Skip to main content

Twenty Years

Over twenty years ago, I was contacted by a recruiter from a company based out of St. Louis. We hit it off at once and she got me in for interviews at a company that seemed way ahead of it's times. The conversations went great and they were ready to bring me on. Around the same time, my life started to unravel and while the details escape me now (and I am grateful for the lapse of memory). I did not end up taking that job or moving. I stayed in touch with R for several years after that even if more and more sporadically - there was something about her that set her apart from others in her profession. it made me think of her every time I was felt misunderstood. She really loved her job for one thing and was excellent at it. My resume was a hot mess but she was able to tease out who I was and what I could do. She made a wonderful match - a great team and a job that would have been a lot of fun if I had been able to take it. 

For over a year, off and on, R has been posting very candidly on LinkedIn about the tremendous difficulty she is experiencing in getting hired after she got caught up in a layoff. in her last company. She is asking the network she cultivated so diligently to show up for her in her time of need. I am not in her line or work and don't know anyone who is. The same maybe true for most others she is connected with. We were all her candidates once - some of us she placed into jobs, others she didn't. Very few of us are any use to her professionally because she recruited for tech. The last time I was in touch with R was ten years ago. In the sea of candidates she has dealt with her life, its very unlikely she has any recollection of me but I will always remember her as being exceptional, the standard by which to measure others in her profession. But that is clearly not sufficient to get her a job and that is such a shame. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more