CaratLane Stories – Do you have relevant experience ?
This is another of my CaratLane Stories. More personal than the others. I call it the story of relevant experience.
I can write. and laugh about it today because life has been very kind to me. People please dont get offended. This is all in good fun.
This is 100% a true story and any resemblance to real life characters is actually real.
Thanks to my time in CaratLane, I have had the good fortune of working in the consumer internet and the retail industries.
If not for CaratLane, I would have never been considered for this opportunity.
In fact getting this opportunity played a role in my decision to join CaratLane.
I had always found retail and consumer Internet to be very interesting work opportunities.
However, thanks to my extremely poor grades and weak resume, I wasn’t shortlisted by any of the retail companies or the ones in related areas like consumer internet or FMCG.
As a result I got caught in the “ have you got the relevant experience “ curse.
I applied to many such companies and would always get rejected because I had not worked in their industry and therefore didn’t have the relevant industry experience.
I have found this to be one of the most boneheaded recruitment practises. How does one get relevant experience if they don’t a chance in the first place. It’s like a paradox.
You cant get relevant experience because you dont have the relevant experience. I am sure even the great philosophers would been stumped by this paradox.
Anyways, I was very frustrated because of this. I almost considered doing a second MBA to get out of this loop. I still have the GMAT book that I had borrowed from a college friend in Chennai.
And then one fine day, I get this call about a retail start up in the internet space. Or what we now call e-commerce. I was not interested in going for the interview because I was certain, I would be rejected because of the relevant experience curse once again.
But thanks to the persistence of the caller, I ended up going for the interview. God bless you Vinoth. I can’t thank you enough in this life.
There were two interview rounds. Luckily, none of them invoked the relevant experience curse. I guess they also didn’t have a lot of choice. Which sane person would consider joining an online jewellery start-up in 2007.
One gentleman liked me because of the institutes I had studied at ( or let’s say gotten into but not studied. at ). For once I was on the right side of a recruiting bias – the bias for brand names.
The other gentleman didn’t ask anything about work or retail or jewellery or the internet. He didn’t know much about these things either ( except for jewellery which he was a master in ).
We spoke for an hour and a half about sports and my sports blogging. Once again, I benefited from one of humanity’s most common biases. What Robert Cialdini calls the likeness principle. Having things in common. ( people use this a lot these days. They will message you and say how. much they loved a certain post and they totally resonate with it before asking for a favour. That’s very obvious people )
Finally, I had the offer. To become the first employee of an online jewellery startup in 2007. I had very little data to make a good decision. Very very few people worked in start ups back then. I didn’t even know about esops or what due diligence to do. The Google search of one gentleman who interviewed me had a single result – a page3 article. I didn’t even have an understanding of the difficulty of the job I was being considered for. I didn’t realise 90% of the difficulties I found out after I joined.
The support of my wife and parents played a huge role. The other thing which influenced my decision was the curse.
Finally, there was one company which wasn’t bothered about my relevant retail experience or consumer internet experience. it was another matter that this company didn’t even exist on paper at that time. They were incorporated 2 months after I joined.
Even better, as long as this jewellery start-up survived for two years and didn’t find out all my inadequacies for the job and fire me, I would end up with two years of relevant experience in retail and consumer internet. This would break the curse for me and give me a chance in other retail and consumer internet companies.
I was ready to take a massive loan and do a second MBA to break this curse. Staying in India and giving this start-up a chance seemed a safer bet.
So I took the chance. Luckily, we survived ( and had started to thrive ) for close to 4 years. I now had more than enough relevant experience.
I left CaratLane in 2011. Today people ask me how could I leave. There are three answers. One is personal reasons. Second, I didn’t think CaratLane was going to become even one-fifth of what it has become today. Third, I had achieved one of my big objectives. I had got the relevant experience. I could go job hunting again.
The curse had really been broken. I had lots of options after leaving CaratLane. I even started getting product management roles. During my time in CaratLane, I didn’t even know that there was something called product management. I would write down requirements for the technology team without knowing what that task was called. But that qualified as relevant internet product management experience and that was the only thing that mattered.
Such is life.
Post script – I never forgot the curse though. My personal experience taught me there. were many others like me. Who really wanted to do something that they had not done before. They were suffering from the curse but had strong desire. That became one of my hiring filters. One of the best lessons I learnt in life.
