Live Teardown

One advertisement goes up on the screen at the start of the hour and is still up at the end, in four pieces. Bring the ad you actually want, not the one that is easiest to read.

Before you arrive#

From the three ads you filed as Dossier §2, pick a primary target: the role you would take on a Tuesday if someone offered it. Have the full posting with you, not a recruiter’s summary of it — the summary launders precisely the reqspeak this session exists to read.

The four columns#

You rule up four columns and every line of the ad goes into one of them.

• Boilerplate — text present because the legal team or the applicant system requires it. Strike it. It carries no information about the job.
• Wishlist — the eleven technologies or attributes nobody expects in one human. Count them and write the number at the top. That number is a fact about the employer, not a verdict on you.
• The work — the sentences describing what you would be doing on a Wednesday afternoon. This column is almost always the shortest, and it is the only one your materials have to answer.
• The confession — the phrase that leaks what went wrong in the last hire. “Comfortable with ambiguity” means nobody has written the spec down. “Able to influence stakeholders at all levels” means the previous occupant could not.

No column is allowed to stay empty. If you cannot locate the confession, you have not read closely enough yet, and your convenor will sit with you until it surfaces.

Your stream’s document#

The ads differ enough by field that the columns behave differently in each room.

• Technical Practice works a graduate engineering ad, mapping each bullet to a verifiable artefact — the thing you would point at if the bullet were read back to you as a question.
• Creative and Communications Practice works a studio or agency brief and answers one question underneath the columns: what is actually being bought here, taste or throughput.
• Commercial and Public Practice works a written selection-criteria document and maps each criterion to the shape of answer it is fishing for, which is usually narrower than the criterion pretends.

The swap, last twenty minutes#

You hand your teardown to the person beside you and they mark one line they would have filed in a different column. You argue it out. Column disputes are the point — an ad that everyone reads identically was not worth tearing down.

Leaving with#

Dossier §3, a four-column annotated teardown of one primary target, each annotation naming the column and the reason. Keep it legible by a stranger: next week it is anonymised and handed to somebody who has never seen your ad, and it travels into Assessment 1 largely as written.