Cons as a Place to Hire

Here are my thoughts about Career Tracks and job hunting. 

Summer Camp Experience

I was pretty dismayed by the BSidesLV Career Track. I came to the conference with a folder of resumes, and every intent of hitting those sessions until I looked at the agenda, and realized the bulk of the material was aimed at college students or recent grads. 

Trust me: There is nothing anyone can tell me about a Life at a Startup that I can't beat, like coming to work to find the doors chained and padlocked.

While there were a few talks that sounded interesting, the way the track was laid out, it felt like I needed to dedicate the entire day, and there were other talks I wanted to go to, in addition to volunteering as a red shirt.

I was working security during the chill-room table time, so had a great excuse for eavesdropping on two of the tables without looking like a creep. The conversations were 100% buzz-word compliant. I'm not certain any of the parties involved had any idea what the other people were saying...and all I could think of was the career fair booths that I'd (wo)manned in the past, collected literally a thousand resumes, and I swear not one of those resumes landed on a manager's desk. Not one of those people got hired! As a matter of fact: We would rent the booth for PR, to make it look like we were hiring and growing and competitive.

The clincher was when some guy wandered into the SOC room to "volunteer", and when Nous politely told him the schedule was set 2 months ago, he said, "But I'm here to jump start my career!" and stormed off.

DefCon mirrored the same focus and fervor for young people.

I didn't hand out a single resume, and came away feeling pretty much like an anomaly: ton of experience wearing many different hats in tech, newly interested in infosec, discovering the stuff I've always done to get the job done is called "hacking" - and that it's really cool being around other people who don't think like everyone else either i.e., college was a looonnnngggg time ago.

#DerbyCon Hiring List

I bumped into Rob's tweet and followed to his post:

http://www.room362.com/2015/09/2015-derbycon-hiring.html

It’s often tough from both hiring and job hunters to find one another at conferences. I think this is mostly because of a couple things.

1. No one wants to stand at a both on either side and talk job stuff in front of a bunch of people and people at booths rarely get the chance to get away.
2. It’s hard to know “who” to talk to.

So I created a very simple Google doc to help put twitter handles and links together for people who are job hunting and people who are hiring to kinda get to know who to talk to.

Yes! Such a relief to see someone else's analysis of my problem, and addresses my primary issue which is: If I can just talk with the hiring manager or the team, I can explain what I do to relieve pain - and at the same time assess whether they are a good fit for me, because I really don't want to be a sacrificial lamb (hired to fail), work for another asshole, or work for a company that can't make payroll.

Note: I think a key component of why the Hiring List is so appealing and successful is because it is constrained to the con - not after, and not inclusive of non-attendees.

There is an amazing amount of communication that happens face-to-face that you just can't get via any other form of communication, and that I think is key to getting hired and building the kind of trusting relationship that successful teams need to thrive. 

Ideas

I don't know if Rob's Hiring List can work at BSidesLV. I can imagine getting overwhelmed with contacts...

Here's a few ideas, just to kick-around other options that might help the not-right-out-of-college job hunter. Goal being to inspire better thoughts and conversation (the over-used word of 2015):

• Anonymized Hiring List? This is prolly a bad idea, but set-up a "drop-box" for hiring managers so their home feed doesn't get bombed, and so they don't continue to get bombed after the con, but they can still meet face-to-face.
• Flip-it-around: Instead of company booths that job-hunters approach, what about tables where we can advertise our skills - and what we're looking for. I almost came with a custom printed shirt "Looking for work!", but then decided that could be mis-interpreted ;-)
• Coffee social - or something like that: I would go to a gathering dubbed as a meet and greet opportunity. I don't like selling my shit at Happy Hour because it's Happy Hour! Or at a Party because it's a Party! Maybe I'm old school (okay I am), but there's a time and a place and aggressively hunting folks when they are hanging out is just rude.
• Resume board: Heavy sigh. 

Thoughts?