EVOLUTION. THE IMPOSTER

PRINCIPLE 3 - TRUST IN ABILITIES, NOT WORDS 

This one was especially painful for me to discover. I always thought that enthusiasm and hands-on experience were more important than a degree. But as practice showed, there is a reason why a degree is a common requirement.

After his fiasco with Wanna-be, my friend changed his approach to scouting and interviewing. He decided to look for people who show genuine interest in something before they know about the job opportunity. And instead of an interview he would offer a task relevant to the future position and see how well, how creative and how fast the candidate accomplished it.



There came the Imposter. Her test task was to design a user journey for a certain project. She drew up some screens of how it could go, presented the story to my friend, and got hired as a data artist. 

The hope was that a combination of her design abilities, experience in user journeys and natural enthusiasm to make data into a helpful and easy-to-navigate source of information would put her in a driving seat of many interesting digital initiatives and help fulfil the mission of my friend’s startup. 

The real work started coming her way. Ambitious promises were made to our corporate customers. The Imposter was presented to them as a hero that knows just how to make data serve the business. But time passed, nothing she was responsible for got done, not even the workshops she was supposed to run, and the frustration of our customers spilt into the higher levels of management.

So after a few months and the Imposter’s masterful disguise, the reality got revealed: she was neither qualified nor interested in doing what was expected from her. Sadly she simply didn’t know how data and business are connected and why is it important to act promptly when the top layer of the corporation asks you to. What she really enjoyed doing was making pretty visuals with fancy software. 

In essence what she lacked was the perseverance or desire to complete a task - which you willingly or unwillingly gain during your time at university, otherwise, you never make it through there.

So her CV didn’t lie - she didn’t have a degree. In her interview she didn’t lie either - she got a lot of experience in talking to users. Although talking was where it ended. In her hiring task, she did show what she could do - designing nice-looking visuals. But at the end of the day, it was a mistake to trust that she could do more than that. 



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