Yesterday was the day at my new job at BambooHR where I could state my tenure in months instead of weeks. I’m on Month Two.
In the last post I talked about finding this job, Program Manager, at BambooHR. But I had to go through some mental wrestling to come to terms with this. The companies I had been looking at were more familiar to me (I heard about them a lot from friends, and drove by them all the time). The commutes would have been awesome, as I mentioned. And it would have put me into the product manager network locally, a group I found a little hard to network into. Remember, being an entrepreneur is not looked at as a benefit by a lot of corporate people.
I had to ask myself, was BambooHR really a target company for me? Back in 2017 they included this very blog as one of their top 25 HR blogs. I was a lot more familiar with their industry and customer and user (and the issues HR faces) than a high interest rate lending company or a contact lense company. I’m sure I would have settled in and done a great job, and enjoyed those… but there would be a few learning curves.
That’s part of career management, though: learning, adapting, etc.
BambooHR was perfect, with one little exception: the commute.
Going from a down-the-hall commute to a twenty something mile commute would mean changes. I’d be in traffic… rush hour! Bleh!
We have the exact right number of vehicles for our family… as long as I don’t need a car 🙂 That means a $5,000+ expense so we don’t have to double up… plus the cost of insurance, gas, etc. to add a new car. Double bleh.
When I put everything on paper, though, BambooHR was definitely a great option. In fact, something weird happened: As soon as I applied to BambooHR, every other company and opportunity because completely uninteresting to me. When I read the posting again and again, and slept on it and then read it again, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else, anywhere else.
This was made for me, and meant to be!
So I applied. Online. You know, that thing some experts say to avoid at all costs? What if my resume got overlooked like it had from other companies? What if it got lost? What if, what if, what if…
All I knew was that I had now pretty much invested all of my hope in this one company and one job.
Because of what happened 12 years ago, when I was sure I had found the right job at the right company, and then I got the horrible, cold email saying they chose someone else, I knew that I couldn’t trust that this was the one. I had to keep doing things … the right things, in my job search. So, as hard as it was, I kept looking, and kept up my job search.
This was good because I needed to do something while I waited. And keeping my job search going helped me feel like I was doing something right, especially if this fell through.
I should mention, the application process on BambooHR was pretty sweet, which is good, because it was their software that they sell to others for applications :p Don’t you hate all of the online application pages that feel like they suck the soul out of you? That’s not the experience I had applying online.
I hit send or submit, and then crossed fingers… hoping.. waiting…