have enough focus or energy to keep up the good fight.

Pride

You did it! You got the job offer. Congratulations! Take a deep breath and relax. It’s funny how suddenly everything seems brighter. Your worries and dark thoughts have vanished. You go for a walk and are struck by the beauty of your surroundings. You stroll around with a big smile on your face. You’re not walking, you’re floating two feet above the ground, head held high, experiencing incredible energy, like an ultra-marathon runner before a race. This is the perfect moment, you’re happy but also extremely proud of your achievement.

“Being proud of yourself is positive because it allows you to feel strong and gives your self-esteem a boost. It’s the satisfaction of having achieved something that mattered to you, so enjoy it,” says Albaret. “Pride will give you enough confidence and energy to start your new job without feeling like an impostor.” You’re in the right place and you know it. There’s nothing better to start this new stage of your professional life.

“Of course, too much pride is harmful,” says Albaret. “An employee who’s a bit too sure of themselves can become disillusioned because starting a new position is never easy.” Although you have the skills and qualities needed for the job, adapting to different tasks in a new environment requires time and effort. Albaret says, “True pride, less fleeting than after a one-time success, comes when you have mastered your role.” So be proud of this success because you owe it to your hard work and talent. However, you’ll be even prouder when your potential is realized after you’ve settled into your new job.

We all have our own path and emotions

While the recruitment process stirs a range of emotions, these vary from one person to another, as do the behaviors triggered in response. We feel differently about the events that occur during a job hunt, and everyone reacts in their own way. “It depends on each individual and their situation,” says Albaret. “Are you employed during your job hunt or unemployed? Are you actively searching or just testing the waters? How important is this job change to you? All these factors have an impact on how emotionally invested you are.”

However, individual differences can have other explanations. According to an article cited in “The Conversation,” the intensity of emotions and self-confidence play a key role in managing our emotions during job hunting. Strong emotional experiences, whether positive or negative, are more likely to boost job seekers’ efforts and their effectiveness. However, it should be noted that the candidates most likely to react effectively to intense emotions are those with high self-esteem, who have confidence in their abilities and a positive view of themselves.

Albaret says another factor has a real impact on managing emotions: the degree to which you project yourself into a job position and your ability to put things into perspective. “The more you project yourself into a position before signing the contract, the higher the stakes will seem to you, [and you will be] at risk of investing too much emotionally,” she explains. “Even though finding a job is important, you need to be able to put it into perspective. What happens if you fail? Nothing earth-shattering, but you’ll need to start over. It’s not pleasant and can be stressful, but it’s not something that puts you in danger. Be aware of the stakes, but keep calm. The important thing is to apply yourself while remaining authentic.”

Photo: Welcome to the Jungle

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