🤠's Dua Sen : Never accept less than what you're worth
I read an interesting LinkedIn post by Peter Tan, a hotelier, on his experience at a job interview in the 1990s. His panel of 3 interviewers included a guy who played the role of “bad cop”. The ” bad cop” interviewer was “rude, aggressive and combative”. Now Peter's industry - hospitality- is famous for a dictum, “ The customer is always right”. But of course the customer is not always right.
We expect a good hotelier to be empathic and customer-centric. But sometimes hoteliers might need to deal with ass****s who are NOT always right. Having had some experience (I interviewed and hired a team of analysts, support staff, IT programmers, content writers etc for a start up FinTech venture in Online Trading), I think the “bad cop” interviewer was intentionally trying to see how Peter performed under pressure. Peter was offered the job eventually but turned it down.
How would you turn a job offer down?
A lifetime ago (ie in the 1990s) when I was in middle management at a listed financial group, I wrote a paper convincing upper management the future of stockbroking in a digital world was Online Trading. Yours truly got a budget approved to hire people and rent separate premises upstairs. For a junior management position, I interviewed a 28 year old candidate. She had all the right qualifications - a First in Engineering from a Canadian uni, a MBA from INSEAD, experience as an associate in one of the top 3 US management consultancies and most importantly, experience in setting up an online travel website. And she was multi-lingual too - besides English and her native Cantonese, she was fluent in Mandarin and French.
I thought the candidate was outstanding. So I offered the maximum salary I was authorized to offer -about RM400,000 per annum if my memory is correct. NB I did some research on the salary ranges for IT people in both technical and management jobs and got a multimillion budget approved to hire about 10 staff.
But she turned my job offer down. She simply said yours truly knew it wasn't enough. She knew of course her own worth. And she was prepared to walk away from a job offer with a respectable listed financial group and go back to the uncertainties in her internet start up.
🤠’s Dua Sen : Always know your own worth. Never settle for less.
Post Script
I went back to my bosses and asked if the Group might consider increasing the pay for the candidate. I think it took an additional month before I got approval to finally hire her. The candidate had already aced 3 interviews (yours truly, my boss who was a GM, and our boss, the Executive Director, Investment Banking.) She was asked to attend more interviews with the bank's other Executive Director, Commercial Banking, the Chief Information Officer and the bank’s CEO. She impressed those interviewers too. I think but cannot be 100% sure (I tendered a resignation letter after a year as Head Online Trading) she stayed on in the Group's HQ financial management about ten years, rising fast to become one of the youngest GMs.
The Online Trading startup, like so many other similar ventures in the 2000 Dot Com Bubble, fizzled out after the Group divested it's core commercial banking business at the top of the market, leaving just it's investment holding, stockbroking and property businesses.
More Dua Sen advice : “Don't Work Hard, Work Smart”, “Never Criticise Your Boss’ Boss”
