Try to impress the interviewer by selling milk

One meeting at a time, a boy impressed me deeply. Many of the candidates in this interview have a lot of glamorous internships with multinational companies. He didn't. As a science major, his school was heavy and he spent most of his time on schoolwork. When asked about his experience in social practice, he frankly said no.

Asked again, he asked: "selling milk on campus?"

He said he saw on BBS that a brand milk company was looking for a part-time sales manager at his school, so he applied. Sales manager, that's who orders milk. And he was willing to do it, because there were more than 10,000 students in the school alone, and even if only half of them ordered milk, that would be a huge number. At forty cents for a bottle of milk, he figured he could do it.

When he really did it, he found that things were not so simple. First, developing subscribers was harder than he thought. In the dormitory floor of their own sales, men order milk only a few people, many people think it is too much trouble to drink milk every day, want to drink to buy.

He thought girls might be more willing to order milk, but he couldn't get into the girls' dormitory. After running for a day, he found that it was not a person's job to run the whole 90 dormitory buildings of the school. He decided to recruit more men.

He divided the school into seven districts and recruited seven people through BBS. He gave them ten cents of the profit of forty cents a bottle of milk. The men were happy at first, and after a day of selling, some of them backed off, saying that too few people were really willing to order milk. What to do? He came up with the idea of printing up milk orders at restaurant doors and letting everyone taste the milk for free.

In the first month, he didn't earn a penny. The money was all in costs: commissions for seven students; Printing advertisements; Buy your own milk at the last minute. The next month, he changed his strategy: when ordering milk, he made it clear to his classmates that if he wanted to cancel the delivery order, he needed to make it three days in advance, because he reported the order to the milk company every three days.

The next month, he began to make money, but not much. One important reason is wear and tear. Some of them are delivered wrong, some of them are not updated in time, and some of them are cancelled temporarily.

He found that the errors were caused by the company's milk ordering system, which did not reflect every subscriber and was not flexible enough to update every three days. So he kept up to date, manually recording the ordering and delivery of milk. Since then, the error rate has gone down a lot. From the third month on, he made more money.

By the fifth month, he decided not to do it. He was too tired because summer vacation was coming. When he delivered milk, he got up four or five o 'clock every day to collect the goods, and he had to deal with a lot of phone calls throughout the day and night. He also often encouraged seven "subordinates" to deal with their conflicts. "I'm not afraid of hardship, but I think I've developed my ability to communicate, coordinate and lead a team. I decided not to do it.

He passed through one face and entered the final group face. The group interview was conducted in English, which was obviously difficult for him. When it came to him after the group interview, the global HRD(Human resources Director) said NO, but I had a different take: "He did not do well in the first 50 minutes, but I think he got better and better after that. He's a slow starter, so I think he can be considered."

"He's not showing leadership!"

"Not some candidates whose leadership comes through a strong tone of voice, powerful gestures and confident facial expressions, he wields influence through his ideas."

"His expression is not good."

"To be precise, his English is not good. He was able to express himself very clearly. But English is ultimately trainable."

I had other interviewers support me, and in the end, GLOBAL HRD was convinced. During the break, HRD in China communicated with me and said, "You speak very well. We could definitely hire someone like that. Foreigners like smart kids, but we need kids who can bear hardships and work hard."