Hiring Lara (2) - The First Quest

Part of our rethinking recruitment experiment.

The first application task began for me with the digital equivalent of dancing and chanting around the roar of a flaming pyre:

We’re not looking for a CV and standard cover letter! Instead, please send us:

1) A couple of pages letting us know what’s led you to apply for this role, what excites you about working with us, and what relevant experience you bring.

2) A short example of some comms you think CIA could put out into the world that demonstrates your comms ability. This could be a couple of tweets, a short article, or anything else you think is suitable.

YES! BURN THE SCRIPTURE! DOWN WITH THE PORTFOLIO!

The bane of my current existence as a creative professional, the diabolically misnamed ‘Creative’ Portfolio (an exercise in shoehorning in metrics and pointing at 'stuff I done' to somehow demonstrate that I am the 'useful' kind of creative) was now reduced to smoke and ashes by this new approach to hiring.

Which then left me sat (soot-smeared and wild eyed with glee) staring at a blank page.

The blank page stared back.

I tried not to blink.

The blank page stared back harder.

Luckily, this was not the first staring contest I'd had with an empty page.

The problem has always been with how the staring contests end. Because you can’t write your personal statement for university on the walls of a disused shop. You can’t apply for a head of department position by filming a video while wearing 7 hats balanced on your head. You can’t write customer service emails about outages that mention needing to apply more marmalade to the hamster wheels that run the servers.

Except... My blank pages and I have. And it doesn’t always go down well.

I've found that if you have a staring contest with a blank page hard enough it begins to whisper about the edges... and the edges are always the interesting bits to me... and often the horrifying parts for other people...

This time The Edge whispered: What if you found their address and posted a handmade book to them that contained your 'couple of pages'?

I am filled with both horror and joy at the idea.

A physical self portrait of beautiful words, an object made of heart and soul, something tangible...

...and a potential restraining order from abusing my 'Google-Fu' to find their address. 🫤

You see, the hardest part with ideas that are whispered from the edges of blank pages is that they always require you to tuck them back in so that the idea, at least marginally, fits reality. Luckily, I’ve been myself for quite a while now. I'm aware that 'thinking outside the box' generally means 'not too far outside the box, please.'

I shelve the idea under 'ways in which I don't wish to be arrested.'

Instead, I write a letter to Abby and Andy about letters. I tell them about the edges, I write from the heart and some wonderful moments emerge...

...and then I meticulously and ruthlessly shoehorn my previous experience into the letter.

Because this is a job application.

Because they asked for my experience.

Because while I believe this is a different approach, it can’t be that different really, and every survival instinct in me is screaming to do this ‘right.’

And I hate it.

I can’t work out why I hate it and I can’t work out how to fix it.

It's flowery and dramatic and vulnerable and it somehow feels like a job application and a diary entry at the same time.

It’s like a strange little brain dump on a page and it doesn’t fit anywhere.

My partner reads it and tells me it is ‘hugely risky,’ and that he wouldn’t hire me.

I agree and then I promptly find myself saying: "but they're trying to do this differently, remember?"

I hear those words coming out of my own mouth like I have never heard them before.

I return to the document, get the hell out of my own way, and lean into the edges.

I create a digital book from the letter instead.

I listen to an old CIA podcast about ‘play’ so I can create an example piece of comms for it (as the other part of the task) and I remember that some of my favourite moments of play (in gaming) have been easter eggs left by the developers for the players to find.

So, I invite Abby and Andy to play with me. I have fun dropping little easter eggs into the design of my book. I leave an ISBN number for a book recommendation that I think they'd like and a QR code disguised as a barcode that takes them to my very not professional YouTube channel.

(I then promptly panic about that link being weirdly self-promotional and the videos not being good enough and change it to link to my LinkedIn page like a good, well behaved, job applicant... I'll later admit this to Abby and Andy in the interview and we'll all laugh about it.)

I've created a book similar to the one that The Edge whispered about, but with markedly less ‘weird internet stalking job applicant’ about it.

And I still sort of hate it. But now I hate it because it scares me; Is this too much? Have I gone too far? Could I have gone further?

I have no idea.

It does feels right somehow though, like something I am willing to risk.

I will (much) later realise that it felt authentic (an alien feeling in something created for work) and that it felt risky because it was actually risking exposing my self - something that I needed to do to see if Abby & Andy actually wanted to work with me and my merry band of weird of edges and whispering blank pages...

So I risked it.

I sent it.

Waiting For Godot

Then the waiting began.

Just enough time for me dislike the comms piece that I also sent as part of the application.

I mean it’s fine but, I spent far more time on the book and I wasn't really sure that the comms piece added anything.

Their podcast made me feel a way – inspired, seen, understood - and I wanted to elevate the idea further, to ask where it could go. I began feeling like I could have done so much more than just telling them a story with ‘Check out our Podcast!’ at the bottom.

I could've explored changing how social media comms for businesses are usually done...

Which, yanno, was ironic coming from someone who just had a full blown life crisis over writing a different kind of application letter.

I am not surprised when I don’t hear back from Abby and Andy on the day they said they were going to contact people.

For a start I didn’t believe they were going to contact people by that date (because no one ever does) but I also knew that my work was caught in that limbo of going far enough vs going too far. I'd fought myself through the process and I wasn’t entirely happy with it, so it made sense that they wouldn’t be either.

I did wish I had enjoyed the process more though, that it had been a true opportunity to create and experiment, and I’d not held myself back.

By the end of the day, after the contact deadline, I have resigned myself to not knowing. I assume it was probably ‘too far' and that I’d likely never know for sure. They'd had hundreds of applications (I know because I went looking for the applications metric on the LinkedIn job advert) so I understand they can’t give feedback to everyone.

I wished it could be different, though. I had so hoped that it was. Even a cookie cutter rejection email would have felt, at this point, fairly revolutionary.

I throw a few more pennies into the inbox wishing well (using the refresh button as currency) but it remains empty.

I try to let it go.

I try very hard.

Later the next evening an intrusive thought that is stubbornly, definitely, completely not letting this go insists that I haven’t checked my spam folder recently.

So I do.

And there it is:

We loved your application for our Insights and Communications Lead vacancy and would like to invite you to stage two of the application process!

It wasn’t too far.

IT WASN’T TOO FAR!

I am simultaneously unsure if I want to kick my inbox filter in the shins for putting me a day behind on the next application task or kiss it for catching the email. I settle for a long meaningful look at it instead.

I knew then, though, that I had to go all in with the next thing I created. I had tested the waters and had already ‘lost’ the opportunity once. It wasn’t even so much about the job itself. I needed to know what would happen if I followed the edges from the start, if I followed the process instead of the outcome.

I wanted to find out what would happen if I worked the way that The Collective Impact Agency does (human-first, autonomously) instead of the toxic-productivity focused way I have learned to work (to fill the needs of the system).

It was easier said than done...