Quickie Thought: Post Job Interview Email

I had my first job interview in a number of years - I think it went really well, but you can never tell from these things.  There have been interviews where I felt I did terribly and got the job and others where I reach the pinnacle of perfection and finished a distant second place (or third, fourth, fifth, etc.).  So, I have no idea.

As any good interviewee knows, you must always send a thank you note of some kind after the interview is complete.  These days, these notes take the form of email, so you best be getting that email off within 12 hours (they say 24 hours, but in the age of blackberries and iphones, that doesn't seem right).  I dutifully sent my note off tonight - plain and simple, nothing too flashy.  But I must admit, I was tempted to take a bit of a risk...try something a little off the wall perhaps.

First I need to give you some context.  As mentioned previously, I've been toying with this notion of creating a personal brand for myself around the idea of "professional craziness", which I've now thankfully renamed "professional eccentricity" (I've always said I'm terrible at naming things).  The idea of creating a personal brand is not new of course, but it has become increasingly important in the age of social media when a quick google search will reveal pretty quickly many aspects of who you are, both good and bad.  I'm kind of a mixed bag of often opposing qualities - creative with a analytical twist if you will - so I feel this idea of being professionally eccentric fits me well.  I often bring up hair-brained schemes as solutions to problems in order to think of ways to solve them in a different way.  But I'm generally grounded in reality - I'm not weird or strange just for the sake of it.  There is a method to my madness.

Of course, this branding has trickled over into my quest for a job in social media.  And I want to work for a place that is going to accept me for who I am and not stifle my creativity and zest for new ideas and ways to do things.  So my cover letters are a little bit more "familiar" than the average potential hires out there with phrases like "get-it-done-ness" and "you won’t see me shiver at the sight of an Excel spreadsheet" and "you need someone fearless enough to walk up to the edge of the cliff, but have the presence of mind to strap on a bungee cord".  Maybe this writing style of familiarity turns off potential employers, but they probably are not places I want to be working at anyway.  Kind of like a weeding out process, similar to my reason for having a beard as I always rationalized that I wouldn't want to meet a girl who didn't like beards.  It worked, I'm now married to a beard-obsessed wife.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I wanted a little something different in my post interview email.  My idea was to end the email with "And in the words of the Gingerbread Man in Shrek 'Pick me! Pick me!'".  Nuts? Yep.  Even nuttier when I recalled afterward that the Gingerbread Man only said this during the menu loop of the Shrek DVD.  I've only seen the movie like 2 times and somehow this stuck in my head.

Yeah.  Probably a good idea I didn't do that.

Professional Craziness

Have you ever tried branding yourself? Like, have you ever thought about how you try to present yourself to the world? I'm working on this hazy concept I have running through my head called "Professional Craziness". It's this nebulous notion (how's that for an alliteration, teach?) of mixing creativity-on-steroids with the ability to reel it in to make some semblance of sense to your bosses, company, and most importantly, your audience. Let me give you an example...

Back in university, I was entered in this really intense marketing competition called The Apprentice. It was similar to the TV show: we were split into two competing teams who would be challenged by a real world case each week by a sponsoring company (someone like Xerox, Frito Lay, Pepsi, etc.) and we had to create a unique marketing solution to the problem and present it in the next week's boardroom meeting in front of a panel of judges and often 70+ audience members including students, faculty members, media, and prospective employers. The big difference between the competition and the show was that our motto was "You're Hired", not:

Anyway, it was really intense and both groups would pull out all the stops. Leading into our third week of competition, I felt like we needed to hit a new level in our presentation for the next challenge. Xerox had laid down the gauntlet by asking us to develop, write and design a new sales collateral piece for their SMB sales agents. So we went to work on what we thought would be a unique idea on collateral design. Meanwhile, as we began prep for our presentation, I proposed an absolutely bat-shit crazy idea. The presentation would take the form of some pseudo trip along the yellow brick road à la Wizard of Oz where we would encounter strange travelers who would give us advice on how to build the best sales collateral possible and we would finally meet the Wizard himself to whom we would sell this new-fangled sales collateral. My favourite (favorite for my American readers) part of this was that the wizard bit would be prerecorded and projected up on the screen - eschewing powerpoint altogether and forcing us to time our "lines" to match up with the recorded wiz. This hair-brained scheme all sprung from my love of the movie quote:

Despite my enthusiasm my group members unsurprisingly didn't quite go for this. However, I took this kernel of an idea and shaped it into something a bit more palatable - a recreation of a high-level Xerox manager assigning us this task and then us presenting it to him "live via satellite" (i.e. rerecorded projection) complete with hilarious synchronicity improvisations and low-budget production values (this was before the advent of youtube, where everyone now knows how to shoot a Hollywood level film). It had the crowd in stitches and firmly in our corner. Now that's "Professional Craziness".

Do I have this illusive attribute? I would say I'm a Pro Crazy young padwan aspiring to be a full blown Jedi of Professional Craziness. And I'm looking for my yoda.