Rejection Isn’t a Verdict: Helping First-Generation Grads Keep Going in the Job Search
By Dan Rosica
Mariana had applied to more than a hundred jobs. The vast majority of hiring managers never wrote back, and the few who did sent the same boilerplate rejection everyone gets. The faceless process was demoralizing. Mariana eventually concluded that she was the problem: Maybe I’m just not cut out for this. Over time, opening the job boards felt increasingly pointless, and Mariana checked them less and less. She still had rent to pay, so she took the first thing that came — a job that didn’t require her degree — and told herself she’d pick up the real search again once she’d caught her breath. Months later, she hadn’t. No one told her to lower her sights, and she never decided to. The search for the career she’d trained for just quietly ended.
Mariana is a composite, drawn from what first-generation graduates told us in our research. For the past several years, we’ve been studying the behavioral barriers that sit between students and a good first job, and what behavioral science can tell us about navigating the search more effectively.
When rejection feels personal
Rejection is part of any job search, but the real damage comes when cumulative rejections start to build into a story about identity and self-worth. In our work with Bottom Line, a nonprofit that helps first-generation, low-income students get to college and land their first job, we saw students read each ‘no’ as information about themselves, rather than about the quality of their application or their fit for the job. In behavioral science, we’d call this an attribution problem: the explanation we reach for when something goes wrong. A student can read a rejection as personal and permanent (‘this is who I am’), or as specific, changeable, and external (‘this posting, this approach, this time’). Our working hypothesis is that the students most likely to give up on the jobs they’re aiming for are the ones who pin rejection on their own worth: if the problem is who you are, no change in strategy can fix it.
The hiring process fuels this story
A single opening can draw hundreds or thousands of applicants, and recruiters often review them in the order they arrive and stop once they have enough. Plenty of strong applications are never seen at all, for reasons that have nothing to do with the person who sent them. And whether the problem was a small resume fix, bad timing, or nothing at all, the rejection (or the silence) looks exactly the same. With no feedback about why they didn’t make the cut, students are left to fill in the story themselves, and for many, the explanation closest at hand is ‘the problem is me.’
Two things make this narrative more common for first-generation students: (1) they often have fewer people in their lives — a parent, mentor, or former manager — who can help make a professional rejection feel ordinary; and (2) when students rarely see people from similar backgrounds in the roles they’re reaching for, that absence can read as a signal: a quiet ‘people like me don’t get hired here.’
Changing the explanation
Almost everyone’s instinct is to reassure: stay positive, keep trying, the right job is out there. However well-meant, that gives a student nothing to actually do, and it can reinforce the feeling that the outcome is out of their hands. What makes the bigger difference is shifting the explanation itself, so a student lands on concrete steps they can take.
Concretely, that means helping a student move from ‘it’s me, and it won’t change’ to ‘it’s this approach, this time, and I can change what I do to influence the outcome.’ That shift is learnable, and it's likely one that college students approaching graduation have already learned for themselves in a different context. Interpreting academic struggle as a signal of ‘I'm not cut out for college’ is all too common for new students, particularly first-generation or low-income students. Seeing these challenges as a normal part of college helps students feel more comfortable using academic support services like tutoring or writing centers.
We've seen how changing narratives around academic struggles can help students succeed in the classroom. In our work with San Francisco State University, first-year students who got help shifting their mindset and building a sense of belonging were nearly 9 percentage points more likely to persist to their sophomore year. And the same pattern shows up at scale: in a study of roughly 21,700 U.S. undergraduates, a one-point increase on a five-point measure of first-year who got help shifting their mindset and building a sense of belonging were nearly 9 percentage points more likely to persist to their sophomore year. And the same pattern shows up at scale: in a study of roughly 21,700 U.S. undergraduates, a one-point increase on a five-point measure of first-year belonging was associated with a 3.4 percentage point increase in four-year graduation and a 2.7 percentage point increase in six-year graduation.
How to reframe narratives around rejection
So we have evidence that reframing the story around academic struggle helps students keep going, shifting it from a verdict about their ability to one where they have some agency and can ask for help. These findings are about finishing college (not finding a job), but the same mechanism applies to the job search. A student can read a string of rejections as a story about their own value, or tell a different one, where a ‘no’ points to specific, external, changeable things they can act on.
A few low-cost changes to the process around the search can do much of this work, whether you’re advising students one-on-one, coaching a cohort, or running a career-services team:
Set expectations before the search starts. Before students start applying, tell them plainly that rejection and silence are a normal and expected part of a job hunt, so that when the no’s arrive, students read them as part of the process they were told to expect.
Give every rejection a two-minute routine. Coach students to pause after a ‘no’ or a prolonged silence, name what kind it is — no response, a rejection after applying, a rejection after interviewing — pick one thing to adjust, and move on. The routine turns a sweeping ‘I’m not good enough’ into a specific, workable ‘this one thing, this time.’
Pair each setback with one small, pre-chosen next step. This could be sending a single message to a single person with the reflection from the “rejection routine.” Small, concrete wins build a student’s sense that effort pays off — what behavioral scientists call self-efficacy — so the next step shouldn’t wait for them to feel ready.
These small shifts can help a student turn a ‘no’ into a reason to send one more application tomorrow, and that’s often the difference between a search that ends and one that eventually pays off.
This is the third piece in our series on the challenges first-generation graduates face landing their first job, based on our research with Bottom Line. Read the first two: Fear Delays the Future and It’s Not a Numbers Game.