Back when people used to entrust me to run their London offices, I made the decision to expand our small PR team with the addition of two fresh-faced junior account executives. Unfortunately, just a few short weeks beyond their arrival into our cosy WeWork space, I lost my mind and had to sign off sick, never to return.

I caught up with one of them a few nights ago. She told me that I was a great boss (I disagreed), and she felt that on balance it had been a positive experience. Yes, the two of them went onto lose all senior support and found themselves entirely unsupervised in the office each day, performing karaoke to one another while they awaited their inevitable redundancy. But ah, the memories!

There are several lessons here. Firstly, having any boss is preferable to having a boss-shaped void where a boss is supposed to be. Collectively, we discovered this as a nation during the brief period when Prime Minister Johnson was hospitalised, and Dominic Raab was left karaoke singing at the Covid lectern.

Secondly, disrupting the professional trajectory of young people as they attempt to learn the ropes of a new craft is something that should be avoided at all costs. It weighs heavily on the conscience. And while it’s comforting indeed to learn that, in this instance, both individuals emerged unscathed and have gone onto forge meaningful careers, as employers, we have a duty to provide junior colleagues with a stable working environment in which to develop and grow. Knowing what I knew about my mental state at the time, I shouldn’t have taken the gamble, and I wouldn’t do it again.

Thirdly, and this is perhaps more an emerging train of thought than a fully formed observation, but if we know ourselves to be unhappy in our current work situation and setup, should we perhaps think twice before encouraging others to join us?

Effective recruitment involves selling opportunities and possibilities to people who are generally not well-placed to see beyond our words and promises. “This isn’t working for me, but it might work for you,” is a difficult pitch at the best of times; if your heart isn’t in it, maybe it’s better to recuse oneself from the process altogether and hand over to someone who still believes.

These days I have no qualms about encouraging people to work for my agency, because my pitch is sincere, and I know – at least as far as anyone can know – that I’m not going to up sticks and disappear.

But if I have any useful advice to impart to young people as they embark on their new careers, it’s to turn the tables on their interviewer and ask them that most cliched of interview questions, “Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?”

Photo by Olivier Collet on Unsplash