Nancy姐姐说故事之——我们为什么而工作

我们为什么而工作，这是个old topic.
与我，和很多朋友，工作的意义在于它的ideal。它不是钱，不是位子，而是意义，理念。这些东西很虚。1/15日 USC MBA Round 2 deadline, 读到了我的同事Kai的一篇essay, 关于BeBeyond在卖什么。写的真好!
坚持理念已经很难，在生存的压力下，在和市场上其他所有player的做法背道而驰的状况下，坚持理念不挣quick money就更难了. (于BeBeyond, 如果我们就搞面试技巧培训，或者干脆做中介替别人写PS, 我们的收入早就翻翻了)
看着Kai的essay，我想起了我的一段经历。05年BeBeyond的发展仍然很缓慢，到底要多久我们才能有突破呢? 绝望中，我思考如果不在BeBeyond我可以做什么。NGO中做officer or manager！他们的工作有意义，而且我完全具有相应的能力。痛苦了两周后，我找了一个在NGO中做到director的朋友聊，在回家的路上，我决定接着做BeBeyond，无论多难. 愿意很简单：和她提及的在中国做得不错的国际NGO的工作和成就相比，我觉得BeBeyond做得更扎实，更有影响力，更有长远的意义。更重要的是，同样做有意义的事，我们可以self-support, 还可以make profit, 比NGO了不起多了。
重提这段经历，是想说，坚持ideal有多难。我犹豫过，Kai也是。下面是他的essay, 献给所有的理想主义者。
The most difficult thing in business is not to sell our product, but to sell our dream. As an entrepreneur as well as educator, in my past three and half years, I changed thousands of college students’ job-hunting mindset, and directly spread out the brand-new job-hunting concept to more than 100,000 audiences in 40 Universities in Beijing & Shanghai.
I joined BeBeyond as an evangelist, holding the belief that we can change China students job-hunting situation by teaching them right concept and methodology. We provide action-based and deep-self-discovered training compared to traditional techniques teaching and test-taking preparation class.
Nevertheless, there was no such a market needs, as Chinese students and colleges focus more on test taking skills than setting up career goals and building up right job-hunting concept. Almost 99% of the students thought that they needed the “right” answer of every interview question but not a never-heard and expensive workshop.
In my first year, I cold visited every career office in 15 universities in Shanghai, talked to all student unions I could reach, trying to build up partner relationship. Also, I knocked out every boy’s dorm in those 15 universities. But only few people would like to join our workshop and few student organizations would like let us hold seminars, which was our most important marketing channel. I still remember that during my first public career speech in one famous University in Shanghai, more than half of the audiences left the room without patient and respect before I finished.
On the other hand, our competitors seemed to be very popular among the students in a very short time. I thought we were lagged behind. Every time when I picked up the enquiry phone call with hope and excitement, but heard that all they asked was “do you provide any companies’ internal information and recommend me to my desired one?”, I felt lost. At the age of 24, without many experiences, I wondered whether we were on the right track. There were two choices in front of me: start to provide what our customers “want”,, or stick to our dream by teaching them what they “need”. We chose the latter one, which means that we chose a way with more challenges and difficulties.
We’ve rejected countless potential customers who didn’t buy in our concept and vision. I wanted to earn money to keep us alive and make an easier life, yet I stick to our original vision. We repeated our vision and mission in all kinds of occasions, such as seminars, training, emails, coffee hour, Christmas party and all our marketing messages. Now, when we gradually build up our brand and the students and career office become more mature in job-hunting, we win an edge by putting our competitors into a dilemma that they can’t change their image in a very short time.
By not teaching trainees to use some tricks to win the job offer that most of other competitors did, our workshop has 100% job-hunting success rate in the past 3.5 years, and 75% are getting offer from multi-national companies, such as McKinsey, P&G and JP Morgan, compared to less than 15% generally. We not only provide an opportunity to change young students’ career, but also teach them respect self uniqueness which benefit longer in their career development.
Now, the former trainees who have promoted to senior level position in various companies started to recruit employees directly from our current workshop. They started recommending our trainees to their hiring managers. As our reputation is growing, several top-tier universities’ career offices have adopted our training concept and content as their internal job-hunting courses. Consequently, we bring value to more students in colleges and universities.