One time someone tried to steal my job using a mini bag of Haribo.

He sent my boss a physical letter stating his interest in a marketing manager role (specifically my role, because I was the manager), and attached was a mini bag of Haribo.

My boss was impressed. Thought it was really clever, funny, and all the rest of it. Probably because he liked to think he was a cool startup founder and it would be a good anecdote for one of his talks or interviews. He showed me the letter.

I was not impressed. Obviously.

But I was more unimpressed that this person, being a graduate, had no real-world marketing experience whatsoever. And didn’t have enough awareness to know that they would be massively out of their depth marketing a new, very technical startup with a niche tech business audience who didn’t know the service existed yet.

In a company with one marketing person, and three employees total. There was nowhere to hide and no one to blame, if you were that way inclined. And if the plan was to keep both of us, well, I didn’t have time to train someone from scratch with everything I needed to do, nor did I want to do that – it wasn’t what I signed up for.

You would not be getting results with someone like that. You’d be paying someone to suck up to you so you thought they were great.

And he also hadn’t done the basic research to know that someone was already in that role. You would hope.

But more critically, the letter was all about him. There were zero acknowledgements of the company, what he could do for the company, what he liked about the company, let alone any references to goals, target market, potential results.

It was very obvious the same letter had been sent to a bunch of different companies with no attempted attention to detail. Possibly he hadn’t even thought of it himself, but copied the idea from something he’d seen. Who knows.

Anyway, my boss arranged a phone interview with him.

“He was terrible,” he said when he came back.

Yep.