11 steps from being rejected by Pret
My story on getting back into the workforce … my hardest struggle yet
I have written so many things over the last two years since I took to Medium. I have had a lot of time, perhaps too much and so I’ve written about whatever has been on my mind at the time. Some of it has been good, some appreciated, and a lot not. Ultimately though, I write because I can and I am reasonably good at it.
I have been in the workforce since 1998 and over that time gone from being a qualified solicitor to what I am today — a ‘jack of all trades’. A better description might be a ‘guy that can do lots of things’ and while I was on the inside at Investec between 2005 and 2014, this was a help.
Once on the outside, it has been a hindrance. For six months in Bali, the ‘Handy Andy’ line was useful for about five minutes.
What you are about to read, I hope, is a post with a real purpose — one where I fully open up and share my real anxieties and lay it all out.
To be at this point to be able to write what you’ll read below, has only come from trusting people, and feeling that they will see past all my weaknesses and believe that I can be useful. Some do, some don’t, or are not willing to.
If I am really honest, it is also a moment to admit publicly, that in my professional life, I have found a new place to call home, just up the road from my former bosses and great mates, Jamie and James at Investec.
This is post not my whole story, that’s a much bigger unpublished series of thoughts and feelings, but as I have come to realise, my identity is so much to do with my work.
So I am writing now. I feels long overdue.
Hugs, Andy
- The phone call that I badly needed
It was a grey Tuesday afternoon in December last year when my phone rang, as I lay on my bed feeling demoralised. It was my old boss James Arnold: “Andy, I am worried about you”.
After an hour on the phone, James got me out of my funk and had convinced me to go to the Job Centre in Kilburn, “today”!
His point was I didn’t need to be running 15 miles down the Paddington canal, I needed to be around people doing “something, anything”.
When I got to the Job Centre that afternoon, it turned out you can’t actually get a job at there as you have to ‘go online’, so I applied to Pret.
2. A smile that turned to tears
Two days later I went for an interview at Pret HQ at Victoria Station. The photo below was taken after that interview. I forget whether I got the rejection by email or by text the following day.
2. Rewind to the easy part when the sun was shining last July
After 360 days outside the UK (which I now call a ‘career break’), I had a pretty clear focus when I touched down at Heathrow on 9 July 2015 as I sought to look for a ‘job’: get out an meet people.
That bit comes very easily to me and I also thought it was my best chance of finding work. My gut told me that a jack of all trades would be unlikely to be able to navigate the modern world of online applications with all its racy drop-down lists and role titles.
I think it was 70 meetings that I had in those first six weeks back in London. Of these, there was one lead that I felt may well go somewhere — with Adaptive Labs. I also exclude the challenger bank that asked me to volunteer.
In the middle of this, in August, I got distracted and started ‘doing a startup’ but soon realised that was a bad call but I met a great guy in Tim Boler, who has today become a father! Awesome Tim!
So, 70 meetings later, I called in a favour from a mate in banking and got me an intro to a ‘reliable’ recruitment agent. It actually happened on August Bank Holiday Monday so it seemed a nailed on certainty. It wasn’t. They couldn’t find a box for me.
Thankfully, I had struck up a relationship with Ben Walton, a classy lad from Bournemouth that is in recruitment and we had some fun thinking about how to improve the recruitment process.
Check out our short video on Digital Hiring here, that we recorded at Huckletree, my favourite coworking space in London! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmizj7J8in0&feature=youtu.be
3. So what is it that I ‘do’?
In January 2014, while in a yoga class in Bali I had a moment when I realised what it was that I was good at: to lead and motivate.
It was an awesome feeling at the time, because I had never quite figured out how I managed to deliver a £900k IT project at Investec without knowing anything at all about IT.
The problem with this ‘lead and motivate’ conclusion is that is it useless as a bald statement. Even with empirical data that may prove it (i.e. my articles on Linked in on what we actually did at Investec) are pretty much useless when it comes to looking for work.
Recruitment agents are in effect sales people who cherry-pick the low-hanging CVs.
So, it’s no surprise that it’s only people like Ben Walton that place any value on my article from January 2015 (when I was in Bali) about how the art of spotting talent is to spot character, not a nice line on a CV.
Another good ‘un’ is Charlotte Roach, the founder of Rabble, who I interviewed with in November. When I asked what she thought of my CV, she replied “I didn’t look at your CV”. It was my video on the Escape the City website that led to that first coffee a a cafe by Hampstead Heath!
4. An untimely break
A year earlier, I had agreed to organise a joint 40th for 15 mates back home in New Zealand. I love this sort of thing (remember what I said about ‘leading and motivating’) and even though it was poor timing, since I was the host, I couldn’t back out.
So I left London for three weeks. I was feeling really positive as I flew out to Memphis on 25 September fuelled by positive effects of the Escape to the Woods festival.
Yet when I got back from New Zealand in late October, for the task at hand (finding work), the break had broken the momentum.
At this time I moved into a flat on my own, one that I had owned for many years, but one I had never lived in. I hated it from the off.
5. November and December depression
This period was probably the loneliest time I have ever had. None of my leads had materialised and I took the decision to pitch for ‘basic’ work, which for me meant regulatory compliance.
Worse, no one was interested in what I was up to. I realised how shit job hunting really is, and how my friends have felt being in that situation.
The task of ‘highlighting’ some of the mind-numbing tasks that I had done over the years was throughly depressing .. and hard to actually do. To say “I can review a financial promotion” because some sales guys in recruitment wants you to is a battle at 40 years of wisdom.
