Hello World

I’m in the middle of learning how to improve my personal brand and build sales funnels for our business. I wanted to start documenting my journey so if anyone is in the same boat, they can perhaps find something of value here.

A bit about me. I graduated with a Computer Science major and an Economics minor, great grades but horrible, I mean nonexistent interview skills. I went to interview after interview, rejection after rejection with no end in sight. It was soul crushing for me, it wasn’t something I can study for, but I studied. Read everything I can about interviewing, what to do, what not to do. Nothing seemed to help. I was running out of resources because I had no family in the country, and I didn’t want to leave a country I fell in love with. With every rejection, it chipped away at the little confidence that I had… all of the fears of not being smart enough, good enough, etc surfaced. None of it helped any of my interviews.

Then I got a break. The first job I ever got is from a good friend of mine, who got the offer and turned the job down, and said to my future boss, listen, you should interview June. She’s great, just horrible at interviewing and I know she can do the job. My boss agreed, probably out of sheer pity, and after what seemed like hundreds of interviews, I finally got my first job.

Development was good, but I wasn’t passionate about it. It wasn’t intuitive to me, so I had to work extra hours just to get by. I was one of those developers that would take 10 hours to do something it took the person beside me 30 minutes…

I woke up one day and thought, there’s got to be more to life than that. I thought a change of scenery would be good since I was living in a small town at the time, I started applying to jobs in Toronto. Since I knew it would take me a long time to find a job, I applied to literally everything, didn’t read the job description, if it said IT, I applied. Knowing what I know now, I would highly recommend against this!

It was by chance I applied to a role of an IT Recruiter, I didn’t even know until I got the call for an interview. I didn’t know what a recruiter does, so I studied like crazy, read all about successful interviewing, 50 questions to prepare for, how to sit in an interview, etc.

I failed that interview.

A couple months later, the same company called. The manager said, listen, we think you have potential and we’re trying out a new role, Recruiter Assistant. The hours would be afternoons and nights and I think you can do well. At the time, the salary was half of what I made as a developer, but I was intrigued. I knew I needed to change because I didn’t love what I do. So, I took the job, move to Toronto and started with Computer Horizon, now Tek Systems as a Recruiter Assistant.

I was told to call as many people as possible with the key word skills, send them a skills matrix to fill out and send that along with the resume to clients. I started to notice that sometimes the people with the best skills for the job didn’t get the job — that was the most confusing thing to me.

One day, it hit me. The best candidates are usually the ones that don’t know how to interview well, they don’t like to talk about themselves and most of what they do, they think its common sense!

That’s when I started to become obsessed with learning more about the companies, who are successful in what roles long term; then candidates and their experience, what they are good at and how to help them bring it out in an interview.

It’s been over 15 years that I’ve been in IT Recruitment, what started out as a personal journey to simply get a job has turned into mission of mine. To help people who are outstanding at what they do get better at interviews and land their dream job and to help organization grow by recognizing talent that perhaps don’t speak well in the hour you give them when stressed out and sweating bullets.

It has been so rewarding helping hundreds of candidates find roles they continue to grow with, and companies build teams that help change the trajectory of the company. I have learned so much along the way, I mean, how can you not when all I do everyday is talk to the top 20% of the brightest minds in the industry!?