Hmm, interesting…

I got a call out of the blue this morning from a head-hunter – an Italian woman, though based in Spain, looking to appoint someone to run a new “think-and-do tank” (sic) to run pan-European campaigns. I thought at first this was a result of my previous interaction with a Belgian-based head-hunter, but no, it was a totally different set of contacts that put them on to me.

What bothered me about it is that the policy area they campaign in (though it’s one I’m vaguely interested in and probably sympathetic to) is an area of policy that I know almost nothing about. Luckily a friend of mine who works in the next door building does work in a related field, so I took her out for lunch to pick her brains, and was not awfully surprised when she was able to name three other people who she knew and who she would have thought were better suited to the job than me. Odd that the head-hunters didn’t go to them first. (Or perhaps they did, and had their offers rejected.)

I’m interested by my own reaction. I had always sort of said to myself that it is high-level policy work of any kind that atracts me, not the specific international politics/war and peace stuff. But when I put my current week on one side – I’ve spent most of it working on Cyprus, Kosovo and Montenegro, and have to go out shortly for a meeting with the European Commission’s new Special Envoy to Azerbaijan – and balance that against the otherproposed policy area, important and vital though it is, I am just not really excited by it. So in fact it really is the specific policy area that I like, and not the broader nature of the work.

But hey, it’s nice to be asked!

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