Two Phone Calls That Saved My Bacon: How to Give a Sh***y Interview and Still End Up Great at Your Job

Once upon a time two phone calls saved my @$$.

This was March 1998. It was a wet El Ni?o spring and I was a bank teller in Los Angeles. Banks everywhere were buying each other out, consolidating, and turning into massive behemoths. Especially in California.

I worked at a little place in Woodland Hills called Home Savings of America, at the corner of Ventura Boulevard and Topanga Canyon Road. (It's now an Amazon Go.)

That year Home Savings was bought out by American Savings. As part of the consolidation the regional managers had to go through and weed out a bunch of employees at various branches before the changeover.

What They Could Never Measure

Now, the customers at Home Savings liked me. I gave great service. People who felt like they had been screwed over by the bank would come to my teller window, realize I was a decent sympathetic person, and decide NOT to close all their accounts.

That's a value metric you'll never see on a corporate report.

But of course the company didn't know to look for that. All they saw was that I had been out of balance at the end of the day X number of times over the months I had been there. This was above some threshold so Home Savings gave me the axe.

My boss there was a guy named Carl. He was a good, sensible, practical guy from Iowa. Carl liked me and he knew that customers liked me even more. I kept everybody happy.

Carl was like, "You know what? Bryan shouldn't be losing his job. That's dumb."

So he called around to a bunch of his bank friends around the San Fernando Valley and he found a new gig for me. He set me up for an interview in Northridge, much closer to where i lived.

This was at a branch of Great Western Bank, which also happened to be in the process of being bought out by another conglomerate, Washington Mutual.

I got a call inviting me to go there and interview with a lady named Georgia. She was Carl's friend. I did just that, and a couple days after the interview Georgia called me and told me I had the job.

So I went to work for Washington Mutual. I stayed there for the next 21 months.

Now, I knew -- everyone knew -- that I did not want to be doing this kind of work the rest of my life. But for the time I was there it was not a miserable job. Not at all.

Why They Were Fond of Me

Georgia liked me. Her boss Melinda liked me too. Among other things, they thought I was funny.

Eventually they made me the person who trains all the new tellers.

Then, over time I lost count of how many times someone over at our service desk would have a spat with an angry customer. The client would announce that they were closing all their accounts and would be sent to me to collect the last of their cash.

Within seconds of arriving at my teller window the customer would look at me and say, "You know what? If YOU had been the person I was dealing with all this time I wouldn't be closing all my accounts."

One day a younger teller named Obie went to our manager Jeff and asked him, "Bryan doesn't push products and he doesn't sell and he hardly ever gets referrals. Why do you let him do that?"

Jeff answered, "Obie, when you give customer service as good as Bryan does you can work here without getting referrals too."

Soon after that they moved me to the VIP counter where I handled all the merchant accounts.

So they clearly liked me. I made friends there and was always in good standing.

The Story She Hadn't Told Me

At the very end of 1999 I was presented with the opportunity to go work in China. I accepted the offer and got to work wrapping things up at the bank.

And then a funny thing happened my very last week on job. Things were winding down for me and there was all kinds of buzz about me heading off to China.

Georgia, who had hired me, came by my counter late one afternoon.

Mind you, Georgia was an interesting lady. Never said much. Always got her point across in as few words as possible. Had a droll sense of humor.

She said, "Bryan, did I ever tell you about your job interview with me?"

I said no.

"Come by my desk before you leave today. I'll explain."

So before heading out the door I popped in to see Georgia. "I hear you have a story to tell me."

She said, "Oh yes. Bryan, you had a manager named Carl at the place you worked before. Carl called me one afternoon and told me to hire you. He gave you a big recommendation over the phone. So I agreed.

"But then you came in and interviewed. Your interview was TERRIBLE. Just terrible. You couldn't answer any of my questions. You were kind of absent-minded. Confused, even.

And I thought, good grief. So I called Carl. I told him, 'Look, Carl -- this guy Bryan just gave me one of the worst interviews I've ever had.'

"And Carl said, 'Georgia, hire him. You won't regret it.'"

She smiled at me.

"So I hired you, Bryan. And I've never regretted it."

There's a Team-Building Lesson Here

I learned a couple things from this:

(1) You can give a really sh***y job interview and still do great at the job.

The reverse is also true. Particularly if a company doesn't understand the science of audition-driven hiring and recruiting.

(2) A company can look at spreadsheets, balance percentages, sales and referral reports, and still have no clue what's really valuable in a person.

The worst offenders will fire great people and keep the idiots. Dumb corporate institutions do it every day.

Don't be like that. Do what Carl did.

The principle is this: There will always be someone, some person on your team, somebody in your circle, who's an island-of-misfit-toys kind of person. They see things differently. They share your values but they have a different lens on the world. What motivates them deep down is not what motivates everyone else. And yet they're happy to be a committed part of your team.

By any objective or numerical measurement there's nothing compelling about the person. They might actually look bad on paper.

But on closer scrutiny you realize, wait, this person brings a value I didn't recognize. What they do is special, far outside anything I could initially see or measure. Getting rid of them would be a huge mistake.

Be like Carl. Have the organic sense to know when you've got a good person who may not tick all the traditional boxes but who has intangibles you could never put a number on.

Because there will always be someone.

Need a fresh pair of eyes and a new take on your business, your processes, your team, yourself? Message me here or email me at Bryan at bryantodd dot net.