The best thing that my worst job taught me
I am incredibly lucky to be self-employed and doing something I love, but just because jobs are my job now, doesn’t mean I’ve always known how to pick ‘em. There were some terrible ones early on. I mean, on more than one occasion, I felt pangs of real envy looking back at my sleeping cat as I left for work. (I’m not even slightly joking.) Eventually, you get more comfortable trying new things and balancing the risks though. Bad jobs happen to good people - all the time - and hopefully it’s a chance to learn something about yourself. Figuring out what you don’t want to do, is half the battle, and that trial-and-error process is what builds resilience and clarifies our goals, BUT… I never advocate that people should stay in soul-crushing jobs when it’s at their own physical or mental expense. Period. Like many though, I learned this lesson the hard way.
Case in point.
Not once have I ever woken up and thought, “I think I’d like to dial up 50 strangers today and try and sell them something.”
Not once.
And yet I’ve totally worked those jobs! Haven’t we all? I mean, I’ve never actually met anyone who loves them. Like, really loves them. I’m sure they’re out there, and I’m slow clapping and saluting them on the inside, but they are most definitely special unicorns. My personal experience with the world of outbound sales, however, looked very different.
It was May of 2004. I had just completed my first year of college and decided to look for a second summer job to fund my study-abroad plans. Ireland was in sight, and the Euro was strong. I perused the local newspapers and answered an ad for a part-time receptionist in my hometown. When I showed up and mentioned to the manager I also waitressed, I was quickly ushered into a secondary conference room where group interviews for “the sales roles” were taking place. I remember thinking, “Well that’s nice of them! They think I can sell!?” My God, they must have seen me coming a mile away.
The company, Vector, hired thousands of sales reps nationwide to sell Cutco knives through home-based presentations. The people interviewing us seemed fun and nice, but also super charismatic and well… salesy. Looking back, I realize I had no chance. I attribute this terrible decision to actually accept this job based on the fact that I was 19 and had no idea how to read the tea leaves of a shitty interview. I also wasn’t aware just how annoying it would be to have someone come into your house and then pressure you into buying expensive cutlery. (As a broke college student living at home, I wasn’t exactly the target demo for companies like Vector.) All of the red flags were in plain sight, including the multi-level-marketing vibe, but there I was… excited to get one of the [many] on-the-spot offers.
Not surprisingly, I didn’t even last the whole summer. Even worse, by the time I quit, all I had to show for my efforts was a fresh line of stitches down my right hand from where my favorite high school teacher, Mrs. Overbey, accidentally sliced into my palm during what we’ll call the “Okay, I’m going to hold up this piece of leather and you just cut right through it with this steak knife…” portion of the script. This poor woman! She was nice enough to let me into her home so I could make $13 for the demo, and 20 minutes later, she was rushing me to the hospital with a bloody rag held around my hand. I didn’t even cry out in pain. The sheer humiliation of it all drowned out any other emotion I could have possibly felt in that moment.
I called my boss from the hospital to let him know what had happened. He laughed and said, “Well now she has to buy something!” After not caring, he also somehow convinced me to STILL ATTEND THE NEXT DEMO which was scheduled for later that day. In case you’re wondering, yes, I knew then it was over. Also, my stitches busted, and I bled all over my next appointment, but at least they were family members. (Can’t make this shit up.) As soon as I got in my car, I called my boss to quit. My final thought as the phone rang was, “How did I let them talk me into all this?!” I felt like a guppy amongst the sharks… small, manipulated, and now wounded, chumming the waters with my bleeding hand.
It was a hard lesson to learn, and one that was made even more frustrating considering I quit with no actual money saved towards my trip. Believe it or not, I was actually great at the selling part, but all the income I made went towards my debt since I had to spend money upfront on – you guessed it – my own demo knife set! ::Face palm::
Now, one could argue that I at least learned some “skills” here, and that’s true, but none that I felt very ethical about. “When a customer says they’re not interested, you hit ‘em with this…,” the sales manager would say, pointing to a script. Rebuttal Training. Ugh. It should have been titled: How to identify people’s boundaries so you can manipulate them into buying things they can’t afford. I felt sickened by it. Not only that, but as mentioned, new reps had to start off asking family and friends for demos! People I cared about started dodging my calls! This was real? People make careers out of this?! Never again, I thought. NEVER. AGAIN.
As mentally (and physically) painful as that summer was, that job afforded me a TON of perspective. I learned in the most explicit way possible that, even if I was good at something, what I did actually mattered less to me, then how it made others feel. Because, simply put, how it made them feel, changed how it made me feel. The veil had lifted. I had found my north star. And to this day, I lean on this sentiment to help guide my professional decisions and serve as a barometer for how my contributions might impact others.
Even when I took a job at a staffing firm in 2008, the fact that I was helping great people and companies find each other felt incredibly fulfilling. The job itself was still a total grind. I was cold-calling 50 companies a day in search of roles we could fill for them – in a recession. It was brutal. But at least this time, I left with a lot more than just resentment and a carving knife. I left with a career path! Because while staffing management was not the job for me, it did introduce me to the space I realized I wanted to be in… the employment sector.
From there, I shifted into career counseling and then into corporate recruiting. With each pivot, I’d recalibrate my direction against that north star, honing my focus more and more on how exactly I wanted to affect people through their job search… how I wanted to empower them. That’s what it was all about. It took me a while to realize, that even though I was great at sales, selling didn’t scratch the itch for me. Empowering people did. Once I began plugging into spaces and roles where I could do so, it made every step of the journey – even the stitches – worth it.