4 Inspirations From Hamlet during my COVID Layoff Job Hunt

“This is an email I wish I never had to send”.

At 10am sharp, the CEO’s email popped up in my inbox. A few minutes afterward, my work computer was locked, my slack account and email deactivated, and I laid off, among the 250 colleagues.

While scrambling in the red sea of COVID job market, I see news daily — employees laid off, offers rescinded, internships cancelled. In this challenging time, I motivate myself through different arts, including Hamlet. I hope to share with you a couple quotes from Hamlet, to battle through the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. From being the prince of Denmark to having “a father killed and a mother whored”, the sudden twist of fate made Hamlet mad, just as the COVID layoff made us mad. It doesn’t make sense. I hope Hamlet’s madness and introspections could inspire you too, on this difficult journey of job hunt.

1. Sleep Well:

“O God, I could be bound in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space — were it not that I have bad dreams.” (II,2)

It is a tough time to sleep tight. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night in tears, other times in fist of rage. Getting enough sleep is absolutely crucial, especially before the interviews, where you need to be sharp. When I don’t sleep well at night, I take several 30min naps during the days to make up for that. Melatonin also helps like magic. Please take your sleep seriously.

2. You will eat a lot of shit in the interviews. Be okay with it.

Must I, like a whore, unpack my heart with words

And fall a-cursing like a very drab…(II,2)

Yes, unfortunately, that’s exactly what I had to do to ace the interviews. It’s both ironic and painful that I spent 10x the time talking about my job at company T, after I was laid off by the very company. It did not help when very rarely, some low EQ interviewers would ask “if you did so much, why were you laid off?”.

My advice to you is that, do take these behavioral interviews seriously. Use a framework, mock it, and tell some killer stories. Interviewers have a specific set of skills they are looking for in the candidates. Make sure your stories check these boxes. And if telling your story of your ex-employer gives you PTSD, it sucks. But when you do enough interviews, these spiels and pitches will become calm and natural, so you don’t have to invest as much emotion to it to deliver the impact.

3. Be Patient

…If it be now, ’tis not to come.

If it be not to come, it will be now.

If it be not now, yet it will come —

the readiness is all….

Let be. (V,2)

You never know when the first offer would come.

This is a hard one. On any given day, I would find myself constantly checking my phone and emails for interviewing updates and assessment feedback. It is distracting. To cope with the anxiety, I laid out a systematic plan of how much time I would allocate to each thing each day, and monitor my progress to keep myself honest. When discipline does fail me, I go for a run, have a meditation session, or take a nap. Focus on what you can do, not what others do. “The readiness is all”. As I make progress each day, I feel fulfilled, and become more patient. It’s a process, not a gamble. Be patient.

4. Risk → Reward: Don’t let the fear of rejection get in the way

The undiscovered country from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all…

(III,1) from the To Be or Not To Be soliloquy

Getting rejected sucks. But aside from your ego, what do you have to lose in keep trying?

In Hamlet, the inability to take decisive action (“to be”) is the pitfall that leads to his tragic end (“not to be”). The job market right now is a bloody sea for a junior person like me, for every opening there are several dozens of people competing to get it. And ergo, I had been rejected for the weirdest reasons: “you did too much analysis and our VP didn’t have time to read it”, “you did not address a point (which the interviewer did not ask)”, “you aced the onsite but we were looking for someone with more industry background (can’t you tell that from my resume?)”, or simply “sorry for spending 10 hours on the takehome but we filled our headcount”.

Please don’t let these rejections get in your face and deter you from trying. It is crucial to be brave, and be risk-seeking. In my job hunt, I tried to cast a wide net and apply to as many places as I can absorb my energy, in order to maximize my chance of getting any offer. The odds are against us. So we make more bets. Keep knocking at the doors. Believe in the Law of Large Numbers. And most of all, FEAR NOT.

By the way,

if I have piqued your interest in revisiting Hamlet, I recommend watching the 1990 movie by Mel Gibson. The 1996 movie was also a masterpiece, and it’s 4 hours long.