Welcome to Plug In with TTC, our brand new podcast that will help shed some insight into the non-traditional side of hiring and getting hired. We are so excited to start this series and would love for you to follow along!
Join Dax Moreno as he sits down with Dirk Elmendorf, one of the founding members of Rackspace, entrepreneur, and creator of the brand new job searching tool, Jobward. Listen in to hear Dirk share untold stories from his time at Rackspace and explain how having an owner’s mentality towards your job search is the ultimate career hack for today’s tech worker.
Click on the links below to listen and subscribe!
Key Takeaways from Tacosaurus T-Shirts & The Art Of Being The Boss
- The new app – Jobward
- Job seekers and hiring managers both commit sins during the hiring process
- The job seeker side is underserved, most people don’t know how to “play the game
- “Spray & Pray” doesn’t always work when you submit your resume
- The intersection of making money & doing the right thing
- Life lessons in the workplace – small teams vs politics
- Job hacks – Ex: Working at a temp agency to figure out what you like/ don’t like
- Why you should have an owner’s mentality around your career
Our favorite soundbite:
(Minute Marker 38:45-43:33)
Dax:
It’s very interesting to hear other perspectives of how people view jobs and employment vs. how I view it. Which is, “Hey there is safety and guidance here for the next two years… This is going to be good for me.” Talk about your job hacks because this was so awesome and a few people are going to look at it and think “that’s how I look at it too” but, they need that encouragement.
Dirk:
Okay, so I think it’s Kaufman one of the researchers said that the highest predictor that you’ll be an entrepreneur is that you have an entrepreneur in your life and my dad set up his own law firm and my mom ran her own catering business. So my parents didn’t have bosses. So that was never a conversation at home, which i didn’t realize was weird until later on in life. He had a law practice that was him in a partner and they both basically operated completely independently but they said having two names sounds like a bigger firm. That was their solution.
Dax:
*Laughs* Marketing
Dirk:
Yeah, marketing. So when I started looking for work originally, finishing college, I was working on an ecommerce platform to do recurring billing online, we called it Total Commerce. And it did not go anywhere and hopefully you cannot find it anywhere. I paid my dues building web applications in C++. That’s how old I am. And I was looking for money to survive during all of this and so in highschool I had done this thing where I had taken on temp jobs. What I learned is that if you go to a temp agency and you say, “I will take any job that is two weeks or less, they love you because most people at a temp agency are trying to find a permanent position.
And in high school I wanted summer break some of the time and I found if I took a two week jobs and at the end of the two weeks I could tell the temp agency, “hey I’m not available for a week” take a vacation and then go right back and work.
Whereas my friends who got jobs for the summer, low man on the totem pole, never get a break – ever. Right?
And so I started as a light industrial temp and I moved up because I was a typist. I eventually became like a secretary or an assistant. I was rejected once as a receptionist because they were like I don’t think we want Dirk as our front desk person because I apparently did not fit whatever they wanted. And, apparently you’re allowed to do that with temp employees, you can just say we don’t want that dude, so I left.
I think that was the only job I had been officially fired from. I am such an idiot… I got assigned a job where I was in this big open-plan room and they had forms that had to be typed and the guy was like, look we are a US subsidiary of a Japanese corporation you need to type these and they need to be perfect. I was like you know you hear all that but I just didn’t onboard it in a way that now I just cringe to think I made mistakes on those forms and I didn’t correct them or just start over. And at lunch they’re like yeah you’re going home, you’re you’re fired. Like you’re not the guy. Just think about how embarrassing it would be in a Japanese company to turn in a typo. He was right to fire me, but at the time I just didn’t have enough awareness to understand where I fit in that cog and so that gave me an opportunity to be inside lots of companies.
At Rackspace I originally was HR because I had the most jobs, because I worked all over the city of San Antonio. I spent a week writing people notes about how much credit they had on their balance before school started. I worked at KCI, they were like you’re the first receptionist we’ve ever had who knew Unix… I’m like yeah, I’m a programmer on the side, I’m just doing this thing so I can eat while we try and launch a thing that didn’t work out, and eventually Rackspace did workout.
And so that was a way for me and it turns out when you’re a temp the temp agency just places you. So you show up and do things and you don’t go through an interview process unless they want to hire you which I was unhireable like I was like no I’m not here to be hired I’m here to do your thing and then I’ll get a new mission and go off and do my next thing.
Dax:That just made you more attractive to them I bet.
Dirk:
I had a friend who followed my strategy and then he got a permanent job like week two, so I said you’re not doing this right… then he said, “I got a job!” So I’m like, I guess that IS an outcome like that’s what you’re trying to do… So you know he was happy. He got benefits and all. I think that ever since then is what I’ve realized and what makes me a bad… not a bad employee but a complicated employee. Is that I don’t know how to NOT act like an owner.
That’s the only mode I’ve ever operated in.
I’ve always started things or worked in such an early capacity that my concern was how am I helping the business? How does this work out? Which is not always an employee concern. Sometimes the business has the employee do dumb things for reasons and when you make me do dumb things for reasons, if I can’t figure out how it helps with the business, you’re about to have a really unhappy employee of me.
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