Now I am facing another challenge: I need a job. I’ve spoken with many recruiters and HR professionals, along with people who are interested in either acquiring my company(s), funding them or just want to make themselves available for a chat. I’ve received offers for leadership positions at nonprofits, but I haven’t yet discovered the right fit. Maybe I love the startup life too much. Maybe my criminal record hurts my chances. (Maybe!?!) Maybe my age is a deterrent.
Before I accept a position that doesn’t thrill me, I thought I’d get the word out to the YC community. Perhaps your company has—or has been considering—beginning a foundation or some other mission-based, social impact endeavor. Perhaps you need to hire lots of folks for your work force and want to seriously access the largely ignored 70 million Americans with records. I can help.
What else am I very good at? Business development, sales training and management.
Please note: I’m not very technical.
If you’ve got ideas, I’d love to hear them. Thanks for your time and consideration.
- Do you want to work only for startups ? Do they have to be startup or can they be small business (non VC funded but growing organically).
- Do you only want to work for "social impact endeavors" ?
"but I haven’t yet discovered the right fit"
What is a right fit for you ? Can you be more specific ?
A quick question - I worked briefly for a group doing job-re-entry work for folks with records etc. Such critical work, some very positive stories.
However, on the admin side, a fair number of scams and accusations. Curious how your work addresses this (for what it is worth this was in CA) or you'd suggest folks approach this.
Workers comp:
We had to make sure to not let folks into building for final paychecks (if they were a no show quit or had other issues) because there were repeated workers comp claims from the 3 minutes it took folks to get their last check. Bumped knee on desk, trip and falls and more. Workers comp overall was tough. Out of work injuries etc etc getting reported as on-job injuries, and there was an industry that seemed to serve these claims so they went on forever. Our x-mod was horrible.
Age / race / etc discrimination claims. Just basics like showing up to a job, on time. If you can't do that it's not (necessarily) a discrimination issue always.
Unpaid time claims - often for very small amounts. This was fully digital clock in / out system with careful timesheet rounding settings where CA has some rules (ie, OK to round to nearest minute in a fair way and not always pay to the second).
Stolen checks, reports of stolen paychecks. We couldn't investigate all, but some seemed pretty thin based on cancelled check images. Some were probably very real.
Admin issues we were OK with but worth thinking about.
-> Relatively high number of child support orders. The calculations can get complex in CA with multiple orders. -> Lots of ed debt collection orders, there must be some industry that get's people into debt here or a way to use ed debt to fund living expenses? I didn't investigate but caught my eye. -> Some bad dysfunction at state agencies dealing with folks (so folks not paying attention can easily double pay).
This wasn't NOT the rule by any means, but out of 100 folks, 10 maybe still "hustling". If you are not setup / used to this it's a bit of a shock. We had to do everything from signing to pickup a paycheck to many other controls (full positive pay on all accounts used to write checks to staff etc). Also went to a full contest mode basically, where every bogus claim was fully contested - including the unpaid 15 minute claims. That's a loser economically (ie, the cost of just paying the 15 minutes is nothing compared to cost to fight with no recovery of costs to fight). But it ended up being critical to slow the pace of claims to make sure there weren't "automatic" rewards for things.
At the end I found it incredibly rewarding and the good far outweighed the bad. Folks need a path back into the working world. But I'd have loved it even more if there were some things to do to weed out the 10% or so still hustling.