Thread by @KieranSnyder

1 The year after I finished graduate school, I interviewed for 10 different jobs, applied for dozens more, and ended up getting one. It was a difficult time, both financially and in terms of self-esteem. That year forever changed my pov on recruiting and job-seeking. Thread >>

2 I entered college believing I was heading on to a PhD and an academic life. I graduated college heading straight into a PhD program as part of this path. I did not take a break in between, so by the time I finished my PhD, 100% of my work experience was academic.

3 I had research experience and teaching experience. I was very lucky; during the final year of my PhD program I got two solid academic job offers for after graduation. But by then, I was starting to have doubts about the path. I didn’t know what I wanted instead.

4 I turned down those job offers and graduated, confident that I would figure it out. After all, things had always worked out before.

But then this time they didn’t.

5 I had a (very) little money saved and started looking for a job. I tried to get hired for many unrelated jobs: teaching elementary school, becoming a designer and tester for a board game company, academic administration, non-profit work.

6 One after another, everyone said no. I was stuck in the worst kind of in-between-land: I had a PhD but no work experience. Everyone assumed I’d quit as soon as I got an academic job. Try as I might, I was not able to convince anyone that I didn’t want this.

7 I earned a little money doing freelance translation work and tutoring as I continued to look for a job. I wrote a lot, 100,000 words of essays that year. I rewrote my resume countless times. I was broke, stressed, and depressed.

8 My whole identity had been about professional success. I had been at the top of my field and earned very scarce academic job offers — two of them! I could not understand why no one wanted to hire me. I was smart and willing to work hard and learn.

9 But not only were people not impressed by what I’d done, what I’d done made them suspicious. I came to feel that I might have been more hireable had I dropped out of graduate school.

10 Horribly frustrating, but years later, I understand why people were skeptical about me. Most people with no work experience and only school do actually want to stay in school. The fact that I didn’t want this was a break with their very reasonable expectations.

11 After about a year, a friend suggested that I consider working in technology. I interviewed for a full-time localization role at Microsoft and didn’t get hired. Felt like just another of many rejections.

But then something happened to disrupt the narrative.

12 The recruiter for the position I had been rejected for fought for me. She saw me, believed I was capable of something big, and she fought for me.

No one had ever done that before.

13 She didn’t fight for me to get the role I’d just been rejected for. It was not a good fit. Instead, she went to a friend in another part of the company who ran a team to make Microsoft Windows work globally. She told them about me and said it might be a fit.

14 There were no full-time roles open on the team at the time, but there was a contract position for a computational linguist. It was an 11-month position to help make Windows render and sort all non-European languages.

15 I gratefully took the position. It was a massive relief that someone wanted to hire me and that I would be able to earn some money.

Determined to make the most of the opportunity, I worked extremely hard. I finished all the work for the 11-month contract in 6 weeks.

16 Towards the end I began worrying what would happen if they decided to cut me loose once the work was complete. I wondered if I should slow down my progress, but felt guilty about sandbagging.

17 With a great deal of angst, I showed my boss the work I had done and asked if there was something else I could do to help, given that she had the budget to keep me for 9.5 more months.

18 She looked at the work with shock. The next week, she argued successfully to open a new full-time headcount for me immediately. That was the start of my tech career. I have never forgotten it or taken it for granted.

19 Looking for a job when no one would give me a chance was more than stressful. It hit at the very core of who I was. My felt like my entire identity was at stake. It created something of the chip on my shoulder that has been underneath my career ever since.

20 Ultimately, the turning point was that one recruiter seeing me, believing in me, and using her own credibility to get me a shot. She 100% altered the course of my career and life. I like to think she altered the course of the work I was thrown into also.

21 think about that recruiter every so often as a reminder of the fact that business is essentially human. Whatever technology we use, business is people seeing other people, giving each other chances or not, agreeing and disagreeing with each other.

22 I was both qualified and not at all qualified for the job that started my tech career. But it took a specific person seeing me for me even to be in the race. 🌠