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So I've got a job!!! At last! Nearly two weeks of job hunting and I'm finally sorted for the next few months. What's more the success of achieving it came in a very unorthodox and spontaneous way indeed. It was also one of the most unorthodox assessments I have ever been to, as is the job title. All sounds very mysterious to you I am sure, so here are the details. I was scrolling through a job site the other day, applying for everything I could find pretty much (by this time I was past being fussy) living in Sydney now is the equivalent to paying taxes in the time of Robin Hood, the only difference being that theres nobody to steal from the rich and give to the poor (me) this time. So as I was saying, I was scrolling through hoping for something a little bit different. What came up under casual/vacation work? 'Fundraiser' 'Fundraiser' 'Fundraiser' everywhere…. As Chloe pointed out I didn't want a job where I'd be pestering Sydney tourists and residents alike, feeding them gobbledegook about how important it was to buy off me and guilt tripping them into a cause they quite probably couldn't give two s***s about. But then out of nowhere… EUREKA!!! (Archimedes, somewhere between 267BC and 212BC). I had found something I genuinely wanted to do. Ok the pay wasn't amazing and the job wasn't one you hear about everyday. It was or is I should say, titled 'database list researcher.' It was the researcher part that initially caught my eye and was soon excited by what else I saw. The main gist of the role is to research and network with high up members, or leaders I should say, who are at the top of their industry and attempt to convince them to be a speaker at conference which the company provides throughout the year. Upon seeing the advertisement, for the first time I wrote a well organised, passionate and sincere cover letter, highlighting my interest in the role more than anything else. After receiving a phone call the next day, I was told to go in for an interview at 8am the following day. 8am? Really? Seriously? Were they joking? I mean ok… I understand people who are in a job want to get in the office early, they want to work hard and want to achieve, I very much believe I will be the same when my proper career begins, but 8am to interview candidates, interesting……. It meant getting up at 6.30am when the day before I had got up at 10am. My own fault admittedly, but how easy it is to mess up your sleeping pattern when you have nothing to do. Matters were not helped help in the morning by the fact that the heat had allowed me just 4 hours sleep, meaning I walked through Sydney fearing I may be mistaken as a zombie by Shaun of the Dead. As I said before, the assessment itself was different to others I have been in before, and there was no face to face interview, at least there wasn't meant to be…… The other two candidates seemed fairly decent people, one a girl of 24 who had lived in Australia for 17 years, and the other a lad around my age, possibly a year or 2 my senior whose appearance fitted not that of someone coming for a business interview with his casual polo top and baggy jeans. I said to him jokily but in a subtle tone "I'm not sure if I've come overdressed or you've come underdressed." He replied with completely sincerity; "oh no mate I've come underdressed, I've only just moved to Sydney and I've been ill." Ok? So arrive at the point possibly? He was clearly an idiot. Despite that he claimed to have experience in an extremely similar job role and straight away that is always a threat. What it rested on was whether or not the assessors would see through the transparency of his clear 'gift of the gab approach' which seemed more appropriate to some of the mindless sales roles I have also been applying to recently and discussed at great length in a previous blog. The assessment kicked off with a scenario in which we had to discuss ways in which we could find a list of all the dispatch managers of all the hospitals in Australia, what problems we could face with this and how we would overcome them. I felt the suggestions I put forward were the best if not the most assertive ones. As you can expect getting a word in edgeways wasn't always easy, as it never is in any group assessment for anyone. I felt my suggestions though made much more sense than the other two, the bloke in the polo merely suggesting typing it into Google, and simply using the internet to find them. Well yes mate, but how? Any idiot knows that the internet is the best source of information but elaborate a little perhaps? His only other contribution was a website in which you could pretty much type in whatever it was you wanted to find and magically it would appear. (Of course he didn't explain it exactly in that way, he just didn't really specify which particular area or industry it was for.) Conveniently he did not know the name of this great wonder as did anyone else. The second part couldn't have gone any worse. It was a written assessment, the kind of thing I generally pride myself on because in such situations I have very good attention to detail. This day, however was different, possibly due to my lack of sleep and lack of Coffee. I made the mistake of writing on the wrong sheet for starters, and spent ages on some of the questions. The end of the test signalled the end of the whole assessment, yes that's right already! Crazy I know! And as I was leaving I thought to myself, I've really messed this one up and it's a role I really would love to do while I'm in Sydney. Think about it Alex, either you continue to scrap around for an unreliable, poorly paid and unrespectable job or you go back in there and force them to say yes. So I did go back, I came in a very relaxed manner, jokingly saying that I'd screwed up the assessment and wandered if I could have 5 minutes of their time to relay why I thought I was the best person for the job. It couldn't have gone much better, they said that they were impressed that I had shown the initiative to come back and agreed with what I had said. The strangest thing about it was that she actually believed I had done fairly well in the assessment, at least 'conducted myself well in the scenario aspect' and that 'everyone had done badly in the written work.' So after all that, she may have offered me the job anyway. But as it was I went home and within an hour of speaking to her at the assessment had offered me the job! Whether this was down to my decision to return, who knows…. But one things for sure, it did me no harm. Theres a lesson to learn for anyone who thinks they've messed up an interview, why not go back? What do you have to lose? Theres a chance, probably a good chance they'll admire your bottle and determination to do what is necessary and may just offer you exactly what you want. The best part of the whole thing was that I didn't have to go to my next job interview for a fundraising role which was 2 hours afterwards yes!!!!! I'd better be getting some sleep now though, start my new job tomorrow….. Apologies for any grammar, punctuation or spelling mistakes, I really don't have time to check!!!
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