After decades of working with job seekers of many stripes on finding a job, and finding many candidates to fill jobs, I am looking for a job – sort of.
Just to stay in context for this piece, I need a specific job so let me give you the criteria. This isn’t about just finding a corporate recruiting job. Its about finding a job that I’ll bet many, many boomers like me would like to find and maybe its about suggesting that more employers could consider this criteria to attract excellent candidates and, its about me finding a job.
After over 30 years of steady work I finished my last contract on January 15th. It felt right to resign after completing four years of what should have been a 1 year assignment following the sale of my niche job board – www.canadianretail.com – to CanWest in 2005. (You can easily read my entire career by checking out my profile on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/brendadumont )
From then to now I have been taking stock and came up with what I could offer an employer (an exercise I have often recommended to candidates unsure of how to proceed with a focused job search)
- A solid, national understanding of the Retail industry in Canada. Who the players are, the associations, interactions, what the challenges to the industry are, how job seekers in and outside the industry view the industry and a historic understanding of the development of recruitment trends for the industry.
- A solid understanding of online recruitment – probably a better understanding of the introduction of job boards to Canada than most, which job boards have succeeded why and which ones faded offline due to many reasons, primarily poor design or underfunding. Also, in this area a sharp understanding of the evolution away from strict utilization of job boards for online recruitment to all sorts of nifty new tools including social media, virtual job fairs, jobs2web type stuff and jobsinpods. Love em all!
- Computer saavy – really computer saavy, including social media as it relates to recruiting.
- Marketing smarts – having had to sell and market the services of my two companies plus Drake’s and advise and participate on sales and marketing efforts for the last four years I’ve done a lot of selling and developed and executed many marketing plans.
- 3 decades of experience recruiting for and within the retail industry in Canada.
- 3 decades of passionately executing and training customer service at a level that still garners praise today.
Plus I am reliable as the sun, full of energy and passion for the industry, creative as all get-out, and you’ll always get extra effort from me.
Ok, I’m a real superstar. But, and here’s the big but, here’s the criteria for the type of position I’d like to find and haven’t got a whiff of as yet……………
- I want working on a consulting basis, I don’t want to be anyone’s employee.
- As you can imagine, and many employees and co-workers and previous bosses will heartily attest to – I am self-motivated and self-directed. (I suspect many senior and executive level boomers are). It’s good to make it clear what you expect from me, but I don’t need a detailed road map of how to get there unless you can prevent me from falling into a political man-hole with specific instructions.
- I’d like to work from home. I am very pleased to travel, but I’d like to undertake something that requires day to day interaction with a computer and a high speed internet access with occasional travel to maintain and develop relationships.
- I’m OK with short term consulting work or consulting work where I work part-time every day or three days per week or…… Throughout my career I was at my best with multiple challenges, multiple clients, varying interactions, people, requirements, etc. etc. Lots of us boomers had to be generalists more than specialists during a significant portion of our career.
- I don’t want to accept recruiting assignments. I dearly loved my headhunting days and my reputation is still largely based on those days despite the fact I haven’t conducted a search for over 10 years. If I wanted to be a corporate recruiter, start up another retail recruitment search firm, or work for an existing third party recruiter I don’t think it would be difficult to find a position. Many boomers have been bankers, teachers, government employees – you name it. But in the final phase, don’t want to stick to what they’ve always done.
- It doesn’t have to be retail – I am an avid and educated gardener, have a BCIT diploma in Hospitality, Food Services Management, am a rabid advocate of the beautiful Cowichan Valley, could embrace something Tourismy and I’m a dedicated foodie.
To date I have carefully searched, using advanced and basic methods, all the usual job boards including usedvictoria.com, craigslist, and some very local ones like Black Press’ www.bcclassified.com, starting today I am Twittering, blogging, LinkedIning, and Facebooking my credentials and criteria, and I’m beginning what always works best in a job search – networking, networking, networking. So, know of a job for me? I’ll keep you posted as to the various processes and eventual success (rule one – think positive) of this job search!
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