I’m going to follow the lead of my (soon to be) great new friend Zanger!
On January 6th, I woke up and had a stark realization.
I’ve been unemployed for 16 months?
Then I went to lunch with a former colleague. Now I am employed! I’m going to step back a bit and return to recruiting. It’s been the foundation of what I have been doing for almost 20 years. Wow, another stark realization! But it has been what I’ve liked best about the past 20 years.
I’ve been navigating my employed life over the last several years with two ideas — philosophies if you will. Both quotes that I have imprinted in my brain with no recollection of who said them in order to give credit where credit is due. (If it’s you, let me know…)
“I have a job, but I am not my job.”
“It’s not your fault you have a crappy job, but it is your fault if you keep that crappy job.”
That last one stopped me and my former co-worker and dear friend Colette, dead in our tracks in 2003. Think about that for just a second or two. Ah, 2003 … dot … com …bombs. No more candy bars delivered to the office (thank you, Kozmo.com!) No lackey picking up my dry cleaning. No Agency.com. No 800.com, I’ll have to buy those electronics someplace else? No more Reach and Frequency from Elvis & Bonaparte? No more Chrome Data (well some form of that is around), or Emerald Solutions. No more CyberSight or NineDots. It was that dot com thing that started running words together — wasn’t it?
The day one of the principals of an agency who was a client of mine called to ask for a meeting, I thought here we go! The pendulum is swinging in the other direction. Yeah … no. He came in and asked if I could help him find a job. So I did. That was strike three. He was the third principal of a client in as many months that came to me asking for help finding work. Someone who normally would ask me to find them talent.
WALL … WRITING.
For some this might sound extreme. In my world, I think not so much. Hey! It is my world! Of the nine jobs that I have had in Portland, eight of them I got through my network. The one job that I applied to and got on my own was five months in the bowels of hell with the spawn of (insert reverb echo here) SATAN.
In all fairness one was a stopgap job in retail. And one was my own infamous grueling two-week dot.com adventure. Where I made more money in those two weeks than that 90-day retail job. The new job, #10, is with a former colleague.
Wait, does my alarm clock still work? I’ve been telling my friends for a few months now, that I’m going to have to find work, cause I just can’t afford to be this happy. But there seemed to be no work? And I think going online and applying to jobs is such a waste of time. This from a recruiter, someone who has for years helped others in finding work, getting work and keeping work at some of the coolest places in Portland.
So all of that history leads to this: in Portland (maybe anywhere for that matter) you are better off getting a job through your network than applying via those, yes I’m going to say it, annoying crutches they call applicant tracking systems. Yes I understand, sometimes you have so many people applying to a job that you need help sorting it. But I am on a journey to prove that if you are a proactive and engaged recruiter (answer your phone, return calls and reply to email), you will not need to sort through hundreds of resumes.
Better yet, you will not have to post a job ever again!
So I’m now shifting to focus on IT recruiting, and I’ll admit there will be ramp up time. I know where the best footwear and bag designers are, so I will have some re-acquainting and networking to do. But I challenge you to doubt that within the year my network will have expanded. I will be a force — and I will only need LinkedIn and my address book to fill open positions.
Portland is a small town. No matter how many people move here when the unemployment number rises! It will remain small and you should make it your personal mission to network yourself into your dream job with your dream company without applying online. There is a networking group for everything. And if you don’t find one that fits you, create one!
I say it can be done. But you go ahead and grumble how busy you are and how tired you are, that you’re slammed. And complain that your company just doesn’t give you the resources to do the job. Which is probably true. From my experience those who say they are “slammed” and so busy, are slammed and busy saying they are busy and slammed. You will never catch up or get your stride this way. You have to dig in deep to level off.
So there, I said it. Now beat me up. I’m ready. I also promise you that in a year, if I have not been able to do this. I will say you were right … maybe.
(jgx is another new author at OurPDX. Please welcome her!)
{ 1 trackback }
{ 1 comment }
Congratulations, I think. I’ve been out of work a while, and you’re probably right, have not gone about finding QA work the best way – mostly been sending in resumes blindly via Monster. There must be a better way, thanks for the cheer.
Comments on this entry are closed.