How do I get employers to stop telling me that I'm very hireable and actually hire me?
tl;dr:
I have two certifications, 3 months of professional experience, and an awkward termination from my last position. How do I get employers to stop responding to my applications with "you're very hireable, but we won't be hiring you"? How do I gain more experience, if I can? and how do I respond to "why was your last role only 3 months long?"
l;r:
So, I've been trying to get work in the IT field since August of this year, and I haven't had much success. When I do get a response to my application and get to the interviewing phase with the company itself, I always receive the rejection, some variant of "While we are impressed with your technical skills/background/résumé, we have decided to proceed with another candidate with more experience/whose background more closely matches the position". I have two recent certifications, CompTIA A+ and Network+, and about 3 months of professional experience (I have no idea how to count the work I do repairing and maintaining my 7 year old laptop, or basically being on-call tech support for my grandparents' laptops, printers, and wireless network---or if I even should); most of that comes from my most recent position, which is the other issue I have.
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That role was a 3 month contract-to-hire position. while I was there, I did pretty well: I whittled my call times down to 10 minutes (which is about average there, although workforce management assumes a handle time of 8:30, though this isn't a hard requirement), I had good customer response surveys (which had the customer rate the knowledgeability of the tech, the timeliness of resolution, and a third metric that was something like quality of service; a perfect score is a 5 in each category. I got 1 to 3 perfect surveys in a week depending on call volume, but usually got two 5s and either a 3 or a 4 in a random category, and I received exactly one bad survey early in my tenure there), and my weekly meetings with my team lead went well. However, the day after a weekly team lead meeting where I was told I was doing good, I was fired for "insufficient customer service".
Since the only customer feedback I have access to is the surveys, I don't know what happened. Aside from "surprise! you've actually been really bad at customer service this entire time!", the only think I can think of is that 3 weeks before my termination, one of our clients was doing a massive overhaul of their SSO system, "moving" student accounts from their own domain to the faculty/staff domain, and switching from one cloud-based email system to another. This last part is important, because the customer response surveys were sent to the email address associated with the caller within our ticketing system only---adding an email to the watchlist only CC'd them on ticket updates; moreover, the client made the original email harder to get to (because it's depreciated and going to be deleted entirely by next year) but they also enabled automatic forwarding from the old address to the new so that wouldn't be an issue (except it was because the forwarding only sometimes worked and the old email servers were only sometimes available). So, not only did my call volume come almost entirely from this client once the migration happened, but also the callers had two email addresses now, only one of which they would bother checking and there was no telling if it was the one we had on file.
So customer response survey results (which were rare to begin with, the best techs there never managed to meet the 15% response goal, average was closer to 5%) dried right up and I think I received one response in the whole 3 week period. I wasn't the only person this happened to, which is slightly comforting, but I did notice that the compliments on my work quality from upper management dried up around the same time. Since customer response surveys were the primary metric by which techs were judged, it kinda feels like that's what caused it. That, or there was a phone complaint line and that was were I got all my complaints.
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All that makes questions about why I'm on the job market or no longer at that role very awkward.
So, what even do I do with all that, to turn all that into actually being hired instead of being just hireable?
Is there a way to gain experience outside of employment, or am I just stuck like this?
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