Part of our rethinking recruitment experiment.
It’s the day after after submitting my video application that I notice something strange happening.
The views on the, unlisted, video are climbing – in a way that far exceeds the 6 people it has been shared with.
I haven’t even sent it to my mum yet.
There are 48 unique views on the video.
People are sharing it… organically?! Have I actually… made an impact?! During a job application?!
A few hours later I get an answer to my confusion - a message from giant pastry visitor (who I am sure, reading this, will love this new nickname).
“I hope you don’t mind,” they tell me, “But I visited a friend recently” (with giant pastry I privately hope) “They’re having some problems, and weirdly I sort of ended up talking about autonomy with them, it seems to be a conversation I’m having a lot lately, so I shared your video with them, they thought it was really helpful and laughed a lot!’
We agreed that if I don’t get this job I am going to cold call the Valheim game developers instead: ‘Hey I made a thing, hire me!’ It sounds like a hilarious email to send and I chuckle at the thought of the poor customer service agent (having been one myself) tasked with responding to such unhinged fan mail…
…but I think giant pastry visitor might actually be serious.
I find myself wanting to crawl under a pile of blankets for a while. 🫣
This time the email comes sooner than expected.
We loved what you created for the stage two assessment task. We’d like to invite you to interview.
I literally sing ‘I got the interview!’ to my fiancé from my office, I tell everyone, I share the video with mum, I am elated.
Then it suddenly gets serious. Again.
Normally, getting to the interview stage is the best part, I have always interviewed well, I am (after all) good at communication… and I do theatre, I am good at following the script and I’m good at improvising.
We’re even developing the interview questions together, so it’s not even a fear of the unknown, of what they might ask.
It's the fear of being myself, of not wearing the professional mask.
All of the questions they send me are about me, my inner processes, my messy, messy, unprofessional, inner processes.
Not for the first time in this process, I panic considerably.
Literally no one has ever hired me for me. For my skills, sure, but for me? I am a reclusive Goth gremlin who currently spends their spare time running around as a digital Viking, and visits old insane asylums and surreal museums about French-fries for fun. I am fully aware that I am a strange flavour of person for most people.
People hire me for my skills at talking to people on their level, for my ability to tell stories, and my randomly accumulated technical knowledge. Not for all the mad-cap thoughts that go through my head while I do all that.
It appears that I am juggling several suitcases labelled ‘emotional baggage’, and most of them seem to be labelled ‘misunderstanding’ or ‘too much information, abort, abort.’
I get stuck on one of the interview questions. I get stuck because it should be an easy question to answer. It’s one of the few ‘standard’ type of interview questions they have proposed.
I get stuck trying to answer ‘what am I like when I am working at my worst?’
Because I can’t answer it truthfully. I can answer it in bullshit corpo-speak but the real, truthful answer, is actually really unsatisfactory.
I don’t know.
I have been working ‘at my worst’ for so long that I burned out. Now that I am in the process of healing, everything is different, and I don’t know how that might manifest in a new space… and it terrifies me.
How can I ‘lead’ insights when I have so little insight about myself for something as basic as this?!
I feel broken…
…and I don’t know if I can truly trust these strangers with the pieces of myself.
There is clearly still a part of me that doesn’t think I can do this job. That I am not the person they need, but I’ll never know if I don’t trust them with the raw truth of me. I take a deep breath and decide to be brave...
I can’t help it, though.
On the day of the interview, I wear a white shirt.
Like a token comfort blanket of all the rules I know I should follow.
There are some things that are very hard to unlearn. I started learning this lesson when Pizza hut refused to hire me at the tender age of 18, because at the time my hair was the same colour as their logo, and that wasn’t okay for some reason. (They liked it even less when I pointed that out to them, and seemed positively outraged when I offered a workaround where I could wear a headscarf at work instead of dying my hair for a part time summer job with them.)
Apparently red hair makes you bad at serving pizza, who knew...
But... artfully creased white shirts make an excellent comms lead though… right? 🙄
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