You know how I posted about my recently-assembled-by-me home office, and I implied that I might be spending some more time in it? Well, my job status at the moment isn’t quite resolved, but I guess enough of it is in place where I can blab about it here.
This past spring, I moved from Madison, WI back to the DC area where I grew up. I had 2 offers on the table, one for a corporate recruiting manager position at a company that’s a subsidiary of a large retailer, and one as a recruiting manager at a company that does IT work for the federal government. The retailer’s offer started out better, and was actually better enough that I accepted it, but then the federal IT contractor kept upping their offer until it became the better one.
So I backed out of the retailer and took the federal contractor job. Even though the director lady who interviewed me was cray cray, and I had mixed feelings about the company, and the federal contracting business in general. But the director who interviewed me dangled the carrot of me taking over her director job in a year or two when she wanted to retire, so I figured I’d only have to deal with her for a relatively short time, and it was a good stepping stone.
Oops.
That job turned out to suck, a lot, for various reasons I won’t get into. The company was a mess financially, and that was part of it, but not all of it. Just a very messy operation. Then, they started eliminating people’s jobs, one by one, as they continued to not make money.
A few weeks ago, they eliminated several people’s jobs, including me. After a bit of negotiating, I got myself a halfway decent severance package. I applied for many jobs, as there are many, many recruiting jobs in the DC area, and that’s one of the reasons I came back.
Lots of recruiting jobs suck royally, and I was trying to line up one in which I’d be similarly overpaid as the one from which I was laid off. Thanks to my severance package, I had some time. And since I now have exposure to federal contracting recruiting, that opens up a lot of possibilities.
A buddy of mine also works in the federal contracting game, and I asked him if he could pass my resume around. He connected me with another guy who runs a small recruiting company, but has so much business from federal IT contracting companies that he needs recruiting help from someone like me.
It started out as just working freelance for him, but there’s some stuff where now I can go on retainer for him, and work from home, basically for myself, and as long as I place 2 people a month, I will exceed my income from my previous job. If I place 3 people a month it will be a big big raise. Hypothetically.
I don’t really relish the thought of going back to the staffing agency world, but this is all placing people as direct employees of his clients, and getting a percentage of the salaries, and these are specialized jobs where I have to really find good people. It’s not a constant churn & burn of temps, or trying to hire commoditized jobs at crappy pay, like say a help desk specialist who needs a security clearance, because those jobs you have to call 30 people who have the clearance & required certification to find 1 who will take the shitty pay. So it’s a good gig.
On top of this, I interviewed at a couple of companies. One of them was as an in-house recruiter and/or recruiting manager at a certain financial company whose commercials you’ve probably seen and rhymes with Shmapital Fun.
It was...interesting. Their fancy new HQ building is indeed very fancy and well-stocked with non-dairy coffee creamer. But the people I interviewed with kinda acted like they were in a cult. I dunno. Just weird.
The other place I interviewed was yet another federal government contractor, but this one does industrial engineering and procurement and other stuff for the Navy. So not IT. I’d be a recruiting & HR manager there. It’s actually pretty appealing to me. Smaller company, but stable and growing business, and I’d have more responsibilities than just recruiting.
After my interview, I sent a thank you email to the president of the company who is the person who originally reached out to me, and he responded that he enjoyed the conversation, and asked me to complete their employment application. That’s usually a prelude to an offer, but after returning my application to him, I didn’t hear anything, not even an out-of-office reply.
So that brings me to today. Last week, the guy I’m freelancing for hit me with some more specifics of how the fee structure would work if I took the retainer from him, and that’s the lucrative info I mentioned above. I emailed the president of the Navy contractor again to confirm he received my application, and gently said I have another opportunity and just want to know if I should expect to hear anything further from the Navy contractor about an offer.
I got no reply, and the dude only has his cell # in his email signature, so I didn’t want to blow him up directly. I called the front desk at the place and spoke to the receptionist/office manager/HR coordinator who scheduled my interview. She checked on it for me, and turns out the president has been out of the office. Turn on your OOO auto-reply bro! Anyway, she did talk with another of the senior people there who also interviewed me, and that person said they would have an answer for me by mid next week (i.e. in the next couple days now).
Now the waiting game commences. If the Navy contractor doesn’t offer me a job, off to the land of hired gun headhunting I go, with what is a pretty sweet fee structure on top of a monthly retainer fee. If the Navy contractor does offer me a job, then I’ll have to decide among them.
Oh, and it would be a not-insignificant commute. It’s down in the Navy Yard section of DC, which is down by Nationals Park. I can either drive, since they do have on-site parking, or take the Metro, since I live about 3/4 of a mile from a Metro station. This office isn’t particularly close to the Navy Yard metro, but there is a shuttle bus that runs from that and a couple other metro stations to this building. So I’d have options. But it’s way longer than waking up and rolling down to the basement where my home office is.
I dunno, we’ll see what happens! I guess I don’t really have any bad options here. It will all be fine. Which means your tax dollars will continue to pay for this!
Thanks, MURRICA!