I got hired in Carnegie Consulting through what came to be a happy mistake. A good friend of mine suggested to look up people on LI who had done recruitment internships and to call these companies upfront. One person (whom I will probably never find again) had done an internship in a company called Carnegie in London so I decided to call up the first recruitment firm called Carnegie.
Wrong assumptions will drive you away from a good opportunity.
The first result that came up on google was Carnegie Consulting. At the time, I could not tell whether it was a recruitment firm or a financial services firm advertising in-house roles. I closed the tab and moved on with my search. A few hours later, when nothing interesting came up, I decided to look up its founder on LinkedIn and was delighted to see that it was recruitment.
When I rang, from my dorm room in the 2nd arrondissement of Lyon, the first person to come through was Guy and his initial response was “sorry we do not advertise internships, goodbye!” and I had to quickly ask before he hung his phone up whether they hired interns themselves. After a surprisingly pleasant phone call, I suppose Guy was intrigued about this completely random stranger asking for an internship because he scheduled a face-to-face interview for early January.
If your placement didn’t work out for whatever reason, it wasn’t the right placement for you.
At the time, I was living in Lyon, finishing the study part of my masters in a hectic frenzy of exams and group projects. You see, the reason I got in touch with Carnegie was a bit complicated: I had previously been accepted as an intern at a big recruitment firm located in Liverpool Street, but they sort of retracted their offer tacitly. Until today I won’t be able to tell you what I did wrong. I thought I had a lovely CV, that I came across well and that my bilingualism would be a fantastic asset. I travelled back and forth quite regularly to secure my internship: surely that demonstrated motivation! However, things didn’t work out and that’s the end of it. I couldn’t really afford to dwell on it and had to search for a new internship ASAP.
Written by Ladane Faycal, who worked with us whilst finishing her Masters dissertation