He had been covering the warehouse supervisor job for eight months — ever since the previous supervisor quit. He built the schedule for fourteen people, handled supplier problems, and did essentially everything the old supervisor had done.
Then the company advertised the role permanently. He applied. He was rejected for lacking formal management experience.
The next request was stranger. HR asked him to sit on the interview panel for the outside candidates, and to help design the practical assessment they would be given.
He was not upset that they had hired someone else, he wrote. He was upset at being asked to evaluate people for a job the company had just told him he was not qualified to do. The experience he lacked was the experience he had been doing for eight months.
He wanted to move up inside the company, so he worried that declining would hurt him later. He asked how other people would handle it. The role was still open. The panel still needed a chair.