Kiel Henry spent two months working with a recruiter and applying online for jobs at more than 50 companies before he landed a systems administrator position at SingleHop, a fast-growing Chicago data center and web-hosting company.
Henry, a 29-year-old Batavia native, took advantage of an irony of today’s job-seeking environment: He combined an aggressive email strategy with an equally outgoing habit of telling friends he was looking for a job. He found out about SingleHop from a friend at a bachelor party, called the company to get the chief operating officer’s email address and eventually found out about SingleHop’s hiring open house through Reddit.com, a social news website where users generate links.
“I saw on Reddit that SingleHop was promoting a “meet and greet” at Goose Island. I thought, ‘What’s it going to hurt to show up there? That was my first interview for the job,” said Henry, who earned a bachelor’s in networking and network security from the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Ariz., and is pursuing a master’s in computer information and network security at DePaul University.
Henry learned that job openings often aren’t posted on company websites, and that it pays to be what he deems “shameless” in contacting executives at companies that look like good places to work.
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