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 the biggest company of its kind in the world 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...
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