This memory keeps me up at night

Before we begin:

You know those moments that flash through your head at 3am and you can't sleep for hours?

This is mine.

About 5 years ago, I went into a process with a big agency for a senior role in Saudi Arabia.

I found them the literal perfect profile - willing to relocate. The individual went through 9 (nine!!!) rounds of interviews over a 7-month period. It was arduous - especially when they had indicated at interview 3 that they wanted to bring him on board. 

Finally when it came to offer-stage, they took three weeks to release the written offer. 

In that time, the candidate was approached by a rival firm in KSA who did a one-stage interview and offered him a day later. Nice.

Safe to say, I was raging. Being a younger and more hot-headed man than I am now, I sent a direct email to the client offering them my thoughts on how things had played out, the lack of respect for people’s time and general indecision. 

I felt fantastic for about 45 minutes. Then I re-read the email and felt pretty crap for a long-time. It was unhinged and driven entirely by emotion. 

About 4 months later, the profile reached out to me that the relocation opportunity had fallen through and I knew that the first company were still hiring. 

The candidate was unaware that I’d sent the email and so I had to go back to the first client and try and get them back in. What followed was one of the most uncomfortable (and awkward) conversations of my career.

I still cringe thinking about it now. I’ll spare the details but I got lucky, they gave me another shot, we made the placement (after a year) and went on to do more work with them. 

This is a completely true story and the individual might even be reading this post. 

The massive takeaway that I took from it was: don’t burn your bridges and delayed gratification is very real.

Fast forward to this year, here’s a few examples. 

Sitting on LinkedIn. ‘Hi Charlie, it’s X’. It’s a profile I’d placed SIX YEARS ago. We’d had absolutely 0 meaningful contact between those phases and here they were. Intro to a friend who was hiring. 

I just got an inbound lead here in Hong Kong from a client. We went to their office and I asked how they came across my profile. I’d relocated their best friends brother-in-law to the UAE three years ago. How random.

Conversely, I had an interview cancelled a few months ago for a profile on 2nd stage quite abruptly. When we enquired why, the hiring manager said that they’d met them in their previous role and they’d made a poor impression. 

We work across sprawling cities with multiple million populations and I’m always struck by how small a world it is and how all of our reputation precede us. Someone knows someone and they will have an opinion. 

The world rewards patience and penalises impulse. People move companies. They get promoted. They become the decision maker. If you were kind, they’ll remember you. 

Takeaways:

This post proves the point, right?

One placement six years ago turned into an inbound referral last month. A brother-in-law's relocation became a new client. One intro can change everything.

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Thanks for reading and see you next Thursday.

- Charlie.