A couple of weeks ago I got a message through
LinkedIn from a woman who said she’d just moved to the District They Call
Columbia from San Francisco, and noted that we seemed to have some similarities
in background. She asked if I’d be willing to share my experience in making the
transition from California to DC, and from tech to non-profit.
Well, you know—LinkedIn, right? But I thought,
oh, why not, and I connected with her (I’ll call her Carol) on LinkedIn. She
said she was interested in a couple of positions at my company, and would I be
willing to meet in person to discuss?
I did a bit of sleuthing and discovered the
reason for one of the requirement for a Ph.D. in one of the essentially social
media positions (basically, they’re looking backwards, quelle surprise), and
set up a coffee date for last Wednesday. Further to that, I asked my ex-manager
what he knew about the non-Ph.D. opening. He got very excited—this position, it
seems, is one of the best in the company, melding social media with social
policy. Apparently, next to [communication and
collaboration platform], this remit is the innovation that’s going to change the
world. One component (the SoMe) will be led by someone who’s certainly sold
herself as a thought leader/guru/disruptor in the area; the other (the policy
content) will come from a woman who is a globally-recognized treasure in the
field. So the incumbent has an opportunity to learn a great deal while doing
some good work.
I met with Carol, and we commiserated on The
Weather—that’s always a good conversation starter—and how we’re adjusting to it,
coming as we do from what’s essentially a climate paradise. (If you leave out
the droughts, fires, floods and earthquakes/tsunamis.) Carol moved out just
before Christmas, and hasn’t yet bought real winter clothes. We’ve both
recently started looking at Uggs, for pity’s sake.
I’d looked at her LinkedIn profile and seen a
string of short-term contract SoMe gigs at Valley They Call Silicon giants. I
didn’t ask her about them because I’m painfully familiar with that employment
model of indentured servitude practiced by the tech industry—they hire
contractors through vendors in a system where the actual providers of labor get
no benefits, no future and no sense of being valued. Instead, I gave her a data
dump on the position—such as I knew, which wasn’t in depth, tbh—and my take on
the organization.
As it happens, she mostly grew up in the area,
with a B.S. in biology from the University of Maryland, and she added an Ed.M.
in public policy from Harvard. (My ex-manager has an MBA and an MPP from
Harvard, so when I discussed Carol with him, I made a point of bringing up that
connection.) She’s also worked in non-profits before, so she really didn’t need
much from me on that score.
Well, the short version of this is that when we
parted, Carol was visibly energized. Back in the office, I sought out the madam
who’s doing the screening for the position (and who will be the dotted-line
supervisor of the SoMe part of the job), who declared herself “happy to have an
informal chat”, and I made that introduction. They had the conversation on
Friday, which elated Carol further.
Naturally, there’s no predicting how this will
turn out. (Over the weekend I recalled my difficulties filling an intern
position once HR inserted itself into the process before I could even see the
submissions. The “talent acquisition specialist” passed on applicants without
qualifications, and I had to ferret out someone who I knew had applied, but
hadn’t been sent on to me, so I don’t know what good researchers never made it
to me because of HR. There’s no telling what could happen to Carol’s
application before it even makes it to the interviewers’ eyes.) There are also other
people in the works, with whom Madam has also had informal chats, and I have no
insight into that.
But my point, on this Gratitude Monday, is that
I was in a position to offer help to someone who’s standing where I’ve stood in
the past. And I did. It’s pretty ballsy to do a cold call via LinkedIn (our
mutual connection is someone I don’t recall); most of the unsolicited communications
I receive there are spam, and get filed in the appropriate bin. But I recall
people who surprised me by offering help, and I recall how very much those
offers meant to me.
Over the years I’ve sunk into the mindset that
I don’t have much to offer; I’m not well connected, I don’t have a wide
expertise; I feel my limitations acutely. This time, I was able to do a bit of
digging and make connections that may help Carol find a job sooner rather than
later, one that makes good use of her background and sets her up for more good
things in the future.
That’s best-case scenario. Worse case is that
I’ve given her encouragement early in her job hunt, made her a more confident
networker and become a new acquaintance with common experiences in this area.
In turn, she’s reminded me that I do have
things to give, and that even small acts of generosity can warm the soul and be
banked against the days when everything looks bleak. And I am grateful for
this.
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