January 24, 2025

Stuck in limbo

I'm navigating job interviews in limbo after unemployment, celebrating progress amidst uncertainty.

I’ve spent a lot of time in limbo these past few weeks.

I remember learning at university about the concept of “liminality”, which (Wikipedia helpfully tells us) is about:

the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.

In other words: I’m interviewing for a new job while currently unemployed.

This is the first time since 2008 that I’m applying for roles while not currently possessing one. It certainly ups the ante, I can tell you: the nerves and pressure I felt before the first stage with one company was like nothing I can remember feeling. Once things began and I started talking about my professional experience, everything clicked and I was able to relax. But sitting there with a coffee watching the minutes tick down before you can join the Zoom call that might change your life? It’s… taxing.

The companies I’m interviewing with have lengthy processes, too: six rounds of interviews, for one thing. For people who are currently employed, this may be easier to work with, aside from the calendar tetris: you don’t have too much time to sweat about the interview because you’re too busy, well, doing your day job.

Not me: I’m currently unemployed, and my days and weeks are solely structured around studying for, rehearsing for and performing at these interviews. And then as soon as they’re done, I’m anxiously waiting for the email response to tell me if I’m continuing the process, or whether it’s back to the liminal drawing board.

But this week I finished the sixth and final round with one org. No news yet (watch this space) but I’m honestly celebrating this evening just being done with the process, however it pans out. I’ve hired a lot in my career to date and have sat on the other side of the recruitment table hundreds of times by this point. You might think this puts me in a strong position when I become the candidate, but I’ve worried that I’m over-analysing and over-thinking things as a result.

It’s also a fundamentally frustrating scenario to have to convince another person that you can do a thing you definitely know you can do. There’s no objective way to express that certainty, of course, which makes job interviews the best proxy we have for assessing someone’s professional capabilities.

One organisation I know asks prospective employees to work on a week-long project (paid) to help both parties figure out if the role is a good fit. I nearly chewed my own beard off in horror when I first heard about this, but the last few weeks have changed my mind: right now, if I could just go to work as normal for a week and demonstrate my abilities directly instead of in the abstract, I’d bite the recruiter’s hand off.

So I remain in limbo, at least for now. Today I received the largest single sum of money I’ll likely ever see arrive into my bank account, as my redundancy pay was finally awarded. (This isn’t a humblebrag about what a great payout I got, it’s just unusual to see a decent fraction of your normally-annual salary arrive in a single month like this). The temptation to start spending it is vast and I’m avoiding looking at it as much as possible.

But when the limbo ends? Well, there’s a laundry list of things we want to do with it. Hopefully we can get on with that list sooner rather than later…

Mini-feels this week

Matt gets a massage

Last week was mine and Maddy’s 17th anniversary – a frankly terrifying amount of time. I also spent an embarrassingly long time trying to figure out how long it’ll be until we’ve been together for longer than we haven’t been, until I realised it just needs to be more than our age when we got together: 21. I’m 40 next year…

We celebrated by going to a spa in the morning, and I broke the curse of the terrible, painful massage I had many years ago in my first spa experience – this time, I didn’t need to hide my grimaces of pain and tooth-grinding under the towels.

“Wow, your muscles are so tight!” said the masseuse towards the end, which is a sentence that starts off so well that it feels like a verbal rug-pull when it reaches its devastating conclusion. “You really need to book a deep-tissue massage!”.

I didn’t know what to make of this: I feel less stressed and uptight than I have done in years, and I’ve been doing more exercise, getting more rest and chilling out more in the last two months than the previous two decades. How can I still have a knotted back?!

On the other hand: she probably says this to everyone. Oldest sales trick in the book. I didn’t book a follow-up.