Larry got a message from his company about career development, the kind that sounds like good news. Two days later, they told him he was being let go. His last day was the next morning.
No transition. No heads-up. Just a Thursday-to-Friday freefall that didn’t leave much room to process anything.
What came after wasn’t some clean, linear path to a happy ending. It was messy and hard. There were real lows: a six-round rejection that knocked him sideways, weeks of waiting that tested everything, and mornings where the weight of it all showed up before his feet hit the floor.
But Larry kept going. He leaned into preparation, stayed connected to community, anchored himself in God, and did the unglamorous daily work of showing up when nothing felt certain. And eventually, it led to two job offers.
If you’re in a season like that right now, laid off, discouraged, unsure what’s next, this one’s for you.
When the Timeline Isn’t Yours
There’s something uniquely disorienting about a sudden layoff. You don’t get to ease out. You don’t get closure. One day you have a routine, a team, a plan, and then you don’t.
Larry described it like this: it happened so fast he didn’t even have time to process it. And that’s the part no one really talks about. Before you can even think strategically about your next move, you’re just sitting with the shock of it.
But here’s what Larry did that mattered: he didn’t wait until he felt ready. He started moving, even before the emotions settled, even before the plan was clear. Not perfectly. Not with total confidence. But forward.
That’s not rushing. That’s stewardship in real time.
One Message Changed the Trajectory
A lot of job seekers spend weeks sending applications into the void, waiting for something to come back. Larry took a different approach early on.
During a coaching session, he and Audrey worked through outreach together, finding hiring managers on LinkedIn and sending personalized messages. The very first company on the list, the very first message he sent, led directly to an interview.
Not after months. Not after hundreds of apps. One message.
That doesn’t mean every outreach message will land like that. But it does say something about what happens when you stop relying only on job boards and start putting yourself in front of the people who are actually making hiring decisions.
His Resume Told a Different Story
Before working with the team, Larry’s resume was one page, education up top, bullet points stacked underneath. It looked like a lot of resumes look. Fine, but forgettable.
After Tim (our resume writer), got his hands on it, the whole thing changed. Each role opened with a short summary and was organized around clear themes, cross-functional collaboration, analytics, leadership. The education moved to the bottom. It went from one page to two.
And that two-page version was what opened doors. Because the goal of a resume isn’t to be short. It’s to make a recruiter’s job easy. When someone can glance at your resume and immediately understand what you bring and why it matters, you get calls back.
From Rambling to Ready
Larry will be the first to tell you, his early interview prep was rough. When Audrey asked “tell me about yourself” in their first mock session, he described himself as rambling, trying to figure out what to say while he was saying it.
So he did the work. He used AI tools to generate practice questions, recorded himself answering them, listened back, trimmed the fluff, and ran it again. Over and over.
By the next coaching call, the difference was obvious.
He also made a bigger shift in how he thought about interviews. Instead of treating them like a performance, nail the STAR method, sound polished, don’t mess up, he started treating them like conversations about a real problem the company needed to solve.
What does this team actually need? What’s the gap this role is supposed to fill? How do I show them I get it?
That reframe changed everything. He stopped trying to impress and started trying to connect, and his answers got shorter, sharper, and way more compelling because of it.
The Six-Round Rejection
This is the part of the story that hurts to read, because a lot of you have lived some version of it.
Larry went through six rounds of interviews with one company. Plus a presentation. Plus a technical case study. They flew him out. They bought him meals. He was deep in it, emotionally, mentally, all of it.
After the final round, he felt great. Confident. Like this was the one.
Then a week went by. Then two. Then, while he was on vacation, the email came: they didn’t think he had the right experience.
It gutted him. He started spiraling, second-guessing his interview skills, his qualifications, everything. And honestly? That’s a normal response. When you pour that much into something and it falls through, it’s supposed to hurt.
But what Larry did next is what set him apart.
He let himself grieve.
And then he made a choice: he sat down, looked at the interviews like game film, and pulled out the specific moments that tripped him up. A technical question he fumbled. A story that went off the rails. He dropped those into what he called a “test bank” and practiced them until they weren’t weak spots anymore.
He grieved it, learned from it, and moved forward.
And here’s the kicker, that same company eventually came back with a different role. It became his second offer.
The Stuff That Kept Him From Burning Out
Larry interviewed for months. He had weeks of waiting, rounds of rejection, and all the emotional weight that comes with being unemployed and searching. But he didn’t burn out. And the reason wasn’t willpower, it was structure.
Every single morning, he spent an hour in Scripture. No exceptions. He wasn’t asking God for a specific job or trying to manifest an outcome. He was just reading and listening. He started in Acts, worked through Paul’s letters, moved into the Old Testament. It was the first thing he gave his time to every day, and it became the thing that held him steady when the rest of the day went sideways.
In the afternoons, he ran. He’d been a cross-country runner years ago, and he picked it back up during the search. If an interview went badly, he hit the pavement and let the frustration burn off physically. It gave him somewhere to put the emotions that didn’t involve replaying every answer in his head for three hours.
He also protected his schedule. Never two interviews in one day. Always a rest day in between. Weekends were off-limits. He treated the job search like a job, but not like his entire life.
There’s a line Larry said that stuck with me: “You can take the job away from me. You can reject me all you want. But there are two things that are central to who I am, and no one can take those away.”
When your whole identity gets wrapped up in the search, every rejection feels like it’s about you as a person. But when you’ve built a life around something deeper, you can absorb the hits differently.
“Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” — Matthew 6:33
The Offers Came When He Least Expected Them
After months of work, the breakthrough came in the most unlikely way.
Larry hopped on a group coaching call and told everyone he’d just bombed an interview. He was exhausted, it had been a brutal week of back-to-back final rounds, and this last conversation with the hiring manager and chief of product left him shaky. Nervous fatigue, stumbling over words, the whole thing.
Two hours later, the recruiter called. They were extending an offer.
The interview he thought he’d tanked was the one that got him the job. Maybe the exhaustion stripped away the overthinking. Maybe he came across more real because he’d stopped performing. Either way, it worked.
Then, the following week, the second offer came. From the six-round rejection company. They’d kept him in mind, circled back with a different role, and this time it all lined up.
Two offers. After everything.
What Larry Would Tell You
When Audrey asked Larry what he’d say to someone going through something similar, he didn’t give a tidy answer. He gave an honest one:
“Keep moving forward, even when the step feels impossibly small. Give yourself permission to grieve when it’s hard. Let your emotions out so they don’t rot inside you. And lean on God, not just when it feels good, but especially when you’re angry at Him.
Throughout this entire process, I’ve come to see how God has refined me in ways I didn’t expect. It’s easy to get angry at Him, but at the end of the day, it’s really about understanding where He wants you to be, how He’s refining you… and having the diligence to keep moving forward when it becomes tough.”
Rejections aren’t proof that you’re not good enough. They’re data. And unclear seasons aren’t wasted, they’re where faith gets refined and something new gets built, even when you can’t see it yet.
Your Next Step
If you’re in the middle of this right now, keep going. Stay consistent. Stay grounded. And don’t do it alone.
If you want help with your resume, your interview prep, or just figuring out what your next move looks like — book a free 30-minute consultation call with us. No pressure. Just a real conversation about your next faithful step forward.
