Trustee Paddy Magee and staff member Chris Kendrick joined me on yesterday's interview board. Try as we might we were unable to find a female board member but in the end with six females and one male shortlisted for interview it would be hard to accuse us of having been at all discriminatory.
In line with good equal opportunities practice, the questions were identical for all candidates, but we did try to avoid those standard ones like "What has been your greatest/most rewarding achievement in life?" the answer to which can be rehearsed in advance by a savvy candidate. That said I did include the predictable, but horrible, question "What is your greatest weakness?". All the interviewees bar one resorted to the trick of presenting a virtue such as "being too conscientious" or "too much the perfectionist" as a weakness but their ploy was very transparent. The one who was honest enough to declare a true weakness said that she might be shy of asking for money off important people. She didn't get the job but made a good impression nonetheless through her frankness.
The first question, asked by Paddy, was "Who was Esther Benjamins?" to test if the interviewee had studied our website and could then make the link to me after I had previously introduced myself as being the Founder of the charity. All the candidates knew the answer to that apart from one girl who, amazingly, declared that she had absolutely no idea. We graciously continued the questions but, as Paddy said afterwards, her interview started badly and got worse with her remarking that she had a tendency to have her head in the clouds.
The other question planned and posed by Paddy was "What do you see as being the unique selling proposition (USP) of The Esther Benjamins Trust?". I mused further on his question this morning as I jogged past the home of the late Dr Kingsley Whitmore, who lived two doors down from my in laws' home in Welwyn Garden City. Kingsley, a retired consultant paediatrician, passed away in April last year at the age of 93. He had been introduced to the work of the charity by my mother in law and became a regular and generous donor in the two years preceding his death. On my return visits from Nepal he would be invited up to the house where he would sit with a sherry and listen bright-eyed and attentively to my accounts of the work of the charity in Nepal and India. Afterwards he told me that he wished he were years younger so that he could do something for us over there but that he was in any case "full of admiration" for our work.
The last time I saw him was in February last year when walking past his home I spotted him rummaging in his garage. I went over to say hello and after a short conversation he told me that he had been diagnosed with throat cancer. He was quite philosophical about it, telling me that he'd had a good life and, wrinkling his nose, that he might manage another year. Before we parted he advised me that he had remembered the Trust's work in his Will. Kingsley died peacefully in his sleep just two months later. I was relieved for him that he had been spared the pain and discomfort of a slower death.
From our exchanges I expect for Kingsley the USP was the very edgy nature of our work with its tangible highly worthwhile outcomes, but most of all the very personal nature of the Trust. Unlike the big charities we are still very close to our roots, with my link to Esther and two Trustees (including Paddy) who knew her very well. We pride ourselves in how we interact on a very personal level with supporters by e mail, letter, and face to face both in UK and Nepal.
Nadia Kamel, the successful (and very impressive) candidate from yesterday, should be very proud that she has been selected to join such an organisation and given the opportunity to play her part in upholding its core values.
