Eva Jinek is very strict with the interns who work at her editorial office. If one of them doesn’t get up fast enough at breaking news, then she shoots it immediately. “You’re not going to make it!”
The media may be talking about the working atmosphere at De Wereld Draait Door all the time, but expectations are also very high on the editorial floor of Eva Jinek. The presenter can pretty much swim in her vacation days herself, but if her employees show lazy behavior, she detests it.
Volume knob
Eva points in the podcast Young Years especially on the interns who walk around with her. “When I’m in the editorial office and something happens to it breaking news… There are always interns at our editorial office. If I get up earlier to turn up the volume of the television that is on than an intern, then I think: ‘You’re not going to make it.’”
Oops, do her interns know that too? Laughing: “I hope so now.”
They can also be positively striking, says Eva. “A lot of people work for me at the editorial office who once started as an intern. (…) There are plenty that I have seen, because they did every last detail of what I asked them or what their duties were in such a way that I thought: hey, who is that young girl or boy who is so good…”
Foot in door
That works best, says Eva. “We’ve taken on so many over the years that way. So it really works. (…) You have to make sure you get that internship, but when you’re in, that’s your chance to show who you are. And that’s in every… It’s how you greet when you come in. It’s how you think along in a meeting.”
Even if nothing is explicitly asked of you, says Eva. “You can just wait until everyone has finished talking. Do you say, “By the way, I was thinking, maybe this is a nice idea.” Believe me, that really stands out. And people remember that and those people are hired.”
M&Ms for Charles
Eva herself was like that when she did an internship with Charles Groenhuijsen. She used to get him salads. “And he really wanted some M&Ms too. Many people wait for the ultimate job to show what they can do or who they are. To really do their very best. That doesn’t work in my opinion.”
She continues: “No matter how small, meaningless and unseen the job is: you do it to the best of your ability. And if you always do that with all the chores… Cleaning the refrigerator in Washington at the internship, getting salad, being on time at work, thinking along, even if no one asks you to think along… That collection of these little moments is building up .”
‘Who is that?’
Eventually you will stand out automatically, says Eva. “Then someone suddenly thinks: who is the one who gets those salads for me all the time? Because she gets them on time, she also gets the M&Ms and she also had some ideas for tomorrow, for a job. That’s how it works. Then people see you.”
Eva is disgusted with lax people. “We don’t look at each other to see slackness, do we? You want to see someone in top form. You want to see someone who is on the cutting edge, with enthusiasm, with energy telling something. (…) And people who are very laissez faire or very laconic… Yes, that also makes less impression.”
Easily angered
According to Rob Goossens, Eva always gets angry behind the scenes of her talk show when something doesn’t go according to plan. The talk show diva is not asked about this in the interview, but she does indicate that she is very keen on the details.
Eva: “This is the core of how I think about things: every detail counts. (…) If you want something to be very beautiful or well-thought-out or thought-out or to have a deeper layer, that it touches people, that it makes sense, that you know how to react if things go differently than you think, then you have to prepare in detail.”