I had my first job interview in seven years this week.
A large American company headhunted me. They sent the email. They identified me. They reached out. I researched them and saw a genuine fit. They were launching into Australia, needed local expertise, needed someone who understood how to build a sales team from scratch in a new market, needed a boots on the ground operator who could handle strategy, process building, recruitment, training, ongoing mentoring, and the kind of culture shaping that only happens when someone has done it before and knows what it actually costs when you get it wrong. They had tried to launch in Australia a few times already and it had not worked. There were a dozen reasons the fit was obvious. It was the first interview I had accepted in seven years.
Then the recruiter opened the call with: please tell me at length why you approached us and why you want to work with us so much.
I said actually you reached out to me. Although I get headhunting contact regularly, you are the first interview I have accepted in seven years and I am happy to tell you all the reasons your company appealed to me.
She was not happy with that.
Notice the power play. She needed me to frame myself as the supplicant. The one pursuing. The one grateful for the opportunity. The entire dynamic of the conversation depended on me accepting that position. I did not accept it and the interview never fully recovered.
We went back and forth. As long as I agreed with her personal philosophies it went well. Then she said they work one hundred percent from home and use Salesforce. I disagreed with both and said I would challenge them.
The interview ended quickly. Statements shifted to past tense. If we proceed. If you get to the next round we may consider such things. Click.
What She Heard Versus What I Said
She heard old man does not understand modern work from home.
What I meant was that the first major company to implement full work from home was Yahoo. It nearly bankrupted them. A new CEO came in and one of her first statements was ‘we need to be one team again’. Her decision was to bring people back into the office. Not because she was old fashioned. Because she understood that an office is not just a location. It is a culture you can shape, particularly in sales. It is tacit knowledge transferring between people. It is close mentorship, a testing environment for campaigns, the compounding that only happens when people with unique and varies skill-sets build something together in the same room. An ikigai. Salespeople need close mentoring and emotional support, learning from each others failures that WFH doesn’t provide tangibly.
She heard old man cannot use Salesforce.
What I meant was that Salesforce is a bloated, expensive, enterprise-level CRM built for large teams. In a team of seven it becomes admin-heavy, frustrating for reps, and creates exactly the kind of CRM reluctance and reporting anxiety that kills pipeline visibility. The tool should serve the team. When the team is serving the tool you have the wrong tool for the job.
She heard old man doesn’t want to do on the road sales.
What I meant was; Australia is geographically challenged and our population density is the lowest int he world. We don’t respond well to walk ins, on the road sales reps are really expensive and hard to gain an effective ROI from. On the road sales is quite outdated and modern multi-channel go to market needs to include social media and video Content and marketing and outbound, it needs a variety of skill-sets, not just door knockers.
She couldn’t get off the phone fast enough and I didn’t care enough to correct her.
I did not want the job. But I want to talk about the rejection because I am no longer interested in playing the corporate game of kissing the feet of junior recruiters who are feathering their own nests of incompetence. And because I know I am not the only one.
The Bouncer Problem
I’m going to create something I call May’s Law ‘the smaller the authority; the more it will be exerted’.
Every person handed a small slice of authority will squeeze every drop out of it. Think about a bouncer at a nightclub. A homeowners group strata secretary. A low level retail department manager who lords it over staff in ways a senior leader would never dare. They press their authority as far as it will go, at every opportunity, to the fullest extent they can exert their authority. Authority is the only lever they have so they pull it constantly.
Now think about your typical recruiter gatekeeping your headcount. Your staff are the most important thing in your company, the very fabric of it. Pulling on that lever of authority in every conversation, filtering your team through their incompetence, their lack of understanding, their political, cultural, generational bias.
Isaac Asimov said ‘the problem with democracy is that my ignorance is equal to your expertise.’ That is the structural problem with most recruiters.
An elite operator will not match a profile cleanly. They will say things the recruiter does not recognise. They will push back. They will make the recruiter uncomfortable because they are operating at a level the recruiter has a backseat view of. So the recruiter screens them out. Protects her metrics. Moves to the next candidate. And the company ends up with someone safe, someone who fits the box, someone who will do it the way it has always been done. Which is ironically the exact reason the company was struggling in the first place.
The Whale on the Hook
Years ago I was APAC sales lead for an advisory practice. Best market view of projects in Australia by a wide margin. I would meet two Sales directors from major companies in the ecosystem every day. They would meet me monthly just to exchange the best leads their teams had uncovered for my time and opinion.
I reached out to a major company and booked a coffee meeting with one of their sales managers as long as he brought the sales director. We sat down at a café, me, the sales manager, and his sales director. Within five minutes the rep was talking over me, with his plan that I would funnel all the leads to him, for no apparent reason.
The sales director looked at him and said ‘shut your f#@king mouth, do not say another word this entire meeting or I will fire you on the spot, you have no idea the whale you have on your hook.’ then he took over the meeting.
The junior just does not have the experience to understand how deep the river runs. Its the same problem as intelligent people suffer in multiple choice tests. They understand multiple truths that a layman doesn’t fathom. Any CEO I meet would love to have me in their team. Every recruiter or sales manager I meet will do EVERYTHING in their power to keep me out.
My father always said a prophet is never known in their own lands. I used to think that was consolation. Now I think it is just an accurate description of how checklist hiring works.
Don’t let recruitment get you down
The very reason I was the perfect candidate was the exact reason I was rejected. That is not bitterness. That is just how the system works. the company has a failure, the thinking that corrects the failure is too far removed from the self affirming confirmation bias so it’s rejected.
Recruitment as an industry is fundamentally broken and should be blacklisted. It was designed to find the safest candidate not the best one. It is run by people who are incentivised to fill a role for a business, at the expense of the candidate. It is filtered through made-up checklists built by the same leadership that created the problem in the first place. It is corrupted by political, cultural, and ideological bias dressed up as values alignment. It promotes people who are good at being interviewed over people who are good at doing the work, or the right personality type. It ignores valuable human traits like creativity, industriousness, and supporting others. It screens out anyone who pushes back, thinks differently, or makes the interviewer uncomfortable.
And it protects itself by calling all of that ‘due diligence.’
The result is that genuinely capable people sit in mediocrity while ineffective people who interview well, and vomit the same narrative as HR get promoted above them. Good people cannot get jobs. Awful people thrive. And the companies that most need transformation keep hiring the echo chamber that confirms they are not the problem.
To everyone who has been on the wrong end of this. Do not hang your identity on the coat rack that a junior recruiter assigns you. Do not let a twenty-six year old with a checklist define your professional worth. Do not mistake their inability to recognise you for evidence that you are not worth recognising.
The whale on the hook swam away. They never knew what they had.
