Tag: mental health

Your Application Has Been Unsuccessful

On By saigonsaysIn behaviour change, International DevelopmentLeave a comment

I’ve been remiss posting on DefinitelyMaybe, having thrown my efforts into a weekly Substack instead – a decision that has yet to yield fame, fortune, or even a single sponsorship from a running shoe company.

In the meantime, no one’s mentioned my absence here, which I choose to interpret as proof that after twelve years of waffle I’ve covered everything there is to cover in the world of development.

Sadly for you, reader, I have not even scraped the surface of our sector’s bleak, lunar landscape.

It’s been an odd year, working freelance in development and humanitarian affairs. One of my last rants here was about Elon Musk’s DODGE experiment, following Trump’s cheerful levelling of USAID’s $40 billion portfolio. I can’t bring myself to post a photo of either man this morning – Musk currently awaiting a trillion-dollar stock decision, Trump berating New York’s newly elected Mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

Today, I want to talk about the future of job applications.

The email above is verbatim from an INGO that rejected me for a “Head of” position. I get emails like these a lot and am comfortable sharing that. It was a rather whimsical application to be fair, given the last six years I’ve been in the market for short term consultancies rather than full-time roles.

However, even with my freelancing I’ve probably only struck gold three times, after spending hours crafting pitches to advertised assignments. Ironically, the most lucrative of those was also the most haphazard application I submitted – a lesson in randomness, if ever there was one.

Most of my consultancy work comes through word of mouth. For that, I’m sincerely grateful. I intend to keep going, not least because my track record with formal applications suggests remaining solo may be wise.

It makes me wonder: is there really no better way for organisations to find people than the tired ritual of CVs and cover letters?

I write this, of course, while still mildly irked by that latest “thanks, but no thanks” email above – copied and pasted as it so often is in the first person, yet unsigned at the end, it felt like a passive-aggressive ghost of correspondence, glaring at me in my in-box.

As this isn’t the first, nor the last, rejection I’ll receive, I did want to share some of the inadequacies I see in the overall recruiting paradigm we have to wade through in the development sector.

Standing Out in the Crowd

Firstly, and as usual, I have no idea what part of my application failed the test, based on the email sent. Was it tone? Experience? Am I too old? Too informal? Should I have omitted my perfectly reasonable demand for sixty days of annual leave and a 25% pay rise each year?

Certainly one can ask for feedback, but some rejection emails even come with disclosures like this other one I received:

“Due to the number of applications received and reviewed, I am not able to give individual feedback at this time, though I do encourage you to consider and apply for one of our consultancy opportunities in future.”

Recruiters tell me the challenge now is volume. Every LinkedIn posting draws hundreds of applicants within hours. Many are AI-generated, indistinguishable from spam. In that flood, it’s little wonder HR teams can’t respond personally. The process has become automated compassion. Efficient, yet entirely devoid of empathy.

And sometimes the role was never really open at all. The ad is window-dressing for an internal appointment already made before your polite rejection hits your inbox. Everyone knows this game.

The Human Touch

When I was recruiting for CARE in London twenty years ago, the process felt clunky, but sincere. Applications came by post, HR filtered the pile, and you spent a weekend reading twenty or thirty of them, scoring each against the criteria. You’d imagine who these people might be, wonder how they’d fit, and inevitably be surprised when you met them.

“He’s nothing like I thought he would be,” we’d gush after the first interview, perhaps a tad disappointed. Then the second candidate would arrive, and we’d instantly revise our judgment of the first.

I want to be careful here, harking back to these times and to any over-reliance on the in-person interview. There’s a strong argument that you’d be just as well to flip a coin, rather than judge two candidates battling it out in 45-minute interviews. I’ve seen plenty of people ace their interview but then turn out to be terrible at their jobs – and vice versa.

That said, while my old team’s deliberations about candidates could be chaotic and subjective, at the same time they were undeniably human deliberations. We’d agree, disagree, wind each other up, have a laugh about it all, and then take a punt on someone. It was a messy chemistry of people trying to imagine other people in their world.

While an interview is only one piece of the puzzle, I hope these deliberations still play out in some teams because it feels instead now that many just outsource that time and imagination to algorithms. Which results in extra pressure on candidates to hit the right keywords, and on recruiters to do the same with the right filters. I think the combination of which can mean people, at times, feel unseen.

Technology was meant to create fairer hiring practices, however I’d argue some of the stuff that used to make it feel more real – the chance for surprise, or for discovery, or for seeing someone as more than a list of verbs and achievements – has been lost as a result.

In Trust We Trust

Truly one of the best litmus tests for success here is trust. Someone who’s seen you work, who believes in you, or introduces you to someone else – that format can work really well, and is devoid of an algorithm and a cover letter. This way of doing things is also, clearly, not comprehensive enough of a format on its own to work for everyone.

There likely isn’t one silver bullet that comes close to solving the dilemma of how to best fill all the roles out there, and all the needs. We will have to use the internet to advertise. I just think our systems for doing so have taken out some of the vital aspects of what used to be there. CVs written by ChatGPT, and rejections by chatbots – where do we go from here?

