Marketing Manager at Koala: a meetup conversation, three months later, an offer

The role didn't exist when we first met. It existed three months later because a conversation over a beer turned into something. I was at a marketing meetup in late autumn. The kind of event where most people network in a way that's obvious and forced, and I'd mostly given up on those events being useful. I'd ended up in a corner of the room with two people I didn't know, one of them the head of marketing at Koala. We talked for about thirty minutes. Not about jobs, not about hiring. Just about a campaign I'd run earlier that year and what I'd learned positioning a B2C ecommerce brand against a much larger competitor. We swapped numbers because she said she might want to follow up on something specific from that campaign. I didn't expect anything to come of it. Three months later she emailed. The team had been thinking about hiring a marketing manager focused on exactly the kind of brand work I'd described. The role hadn't been advertised yet, and she wanted to talk to me before they posted it. The first interview was her, ninety minutes, in their office. We didn't really do a formal interview. We walked through three of her current campaigns and she asked what I'd do differently. I disagreed with one of them quite directly. ↓