The short version
I was on the other side of that table for twenty years first.
Not as a communication coach. As the candidate who could not speak, the founder whose business died because he could not hold a room, the applicant who got caught out in an interview and never got told.
I am not going to tell you I fixed it with a system. I fixed it by doing the uncomfortable thing on purpose, several thousand times, over two decades. The course is what I would tell someone starting that.
How it went
First day in an office. Somebody asked me to introduce myself to the room.
I knew what to say. I said nothing.
I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t talk — although I was good at communicating. But you’re being judged.
Eight thousand rupees a month, selling for HP.
I had an engineering degree I had already quit in my head, and I was a backbencher before that.
So I gave myself homework nobody assigned. Five people a day, from departments that were not mine. Finance. HR. Logistics. Procurement.
Not networking. Practice.
At twenty-five I quit and started something of my own.
It died.
Not the market. Not the money. I could not back myself in a room.
I thought every god was against me.
Business schools would not consider me. I did not meet the eligibility criteria.
Before that there had been an interview at SAP, for a job I was punching well above my weight for. He asked what I do outside work. I said I read books. He asked which one. I named a book I had read half of. I read everything half.
He never said anything.
I got to know that he got to know that I didn’t read the book fully.
I kept at it and got in anyway. Manila. Then a whole market to run with nobody under me, and five hundred campaigns to get through.
Now I am the one on the other side of the table. I hire. I decide.
And I decide on how you carry yourself long before I get to what is on your CV.
I have my own metrics. I have my own meter.
What would I notice about you in the first ten seconds?
You already know. That is the uncomfortable part.
On paper
AIM Manila. Regional Director, Luxury Escapes. Founder, Nerige Story and Social Hippi. Bootstrapped, no outside money.
None of that is why you should listen. It is only there so you know the rooms were real.