I came close to getting an insanely well paid job for a company I would have hated in level 27 of a Canary Wharf tower. If I was broken by the Pret knock back, I was oh so happy about this.
You see I like to work with people, not robots in financial services that only think for themselves, and what they earn.
6. What next? It’s almost the end of the year and I’ve failed in my mission from July.
As Christmas closed in, I was miserable and had been thinking I would head to Bali and stay there till mid February, when the job market ‘opened’ again.
The call with James Arnold gave me a lift and then something magic happened. Writing this makes me cry for my luck.
7. Beating 82 people to a ‘Project Manager’ role
I was lying in bed (again) on a dark December Friday afternoon scrolling through some jobs on Linked In when I saw a project manager role with Tobias & Tobias. It was a glimmer of hope, despite the 82 in the queue.
18 months earlier Chris Tobias was the mentor of me and my mate Frank Ray, while I was working on my last project at Investec and I had come to respect Chris tremendously for his empathy and shrewd, convincing advice. And for his manner.
So, I called Chris as soon as I saw the ad and a few days later I met him and Ofer Deshe, the boss at T&T in Clerkenwell. It was eight days before Christmas and later that night Chris sent me an email saying that they wanted to hire me.
It was about 9pm and right before that I had walked home from my mate Nick’s place in Kilburn in tears. Despite the fact I had a great meeting with Chris and Ofer, I feared rejection.
Instead, I had a ray of sunshine to share with my family back in New Zealand, and as I headed to Bali for Christmas, for the third year in a row.
8. Back in work after 18 months
I am totally obsessed with football management and I have come to use the term ‘out of work’ as if it is a norm. It most definitely is not, when it is not by choice. And, as I found, returning to work doesn’t magically make things normal again.
I arrived at T&T on 12 January 2016 and the first month or so was awful. I had been hired to manage projects and there were no projects to manage.
I felt like everyone was watching me and I had no idea what to do — maybe 18 months out of work affected me more than I had realised. It was much worse than in Singapore, where I was on a stipend — here was was being paid a salary.
Doubts crept in again, but it did give me the chance to observe and I am good at that.
9. My first ‘win’
Quite quickly I figured out that T&T was quite like Investec, culturally. Challenge and straight-talking was the T&T way, yet I spotted that it was also a place where teamwork seemed under valued.
A month or so in, I was asked to lead a proposal to win a £150k gig and I found it really hard work. I discussed it with two friends who agreed I should confront the issue, and be forceful about it. The next day another, younger friend said “Andy, ‘let it happen’”. Thankfully I listened to Sandy! Hugs Sandy!
A few days later we were preparing for the big pitch and the prep went really went. I was thanked by a colleague that I felt doubted my value to T&T for what I had added. It felt good.
We then won that gig. And I hugged Chris Tobias. It felt extra good.
10. Taking responsibility
There are two parts to this.
The first is my decision to start sharing my feelings with my colleagues including introducing a ‘hugging culture’ — if I could give Chris a hug, everyone was ‘in scope’.
Having a hug at work is a good thing, something I learned from James Arnold and it’s happening at T&T often now. Alberta Soranzo is the best!
Whether sharing ‘my all’ is a success or not remains to be seen, but I feel that the principle of sharing and not having a work ‘all is ok” veneer/persona is appreciated at T&T.
The second part, and this proved to be lucky timing ahead of the end of my probation period this week, was that I had to really step up this week as a leader and simultaneously fix team morale, make a client happy and give our senior folks a feeling of confidence.
I was never nervous. I left work on Tuesday night knowing that it was a moment when either I was good enough or I wasn’t.
These situations don’t happen often, and when they do, more often than not, we respond far beyond what we are typically asked to be capable of.
We did it. Pressure is a good thing!
11. Probation and Promotion
Last June I was sitting in a bar in Holland Village in Singapore looking out at a tower block feeling completely worthless — unlovable and unemployable. Tears flowed down my cheeks and I wanted out.
I had gone to Sing as a ‘stepping stone’ to getting back into work and it was a terrible option.
My boss Markus Gnirck urged me to see my role as a mentor at StartupbootcampFintech through to ‘the end’ (an extra month till ‘demo day’). I didn’t see the point of hanging around so I made the call to return to England.
The anxiety I have felt since I was in Singapore about whether I am employable has really got on top of me at times, even since I joined T&T in January.
Most recently I got leathered last Thursday night as I began to panic about whether I would get past probation.
I felt guilty that I was not delivering value to the small company I now work for. You can’t hide in a place of 25 people. I was nervous as hell and I let some people down.
At the same time, I did not hide it from those I am close to, or want to be. I was flying last Friday morning, but it was not pretty. It was a shameful performance, and I know it hurt some really good people.
Ofer is a great man and he handled it like a human. He wanted to understand if I was okay. Not many people do that — not even when they know someone is not okay. They are too scared to ask. \
Hugs Boss!
If I didn’t know it already — which I did! — that was that moment I knew I had found a home at T&T. I pushed it to the limit and found that I am valued and loved there.
Judgment is not passed, not even by those paying my wages. Had I been a footballer, I would have been in The Sun and probably cast aside!
Yesterday marked the end of my probation period and Chris and Ofer want me to stay. Better still, they have recognised that I am terrible project manager and they want me to move into a new, better role.
I could not be happier.
More Hugs!
11. Thank yous
These people deserve specific applause for their contribution to this story.
Chris Tobias, Ofer Deshe, James Arnold, Ben Walton, Charlotte Roach, Sophie Guibaud, and Steve Lemon.
And Jamie Reichman (pictured below next to Huckletree with another good guy, Matteo). I hope these guys do business one day!
