Gratitude Monday: a helping hand

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.