Tell your WYWM story
#becurious #befierce
“You chase the carrot only to find it a turnip painted orange!”
How to describe my journey trying to find a role? There was a time where the tech industry was growing and if you made some effort to learn and showed you could work hard, companies were happy to give you a chance. Sadly, these times have changed. A list of expensive courses is expected, having the right experiences, worded carefully to get past the recruitment bots and being happy with entry level jobs now requiring 3 years' experience (on top of a degree) has become the norm. Add to that if your slightly not aligned with the heavily researched “model employee” or have skills the “churn and burn” recruitment monoliths AI models cannot compute and you're not willing to sell your soul then you have no chance of landing not just a job, but a job that benefits you and the employer.
If you read the steady flow of Linked In stories you can see that these experiences are becoming normal and the impact this has on good people with good skills is rubbish. When I say good skills, I don’t mean skills that have been rightly handed over to be handled by computers, automation and technological advances. I am taking about skills that require an attitude and aptitude that help people succeed in roles like leadership, people skills and innovation. Modern, up to date skills that still very much have a place in our society and can be built on.
This is the issue with automating the very people-based industry of recruitment. Crow baring an infinite number of personalities into a text-based screen scrapper that counts the number of keys words someone download off the internet is not smart recruiting, its minimal via product. It may seem they are getting the best candidates to interview but they are not. They are getting a lookup table response max_wordCount_num_hit == interview.
Thankfully, despite the endless disappointment, hundreds of applications, 30+ individually crafted cover letters and lots of smiling nods, I did not give up and when I saw an ad for WithYouWithMe I still had the curiosity and resilience (hint: good employee traits!) to give it a go. From the first interaction, it felt like all the good things about being in the military with none of the bad. They understood where I was coming from, showed me where to do meaningful training courses and we started looking at roles. Did I get the first job I applied for? No. Did I turn my back only to find they had disappeared because I was not a “quick win”? Nope, we kept talking about it and planned a training path. With the new Potential website this went to another level. I was now able to go through the tests that identified my potential. Then, when a role came up that I was suited to, they called me, were there as I interviewed and made it through. So, were they right, did I have the potential? Yep – I now have three industry certifications with another on the way, working for a major worldwide company to cement these skills and part of a company culture where if I need to, I can (and have) literally contact anyone – including the CEO - that’s how transparent these guys are.
So now, I am back on track, getting educated, working in a job I enjoy, allowed to be creative, listened to when I am being creative and moving forward again. That’s all I wanted.