Hiring Lara (1) - Unexpected Adverts

Part of our rethinking recruitment experiment.

This is the story of how a video game helped to get me a job. It’s a story about Vikings, pyjamas, and fear - and it starts at 3.45pm on a Thursday.

I am miserable. I'm doggedly searching for a job and I no longer know what I am looking for.

It started with the righteous anger of any video game protagonist, the ‘how dare they,’ the ‘I am never,’ and has moved through the dreams of ‘I just want…’ and ‘why can’t I…’ into the much less heroic feeling stoic-acceptance of finding something ‘tolerable’ and ‘manageable.’

But my open tabs are telling a different story.

A head of department role. A charity board role. A ghostwriter role. An entry level tech support role. A simultaneous story of ambition, of a need to make a difference, of wanting to help people find their voice, of wanting the peace of a job that plays to my strengths but that I can ‘put down’. It feels like an impossible checklist.

My search has widened to the point where it is almost useless. My tabs are a parade of maybes and ‘that might dos’ – they feel like a list of side quests rather than the main storyline.

I switch over to read the next parade of black text across the page and I stop.

I frown.

I re-read the advert.

I am halfway through reading it again before I realise how truly confused I am, like these paragraphs of perfectly understandable and legible words have somehow created a disconnection in my reality.

I feel like I just stepped through a portal into another land.

I idly wander through the company website looking for clarification on what this ‘Collective Impact Agency’ actually do.

Their website is a confusing, intriguing, mess of noise.

Well… They certainly look like they need a communications person.

An hour of reading and stalking their linkedin pages later though, and I still don’t understand what they do but… I also sort of… do? Why on earth do I think I can communicate something that I can’t communicate to myself?

I read the application details again.

They have a final live Q&A about the job happening in 30mins.

Oh shit.

Do I go?

I sit there in my skull-print pyjamas surrounded by protein bar wrappers and empty cups of tea desperately trying to think of an intelligent sounding question to ask for an industry I have no experience in and don’t fully understand.

Balls.

I have hired for big companies and I know The Rules of Hiring (™️). I should have a Very Good Question (©️) for this ‘informal’ Q&A. Something intelligent, something that says ‘look what a good candidate I am.’

But this is not hiring as I know it, I don’t know how to do this.

…and excuse me brain, but in what gods-cursed universe do I find that uncertainty exciting?!

In the end not joining the call at all feels worse than joining without Being Prepared (®️).

I join the call without a Very Good Question (©️).

I join from my unprofessional looking office armchair, still in my unprofessional pyjamas, with my unprofessional litter tucked into my unprofessional bin...

More Answers Than Questions

I don’t remember how Abby and Andy started the pre-application zoom Q&A session, but I do remember that I started smiling almost immediately.

I caught myself in my webcam grinning like a loon, nodding along to Abby and Andy's conversation like a cartoon dog on the dashboard of a Jeep with supremely dodgy suspension. I tried reapplying my professional serious-job-face several times but to no avail.

Something, something community facilitation, something, something systems change…??

I was still in understanding limbo. I felt like I should have the experience to understand what this work is, after all it’s a similar field to those I have been in just with different grass. But I was currently suffering from the dawning realisation that perhaps what they do is not what matters, it is how they do it… and I didn’t quite know where to put that yet.

I was finding myself unexpectedly in the surreal position of finding ‘people I want to work with’ before ‘a job I’d like to do’ and, as a self-confessed introvert, this was a slightly horrifying turn of events.

So, as my inner world slowly became upside-down-land, I listened to other people ask Very Good Questions (©️) and lurked in the call like an inane gremlin, occasionally picking up pretty pebbles of information to turn over.

Then, out of nowhere, I was surprised to find I had a genuine question of my own. It wasn’t clever, I wasn’t trying to impress them, and it was something I felt bad asking about.

In many ways it felt like a challenge, a test, rather than an innocent question.

But I couldn’t help being curious. Could I... interview the interviewers?

I debated with myself whether asking this question was a good idea, but apparently my ‘brave pants’ are actually pyjama bottoms with skulls on them (who knew) so I asked:

"How did you manage having to let people go?"

The question was a surprise to them too. (Given that their mention of losing previous team members had been a brief footnote in their discussion on the company’s history, I don’t blame them.)

Abby replied by thinking aloud, treading the expected line of ‘it’s always hard…’ but with an insight and depth of humanity that was profound and deeply reassuring.

But it was Andy’s answer that floors me. If I hadn’t already been seated, I would have needed to sit down.

“It was messy.” He said bluntly, “Really messy and I felt terrible. We didn’t know what we were doing, and we made some mistakes along the way, we just had to try to do the right thing.”

Truth.

It hits me hard. This was the most honest sentence anyone has ever uttered to me about what it is like to have to fire people. It was raw, undiluted, and a shared echo of my own pain and guilt.

I am clearly not talking to the directors of the Collective Impact Agency, I am talking to Andy & Abby.

“So we managed the best we could.” Andy finishes, and I nod sadly because I understand; business is cruel. This was the expected script. Sometimes decisions have to made for the good of the company.

But Andy hadn't finished speaking; “So, we took a look at everything, and we decided to dip into the company reserves and pay them for several months until they could find another job.”

I’m not sure if my jaw dropped physically or only metaphorically.

‘THEY PUT THEIR MONEY WHERE THEY MOUTH IS’ wrote itself (in neon) across my brain.

I didn’t know I was testing them for proof that ‘they are who they say they are’ until that moment... but holy shit did I have it.

I fumble for a reply because the fireworks going off in my brain are so loud. I say something about red threads that was probably intelligent sounding and sit through the rest of the session locked firmly in the haze of a profound culture shock.

Afterwards I told everyone.

Giddy, like a child on Christmas morning, I shouted at people: “OMG YOU WILL NEVER GUESS WHAT HAPPENED TODAY" and I watched as their disbelief (that a place like this exists) mirrored my own.

…and I felt sad

…and then I felt angry.

Because the reason Andy’s answer was so good wasn’t just because it was unusual for an employer to care about their people, it was because it shouldn’t be, and we all know it.

I was now suddenly just as interested in the process of applying for this job as I was in getting the job itself – because what if? What if everything could be different? What would that even look like?

It made me wonder what else was possible…

Originally Posted Aug 20, 2024.