Gratitude Monday: Wine, whiskey and chocolate

Gratitude Monday, and I’m grateful for the completely unexpected opportunity to talk with an extremely interesting company in the social intelligence sphere (data analytics for making sense of your social media presence), which occupied a good portion of last week.

It came about because I’d gone to a job-seekers meetup the previous week to share some info on hiring companies. I chatted with a fellow there, and then met with him last Monday because I wanted to know more about what he was looking for, to get a better handle on how to help him. In the course of that conversation, he mentioned knowing the CTO of this company, which had quite an interesting product marketing opening.

I mean—not only is the job description within my capabilities (with some room to stretch), but it lists as bonus points going to candidates who have “Familiarity with social media analytics solutions” and “Love of wine, whiskey or chocolate”.

Well, alrighty then.

Okay—I sent my CV to Robert, who forwarded it to the CTO on Tuesday morning. Within 30 minutes the CTO had passed it on to the CMO, who suggested we talk, which we did that afternoon. On Wednesday someone from HR emailed me to ask if I could meet with the SVP of Marketing in San Francisco, which I did on Thursday. It was a very engaging conversation, and I hope I was very kind when telling her that their website doesn’t really give me a lot of information about what they do.

Well, she asked. And it would be part of the job to make sure that they have a website that totally delivers the goods.

I’ve learned over the course of interviewing for jobs that I can’t predict how things will go. But I do know that this time I was focused on telling my story, on connecting the dots outlining how I can really make a difference in their operation, and on determining whether they have a culture in which I would thrive. So I believe I did my job, and we’ll see from here.

In the meantime, I’m really grateful that my impulse to help someone kind of reflected the same sort of generosity back onto me, and gave me this tremendous opportunity.