Seeing what needs to be done

Five people arrived for a job interview that had been arranged in advance. On arrival they were invited to sit and wait in a rather luxurious room that looked like someone's lived-in flat. Then an older man came in and said:

• I'm the person who will interview you as scheduled, but my daughter has suddenly been admitted to hospital, so I must hurry there to see how she is. Please make yourselves at home here and wait for me. There's food and drink in the fridge over there; help yourselves. I'm sorry that I can't conduct the interview and look after you as planned.
  Then the interviewer hurried away. The five candidates looked at one another in bewilderment. After a while they asked one another's names and got acquainted, walked around to look at the house, took out drinks to offer each other, and took packets of biscuits and sweets to share, quite naturally, just as the interviewer had told them to.

After the lunch hour had passed, the interviewer returned and invited the five into the interview room, which had individual desks like school desks. He handed each person paper and said:

• As for your personal information, such as qualifications, experience, aspirations and salary expectations... you have already set these out in your application letters, so we won't ask again. Now please write an essay on a set topic. Writing in English would be good; if not, Vietnamese is fine. Or a mix of both languages is also fine. The topic is written on the paper: what are your thoughts about the room you were in this morning?

The candidates were taken aback. So there was no hospital at all; it was a kind of psychological test. Instead of questioning each person in turn, they had put the whole group together in a room and assessed their attitudes. Everyone worried, not knowing how they had been watched all morning, or whether they had done anything to offend. Then everyone bent over their papers and wrote, on a topic never before seen in their small world.

More than an hour later, the interviewer came back and collected the essays. After another hour he returned and said:

• Ladies and gentlemen, the company in fact needs five people for different positions. Judging from your application letters, you already meet almost all the criteria the company needs. However, a face-to-face interview is still necessary. We believed that if we sat down to interview you, you would give answers that billions of people have already given over and over, so we interviewed you another way, with the aim of finding out whether your psychological qualities suit the company's work. Of course we have been filming you in the room since this morning; we stated in the interview invitation that the interview would be recorded. When you came in and signed your names at the reception desk, the recording had begun.
  We watched you in the room and read your essays about your thoughts, to classify which position would suit each of you. As a result, the board of directors rated Trung the highest, for the following reasons:
  . Trung wrote an entire essay in English that was very accurate in grammar and rich in vocabulary.
  . Trung wrote about the things that needed to be done to make the house more perfect, from the arrangement of space, equipment and furnishings to safety measures. It was written in great detail and was sensible. We badly need people who find the things that need doing and propose ideas. There are plenty of people who wait for instructions and only then start thinking about how to carry them out. We need minds to compete in the marketplace, minds that know what needs doing before other companies have had time to see it.
  . Trung said he did not know who lived in this house, but observed it and made a very interesting assessment of its owner; of course, this is the company's guest house for receiving visitors, so it has no individual owner. Trung's assessment of the person who furnished the house was very accurate. Trung is very good at judging people.
  . Trung expressed suspicion that we had used a sick child as the reason to leave the candidates free in this house for some purpose. Trung is very careful and vigilant.
  . We watched on the cameras and saw that Trung's attitude was very friendly, accommodating and caring towards everyone.
  The board has decided to accept all five of you, and Trung will be trained to become a supervisor from the very start.
  Thank you, and congratulations on becoming employees of our company. 🕵️‍♀️

To have the ability to see what needs to be done, ethics is the main factor. It is ethics that gives us a sense of responsibility wherever we are present. Wherever we are, we want that place to be better, and we are not content with inconveniences caused to others. A person with that sense of responsibility quickly and easily notices oversights and shortcomings that need to be made good, or quickly comes up with ideas to create new things useful to everyone.

To train this precious ability, now we should sit still, look around us and see whether there is anything that needs doing, and if so, do it quickly. If we sit looking for a long time and still cannot find anything to do, then we should judge ourselves rather poor at it and resolve to rise above it and retrain ourselves. There is always something that needs to be done; it is only that we have not yet seen it.