Page 49 of Austen Persuaded

“Hi, Annie” and “Nice to meet you” came a chorus of voices and polite smiles, even a few laughs.

Whew, not a total bomb yet.

An older woman stuck out her hand. “Hello, I’m D’Elaina, but people just call me Laina. I’m the senior agent on the team.” She pointed to her left. “This here is Sofia Jackson. We’re the two agents who recently lost our assistant, so the open position will be working closely with us.”

Sofia smiled at me. “Please, have a seat. We’ll get started soon, when Jardin returns.”

I returned the smile. My face was going to hurt by the end of this interview. Why were there nine people in the room? I wasn’t applying to become the CEO, after all.

The tall woman returned, a Gatorade and a pack of wheat crackers in hand. “Ms. York, sorry about the wait. I’m Jardin Floquet, HR director. We spoke on the phone after Robin passed along the referral.”

After I stood to shake her hand, I carefully smoothed my skirt and sat back down. “It’s wonderful to meet you, Ms. Floquet, and all of you.”

“Call me Jardin,” she said, sitting in the vacant seat to the right of Laina across from me. “It’s nice to meet you too, Annie. I want to explain first why you’re going to be grilled by a nine-person interview panel. We do tend to accelerate the interview process for referrals and of course internal candidates, when applicable. Perhaps just as important in this case, though, is that we are looking to fill a vacant seat rather quickly. The man holding this particular assistant position had to relocate very suddenly, and the person we were looking to replace him with did not pass the background checks, leaving us in a tough spot where poor Sofia and Laina have been without an assistant for close to two months now.”

“To their credit, our other agents’ assistants have helped fill the gap in the meantime, and they’ve been amazing in doing as much as they can,” Sofia offered.

“But they have their own busy workloads, including some co-agenting, so everyone’s been stretched thin. Work–life balance is impossible to guarantee in a business like this, but we do try to setup our team for success,” said Jardin. And then she smiled widely before taking a long drink of her purple sports drink. “I sound like an HR handbook, don’t I? I’m actually going to be quiet and let the agent team take over most of the interview from here.”

Everyone looked at me for a response, so I smiled graciously. “I appreciate the explanation. It is great to meet all of your agents and to get a sense of the makeup of your team.”

So far, so good.I could fit in here. And they need someone ASAP—I just need to seal the deal.

I considered telling them I’d start tomorrow if that would help, but … no. That sounded desperate.

“So, Annie,” Laina said, “I do want to introduce you to the rest of the team first. Starting from that end is Jessa, then Caroline …” I tried to mentally associate the names with faces quickly, but I found myself forgetting many of the names as soon as I heard them.

When Laina finished, I said, “It’s great to meet you all,” hating how cliché that sounded but knowing it was the normal response.

“We do our interviews a little differently here. We’re going to mostly avoid the typical ‘why do you want this job’ and ‘tell me about yourself’ questions and jump to some more specific but perhaps nontraditional ones, because we want to get to know you and because, as you know, we already asked the generic ones when you submitted your application. So, with that said, we’re going to do a round robin of questions, like a typical panel, if that works for you,” Laina said.

As if I have a choice.

I nodded, almost giggling at the absurdity. Did anyone ever say “No, that doesn’t work for me?” Probably someone did; Rainn’s HR friend had said some people were just completely clueless about interview etiquette or even just common sense.

Near the far end of the table, an agent named Abi asked me the first question. “Who are your top three favorite authors?”

I blinked in surprise. “That is specific, but I’m happy to answer. I’ll admit to some recency bias here, but I’m going with Ali Hazelwood, Charles Dickens, and Sally Rooney.”

“By recency bias, do you mean that they’re your favorites because you read them recently or because they’re relatively recent authors (compared to, say, Dante or Aristotle)?” Abi asked.

I smiled. “Ah, they’ve been recent favorites. I change favorites fairly often because I become very passionate and engaged in the books I read.”

Laina spoke up. “Do you think that’s a good skill for an agent or assistant to have? Or could it set a person back, becoming too emotionally involved in what you’re reading?”

I tilted my head slightly as I gave this some thought. “Good question. I think it could go either way, and a person needs balance. Too much emotional involvement in a book could make it difficult if not impossible to notice fatal flaws that would be crucial for an agent to spot, but too much emotional distance would mean we couldn’t get into the minds of our readers and couldn’t do a good job of anticipating what would sell.”

I scanned all their faces anxiously. It was a good, safe, and maybe smart answer, but it was perhaps a risky one since it could be, well, wrong. Most panelists smiled, except for Laina and one other agent whose name I’d already forgotten. Laina hadn’t smiled much, actually. She did not appear to be the overly smiling type.

Abi nodded in thanks at my answer, and the woman next to him took her turn. The next few questions were fairly straightforward, not requiring particularly difficult or controversial answers. They asked about my favorite and least favorite genres, the novel I’d hated most in college, the current author I’d most like to sign as an agent, what kind of book I’d write if I ever wrote a book, and so on.

When it was her turn, Laina asked a bigger-picture question, with a shrewd look in her eye. “The agent assistant role is ideal for developing talented individuals to become agents, and we like to hire assistants who are interested in that career trajectory so we can promote from within. So I’m going to ask you bluntly: is it your career goal to become a literary agent?” A couple of the agents glanced at Laina with raised eyebrows, as though they weren’t quiteprepared for her blunt words or sharp tone. Jardin merely continued eating crackers while looking intently at me for a response.

After a brief moment of hesitation, I smiled and looked at Laina first and then around the room at the others. “That’s a great question, and I’ll answer it honestly. My answer is yes, I want to be an agent. But I only discovered this recently. Just a few weeks ago, I was a freelance copyeditor for a small nonfiction publisher, and I had no notion of wanting to be an agent. I realized though, long overdue, that the solitary and often dull work of nonfiction editing wasn’t for me. I didn’t belong in that world. I don’t hate editing, but on its own, it wasn’t fulfilling. I love reading, I love fiction, I love variety and new challenges, and I lovepeople. I’m an extrovert who adores books. Learning about what a literary agent does, I felt like … it was love at first sight. I fell in love with the job description. As cheesy as that sounds. I want to work hard and learn this business and make it my life.”

Everyone stared at me, mostly with what seemed like respect in their eyes. They all seemed to be waiting for Laina to respond. Laina cracked a small smile, finally. “Thank you, Annie.”

“On that note,” Sofia said, running her hand over her shiny, black styled hair, “we do also want applicants to be aware that a substantial portion of the assistant job is administrative support. We do have a full-time office manager, Ernesto, but most of the support specific to agents comes from the agent assistant role. So, for example, if we ran out of staples or needed brochures printed, we’d probably contact Ernesto, but we’d rely on you to take care of meeting planning, royalty payments, social media, that sort of thing.”

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