Hiring Lara (5) - A White shirt makes an excellent comms lead
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 madcap 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?
Tally-Ho
The actual interview consisted of me metaphorically holding on to the seat of my pants and jumping in feet first, I held nothing back.
It was the most fun I’ve ever had in an interview.
Co-creating the questions and being able to ask Abby & Andy questions in return had a lot to do with it - from the very beginning I felt like an equal talking to other equals.
It felt akin to that quiet moment when half the party have gone to bed, and you're left sitting out with the sleep-renegades under the stars. The moments where the universe just sort of falls out of your lips, winding together in a sea of shared ideas and half-thoughts.
Or something else equally as poetic.
The truth is I’ve tried to write this blog post several times, but I don’t remember much of the interview itself other than I how it felt (auditory processing is not my strong suit).
Later, however, Andy would tackle me on one point. He would ask, “Why did you tell us that you were fired from your last job?”
And it would catch me off guard. I did, indeed, throw that factoid out during the last 5 minutes of the interview and then mentally dug myself a 'embarrassment hole' to climb into and wallow in afterwards.
“I don’t know, It just felt really important to be transparent and accountable” – I’d say.
And he would reply: "I think you were testing us, to see if we could be trusted." I would laugh and roll my eyes at myself - and agree. Yes, I probably was.
Though the deeper truth, if we want to get into it, is that I carry shame from my ‘failure’ and I needed to know that I wouldn’t be held to some idealised impossible standard again - because burnout is one hell of a bitch and I have zero desire to wrestle with those teeth another time. I needed them to know I wasn't perfect, and that I wasn't intending to try to be. (Even if my perfectionist tendencies may want to say otherwise).
They held that for me, unafraid of the weird squidgy bits or the sharp edges, and they shared stories of their own. They related to my experience.
For an interview it was a fucking weirdly intimate process.
At the end of it all, waiting for the final email, I felt peaceful. Regardless of getting the job or not, I had already 'won' something.
After dissecting myself a thousand ways, judging myself, analysing and working through my thoughts and fears and creating something I was truly proud of despite it all, things felt different.
I no longer wanted the job. I was no longer sure I had wanted the job in the first place. I think I just wanted to know where this went, what this could mean, what would happen if we did do things differently?
I had already gained so much from this experience. I would be okay if that was as far as this went. I would feel gutted if I didn't get it, for sure - but I wasn't leaving without anything, I was leaving more healed, more hopeful, and more knowledgeable than I had arrived.
That may be everything it needed to be.
I felt I was where I needed to be.
And it was absolutely bat shit ridiculous that a recruitment process, a process that I thought I knew all the rules for, was what facilitated such personal growth.
I bloody love absurdity.
I bloody love that this exists.
And I have never felt more lucky or more privileged to be where I am.
I now constantly and consistently feel like I am having an out-of-body experience as the ‘comfortable professional work environment’ I thought I knew gets turned upside down and shaken until all the pennies fall out of it’s pockets and we have enough change to go buy ice cream.
I worried that, after creating such a great video in my application, that the ‘difficult second album’ wouldn’t be much of a follow up. Yet, somehow, I am now on my third greatest hits album after having learned several new instruments, just for fun.
Our work isn’t easy, it is still hard to be vulnerable, to be brave, to push forward past the ‘but this is how it should be done’ but I am never alone, and I am trusted just as I trust in return - and it has been like this from my very first day. It has felt strangely seamless and right to all of us that I'm here. It's almost as if building a human first, relationship first, recruitment process also enables the entire team to 'hit the ground running', together. It's almost as if trust enables better learning, better growth, and better innovation.
I look forward to telling more of these stories, to trying and failing, and to crafting the small moments that challenge everyone to do differently.
It’s been a ride. It continues to be a ride, and every time I look down I’m in a different seat, riding a different animal.
Tally-ho.
Originally Posted Oct 14, 2024.
