Switching Lanes: Pivoting Careers
In 2014, I found myself exhausted. At this point in my life, I had about five years of experience in the restaurant industry and worked in every role, from hostess, server, and bartender, to general manager. I was the general manager of a restaurant in the middle of SOMA in San Francisco in a mixed-use building filled with tech companies and packed with backpacks during happy hours. It was completely dead on the weekends when mostly everyone fled the area to get a break from work. I was working 60 hours a week and filling in for people who didn’t call to let us know they wouldn’t show up. So, in addition to managing the front of the house, sometimes I was also making salads, shucking oysters, and washing dishes all night on a couple of occasions.
In January 2015, I had wholly reached my limit. It was lunchtime, and one of our regulars, a VP of Talent from AppDynamics, came in to sit at a table and was joined by a gentleman I didn’t recognize. I decided to go over and say hello. I also noticed two sheets of paper in front of them, so instead of awkwardly asking how everything was going (as I tended to do on auto-pilot), I waited for their food to be ready to go out and brought it out to them. As I went to put their plates down, they each grabbed at their sheet of paper to make room, and I caught a glimpse of a resume. After observing the gentleman’s posture and mannerisms, which looked like he was taking his driver’s test, I knew then that this was an interview. A few months before this day, that same VP of Talent gave me his card, and I Googled him and researched what talent acquisition is. If you ask ChatGPT what it is, it will tell you:
Talent acquisition is the process of finding, attracting, and hiring skilled individuals to fulfill specific roles within an organization. It is a critical function of human resources (HR) and is essential to the growth and success of a company.
I thought about that a lot and thought about all the people I had interviewed and hired to work at the restaurant. I was already doing talent acquisition. When they finished talking, the gentleman left first, and the VP of Talent left afterward. I chased him out of the restaurant and asked, “What were you interviewing that person for?” He told me it was for a recruiting coordinator position. I asked him what a recruiting coordinator does, and after he explained it to me, I told him, “I could do that!” He seemed pretty confused at first, and maybe I put on some sort of front like I was working this glamorous position as a restaurant general manager. Still, the reality was that I had inherited that position because I was hired as the Assistant General Manager, and when the real General Manager was there, he kind of flew off the handle, and I pled to take his position. I bit off more than I could chew, but I always believed in myself, hence the “I could do that!” attitude I’ve carried my entire career. If I couldn’t do it, I could figure it out.
Fueled by my eagerness to leave the restaurant industry once and for all and prove that I could do it, I started my new career in tech as a recruiting coordinator, working in the same building but bringing my backpack for happy hour. A year later, I found myself at a recruiting agency. People always question this decision to go from in-house to an agency, but that in-house position was only a contract role, and the agency would widen the scope of my recruiting experience. There, I worked on technical and non-technical roles for technical and non-technical companies - a hodgepodge of recruiting. My favorite company I recruited for was Carl Zeiss. It was one of the agency’s biggest accounts and a microscopy company, which I found equally weird, engaging, and highly technical. In addition to the microscopes you can find in labs across the globe, they also made machines for optometrists, food scientists, and X-ray machines that you find in airport security. I hired most of the entire team of software engineers who developed the software that sits on top of these machines.
I loved working with them because I had direct access to hiring managers (which is a big deal in agency recruiting). The roles were niche and specialized, so their candidate pools were smaller, and easier to distinguish between who was fit and who wasn’t (or at least I thought so). Carl Zeiss is where I made one of my best hires of all time.
I started working on a role for a Machine Learning Software Engineer who needed a background in physics to understand X-ray technology, machine learning experience, and could program as well. It was 2017, and I was now about a year and a half in at the agency. I had a lot of success by this point, and everyone trusted me. Trust is a huge factor that talent acquisition professionals don’t always consider to be essential, and the reason that was so important was that I submitted a candidate by the name of Patrick Langechuan Liu, who had his Ph.D. in Physics, Xray and imaging technology experience, but had no previous machine learning or software engineering experience. On paper, he should’ve been rejected. Patrick is now a Director of AI for XPENG, a company that uses machine learning predictions in the cameras for their electric vehicles and robots.
The trust I built with my account manager and the hiring manager allowed me to help Patrick transition from Physicist to Machine Learning Engineer, and the trust that I established with that VP of Talent allowed me to transition from restaurants to tech. Many people will have to make pivots in their careers as the landscape of recruiting and tech continues to shift, so I hope those of you who have to make these pivots also adopt the attitude of “I can do that!” because you most certainly can. If you need help identifying how you can pivot in your career or you need a confidence boost to go out and do it, let’s set up a time to chat. I’d love to help!
