WEEK 39: Hire Fast, Fire Faster

When we attend meetings hosted at a client’s office, they usually offer us light snacks to eat. These snacks are usually biscuits, cashews or something along those lines. But in a recent meeting we went for with Dalmia Cement, attendants began passing around gol-gappas in the middle of our presentation. Everyone from the client’s end immediately dug in, and told us to do the same, insisting that we must try these gol-gappas. While they looked delicious, I knew I could not eat them. Imagine me trying to talk about social media extensions of a campaign with a mouth full of gol-gappa. So the creative team was forced to politely decline and sadly look on as the gol-gappas were rapidly devoured.

What’s worse is that attendants kept coming into the room through the course of the meeting, distributing various inconvenient edibles. By the end of the meeting, we were all ravenous.

Speaking of Dalmia Cement, here’s an update on the Red Fort: nothing has happened. Due to various reasons, we are still in the process of getting our final script approved. It has now been a year since the project was commissioned, officially making this the longest project we have ever worked on.

Humour Me is currently in a phrase of its growth wherein we are trying to find the perfect team to take the company forward. This involves quick hiring and even quicker firing. I am happy to report that our current team is more than satisfactory, in terms of both skill and personality. This was not always the case. An interview is unfortunately not a fool-proof way to judge a person’s character, as a result of which we have had a variety of unseemly characteristics on the team, such as:

  • Ego
  • Incompetence
  • Toxicity (this got so bad that the entire team working under the individual in question quit, reducing our team to half its size overnight)
  • Aggression
  • Lies (to the point where we began to wonder whether this individual was quite right in the head)

Thankfully, there are no such problems now. We have learned that it is very important to nip these characteristics in the bud, and if we cannot remedy them, we remove their source altogether.

We have a big pitch coming up this week. Although we do not typically pitch for projects – we prefer to sign on with brand for a long term partnership – this particular brand really resonated with me, so I am taking the lead. This is the first time I have ever taken sole responsibility for a brand, and I am both excited and terrified. I’ll let you know how the meeting goes.

See you next week!

    Leave Your Comment Here