you wanted to know how i did it....

["Yolonda S. Sanchez" <yss -at- WEBCOM -dot- COM>]

> Yolanda,
>  You know after putting that tease out...you have to tell us where you
> put your resume so some of us can be inundated with offers!

> <snip>
> when my contract ended in september, (of course, as a contractor,
> everybody knows you need to have 3-6 months of income in the bank --
> just in case) i put my resume out on the internet - in one place. i was
> inundated with calls. no offers for contract work... but headhunters and
> hr people called from all over the country. they all wanted me to "run"
> or "lead" or "build" their documentation dept. microsoft promised to pay
> **all my expenses** if i would move


soitnleee, ma deeer.......

i jazzed it up as much as i dared for the *masses* then i set up a "career:
html page at my sight, with the same resume, one in ascii, and a beautiful
one, with a really cool format, not at all like the "normal" or "traditional"
resume in acrobat's pdf. i used a lot of humor, (i put a paragraph at the very
end that says some outrageous, but funny stuff and sprinkled humor throughout
the entire resume... like, for instance, everywhere i mentioned any knowledge,
familiarity or training in any programming language, i said something like, "i
was forced at gunpoint to take a class in c++," or "i really hate to say this,
but i understand unix" or, "i took the novell admin class because they *made*
me do it, and i have worked very hard to forget everything i heard there...*
but i countered any negativity with a remark like *but i am such a sucker for
acquiring knowledge, and i do it so well and so fast that no matter how hard i
tried to forget, i still know everything they taught me...." and then i
submitted it to the Online Career Center:

http://www.occ.com/occ/

i got calls from all over the US, and because of my skill set, they were
pitching me... with a hard sell, sending me faxes and emails about how great
their company is, da, de, da, de, da, de, da  === i had always told myself, if
"i could get in at xerox, color me gone..." but i spent three hours on the
phone with their hr guy-- twice. i just cannot move to rochester, new york...
too cold, too much snow... i'm from the south and maryland is difficult
enough..

after 6 weeks of this, i finally accepted a position with a small telecom company
here in columbia (five minutes from my door), and i own it practically now...

this is my fourth week there, i have hired 3 additional writers; designed an
knowledge and information process management flow that makes my department,
the central integrator of all other departments in the company; acquired the
affectionate title of "piranha queen" by the engineering and  testing teams; a
spent an enormouse amount of time doing one on one, talking with each engineer
and each person, from the coo down to the janitor, individually... one of my
tasks was to facilitate better relationships among the departments... now
everybody loves me.... this is my fourth week...

their first offer to me was for $55k... i turned it down because they wanted me
to do a job that required a great deal of responsibility and leadership
energy... they came back within two hours asking what i wanted... so i said,
75k and the title director... they said would i take 70k and stock?  (gee,
that's a hard decision to make...)

i'm telling ***all*** of you this, because i've been watching this list for a
while, i asked last week if anyone had put in an info process flow, and got one
response that was not exactly what i needed...  i **made it happen** because i
just TOOK CONTROL... i didn't wait for someone to come along and ask, or
offer... i recognized immediately that the guy who was hiring was a brilliant
business strategist,  and that a mentoring position would be the chance of a
lifetime... so i grabbed it in the best way possible: i laughed, i joked, i
was 30 minutes late, i turned down the first offer, then told him that i
wanted mentoring from him; i pitched a big hissy fit in a project meeting in my
second week, and sent an email to the smes on the list for one of the new
writers and said if they didn't make time for her, i would feed them to a
tankful of piranhas--but that i would institute an annual company picnic in
their honor to commemorate their untimely demise....

i have not regretted one second of turning from freelance to employee, because
with his guidence, i "own" everyone... when they joke on me, (they put "piranha
queen extraordinaire" on my windows screen saver) i laugh with them... the coo
tried to wow me with some quotes from machiavelli and einstein... and i wrote
back to him with several others, explaining why i always took machiavelli with
several grains of salt and then laying out my determination that --it's never
too late to have a happy childhood, and so i was giving myself one now!!
everytime he sees me, he talks to me, he comes into my office to say hello and
goodbye... i'm the only personto to whom he's ever done that ...

you can do it also...  just plan for it... where you want to go, what you want
to be, and how you want to be compensated... it's like a chess game... it
really really is... and games of strategy  are heady...

i hope that  answers your questions without seeming too much like a homily...


--yss


____________________________________________________
Yolonda S. Sanchez
Information Design Services
yss -at- webcom -dot- com
http://www.webcom.com/solaz/

"In my ballets, woman is first. Men are consorts.
God made men to sing the praises of women.
They are not equal to men; they are better."
                - George Balanchine, Choreographer
____________________________________________________