21 years ago i was part of a very small team that hired over 400 people.

i did my best as that Recruiter to try to see into the hearts of prospective employees

to see if they would like the job, work well with the crew, and be good to the customer.

you really only had a few minutes to make this determination

the few minutes you scanned the resume, the 20 minutes on the phone call

and the 60 minutes in the interview.

some people judged people with how they followed up if the process was taking long

but i didn’t.

the process should not take long. that was on me.

still, some prospective employees dressed provocatively in the interview

which, interesting as it was, a negative checkmark

some people were almost overly prepared, spitting back info about the company that clearly PR put on some dusty corner of the website

and even though it should have been a negative checkmark, at least they were trying

this blog is twenty years of a writer writing in

his

dusty little corner of the web.

i am an open person. i wish more were.

i appreciate when i stumble across something that seems so personal and real.

and i am sad there are fewer of those out there because

i think people are wonderful and we dont have that long to be examples of that.

this blog was weirdly launched a month before 9/11. it saw the first Black president and every episode of Lost.

it documents me going from disgruntled bus rider in a job that didn’t love me to watching the Cubs win the World Series

one game in person.

sometimes i worry that portions will be taken out of context and give someone a reason to give me more than a few negative checkmarks but

what i learned from hiring all those people

was sometimes i made the wrong choice.

of course its bound to happen with that many hires in a short period of time

but nobody wants to make mistakes like that.

this job tomorrow im pretty sure id be great at

and im pretty sure it would allow me to use some of the things i learned

from my last job

and take it to a different level.

and that is exciting.

but i dont know how that crew is,

and that dynamic, i have seen, makes all the difference.

unimately, i just want to be a good element

a positive check mark

among others.