Conorthoughts

Interview

I have an interview in the morning with an Ian Williams at financial P.R. company Lansons Communications. I wrote to Dan a little earlier. 

Dan,
hello. Hope all is well.
I haven't been making much headway in the job search, so I am heading into financial P.R.-land.
First up, Lansons Communications, in the morning. I haven't asked whether there is a job on the table but I don't think they would be calling me in unless they are hiring.
I've done enough preparation: I had lunch with Marc Pops [our friend Marc Popiolek] last week.
Two questions, though.
1) I want to convey that I have a down-to-earth side. What, in your view, is the most obvious and basic thing that most London PR people make a mess of all the time?
2) Lansons is a good firm, Marc tells me. Do you happen to know how good?
C

God knows where Dan was but my guess would be with Sam somewhere half-way up the slope in Hong Kong (Is it called midtown? No, that is New York. I can't remember what it's called.). Luckily, however, he was on his Blackberry so I got an immediate response.

Hi Conor, good luck with the interview.  I don't know much about Lansons except that they are a niche firm with expertise in financial services clients (I think!). As to your other question, it always surprises me how PR people will ring journos to talk about clients or to respond to breaking news without having briefed themselves properly. So you often end up with "I don't know" or "I'll have to call you back". To me that is a very basic failing!
A close second in the annoyance stakes is when they ring up to sell a story without having checked whether it might be relevant to the journo they are calling.
Best, Dan

These are useful things to know, and should do the trick in the morning. Maria! (Is 'maria' - with the emphasis on the last 'a' and meaning  'I'm only joking' - Hibernian English? Martha - my late sister - used to use it a lot. Or is it North Cork? It could be in Shakespeare, for all I know.). 

"Why are you so nervous?"

"I will just have to be direct about this", said Leslie. ''I'm sorry but there is no other way. Why are you so nervous?"

The interview was not going well. We must have been five or six minutes into it, maximum ten. It was a small, windowless, room, with a glazed wall and door bringing some natural light from the office across the corridor. There were four armchairs, in imitation leather, off-green and off-orange, between them a table so small as almost not to be one, Leslie and I.

I had come to see a consultant in a big headhunting firm, Whitehead Mann. No, it wasn't Whitehead Mann but it was a big firm, and her name is not Leslie.

It had been billed a meeting but was an interview. All job-related meetings, bar with friends, are interviews anyway, in my stage of life, mid-life unemployment. Leslie had a job in mind, she told me swiftly, in investor relations. So it was a pre-first interview interview.

The first mistake I had made was not to ring her ahead of the meeting, after it had been arranged, to ask whether she had something "on her books" that might be of interest to me. The second mistake was not getting up early, at 7.30, as alarm-clocked for, but instead lying in bed for three whole hours and ten minutes, giving myself little time to get going and get there. The meeting was at 11.30. The third mistake, the most serious of the three, was to get up at all, or rather to get up other than for one reason, to ring, postpone and return to bed.

This mistake came to me as Leslie walked me back up the corridor - we walked each other, I was her partner in this - mentioning how, if you are not in form to see someone for a job, it is best to postpone.   

"Why are you so nervous?". It had been said nicely, placed half way between a real and a rhetorical question.

I accepted the charge with few words and let Leslie speak.   

"You have no need to be nervous. I'm sure you have no need. You have an excellent C.V., lots of good experience. I am on your side. This is not even an interview. You are going to see lots of people besides me. You are so nervous that you are unable to communicate. You will not get a job in communications if you cannot communicate. I'm sorry but I just cannot present you to my client in a state like this because this will be immediately obvious".

All of this was also said nicely. Leslie had been in headhunting for some years.

Was I nervous? I had arrived sweating, having had more difficulty than expected finding the right building, the street having turned out, in the London manner, to have an extra stretch that I and my bicycle had not known about. And I was a few minutes late, bringing the total to five mistakes so far. I suppose that I was nervous. I was mainly aware of how unconvincingly this morning I was talking for the umpteenth time about how I had got to this point in my life.      

To be continued perhaps (in the next post, like in the next newspaper issue for those nineteenth century novels).               

         

A drop from heaven

Re: Vice-President, Media Relations role

Dear Conor

Thank you for your interest in Lehman Brothers and for sending us your
CV. Unfortunately, we received a number of applications from candidates
with more relevant experience. However with your consent we would like
to keep your details on our database for any suitable positions that
come available in the future.

Please note that all active vacancies at Lehman Brothers can be viewed
on the Lehman Brothers careers site at www.lehman.com/careers/europe.

Thank you for your interest in Lehman Brothers.

Regards

Ruth Fripp

Flip! When it rains, it pours.

Looking for a job

Albourne Village is a leading community site in the hedge fund industry: I am finally looking for work in London.

Budapest residential property - overseas buyers beware

A quick post to put something in one of my empty initial Categories, in order to start making them all visible.

The first thing I notice about my Category Finance is that it is too specific. I need to change it to Business & Finance. (I can re-divide this new Category up later.)

Attached is an article I published last July (2004), on Budapest residential property, written from an Irish angle. It appeared in The Sunday Tribune newspaper, under the title 'Hungary for a bargain? Make your money work in Budapest' with sub-title 'A trip to Budapest gave Conor Joyce a clear perspective of what's on offer for Irish investors'. I hasten to add that the tired title was not written by me!

The Sunday Tribune, based in Dublin, isn't online so I attach the article in the imageless Word doc. form in which I submitted it.      

I plan to use this site to market myself as a journalist and writer in London, so need to start posting articles here, beginning with this one.   

Download budapest_res_property_june_2004.doc