Seek and Embrace Flexibility with Leah White (1/2)

Welcome to episode 212 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_), two Pre-Sales Technical Engineers who are hoping to bring you the IT career advice that we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we share part 1 of a discussion with Leah White, detailing her early career and the transition from engineering student to recruiter, getting laid off and finding work at a culinary institute, the value of internship programs, and how through it all she was constantly redefining success.

Original Recording Date: 01-24-2023

Topics – Meet Leah White, The Discipline of Sourcing, Defining Life Success, The Identity Crisis and a Mindset Shift, Becoming Part of the Institute, Internships, Seeking Flexibility

3:27 – Meet Leah White

• Leah White is a sourcing recruiter for Veeam and as of this recording has been with the company a little over a year. She works on roles across the US and Canada identified as needing additional recruitment support.
  • Leah lives right outside of Houston, Texas and works remotely. She is married with 3 children (a 15-year-old, a 10-year-old, and a 5-year-old).
  • And for the record, John and Leah are not related.

4:28 – The Discipline of Sourcing

• Leah says people understand the term recruiter in our industry much more so than sourcer. A sourcer is someone who is going to seek out passive talent.
• As a recruiter you’re generally working with candidates who have applied for a job at a company. But a sourcer is going to seek out prospects that could fit a specific role you need to fill.
  • This may involve attending events, networking, spending time on LinkedIn, asking for referrals…but you’re really sourcing talent for a role that needs to be filled.
• It depends on the role as to whether sourcing is needed. If there is a role that is going to be a role hired in mass volume that people generally are going to express interest in on a continuous basis, usually sourcing would not be needed for this. If you’re looking for a niche role, a higher level role, or if an open role isn’t attracting the quality of candidates you would like to see…you might need additional recruitment / sourcing.
  • In Leah’s situation, she is often times sourcing for diversity. Maybe there hasn’t been enough gender diversity come in for a role in the candidate pool.
  • "It’s really you’re seeking a specific need. That’s when you’re going to pull in sourcing for additional help." – Leah White
  • Nick had really only heard the term sourcing in the context of needing someone on the legal team to help with a specific request.
• Sourcers are not used across every organization because it’s an additional expense. Likely you would see sourcing on teams within larger organizations that have the budget for it or a specific need for it. Leah says you aren’t necessarily going to see sourcing at every organization across the industry.

7:14 – Defining Life Success

• Leah had a pre-determined set of honorable ventures to target when she was in school like engineering, medicine, or law.
• Leah began at the University of Oklahoma and was recruited there through a minority STEM recruitment program. Her focus was chemical engineering with a minor in pre-med "just in case."
• She even did an internship at Exxon.
• Leah had a friend (Miranda) who worked for the athletic housing department at the university. Miranda got Leah a job as a desk assistant, and she later would transfer to be a resident advisor.
  • The job was a lot of student management – checking to see if people were safe, adhering to the curfew, and in many ways almost acting as a bodyguard.
  • Leah really became more of an advisor to female underclassmen who were student athletes. This was really her first time working with students.
• Then life happened. Leah met her husband at the university. He played basketball, and when he graduated, he wanted to play overseas.
  • Leah and her husband moved to France and spent some time in Germany.
  • This wasn’t really something Leah had on her list of life plans.
  • While overseas Leah tried to figure out what she could do with her education. She found engineering wasn’t really an option there, but she was able to obtain a psychology minor during this time.
• After the time overseas, Leah and her husband relocated to Louisiana (his former home).
  • She decided to enroll at LSU (Louisiana State University). It was too tough to transfer credits from previous education there and would have taken much more time, so Leah went back to her list and chose to study in the medicine field (a kinesiology degree). She thought maybe sports medicine made sense.
  • Leah really enjoyed her work in this discipline. Her husband had started coaching a club team, and Leah found herself once again working with students.
  • Leah acted more as a mentor to younger students. She handled the business end of things while her husband did the coaching.
• Life happened again. Leah had her first child, and at this point her life plan no longer made sense. She would not be able to do years in a medical program and take care of children.
  • Leah’s husband had to travel for his job, and she felt one parent needed to be home with the children.
  • Leah had to redefine what success would look like for her and her family in such a way that she would not miss out on non-negotiables like time with the kids (being at their school programs, games, etc.).
  • Leah started to look at opportunities that she could pursue even if her family relocated.
  • After researching, Leah got her first exposure to real recruitment at the University of Phoenix.
  • She initially enrolled in an MBA program at the University of Phoenix. But she really enjoyed recruitment and was recruiting students, attending career fairs, and working on curriculum development. The focus was on adult students who were looking for a new career (i.e. their first career did not work out).
  • Leah could identify with the students because she too had some twists and turns that changed what she had planned to do originally.
  • Leah was advising students on career and encouraged them to think about the careers that would fit within their desired lifestyle. She was truly an advocate for the students and felt very fulfilled seeing the students she had helped eventually graduate.
• Nick likes the way Leah continually defined success professionally but also personally, thinking of it more as life success. And she kept iterating on that.

13:32 – The Identity Crisis and a Mindset Shift

• Did Leah get training when entering recruitment, and did her previous experience actually make her qualified to do it?
• Certainly Leah received some training when she went into recruitment, but what made her successful was more about earning trust than getting someone to believe in a product or service.
  • When someone enrolled, Leah genuinely believed they did so because of their trust in her and because of the research she had done with that person. She was an advocate for that person.
  • In the case of some students it was not the best fit or the right time for them.
  • Leah feels like she still served in an advisory capacity and leveraged her previous experience as a resident advisor to help.
• John says when he abandoned his first college major it was pretty traumatic. It should not have been in retrospect, but he sees it now through the wisdom of distance. Leah had multiple changes to navigate in her studies yet still was able to define success on a personal level.
  • Leah says it really wasn’t an easy thing. She had to rely on her faith. To that point she was someone who had been successful at everything she had done as a student.
  • She was picked as most likely to succeed and had a bunch of plans that just didn’t work out.
  • Leah was the only freshman from University of Oklahoma to land an internship at Exxon and felt she was really achieving some great things.
  • Moving from one path to another for Leah was about evaluating what was more important. Her husband was pursuing a career in playing professional basketball that really had a shelf life and couldn’t really ask him to wait on her.
  • "But I knew there were other things that I could be successful at, and that was a compromise we had to make as a family." – Leah White
  • Leah had a little bit of an identity crisis as many people do in these types of situations. But it was a clear decision, especially when they had children because the one thing she was not going to sacrifice was time with them.
    • It wasn’t going to be a situation where her husband was playing overseas / in another state and someone would have to come take care of the children. She didn’t want to tell her kids she wouldn’t be there for a recital or to help with homework. It was a clear decision.
  • "I had to just really have a different mindset in what success would look like for my family because it would no longer be just my personal success." – Leah White
• Did Leah have s