Assignment №1:
As a child, I was always a bit of self proclaimed “nerd”. Instead of playing with the kids at recess, I would sit inside with the teachers and help them organize their classrooms, and file papers. They must have thought it was cute, to me it was really because I didn’t have many friends, was often bullied (and I also bullied others), and generally just felt more safe with adults vs. other kids. Kids were mean. When I think about it, I channeled the mean experiences I had, into being a book worm and studying, reading, writing, anything academic. I loved being a top performing student because I knew that was a direct impact of my own efforts and whatever I was willing to put in, was what I would get out. That was very satisfying to me at an early age.
My dad had a large family and at every holiday gathering I would “present” to the family. I had an easel, posters, printed out handouts, and a speech. It became a thing and every holiday, my family would expect a speech. Imagine a 6 year old at the head of a table of adults leading a discussion around the true history of thanksgiving. By the age of 16, I transitioned to a high school that was on a college campus and started taking college coursework, in parallel to my normal high school classes. It was exciting. The lectures, the projects, all the learning. It was right up my alley. By the time I was 17, my high school coursework was completed in January, but my class wouldn’t graduate until June. Since I no longer had to attend classes every day, I had a lot of time on my hands. I knew at that time, I needed something to fill the void of not learning everyday, I wanted a “real job”. An “office” job to teach me all the things. Lucky for me, I had a neighbor who was working at a growing company and he needed and intern. He wasn’t quite sure how it would work since they had never hired someone 17 before, but we figured it out and I became their marketing intern. I say intern loosely, because this was before the days of a well define intern rotation program. My internship consisted more of doing anything and everything I could to help this growing marketing team be successful.
The job was great. I was making $10/hr and loving every minute of it. By the time June came around, I was 6 months into the job. I graduated and kept on working. Things were going well until the budget was cut on the Marketing team. Robert, my boss, pulled me aside and said “we really like you, but we don’t have any budget approved. Maybe you can go to HR and see if they can find you something else.” So that’s exactly what I did. As fate would have it, the HR team just hired a new Head of People, Rodney. He was very dynamic and engaging. I knew I wanted to work for this new leader. He asked me, “what do you think about recruiting?”. I had literally no idea what recruiting was, but my natural inclination for learning, drew me in. The rules of engagement were, I could join the team, as long as I continued with my college education and balanced school with working from the office a few days a week. I agreed and we were off to the races.
Assignment number one: Rodney writes a name on a post it and hands it to me. Instructions: find this person, she works at this company in Dallas, tell her we have a job for her, and see if she will call you back. You should have seen my face. After a long pause, I nodded and said, “Ok”, and got to work. Easy enough, right? Wrong! There was no internet search tools back then. There wasn’t Linkedin, or Google. So what was I to do? I had to get my hands on a local Dallas phone book. I called our customer service team who re-directed me to ourDallas sales rep. I introduced myself and told him about the project I was working on. He overnighted me the phone book and then I start smiling and dialing on my quest to find this post it woman and tell her about a job (that I knew nothing about beyond the title), and see if she would talk to us. This woman had a common name, so it took days of calling with no success, and then it hit. Bingo! I found her, I found the one he wanted to talk to. The thrill was exhilarating. She didn’t end up taking the job with us but she was impressed we tracked her down. That whole experience: piecing the puzzle together, researching, learning new things, talking to lots of people, I knew that while I didn’t necessarily choose recruiting, it chose me.
