How I Landed a Job on Wall Street When I Really Wasn’t Looking For One
E92: Taking chances by lowering the barrier to entry
TL;DR — Don’t try so hard. You shine when you are relaxed.
- Have no stake in the outcome (low, low stakes)
- Find the fun — get playful, embrace creativity
- It acts as a warm-up, activating your imagination and increasing your risk appetite
[Subtext: This is also a message for all the emerging writers in WoP10 — Have fun.] And don’t miss the Ozan Varol YouTube at the end of this essay.
How I landed a job on Wall Street when I really didn’t want one
Why had I been interviewing for a job I neither wanted nor needed? It’s one of my favourite career tips.
Many have DM’d me, curious to learn more after I dropped this phrase in E83: The Education of Miss Karena.
I hadn’t been aiming to move across an ocean. All I wanted was for my boss to move me onto the project in Rotterdam. And maybe give me a pay raise. But I knew I’d have to give him a reason to value me.
I mean, here I was 23 and single. And commuting each week FROM London (one of the most happening cities in the world) TO a town in the middle of the sleepy British countryside famous for its sculptures of concrete cows.
I decided I’d get an offer from our primary competitor, and leverage that as my bargaining chip with my manager.
BUT I didn’t want to come across flubbing my lines with the competitor. After all, this was a small industry. And I might actually want to work with them in the future.
The Warm Up Lap
It had been a while since I had interviewed, so I started small. The Post Office was looking for coders. So was the tiny 100-person electrical socket factory a five-minute walk from my parent’s home where I could be the entire one-person IT department. And a stack of investment banks was advertising for a one-year contract for coders from the UK as they began huge digitization projects on Wall Street.
This was the easiest warm-up lap ever. I’d been coding for oil rigs in the North Sea. I had no intention of sticking stamps at the Post Office, or moving across the ocean.
“Half-hour interviews. In and out. No brainers. Then onto the competitor and back to my manager.” That was the plan.
However, there were personality tests at the Post Office, and three interviews over two weeks. Interviewers at the agency on behalf of the Wall Street banks included managers from Drexel Burnham Lambert, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, etc. And one from Morgan Stanley who was a perfect clone of Clark Kent (Superman’s alter ego) right down to the suspenders and glasses. Every employer had an interesting technology challenge they needed to solve.
No Stake in the Outcome
It turned out into a bit of a time investment. But I didn’t mind. I’d updated my resume, and got my “interview outfit”. I was discovering the latest interview practices. And as I never intended to leave the UK, these were “safe” interviews. Low, low stakes. I was searching for answers to two questions: “Am I employable? How much more am I worth on the open market?” [ Always know your worth — the career tip]
“Am I good enough?” I soon grew used to being called back for second and third interviews. It turns out I had a very specific skillset, particularly valuable to Morgan Stanley. I coded in some niche languages, including ADASQL. That muzzled my loud imposter syndrome.
“Clark Kent” was adamant he needed me on his team. I didn’t speak ‘financial’, stared blankly when he asked about the IPO process, and couldn’t tell a stock from a bond. But we chatted. About food. About travel. About culture. About my story to now and how my computing professor encouraged me to switch into a Math and Computing degree after my first year in Psychology and Ecology. About the difference between Dallas, Dynasty and Little House on the Prairie (my only cultural references for North America). He noted that I had moved countries quite often in my short life. I enjoyed our conversations because I was relaxed — they didn’t feel like interviews. He figured out that I was curious, flexible, and teachable.
I soon held a stack of offers (many from Wall Street firms since defunct!) All I’d needed from these interviews was a number. And I had that in hand — nominally four times my current annual salary (though barely enough to make rent in Manhattan as I would soon discover). That shut up my inner critic. But I was certain my conservative father would never let his single daughter live alone in manic Manhattan, so I kept turning them down. Which only made “Clark Kent” pitch harder.
The interview technique he had honed over multiple interviews at the Ivy League and Oxbridge schools, with candidates across North America and the UK was clearly not going to cut it here! I couldn’t tell a Bear Sterns from a Goldman Sachs, a Morgan Stanley from a Merrill Lynch. He could have said SVB and I wouldn’t have been any the wiser. With zero brand recognition, I was not intimidated. I didn’t know enough to be nervous! In the presence of this noob, he had to get more creative.
In the end, he got my attention not with money, but with this sentence: “Even if you eat a different cuisine twice a week for the full year you are with us, you will not have exhausted the cultural variety in Manhattan”. It turns out that the way to this girl’s career exploration was through her stomach.
You never know where you might find gold while digging
I often tell this story to rooms filled with job-hunting young adults.
Take chances.
Look beyond your narrow set of the “perfect places to work”. A brand name may look great on your resume, but 95% of the world’s economy is made up of organizations not on the Fortune 500.
There is more to the world than Apple and Tesla. Try corporate MacDonalds, The Post Office, The Mom&Pop factory down the road where their kids do not want to inherit. These are great low-risk places to do interview practice. Often you discover elements of the job — perks you didn’t know existed — and you can incorporate these as you negotiate at your next ideal interview. Or you may discover the perfect job sitting invisibly in plain sight. They may offer a good training program. Or satisfy your secret dream of an opportunity to do good by designing sustainable packaging. Or offer funds for further education. Or be seeking to groom their successor as they get ready to retire.
In hindsight, a couple of things worked to my advantage in my negotiation. Because I had nothing to lose, I was relaxed. My parents had barely enough pennies to rub together. So I had no clue (honestly) what investment banks were or did. Ignorance, when masquerading as a beginner’s mind, can be very powerful. My imposter syndrome had nothing to hit up against.
“I was lucky,” I would say thirty years later describing that start to a fabulous career that would span decades. “It wasn’t luck,” responded my colleague, “ it was serendipity. You had all the necessary experience in place to take advantage of an opportunity that was offered to you. AND you had the courage to walk through that door when someone opened it.”
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”
- Seneca
The surprising strategy that the writers of The Office use to boost their creativity
For similar flavours to this essay, I highly recommend this 3:56 min video from Ozan Varol, rocket scientist, turned lawyer, turned professor, and now the author of “Awaken Your Genius”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JwqPHR4Xbw
Faced with a creativity block, the writers of The Office would take a break. And create a script for an episode of Entourage. (You heard right.)
Why does this work?
“The same idea applies to creativity. It helps to warm it up first by playing a low-stakes game before you turn to what actually matters.”
- Have no stake in the outcome (low, low stakes)
- Find the fun — get playful, embrace creativity,
- It acts as a warm-up
It shuts down our inner critic. Try it in your current (creative) project and let me know.
This story raises a number of questions for some people. If that is you, please feel free to reach out, or ask in the comments section below.
Please share this edition with someone who needed to hear this message, today, told this way.
Originally published at https://tiltthefuture.substack.com on June 16, 2023. Come and join us there on Tribe Tilt. We are an engaged, collaborative, and supportive community that believes we can make a difference to the people and places that are precious to us. We respectfully engage each other in intellectually challenging discussions. We believe that the best idea can come from anyone, anywhere, at any time.
