Day 264 of writing every day.
I’m reflecting on the exhausting experience I had yesterday in today’s blog. I mentioned the interview before in earlier posts and am using today to tell what had happened the day of. Being new to the whole industry, I didn’t know what exactly to expect and just thought of the general flow of things that was explained to me online the day before as part of practicing to make sure I make a good impression.
First off, I met with one of the sales at my company a little ahead of the appointed time at a location just outside a station. We exchanged greetings and I was told that I’d be handed off to someone else who’d be taking me to the anonymous company I agreed to meet with based on the brief details given on their posting that had been forwarded to me through sales.
I was surprised though that the hand off was actually just the first of all the middlemen involved. The first meeting spot with sales was just so the sales from another company would know that I’m the one they’re introducing. After getting handed off by my company’s sales I walked with the person who I thought would be with me up through the interview. But no, we walked further along the road to another location closer to the actual interview site to wait for a second salesperson from another company.
It was this second handoff point where I’d get introduced to the person who’d be accompanying me through the interview. I don’t know who gave off the top first regarding a project in need of someone who has English skills, but I don’t think it’ll ever be revealed given all the people involved. I assume everyone involved would get a cut of the fees if things went well and I got signed on to the project as one of the personnel.
The network of salespeople is another world of its own that looked to me to be almost independent of the ongoings of people who work in the office and do their job internally. While human trafficking and the smuggling of people is illegal, I’d liken these salespeople to my imagination of human trafficking networks, but call them human resource locators for their work of basically referring people to places in need of specific types of workers.
Once we got to the interview location, there was some time again to wait until the appointment, so my guide and reference went to smoke and I took a gander at the building tenants plaques to make a guess as to which company would be the one we’d be going to.
I’d say the people who I met along the way to the interview were nice, but something about salespeople and other professions where people make a living by putting up a front gives me the impression that they’re not really the people you think they are. They created an amicable face and identity by which they operate that makes them approachable but the way they speak to each other suggests there’s a lot of reading between the lines that the uninitiated might not notice.
To top off all the unexpected things that happened, it turned out there was a budget change for the project or something. What originally had room to take a newbie suddenly got cut down to needing one engineer who’s both an expert in security AND is quite skilled in English. As someone at the bottom of the subcontracting flow, I had no power over the changes and was the last in line to know.
I’m not upset or anything. Contracts and budgets get tweaked around before they’re truly finalized. Those on the subcontracting side have an incentive to jump at every opening they find that needs to be filled even if the details aren’t finalized. If they’re slow, someone else might beat them to the opening and they’d miss out on the chance to win a contract or some referral fees.
Every shot not taken is a shot missed, and it’s better to shoot and miss than to not make a move at all in business where optimism tells there’ll be more opportunities to come. This is where salespeople differ from investors who have to make the right choice or risk losing up to everything as opposed to salespeople who just need to be persistent and be taking as many shots as they can to rack up their earnings.
Long story short, I obviously wasn’t the candidate they were looking for because the required skills and experience suddenly shot up through the roof. There’s bound to be more opportunities in the coming weeks, but if there’s anything I’m disappointed about, it’s how Osaka seems to be lagging behind Tokyo and even Nagoya in terms of low skill engineer jobs. I’ve already mentioned in the past that there’s no need to keep sending everyone to Tokyo, but to think Nagoya is outperforming Osaka makes me feel that Osaka needs to up its game.
I’ll be on standby and looking to sharpen my toolset with the aim of being hireable in Osaka. I just hope the connections my company’s sales team has will be able to forward something that fits just right soon.
Thanks for reading!
One Chance Works 