I Didn’t Get the Job I Applied For

I once went for an interview for an admin job and came out as Business Development and Marketing Manager.

Not at another company.

At the same company.

And no, before you ask, I hadn't wildly misunderstood the job description or accidentally wandered into the wrong interview room. I genuinely went in hoping they might employ me to do one thing, and somewhere during the interview they apparently decided it would be a much better idea to give me something completely different to do instead.

Looking back, it was probably one of the more important moments in my career.

At the time, however, I was mostly just being nosy.

I'd spent the previous few years working for a holiday attractions company and I'd reached the point where I was ready for something new. I'd loved my time there, but because of the structure of the business, there wasn't really anywhere obvious for me to progress to. I wanted to stretch my wings a bit and find out what else I might be capable of.

So I started looking around and found an admin role with a promotional marketing agency.

The job itself was essentially supporting the sales process. An enquiry would come in, and I'd be responsible for writing up the initial quotes, making sure everything had been properly costed through whichever departments needed to be involved and helping it make its way through the business before whatever we'd sold eventually made its way out of the door.

It sounded interesting enough, it used plenty of skills I already had and, importantly, it gave me somewhere new to go.

So I applied.

And, because I'm me, I did a little bit of research before the interview.

I looked at the company website. Had a nose around their social media. Tried to get a feel for who they were, what they did and the kind of business I might potentially be joining.

Perfectly normal pre-interview behaviour.

Except I may have got slightly carried away.

I'd noticed spelling and grammar mistakes on the website. There were backlinks that didn't work. There were bits that could have been clearer and things that didn't quite join up.

But actually, none of those were the thing that really bothered me.

The thing I couldn't quite get past was that I'd spent all this time looking at their business and still didn't really feel as though I knew who they were.

I understood what they sold, but I couldn't really tell you why, if I were a prospective customer, I should choose them. There wasn't much of a story about the business or the people behind it. Nothing that really made me understand what was different about them, why they did what they did or why I should care about this promotional marketing agency rather than the next one I found.

I didn't have any particular intention of telling them this, obviously.

I was going for an admin job.

There are probably limits to how much unsolicited feedback you should give somebody before they've even decided whether they'd like you in the building.

Then I got to the interview.

They had quite a structured process involving various little tests. Mental maths, problem solving, that sort of thing.

And I did them.

But while I was doing them, another part of my brain was busy wondering what some of them were actually for.

Not whether I could pass them. I wanted to understand what they were trying to learn about me by asking me to do them.

How did this particular test relate to the job I'd applied for? What would the result tell them about whether I'd actually be good at that job? Was there a particular skill they were trying to identify?

So, naturally, I asked.

Which may have been the first indication that I wasn't destined to spend the rest of my career quietly following established processes.

We talked about it for a while and eventually they said something along the lines of:

“Well, we always do this.”

Ah.

Now, I appreciate that there are people in the world who can hear the sentence “we've always done it this way” and simply accept it as an answer.

I am not one of those people.

Because my brain immediately went:

But why?

If the thing you're doing isn't necessarily telling you what you need to know, then surely the fact that you've always done it isn't a particularly compelling reason to carry on doing it?

I wasn't trying to be difficult. I wasn't staging some sort of one-woman rebellion against their recruitment department.

I genuinely wanted to know.

And unfortunately, once we'd opened the door to discussing things I thought perhaps didn't quite make sense, there was now the small matter of their website sitting in the back of my head.

So I told them about that too.

Because apparently I'd reached the stage in this interview where actually getting the job was no longer my primary concern.

I told them what I'd noticed. The mistakes. The links that didn't work. The things that could be clearer.

But more importantly, I told them that I'd gone looking for them and hadn't really found them.

I could see their products and services, but I couldn't see much of a reason to choose them. I couldn't see the story of the business or the people behind it. I couldn't find the thing that would make a potential customer land on their website and think, Yep. These are my people.

And you'd be forgiven for thinking that this would be the point at which somebody politely thanked me for my time and made a note to ensure I was never allowed near their marketing department.

Instead, the conversation changed.

They told me there was another vacancy.

They were looking for a Business Development and Marketing Manager. The department needed defining, and they wanted somebody who could develop it while bringing some of that thinking into the wider business too.

And, apparently, the woman sitting in front of them questioning their recruitment process and providing an entirely unsolicited critique of their website might be worth talking to about it.

So I walked into the building interviewing for an admin position and came out as Business Development and Marketing Manager.

I hadn't planned it.

I certainly hadn't gone into the interview thinking I was going to convince them to invent a more interesting career for me.

I don't think I'd even recognised that what I was doing was particularly unusual.

I just noticed things.

And it's only looking back now that I realise how much of what happened in that room has followed me through everything I've done since.

Because the spelling mistakes weren't really the interesting bit.

Neither were the broken links.

Those things can be fixed.

What interested me was the gap between what the people inside that business knew about themselves and what somebody arriving from the outside could actually see.

They knew who they were. They knew what made them good. They knew why customers came back to them and what happened behind the scenes to make the business work.

But I didn't.

And if I didn't, there was a fairly good chance other people didn't either.

That's a problem I still see all the time.

When you live inside your own business every day, you inevitably become too familiar with parts of it. You know the story so well that you don't notice you've never actually told it. You understand exactly what you mean by something, so it's difficult to imagine somebody else reading it completely differently. You know why your offer is brilliant, but perhaps you've become so accustomed to the brilliant bit that you've forgotten it's unusual enough to mention.

And sometimes there's a process that's been there for so long that nobody really remembers why it exists anymore.

You just...

always do it this way.

That interview happened a very long time before Vector & Verse existed, but I think it probably explains V&V better than any carefully constructed paragraph about what I do ever could.

I like standing on the outside of a business for a while.

I like looking at what you've built without already knowing what I'm supposed to see. I like following the journey a customer takes, listening to the way you talk about what you do and noticing the bits where those two things don't quite match.

Sometimes I find something that's not working.

But just as often, I find something bloody brilliant that the person running the business has stopped noticing because they see it every day.

And then I ask questions.

Quite a lot of questions, as it happens.

Why do you do it this way? What are you actually trying to achieve here? Does your customer understand that? Why have you hidden the most interesting bit on page seventeen? Why does the thing you just told me over a cup of coffee sound infinitely more compelling than anything you've written on your website?

And, occasionally:

Are we doing this because it works...or because we've always done it this way?

Apparently I've been asking that question since before I knew somebody might actually pay me for it.

I just used to do it in job interviews.

Worked out rather well, though.