Am I getting better at these click-baity titles? If you agree…Close this page and open it again. Your web-traffic excites me…
After 10 years of working for the same employer back in MD it should come as no surprise to the reader that I’m having some re-entry issues. Not necessarily BAD issues, but certainly a continued series of learning experiences.
The origin of today’s click-bait was the result of a series of interactions at a job-fair hiring event in downtown Seattle, specifically in the Pioneer Square neighborhood. (The location isn’t particularly relevant, I just want you to think I’m cool for namedropping neighborhood names.) This area is riddled with incubators, startups, and co-working spaces. The result of this is two-fold; One, there are lots of semi-employed/unemployed people wandering around. Two, the aforementioned startup/incubator/co-working spaces have a huge incentive for hosting after-hours events to capture customers, clients, and connections. The event in question is called “Tech Jobs Tour – Seattle”; it was essentially a giant networking even with a ring of recruiters for various companies around the far edges of the room. After getting off the bus I had wandered around a little aimlessly trying to find the building which wasn’t superbly well marked when I found it. (That was a test right?) Upon walking through the door, through some joking pleasantries with the security guard; I strode confidently into the room in my best “PNW Tech Worker” uniform (read: plaid) and was met immediately by something that could only illicit one possible (fully) vocalized response….”Jesus Fucking Christ”….
While nothing truly disastrous lay before me, the room was packed beyond belief and the cacophony/din that I was met with at the door was almost overwhelming. Never the less I pressed on and wove my way through the crowd and found a comfortable spot to “hide” against one of the support columns in the room so I could do my initial assessment of how I was going work the room. Time to activate extrovert mode…There was Shivam, the recent graduate with a BS in CS looking for software jobs/internships; Scott who just spent 5 years in school (Portland?) working on his PHd in engineering, but had recently decided he just wanted to do data-science; Will, who works at an incubator and was at this event doing “mentoring”; Julia (?) who moved from Russia a few years ago, has been to 48 of the 50 states, and is “so fucking tired of the bro-fest” at her visual arts job within a Redmond incubator.
At this point the noise in the room had risen to the point where the only effective method of communication was yelling at each other’s faces after moving into 2-3 feet of each other. After attempting to yell at an Amazon recruiter from across a table, I decided that I had had enough of that and wandered in search of a bourbon based elixir to sooth my overly exerted patience and extrovert muscles. Extricating myself from the noisy cave that was the room I wandered down the street inspecting the various intoxicant distribution facilities in the Pioneer Square neighborhood and eventually settled up to one called Damn the Weather. After being served an exorbitantly expensive and unsatisfactory manhattan I prepared myself to close my tab and find a way back to my home. Upon turning to get the waitress’s attention I noticed that the two people next to me had been in the Tech Tour space with me, I thought it interesting that they had bailed early too. While waiting for a convenient time to introduce myself, I ordered another drink. Moments after the glass of Maker’s Mark had arrived I saw my opportunity and interjected myself in the conversation. They had also gotten tired of the noise levels; the conversation strayed to the raft of candidates/job seekers in the room. The overarching theme being that no one in that room had any or enough experience to fill any of the positions at the companies that were hiring. (Cue the silent alarm bells). “Oh really, that’s very unfortunate. Do you know what (X-Company) was looking for?” After some lighter topics filtered through the conversation I started to wind down and indicated that I was going to wander back over to the job fair and see if the crowd was better after some time had passed. One of the people I was talking to offered me a card on the way out and suggested I contact a specific individual at their consulting company. (Score!). Thanking them for the card I made my way out of the distilled elixir distribution establishment and headed back towards the job fair venue…Which was mostly unproductive otherwise for the remainder of the evening. The business card in my pocket was burning a hole into my attention span; I sent an email to the person on the card that night…
Today I have been connected with one of their recruiters with an internal referral. Good news for me, but is this how jobs are gotten in the real world? Drinking cocktails in sub-par-bars in less than reputable neighborhoods and finding ways to interject yourself into the conversations of strangers? Ugh. I think the lesson from this is that unconventional methods often yield the best results. While applying for jobs directly is important, the value of networking/relationships is not to be forgotten or neglected.
A few days later I got another offer for a connection/job for the less glamorous, but much more immediately available job as a landscaper over in East-Side through the bartender at one of the local breweries. She was more enthusiastic about getting me the job than I was about doing it; but hey, take what you can get right?
