A newcomer's first day

Your first day at Color of Vietnam does not open with a long presentation about the company. There is a desk that is ready, the 20 products of our four brands to taste, specifications and brand notes to read, and before the day ends one small task with your name on the tracking sheet. In the first week you sit in on a sample review and listen to a call with our partner facilities. The first month ends with one small trial that you see through yourself. This piece is written for candidates, so that you know what is coming and do not have to guess.

The first morning

We set a few things up before you arrive:

• Desk, laptop, email, shared folders and access to the tracking sheet are all ready.
• A guide. This is someone on the team who stays alongside you for the first month, and is not your manager. You ask this person everything.
• A box of 20 products on your desk. Your job over the first two days is to taste all of them and write one line per product: what you would tell a friend about it.
• The specifications of the products you will touch, the voice notes for the four brands, and the team's decision log.
• A short conversation with the founder, mostly for you to ask questions.

Nobody expects you to remember everything on day one. We only want you to know where everything lives.

Before the first day ends, you receive one small task with a clear result and a deadline within the week. For someone in R&D it might be checking the ingredient lists printed on three packs against their specifications and noting any gaps.

The task is small on purpose. It is not a test. It is there so that you learn how we record a piece of work: the expected result, the owner, the deadline and the next step.

The first week

In the first week you watch how the team decides before you decide anything yourself:

• Sit in on a sample review. You taste and fill in a sheet like everyone else, and you speak last.
• Listen to a call with the partner facility, then read the minutes that follow, to see how spoken words turn into recorded tasks.
• Go with your guide to the facility in Thach That – Quoc Oai if a visit is scheduled that week.
• At the end of the week, write one page about what you do not yet understand. That page shows us where the team explains things badly.

An example: the latest newcomer's 20-product tasting

Our most recent newcomer in R&D tasted all 20 products over two days and handed in exactly 20 lines. Set beside the notes for each brand, four lines did not match. She described a PLAY Protein Bar as sweet first, where the brand note wants cacao to arrive before sweetness. She described the Let's PLAY seaweed rice cracker as moderately salty, where the brand note wants seaweed to come before salt.

Those four mismatches became the subjects of four conversations in her first week. One of them turned into a request form for the next protein bar trial, because it turned out she was not the only one tasting it that way. We do not want newcomers to taste the way we taste. We want to know what they taste, and a 20-line exercise is the cheapest way to find out.

The first month

From the second week you take on one small trial from beginning to end. In R&D that means writing the request form for a trial batch, following it through to the result, and recording it in the tracking sheet. In marketing it means one draft piece of content for one brand, taken through review, revised, and the lesson written down. Your guide stands behind you, but the name on the sheet is yours.

At the end of the month there is a three-way conversation: you, your guide and the founder. It is not an appraisal. Three questions are asked: what have you done, what do you still not understand, and what do you want to do next. We add two questions for ourselves: what surprised you most, and what should we stop doing.

What we hope for from a newcomer

Only a few things, and none of them is knowing everything:

• Ask as soon as something is unclear, from day one.
• Taste honestly, even when you disagree with the founder. Writing your sheet before anyone speaks exists to protect this.
• Record work in the shared format, so that others can read it without asking you.
• See through what you took on, or say early if you cannot.

Those four are our values in their everyday form: Taste First, Speak Honestly, Small Trials, See It Through.

If you would like a first day like this, the two roles open in Hanoi are Fresher Product R&D and Marketing Leader, on our Careers page. If you have questions before applying, write to us through the Contact page.