The job brief meeting that went from hell to heaven.
Although I’ve had many hundreds of job brief meetings (or intake meetings for any American folks looking in), I’m getting old and my memory isn’t quite as good as it used to be.
But there is one that sticks in my mind.
It was with a “Business Consultant” (whatever the hell that means) and he’d been sent into the meeting to speak for the Sales Director, who I was supposed to meet.
That pissed me off from the get go.
I made it clear to him from the start that one of the reasons I needed the meeting was so I could get the right info to be able to write an effective job advert to find candidates for their sales vacancy.
Things started to get tricky when I got to the part about why someone would want the job. A quick summary of his answer was; “Because it’s a job”.
My next question was; “So does that mean we’re only looking for salespeople who are currently unemployed?”
I knew that one would put him on the back foot.
“No” he said, almost too quickly; “We’re probably looking for someone who’s getting bored with what they’re doing at the moment.”
To which I replied; “What types of things might they be getting bored by, and what aspects of this job might remove those negatives?”
The next thing he said was a beaut; “Why do we need run job ads anyway? Can’t you just headhunt these people?”
“Maybe, yes.” I said. “What do you think I should be telling them to get them to want to talk to me?”
By now he saw that we’d gone round in a circle and were back to where we started. The silence that followed was the longest 10 seconds ever.
I have a rule I try to live by when taking a job brief from a hiring manager. And that is; whenever I ask a question the other person clearly finds tough, I wait for an answer.
The next person to speak loses.
But by now I was feeling sorry for my Business Consultant friend, so I bailed him out.
I told him that I appreciate he probably doesn’t have this kind of intimacy about the company and the job and that it was unreasonable for me to expect him to. I suggested it might make things easier if the Sales Director joined in. Thankfully, he agreed. If he hadn’t, I don’t know where we’d have ended up. Probably with one of us telling the other one to fuck off.
I got the Sales Director on the phone the next day to fill in the blanks. He told me he was amused by the way the Business Consultant had conveyed our interaction. And he apologised for trying to cut corners. If anything, our relationship became a bit stronger.
I think I remember this one in particular, not because it had a happy ending, but because it so nearly went off the rails. I also marvelled at my self-control – an attribute I wasn’t historically known for.
I think I also remember it because it was typical of so many companies who don’t think they need to make their job vacancies look appealing. That they think they’re doing the world a favour just by having job vacancies.
You can learn more about asking those tricky questions in our new Taking the Job Brief training course.
