Tami Reiss

Six months ago, shortly after I left a bad employment situation, I contacted my friend Andrew Warner to help me find “my new home”. He connected me with many entrepreneurs and people throughout the Los Angeles tech scene. One of the first lunches I went on through an Andrew connection was with Eric Stephens who then was at Mahalo and is now at Etsy. Eric encouraged me to start a blog about all the cool companies and people I would be exposed to which is how Tami’s Network was created. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Eric for doing so, as blogging (even if you update as infrequently as I have) has been truly fun. My blog has been read by some really well known CEOs and CTOs as part of my interview process for part time work over the past few months. It was an opportunity to show people that although I was fresh, I had some idea of what was going on.

Now I will tell the story of how connections and networking got me my new position as the Associate Project Manager on the Technical Consulting team at Cornerstone on Demand (a Talent Management Software as a Service company in Santa Monica). I will be referencing points I made in other posts to show how no individual networking technique created this opportunity, but a combination of many (yes I know there are a lot of hyperlinks, but it’s to make a point).

I was called two weeks ago an acquaintance of mine who is the Assistant Director of HR at the company called me about the position. She said to me the CEO remembered working with me on a small project a few years back and that she remembered when I had volunteered to run her sister’s kitchen for a charity event. They both were impressed with my organizational skills, my calm in a fast paced stressful environment, and ability to talk to people at many levels. These are skills they felt would be helpful with their needs and because the CEO had seen me recently he wanted to check in to see if I was available to apply. I spent a week interviewing for the position, and know it would not have been mine had I not been sure to send thank you emails every step along the way.

Also, I am quite sure that I would not have been as strong of a candidate without spending the last six months learning as much as I could about technology per recommendations from Mark Geller (of Klickfu) among others. With this encouragement I have invested the last three months working under the dream team of Mike Jones, Mike Macadaan, and Sean Percival at Tsavo Media. I have learned so much in such a short time because they and the rest of the Tsavo team are so bright and were always happy to spend an extra minute to explain all aspects of our products and sites to me. Thank you.

Now for the new job, what does an Associate Project Manager on the Technical Consulting team at Cornerstone on Demand do? And how does this fit into my career experience and goals? At CoD I will be facilitating conversations between our clients and our programmers during the sale and implementation of the product. I will help understand the needs of the customers and various users and then work with our technical team to create tailor made talent management solutions in a very timely manner.  The company provides a Software as a Service, meaning everything is web-based (the future for everything technological), and is recognized as a leader in the field of human capital management. I will be drawing on my experiences both at Farmers in product development and my years in event planning to help me prioritize, juggle, and come up with the best solutions for every problem I am presented. Cornerstone has an amazing track record with their clients (98% retention) and staff (95% retention) so I should be there for the foreseeable future. There’s tons of room for growth and they have me on a great career trajectory within the company already. I am really excited to start this new chapter.

Now for some other questions:

Will I be moving back to Santa Monica? As great as being walking/biking distance to work would be, I’m going to hold off  at least until my lease is done at Casa de Flores and save up some money so that when I move I can outfit my new apartment/home with some pretty cool stuff.

Will I continue to blog? Of course! But only with big updates, I have twitter for the little stuff. I’ve been toying with the idea of changing the blog into a challenge to see if there are 6 degrees of separation from Tami. Sort of a give me a person’s name and if I can’t figure out how we’re connected within 6 degrees I’ll give you a $100. But I think I’m going to hold off because I’m going to be a little busy.

What about the Iphone apps? They are doing great, please check out the website over the next few weeks. After some beta testing we realized some problems needed to be addressed and are working on them right now. Within the next two weeks we will be submitting them to Apple. Jamie Diamond will be helping me develop a PR pitch and will promote them with me during the initial launch. I have decided to blog about the experience of developing the apps and will be having a daily or weekly update on the sales and profitability of the 11 apps. No one seems to have done this, and everyone wants to know, so I’ve decided to tell them. One of them will be free (ObamaTrax) but ad supported, so we will get to test how price impacts number of installations and whether through ads the app will still deliver revenue. The other app that I hope will gain a large amount of popularity is IphoneTrax, which will be a blogregator for Iphone related business and technology news; it’s the app that every Iphone user needs. The other 9 apps are also blogregators but focus on celebrities such as Tween Stars and Pop Stars. I’m hoping to make back my investment with them and make some extra money to potentially develop some more of them for sports teams and dynamic ones that will allow people to choose what they want to blogregate. It would also be nice to be able to take some of the profits and purchase a home in the LA area (but that’s more of a dream situation).

That’s all for now.