Throughout nearly 15 years of recruitment, I’ve seen many ups and downs. I’ve been laid off and told I wasn’t good enough to work a job. I’ve been told I was overqualified, and I’ve been told I don’t have enough experience or not the right kind of experience. While working through a family emergency, I was told I shouldn’t be doing vlogs and write blogs (even though that’s partially why they hired me).
While seeing my healthcare peers laid off, training many of them how to find new jobs, and losing my second uncle to cancer within that time…and with the unneeded hard exit partnered with flooding and hurricanes… I look back and can’t even imagine
I can’t even imagine the turmoil people are feeling right now…
Life is full of hardships, challenges, and struggles. The one thing that has got me through all the negativity is my family, friends, and unexpected kindness, often from strangers. These events helped me grow and evolve in ways I never thought possible.
Kindness is a mindset I have every time I call a candidate…because they aren’t just candidates.
I know they have a family, too; I hear their kids in the background, I hear the dogs barking, and I know we are all living our lives with our own personal struggles. This world we live in now, it’s not about finding the purple squirrel; it’s about helping people. It’s about helping one another. Recruitment is about inclusion and not elimination.
I can’t hire everyone I talk to, but I can help them regardless if it’s with my org or another.
It’s not just about helping the wife of a java engineer; it’s about helping her data engineer husband too. It tears me up inside when I hear both husband and wife contracts have ended. My heart drops. I have to take a break. It’s not fair…they are both so smart and so kind. It’s been five months of these similar stories, these similar struggles.
I sometimes think in the day to day of reqs, interviewing, and zoom calls, we are taking away from what’s truly important…what recruiting is and why sourcing is such a valuable thing? Are we eliminators or connectors?
Some people have trouble explaining what we do as Sourcers. Are we headhunters? OSINT gurus, Researchers, social media profile aggregators? I’ll tell you what I say to my daughters…my job is to find people jobs. That’s the flipping truth. That’s my reality, whether the interview is IRL or virtual.
I’ve seen some troubling things; I hear sad stories every day, I’ve lived the stories too; what keeps me going and driving forward is knowing the next call is one more person I can help, one more person I can help find a new path or a unique solution.
Hope is out there; we just need to let them know.
We all have a new purpose, a new calling. We must all help each other through this, even people we don’t know. So, I want everyone to know that my speech in September is built around how you can help people, find people, and show them the way forward.
We must build the bridge out and over these huge obstacles….you’ll learn about all the resources, communities, and repositories people and companies are building.
And just to give you a head start:
For Sourcing Tips, I have written over 50 articles on SourceCon to help.
I also have an ongoing Youtube Channel with Sourcing Tools, 5MinsHacks, and Nerdy Live Streams:
And websites with some tools:
And of course, I’ll be speaking at SourceCon Digital 2.0.
If you are attending, ping me, and say hello…I’m always glad to meet, answer questions, and learn what else is out there to help our communities.