Meet Jonathan Javier:
Jonathan Javier is the CEO/Founder of Wonsulting, which mission is to “turn underdogs into winners”. He’s also worked in the Strategy/ Operations team at Snap, Google, and Cisco coming from a non-target school/non-traditional background. He works on many initiatives, providing advice and words of wisdom on LinkedIn and through speaking engagements. In total, he has led 170+ workshops in 9 different countries including the Mena ICT Forum in Jordan, Resume/Personal Branding at Cisco, LinkedIn Strategy & Operations Offsite, Great Place To Work, Talks at Google, TEDx, and more. He’s amassed 170K+ followers on LinkedIn & TikTok in 8 months as well as 15+ million impressions yearly on his content.
Jonathan’s failure story:
When I was at UC Riverside, I was applying to all these different roles and I was never getting a response from these companies. I thought I would get responses back from them because I thought companies read through all the applications. I quickly realized that your resume really does go into this black hole. I always thought I was a failure because I was never able to intern at these big named companies. I interned at smaller companies but I’ve always wanted to strive for more. However, I didn’t think I could get there because of my background – being from a non-target, non-traditional school along with being a first generation student.
I always stress having a good mindset. I started looking at rejection as redirection.
When I was getting rejected from these companies, I had to understand that it’s not a person rejecting you; your resume is just going through an ATS system meaning no one is actually looking at your resume.
With this change of mindset, I started networking a ton. I didn’t care if people didn’t get back to me. I reached out to 100 people per week. I reached out to UCR alumni, tech companies, essentially anywhere I could. I went into it believing that at least 1 person out of 100 will respond, and that 1 person is what matters. You only need one yes; you only need one person believing in you that can help you get into your career.
This is the mentality I had for the rest of my journey. At Snapchat, one recruiter took the chance on me and I ended up crushing my interview. When our team got outsourced at Snap, my manager was the one person who reached out to me to get me a position at Google. Same thing for Cisco, the hiring manager believed in me from seeing my LinkedIn and he brought me on the team.
How it led to where I am today:
Without rejection, I wouldn’t be able to be where I am today because it made me work 5x as hard which contributed directly to my roles I was interested in. It also led to me creating my own story and inspiring others to do the same; be the light in the world and you’ll see that darkness is no more.
Advice on failure:
For people out there who are experiencing failure, just know that failure is temporary. It’s not the end, but just the beginning. There’s no such thing as ending on failure because if you keep on working hard you’ll never fail.
Success is a matter of what you perceive it as. You can be successful working at a big named company, a startup, or a retail store – do not base your success on what society deems it as, but as what you deem it as your own.
