When I was little, I wanted to be a veterinarian. Except for the blood. Then it was a writer. No, a sculptress only working in marble; no, a writer; no, an anthropologist studying ancient religions; no, a writer; no, a psychologist working in forensic psychology. After a while, I noticed a trend: no matter what I did, I always returned to wanting to be a writer. There is just one major flaw in that plan these days; most writers don’t make a living just writing. Especially not speculative fiction writers (sci-fi, fantasy, etc.). But nowhere in the chaos of job desires did I ever think I wanted to work in recruiting, which is weird because my personality is particularly well suited to it.

I grew up listening to my dad talk about headhunters and layoffs (from both sides of the desk) and the pros and cons of particular job moves. He worked as a Food and Drug Administration liaison for medical device companies and was darn good at what he did. This meant recruiting was a common topic of conversation. In addition, my mom was a professional volunteer with Girl Scouts, church, and lots of nonprofits in the areas we lived in, and we spent a lot of time recruiting additional volunteers and project leaders for a wide variety of functions. I ran my own council-wide Girl Scout events by middle school, and I haven’t stopped working with nonprofits and volunteers since. 

When I finished undergrad, I decided I did, in fact, want my master's in writing, besides, the job market was awful, so I attended a Writing and Publishing MFA at Emerson College. It was a very valuable experience, but different from the ways they tell you. I didn’t make fantastic writing connections, or form a solid writing group that I’ll trade writing with forever and ever. Instead, I learned some excellent lessons about effective instruction, academic politics, and how to work with people with large (and tiny) egos. When I left the program, it was to join a publisher drawing technical illustrations about computer programming, which was at least in the publishing industry. 

While I worked and caught my breath from a solid two decades of academia, I drew loads of straight lines during the day, wrote and taught writing, and volunteered with a variety of organizations in my spare time. I published stories and novels that I’m proud of, but the need for a day job was most likely never going away. Barring Lady Luck sponsoring me to a ball, of course. So I drew and drew, and before I knew it, a whole decade had passed, and I couldn’t stand to draw another line. It wasn’t a career with anything like advancement, and as a lifelong Girl Scout, the urge to advance is hard to shake. 

During the pandemic, I stumbled across the opportunity to work with a local homeschool group organizing clubs and Girl Scout programming on top of teaching writing and English, and I leapt at it. I was actually going to get paid to focus on the things I’d been doing for free for my whole life, and I was ecstatic. I was thriving on virtual work and teaching (I’d been virtual for the last six years anyway) and I really enjoyed helping the kids access their creativity. But then the contract ran out … and  there wasn’t a renewal..and I was now introduced to the faceless destroyer of worlds: Unemployment..

I spent my time like most everyone else: applying to jobs, keeping up with unemployment, trying not to go slowly insane from sitting around. I managed to get some writing in towards the end of lockdown, and I took any small gigs that came my way, like running Dungeons and Dragons online for kids' parties and intern socialization at law firms. My husband had begun searching for a job that paid better than his current programming role, and a friend of a friend worked in the recruiting office of a quantum computing company and urged him to apply. 

My sci-fi writer brain perked up at this. Quantum computers? Could I get a job at such a brilliantly cutting-edge technology company? I had long ago decided that programming and science weren’t for me as I didn't like siloing my attention in the necessary way to succeed. I was too invested in reading about and incorporating sciences from across the various spectrums into my writing instead. But there, on their job listings, was my unicorn: Recruiting Coordinator.

This job asked for a balance of skills I hadn’t seen before in other job listings. The right candidates would have excellent organizational and scheduling skills; an incredible sense of customer service and discretion; an eagerness to work with a constant stream of new people; the ability to be firm with people at all levels in the company to set necessary boundaries; and the cheerfulness to wheedle out over-due paperwork. Not to mention it was a startup, so there would always be new and different projects to work on which is just the sort of environment I crave. I popped my application in and waited.

It didn’t take long before I was interviewed and then hired. All before my husband even got a callback on a programming position. This was less about his desirability as a programmer and more because they needed a Recruiting Coordinator to take care of the scheduling. 

And I thrived. 

Within a couple of months, I added many new responsibilities beyond a classic recruiting coordinator role. I was writing memos for the company on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, analyzing pain points in our process, and sourcing solutions in the form of process changes and new software services. My coworkers appreciated my work so much they nominated me for the Greenhouse Software Talent Partner Award which I later won. I hadn’t even been in the field for two years, but it was such a natural workflow that I was happy to dive into the stream and keep it flowing as smoothly as possible. 

I left the quantum computing company this year as I had optimized the workflow to a point that it was no longer a challenge for me. Unfortunately, the budget didn’t allow me to advance my career within the company. When the opportunity to make a friendly exit arose, I took it to focus entirely on finding the next step on my recruiting operations journey. I’m hoping to move even further into People Operations to work across initiatives important to both talent acquisitions and human resources, supporting the programmers and scientists who are helping to make the future a reality.