Having worked at 10 different jobs over two years, I was fortunate enough to have great mentors and one of the places I learnt the most from was working at a small boutique investment brokerage firm. Investing money for people is one of the toughest businesses there is to work in because nobody will give you a couple hundred thousand dollars to invest on their behalf, unless they think you’re trustworthy. It’s a lot less about making the client money than many would think. Working for a small boutique investment firm as opposed to an established investment brokerage at the big 5 banks just made it that much more challenging to acquire clients.

One thing that really stuck out to me was that the best advisors in the firm always did something with a purpose. They wasted no time.

Even though their end goal is to get clients to invest with them, the way they handled rejection was key. They never accepted it as rejection (it was never part of their vocabulary), they would always end up with something after a rejection, whether it’d be a phone number or e-mail of the prospective client, an opportunity to follow up with a prospective client at a later time when they weren’t interested, etc. Everything they did was done with a purpose.

I really took a lot from seeing this because I saw that over time doing this allowed them to build trust and form relationships that led to real clients. 

Reflecting back on my own experiences, I ended up getting job offers from two companies that didn’t initially hire me by doing this very thing.

In these two separate instances, even though I was runner up during interviews, and the company elected to hire someone else, I made a conscious effort after finding out about not getting the job to send a personal thank you e-mail to the hiring managers. Within the e-mail, I re-iterated my interest in working for the firm and how I would appreciate them keeping me in mind for future opportunities. 

I turned rejection into something that was less of a rejection and more of a networking opportunity.

It was this one small gesture and positive attitude, that ended up getting me a second chance and an opportunity to work for these two companies I would have never had a chance to work with. Best part of it all was I didn’t have to apply a second time nor did I have to re-do interviews.

Hiring managers hate going through the recruitment process and who would’ve thought this one small gesture would make all the difference. 

Always end with a purpose.