Working For Silicon Valley While Drinking Sangria In Spain-How I Got My Job
How did you get your job? These days - with technology and social media so rapidly changing the way we connect with the world around us - many of us have nonlinear or somewhat unexpected career paths.
Often we feel rooted to our lives and jobs at home, but this week, we heard from a woman who has us itching to explore work abroad. Liz Peterson is a recruiter at ezhome -- a home services startup is based in Silicon Valley -- she gets to do her job from Barcelona (yeah, we’re jealous too).
How did she shift from her previous position at Dropbox in San Francisco to working for a startup while drinking Sangria on the beach in Spain? Here’s her story:
In 2014 I was happily working at Dropbox in San Francisco when my fiancé got a job offer for a role based in Barcelona. We'd both talked about living abroad, so when the opportunity came knocking, we knew we had to take it!
Fast forward to end of 2015, I'd made the move to Barcelona, but wasn't sure what I was going to do for work. As is the cliché, I did some traveling, did some blogging, and then settled down doing some freelancing on Upwork. Within a couple of months I got a message from Spiros Xanthos (ezhome's CEO and co-founder) stating that he was looking to find a recruiter for his Silicon Valley, VC-funded, tech-enabled home services startup.
I checked out the company, which, at the time, looked like "Uber for Gardening" -- and figured it wouldn't hurt to have an interview. I quickly learned that ezhome's mission is much greater than on-demand gardening both in terms of its scope and social impact, which is extremely important to me as a recruiter. Within a couple of months of doing project-based work, Spiros and I determined that it could work to have a remote recruiter for our global recruiting efforts and I joined ezhome full time!
So now I have the fairytale life: I work for a Series B funded, Silicon Valley startup while basking on the beach sipping Sangria.
In reality, I work in a co-working space during the week and save the beach and Sangria for the weekends, but all in all, it's been a very happy ending.
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How did you get your job? We want to hear your story! To be profiled in this series, email [email protected] with your name, company, job title and a description of how you ended up where you are now.
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