Perhaps the future of hiring is more about a ten-minute audio pitch instead of a cover letter? Have any organisations out there experimented with short paid trials? Or could claim they host interviews where candidates ask as many questions as they do as recruiters? I’d love to hear from anyone on this.

For me, anything that reintroduces more elements of curiosity, risk and humanity into the exchange would be refreshing.

You only go round once

On By saigonsaysIn Humankind, UncategorizedLeave a comment

obama
The table where Obama and Bourdain shared a beer and some Vietnamese bun cha

“If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.”

Anthony Bourdain’s words, infectiously honest and, this weekend, hours after he took his own life on Friday, painted all over the internet, a jubilant hat-tip to an affable and engaging character.

It was after a work colleague and her husband (in their home in Dhaka) introduced me to the delights of the cocktail Negroni, that I then stumbled across Bourdain’s youtube advice on how to make one, and I became hooked (both to the drink and to the man).

Bourdain was, in his words, “still dunking French fries at the age of 44” scraping together a livelihood, before the publication of his seminal essay Don’t Eat Before Reading This in The New Yorker, in April 1999, guaranteeing him instant, and ultimately global, popularity.

What I like about his quote above, on the merits of “moving”, is the simplicity of the sentiment, rooted in the instincts Bourdain curated over years of moving around the world himself.

He’d be the first to recognize that not everyone has the luxury of covering as many contexts as he has, but I like that he’s relentlessly stuck to the same message about what he has learned in being constantly on the move. And I think it’s a great message.

Vietnam was one of his more cherished places to visit, too. When Issy and me ever visit Hoi An, we always eat banh mi from the shop – named Phuong’s – made popular by Bourdain, after he sampled one of their banh mis and declared it a “symphony in a sandwich“.

The table in Hanoi, at which he and Barack Obama famously shared bun cha just two years ago, has now been enshrined in a glass cabinet, so proud were the owners of being chosen to host them. And, if you watch some of Bourdain’s documentaries about travelling around the United States, it tends to be a spicy bowl of Vietnamese pho noodles that he goes in search of, on a morning where the hangover is particularly smarting.

In the video above, Bourdain’s unbridled joy at returning to Vietnam and eating street-food turns him into “a giddy, silly foolish man, beyond caring”.

With trademark sign off to his viewers to get out and sample food like this for yourself, his straight-laced take on the everyday importance of community, empathy, humour, and compassion resonated clearly with the millions of people who avidly followed his pursuits from country to country.

**********

It was Milan Kundera, the Czech-born writer who explains in his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, about compassion as having several meanings, depending upon the language origin.

From the Latin, the meaning is “with suffering” whereas, for other variants, the word infers more of the act of “feeling”.

Kundera goes on to state that compassion, taking the Latin derivative, means “we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer.” For the non-Latin version, “to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other’s misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion – joy, anxiety, happiness, pain.”

What Kundera concludes for this second definition of compassion, as a form of feeling, is that it “therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme.”

In Kundera’s novel, his protagonist, Tomas, struggles with a compassion he feels for Tereza (which she “has infected” in him) and it occurs to him that “there is nothing heavier than compassion…not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes”.

In this regard, compassion doesn’t seem like something which would be easy to sustain. In its purest form, it could eventually drive too many emotions round and round your consciousness and your being, that you’d be rendered trapped.

Perhaps a corollary exists here with the compassion that, I think, partly underscores Bourdain’s “open your mind” call to action.

As he moves from one culinary and cultural indulgence to the next, he consistently tells his viewers to use travel and food to gain a different perspective and appreciation of what the world is all about. By extension, he is inviting others into a dynamic whereby they could be susceptible to compassionate feelings for others.

I’m fairly sure that Bourdain’s expectations in doing this weren’t so others would embrace their compassionate inner selves and take on the suffering or the feelings of all those people they meet along the way. However, whilst he knows his shows are entertaining first and foremost, I also feel he does hope to inspire some strain of compassion by sharing his own experiences.

To me, there is some middle ground here. Your movements, your curiosities, your exposure to new things, your ability to actively listen and learn, all of these things leave an indelible mark on who you are. Sometimes this can hurt and other times it produces unfettered joy. Whether it creates compassion specifically in the way that Milan Kundera has analysed the form, or whether a different lens is gifted you through which to view the world, is perhaps less important.

Anthony Bourdain seemed to enjoy living in the present moment – “you only go round once” he exclaims, after his second bite of the Hoi An banh mi. He carried with him an authentic and hearty joie de vivre and a charmingly blunt and down-to-earth swagger, which made his worldly ebullience mesmerizing.

That Bourdain lived a life where roguish enquiry, experimentation, connection and celebration were cornerstones, the darker periods of time to which he was susceptible may also have been mutually reinforcing components to his character.

Of his sudden suicide, more will be revealed. I only hope, as Kundera’s character Tomas felt it “weighing heavy, and prolonged by a hundred echoes”, that Bourdain’s propensity to feel compassion didn’t take hold in such a way, time and again, that its indelible mark was just too much to bear.

ab
Anthony Bourdain eating in Vietnam. Photo credit: http://www.eater.com