From: http://www.bizjournals.com/

When Deborah Majoras went for the top legal job at her dream company, she didn’t get it. She was offered a lower level role, instead.

But here’s why that wasn’t a bad thing — and why she told a crowd of roughly 400 female lawyers Thursday that sometimes it’s worth taking a job as a stepping stone. It may not be what you want, but it will get you where you want to be.

Majoras was finishing up her term as chairman of the Federal Trade Commissionabout six years ago when she got a call from Procter & Gamble. There was an opening at the company for the role of chief legal officer. Was she interested?

“The first thing you do is you call your ethics officer,” Majoras said during a panel discussion at the Women, Influence & Power in Law conference hosted by InsideCounsel magazine.

The FTC regulates advertising, and P&G is one of the biggest advertisers in the world. If there was an ethical problem in even talking about the job, she needed to know that right away.

Once she was cleared to continue, she gave the job some serious thought and started having some serious discussions with the company.

Procter & Gamble generally doesn’t hire from outside, Majoras said. It’s a company that likes to promote from within. That’s one reason she was so intrigued by it: If P&G was a place young people wanted to start, grow and finish their careers, it must be a good place to be.

Those initial conversations morphed into a series of formal interviews, during which Majoras became convinced they were totally “ambivalent” about her as a candidate.

“I kept having these moments when I’d say to my husband, ‘Why am I still talking to these people? Don’t you want to talk to someone who wants you?’” she recalled with a laugh.

Turns out, P&G did want her.

“The CEO finally called me and said, ‘I want to offer you the job, but it’s not the job you interviewed for,’” Majoras said.

“He said, ‘We’d like you to come in, but we’d like you to come in one step short of the chief legal officer because we think that you are a very big part of our future, but if we bring you in now, not knowing this company where everybody else knows each other, we’re really afraid that it will be hard for you to get the legal department completely behind you,’” Majoras said.

Instead, he asked her to come in and learn the company. In time, then, she would get to chief legal officer.

“So then I was faced with this choice, right? So you’re thinking, ‘Well geez, I’ve just been running a federal agency. Why on earth would I do this?’” Majoras said. “And then all your friends and family jump in and they say to you, ‘Why would you do this?’”

Eventually she realized she would do it because it wasn’t about having a title. She wanted to work for Procter & Gamble. So she took the job, in the hopes that she’d one day get to where she wanted to be.

“There was no written contract. Procter doesn’t do that,” she said. “I took them at their word.”

Majoras proved herself, and P&G made good on its promise. Eighteen months after she joined the company, she was promoted to chief legal officer, a job she’s held the past four and a half years.

And P&G may have been onto something with its hiring strategy. Just the other day, Majoras said she spoke with a colleague who championed her slow rise to the top.

“She said, ‘I’m not sure it would have worked nearly as well if you had come in immediately as the chief legal officer,’” she said.