Page 48 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

‘Yes.’
‘Ask to speak to HR, personnel, the store manager, anyone who
is responsible for hiring . . .’
‘I understand.’
‘Ask them if they’ve got any vacancies . . .’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you take a job description from them. Got it?’
‘I think so.’
‘Look, I’ll do the first couple of calls, then I’ll watch you make
a couple, and then you’ll be away.’
He didn’t mind what sector I found the vacancies in as long as
I wasn’t competing with anyone else on the team. So I chose
fashion, presumably because I thought my background in the
leather trade might give me some affinity for the field.
Needless to say, I got a lot of rejections, and it was pretty clear
that if I didn’t find a way of swimming I would quickly sink with
the demoralisation. So I started saying what I thought they wanted
to hear, and, sure enough, my calls started lasting a bit longer.
‘We’re a specialist fashion agency. We’ve just placed candidates
with Yves St Laurent and Gucci . . .’ and with each line I sounded
more credible. I was learning that every time someone said ‘no’ or
put the phone down, I had to work out a way to make sure the
next call didn’t end the same way. It certainly made the work more
fun, and I was able to pick up tips from the others in the office –
there were four or five of us, with one of them doing banking,
another secretarial and so on – and I started to think that I might
have found something I was good at.
At the end of each week, Clive would look at each of the
vacancies we’d picked up, and if there was a reasonably good job
that sounded interesting he’d write an ad to place in the Standard
the following week. The entire business was speculative: we sought
out the vacancies and then drummed up the candidates. In effect,
Clive was creating a business out of nothing. When the candidates

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