Job Hunting… Again!
Last year, I went on the job hunt, and quickly got recruited to be the Director of Operations for what was - at that exact moment - a fast-growing, female-led videogame startup. There, in those heady days at the end of 2021, was the prospect of a return from fully-remote to hybrid work, and the job I was offered would have wrangled many of the details of setting up a new hybrid workspace, while overseeing HR & some aspects of Finance.
Instead, I got to scramble quickly to take on all of the HR functions myself and research 3rd party finance solutions, and then watch from the sidelines as a new round of funding just would. not. close. And of course, we simply got more waves of Pandemic.
By the end of May, Arcadia Games had to cut everyone loose. I’m sure the founders are still out there, trying to get their project off the ground again with new funding. In the meantime, I’m scouting for another opportunity… right during the summer slump - not too much hiring going on while managers are tagging in and out on summer vacations.
The startup world I’m more familiar with is the crowdfunded space - people going out with a mostly completed product, and finding the last-mile dollars to bring it to market. In that regard, even Wizards of the Coast was a crowdfunding situation - the funding for Magic: The Gathering, which was far along in the design stage, was raised by selling stock to about 200 friends, family and business acquaintances of the founders. The world of videogames and venture capitalists is a rather different beast, I must say. The products have to be sold to a handful of investors while still in their infancy, and then the whole company may live and die at those investors’ whim.
It was valuable experience. I now know that I can work remotely, though it’s not my favorite thing. And I proved to myself, once again, that I’m completely capable of rolling up my sleeves and learning whatever new skills are called for to get the job done - in this case becoming an admin-level user of SaaS recruiting and HR software systems. But I’m not sure if the six-month gig helped my resumé. I still have active entrepreneurship going on, though it doesn’t pay my bills, but it does push my recent flirtation with the salaried world off the top of the page.
And, in the deepest of ironies, several people have approached me about jobs, but all were in Marketing, which is the one part of business that I consider a Dark Art. Finance, IT, Logistics, Customer Service, Sales, general Personnel Management: none of those are mysterious, and all have tangible, measurable results. You can get your arms around them. But Marketing? That’s right up there with Product Design - both are a constant quest to catch the lightning - a task I happily leave to those with a particular talent for it. 🙂
TL;DR: If you have a lead on a job for a well-seasoned business professional, send it my way!