Career Path Of A Recruiter At Walden Recruiting

This is a good question. I pretty much spent my summer and winter vacations as a bank teller at Washington Trust Bank until I earned my bachelor's degree in legal studies from Pacific Lutheran University in the Tacoma area.

Then, I attended Arizona State University for law school, wanting to become a lawyer. However, I decided it was too confrontational. So, during my third year, I was accepted into the MBA program at Arizona State and completed it for my third year. The fourth year, I did both. I graduated with both a JD and an MBA from Arizona State University in 1994.

After taking the summer off for waterskiing, I started at Allstate Insurance as a claims adjuster in January 1995. I didn't really use my background then. In 1994 Spokane, Washington, it was difficult to find a business role with my JD, as employers assumed I would quit to become a lawyer after passing the bar exam.

I was a bodily injury and property damage adjuster for about three years at Allstate Insurance. I was actually ranked number one on the entire West Coast for claim settlements all three years.

My future wife, who was from Long Island, wanted to move back to the East Coast. We packed up and moved to Massachusetts, starting our first jobs there. I worked as a contract attorney, while she worked. During the daytime, we both worked at the IRS as tax examiners.

In March 1998, I got my first tech job as a business process engineer and technology consultant. I started at Cohesive Technology Solutions, then moved to KPMG, a Big Four accounting firm, in their financial advisory services practice. I did that for about two years, earning $6,000 to $8,000 a year.

A headhunter friend of my brother-in-law offered me a new role. I literally doubled my salary to $130,000 by switching jobs. However, there was a layoff about nine months to a year later.

Then, through another recruiter, I joined De Novus, a healthcare claims adjudication engine. De Novus reduced the cost per claim from $11 down to $1. This was great until they had another layoff, around April of 2001 or 2002.

I couldn't find a job afterward due to the dot-com bust. I finally got a job as a mortgage representative at East West Mortgage in the Boston area. I quickly rose to become the number two or three top producer for mortgage deals every month for about two or three years.

I then moved to a couple of other mortgage companies because I was fed up with East West Mortgage. It was a very toxic environment; they should have their own reality show.

That's when I got into recruiting. The person who placed me at De Novus, Larry Conn at NDT, told me he had made six placements based on my referrals and asked if I'd like to work for him, as I had a great network. I agreed and spent a year with Larry at NDT.

I then moved to Hoffman Recruiters in downtown Boston in November 2007 and stayed for about a year. Both NDT and Hoffman Recruiters were very toxic environments.

So, I decided to start my own recruiting firm, Walden Recruiting, as a full-time tech recruiter, which I did continuously until around 2014 or 2015. After that, I worked on a few startups. I launched a cannabis social network called Social High, which became very popular with 32,000 users in 72 countries within a few months. It folded because the CEO mismanaged the funds.

I then did charity check-ins and a bunch of other tech startups. I got back into commercial roles, working as a recruiting manager at SharpSpring in Gainesville, and then as a commercial outbound sales rep in Gainesville, Florida. It was hard to make money there as an older person, with so many students willing to do the same work for half the price.

I decided to move back to Boston. I started as a recruiter for Stop and Shop for a modest $35 an hour. This got me in the door, as I had been laid off from Infinite Energy after moving up there. I did that for about a year, then switched to a contract role at Double Engineering for about 10 weeks.

After that, I went full-time with Scient, the world's fastest data warehouse and real-time analytics software company, in April 2022. I was very proud of the work I did there. I filled 84 full-time roles and hired 30 software engineer interns out of 6,000 college student applications in just nine months in 2022. Unfortunately, the sales team failed to meet revenue goals, and they had a layoff in November 2023.

I looked for work for about three months. I started with my old friend, MJ Langle, at Visit, an AI e-commerce software startup in the Boston area. I worked 40 hours a week there and absolutely loved it. I wanted to retire there, as I'd known MJ for 17 years, and it was a natural fit. She gave me a lot of autonomy, which was great.

Unfortunately, the sales team failed to meet revenue goals for 2024, leading to a big layoff in January 2025. I've been looking for another internal role since, but I'm also doing work with Walden Recruiting. I'm currently working on a few jobs for a friend's client company, as he's not a tech recruiter.