The role
You will join a small team. The team has existed, in some form, since the firm was founded, though its composition has changed and its remit has been revised on four occasions, most recently in 1998.
Day to day, the work is administrative in character. You will read things. You will form a view about them. You will record that view in a standard format and pass it on. Occasionally you will be asked to revisit a view you formed some time ago, in light of information that was not available to you then.
The volume is not high. The difficulty is not technical. Most people who leave the role do so within the first eight months, and most of those tell us afterwards that they had expected the difficulty to be technical.
What we are looking for
We are not able to specify required experience, because we have hired successfully from a very wide range of backgrounds and unsuccessfully from within our own industry.
The attributes that have correlated with success are:
- An ability to hold a position under mild, sustained social pressure.
- Comfort with incomplete information, indefinitely.
- A habit of noticing when something has changed and no one has said so.
- Discretion that does not require to be asked for.
Candidates who ask early and repeatedly what the work consists of have historically not progressed. This is not because the question is unwelcome. It is because we cannot answer it, and the inability to sit with that has proven predictive.
Terms
Compensation
Above market. Reviewed annually. We do not negotiate at offer stage and we do not counter.
Location
Hybrid. Some travel. The travel is not to client sites.
Term
Permanent. The terms of engagement survive the termination of employment.
Selection process
Our process is longer than is conventional. It has stages. We do not publish the number of stages, and candidates who ask are told, accurately, that the number varies.
Some stages will not resemble an assessment. Some stages will not be announced as stages. At no point will you be asked to perform work of commercial value to us without compensation.
There will be a period during the process in which you do not hear from us. This is normal and it is not a decision. Please do not read it as one.