Stories

The marketing internship in a basement

She was nineteen and looking for a marketing internship. The company had no website and no reviews anywhere, which she noticed and went to anyway. The office was in the basement of a small building, and about fifteen other people her age were already waiting in the lobby.

The job was going door to door selling phone contracts.

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Recruit widely under an aspirational, CV-friendly title, mass-interview in a room that looks nothing like the job, and let the switch happen live once someone has already travelled there and sat down. Aimed at nineteen-year-olds, it works on the one group least likely to have seen it before — and most likely to assume the fault is theirs for not spotting it.