Twenty-nine, working in corporate communications, earning about seventy-eight thousand. Then a recruiter approached him about a role paying a hundred and thirty: managing the public presence of a chief executive at a midsize company.
Two interviews in, the job clarified. LinkedIn posts. Replies to comments. Congratulations to employees. Personal stories. Opinions on industry news. All of it under the executive's name. The chief did not have time for any of it, but wanted to appear more involved and approachable. The recruiter called the arrangement executive communications, which is a real discipline; this was something narrower.
In the second interview they made one thing clear. The executive would not be reviewing most of what the candidate wrote. He would be improvising a personality at scale, in public, with no one checking the work.
The offer is on the table. His hesitation is not the money. It is the line he would have to explain later — three years spent pretending to be somebody's chief executive on LinkedIn — which sounded ridiculous even to him.
He is still deciding. The role is real. So is the question of who would be doing it.