I apologize for not posting in a while. For the last 7 weeks, I have been interviewing for the position of VP Counsel for R&D for a late stage pharma company. Over the course of the last month and a half, I have spent over 100 hours preparing for individual and panel interviews only to find that there wasn’t a real position at all. In fact, while I was interviewing with them, the company down leveled the position, cut the salary, posted the revised job description, and didn’t tell me.
Fortunately, I have found the perfect antidote to the interview blues - Prince Andrew. In 2019, Prince Andrew decided the best way to handle his Jeff Epstein problem was…to give a TV interview. With the BBC. About sex trafficking. Think about that. His PR team thought, “Yes, let’s put the world’s most out-of-touch aristocrat on camera and let him wing it.”
What followed was not just bad. It was an implosion in real time.
He told the nation he couldn’t sweat — as if the mere existence of perspiration was the prosecution’s smoking gun. He used Pizza Express in Woking as his alibi, as though anyone in the history of the monarchy has voluntarily set foot in a strip-mall chain restaurant. He explained staying at the house of a convicted sex offender because it was “convenient.” Convenient for what I ask?
This wasn’t just a man failing to defend himself. It was a man exposing how little the powerful think they need to try. His answers dripped with entitlement. He didn’t come across as cornered or frightened — he came across as bored, as if the whole ordeal was beneath him.
And yet, that interview did more damage to his reputation than any court ever could. It ripped away the curtain. It showed that under all the titles and medals and royal pomp was just another mediocre man who thought rules were for other people.
That’s why I watch it when I’m drowning in the job search blues. Because no matter how grueling an interview feels — no matter how many hours I spend preparing or how many hoops I’m forced to jump through — at least I’ve never sat in my mommy’s palace under studio lights, trying to explain away my proximity to sex trafficking with a story about stuffed-crust pizza. No offense to stuffed-crust pizza.
So angry for you. This is such a disrespect of your time, energy and mind power. An exercise in frustration to be sure. Keep the faith. These are very difficult times to be job hunting.
Job posting PSA: changing the role mid-loop without telling the candidate isn’t “agile.” It’s careless. Please respect people’s time!!