It is peak summer here at the moment, a great time to be unemployed I suppose. Last week it hit 40 degrees and today is uncommonly humid. But I digress.
Today marked a day where I could let out one of my biggest sighs of relief ever. Let me tell you why...
So back in October I was told that most of the BlackBerry Australia office would be let go. I was offered a position in Singapore or could take a redundancy package with a few benefits to help us move back to Canada.
This essentially left us with 3 options:
- Take the job in Singapore
- Take the redundancy package and relocate back to Canada (or move to another country)
- Find a job locally and get the employer sponsor on my long term visa transferred to a new sponsor (within 90 days - before the conditions of employment for the visa were in violation)
I was determined to make option 3 work, but it was the hardest of the available options for a variety of reasons. Mainly because it is hard enough to find a job, but then finding someone willing to sponsor you and doing it within 90 days with Christmas literally around the corner
So this is what I did to give it my best shot at giving us a fighting chance.
I networked. I networked like I've never networked before. I can confidently say I have a higher caliber network in Australia from the last 3 months than I did in all my time in Canada, mostly out of dire necessity. So, who did I network with? I had a meeting with Canadian Consulate, people from all levels in all sorts of industries (1:1's with CEO's, Senior Managers, Directors, Influencers and the well connected), 4-5 recruiters and everyone in between.
During this time I had recruiters telling me that no one was willing to take on the burden of sponsorship right now. I also had a few dead leads where there was slim to no chance of anything positive coming out of it.
However, during this time I had a lot of support from a lot of good people, people willing to open up their contact list to me, people willing to have an informational interview, people introducing me to others in the hopes they could help.
I had custom designed personal business cards shipped rush order from Reena in Montreal to take to interviews and hand out at meet and greets. I also coupled the networking with dozens of job applications, some to companies I've never heard of. I also started spending time on LinkedIn like a 13 year old girl would on Facebook. I upgraded my account and proceeded to add 150+ connections
in the span of 4 weeks in order to get the widest group to network with. The objective being to come up more in search results, news feeds and so on.
Then I tried to post interesting articles to get higher profile views. Which sort of worked:
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| LinkedIn profile views as of mid October |
Then all that effort seemed to have started to pay off. I got 3 interviews with 3 different companies in the same week I was signing redundancy papers at Blackberry. That was a busy week to say the least.
I was buying new shirts just for interviewing, and getting more wear out of my suits in a month than Indian wedding season in UK.
I even had an interview with a fellow Laurier alumni - class of '87 (now a CFO at a pharmaceutical CRO company based out of Sydney). I had offers to interview with companies who specialize in making Poker machines and pay very well. Both were good opportunities but not my cup of tea.
One time I had an interview with someone in Ireland for a position in Sydney. The recruiter asked me to attend at the recruitment agency office because it would be over Skype, so I turn up in a suit. Turned out to just be a regular telephone interview, which the recruiter already knew. Was so frustrating and big waste of my time. Sensing my frustration, the recruiter said its more professional when you wear a suit for a telephone interview. Bullshit.
And after all that, I ended up getting a job offer from the very first company I interviewed with (after 2 interviews and some on the spot business case testing). However, despite having a job offer in hand it was no time to celebrate. Now came the next crucial step, trying to get the 457 long term work visa transferred from BlackBerry to my new employer. Unfortunately doing so is completely handled by the new company, their lawyers and the government. I was given a time frame of 4-6 weeks processing time, however with Christmas in between and usual slow processing times at government organizations, it took closer to 2 months. During which time I had no way to directly escalate, get updates or inquire. So was left reliant on updates from the company. In the end they created a business case for an urgent approval of the visa transfer request. The application was approved the same day they decided to open my file, probably in a matter of hours. 2 months of waiting was solved in a matter of hours, that is bureaucracy for you. Its ironic because they could have been collecting taxes on all that lost income due to the time wasted while I waited.
The hardest part of all of this was the waiting without knowing. It was incredibly frustrating every time a friend of family member called and asked the same question for the billionth time. Spending a prolonged period of time not know if you'll be starting work next week or having to move to another country can be extremely stressful. There are only so many things you can do to keep your mind occupied when really important decisions are out of your realm of control.
Alas, it is with great pleasure I announce that the visa transfer has finally been approved. My new manager called me to give me the news today , and then asked when would be convenient to start, I said "see you in the morning".
And where will I be working? There is a clue in this post somewhere. Or you could call me and ask.
