What a Compliment!

The other day, my boyfriend told me I looked like this photo from this Buzzfeed list:

What a compliment, and on so many levels! The outrageously gorgeous Victorian woman, the lion cub, the enormous hat, the revealing skirts, you strumpet!

Anyway, that made me really happy, and I just wanted to post a short little thing noting that I have added "About Me" and "Contact Info" tabs. I wanted to revamp the layout a bit here, but that is unfortunately going to have to be a task for another evening. 

Please follow, please share, please keep in touch if we are loving friends living on separate continents.

What a Year of Recruiting Has Taught Me

I am a recruiter. Recruiter, headhunter, talent-acquisition specialist, whatever. Although, that last one seems to mostly apply to modeling firms and people who scout for commercials in Wal-Mart. I recruit professionals for a living.

Luckily, I work for a recruiting startup based out of the San Francisco Bay Area. It is a visible-tattoos and flip-flops sort of office. I doubt I would have lasted this long (one year and counting) at one of the big recruiting agencies; nor "in-house," unless I really liked the company. Not to mention, commissions-based work rules for part-time workers. I make an okay living, and am always rested and eating well. I get to do things I actually enjoy, like pursue a career in writing. I let my gym membership expire, since I do not need to make up for spending most of my waking life sitting on my ass.

Nonetheless, I have put in a more than a couple hours in this field. I would not be opposed to continue working as a recruiter in the future, even if it means making coffee and combing my hair at six in the morning. Maybe.

Here we go...

A Novice Recruiter's Advice and Insights for the Workforce:

Recruiters are the gatekeepers to much of your future earnings. Not enough can be said about good connections and hard work, but your application to a good job will very likely fall into the hands of a recruiter at one point or another. For a big leg up in the business world, learn why they exist and what they do.

Hiring Managers do not sit down and look at hundreds and hundreds of resumes. This is something I was told a lot in high school: that you need to stand out because there is no way the hiring manager, who needs to go through 500 resumes and spends .3 seconds on each, will notice you otherwise. This is a boldface LIE. For professional roles that require skills, experience, education and pay above minimum wage, hiring managers look at five to forty resumes for any one position. It is the recruiter's job to actually read hundreds of resumes a day, pick out the best ones, then verify that they are true. Your resume is meant to impress recruiters as much as hiring managers. It is your proven abilities to deliver results and your capability to talk about them that impresses hiring managers.

That "one-page" resume rule only applies to actual made-of-trees paper. I have seen as many fifteen-page resume tomes as the next recruiter, but hear me out. The truth is, so much of what we do is on computers, is on Monster and LinkedIn and Indeed, that we do not mind a four or five page resume as long as it is relevant. Recent graduates may do well to stick to the one-page rule. After you have a page's worth of actual experience, take off that paragraph-long description of your duties as a sorority sister or doing beach clean-up in high school.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be the goal of your basic resume. This, too, is because so much recruiting happens on the internet these days. SEO is evidence of a shift in the industry since the days of old-school headhunters thumbing through phone books and lying through their teeth just to get some sexy contact information. Most recruiting today is done online via the information candidates post there, and is found by doing newfangled boolean searching. If you have used Salesforce or Oracle, know a coding language, or had an internship at an enormous corporation, put it on your resume! Spell it correctly! Multiple times, if possible!

Do not be cute, unless you are a video game developer. I will never work with a writer who calls him or her self a "wordsmith." Do not use exclamation points either, ever. You get one per year. I realize I used three in the last paragraph, but this is a blog entry, not your financial future. Do not use Comic Sans or Lucinda Handwriting. Do not use the words "I," "you," or anything that otherwise deviates from the third person. The only people who can help themselves by being creative with their resumes are graphic designers, marketing professionals, and interactive media artists.

Never stop learning- formally, if possible. It makes me sad to see "Classes toward X major" from the nineties on resumes. I know life happens, but try your very best to finish what you start. And after you finish, start something else. Learn how to do pivot tables and vlookups on Excel. If you are an engineer, learn the latest version of Pro-E even though your current role uses Solidworks. If you are in IT, get that Windows 7 Certification (I know it costs like $150 and only lasts two years, but that thing is in demand). If you are unemployed, have something to say for it. Write a book. Volunteer. Go for that CPA or CPM certification.

Learn what a screening is. Recruiters perform screenings, which are not interviews. In a typical screening, we get a lot of the basic stuff out of the way for a hiring manager. We make sure you are okay with the commute, the contract length, the pay rate, and things like that. We assess if there will be issues with background checks or drug screenings. On a higher level, we try to assess that you hit every part of a job description. Where a hiring manager may be able to talk to a Software Development candidate about C++ in-depth, we will merely try to find out how much you have used it and where. Screenings are a little bit more casual than interviews, but that does not mean you should curse or yell at your kids during one.

Like sales, a solid piece of a recruiter's income is in commissions. If a recruiter screens you and wants to submit you, remember they have a stake in your success too. If you get hired, part of the fee the recruiting company charges for its services goes to the recruiter (or recruiters) who found you. Good recruiters want to build good relationships with good candidates.

We delete your contact information. I did not know this, but now it seems sort of obvious. We contact you, and we do not want anyone on our clients' ends contacting you and stripping us of that markup for our services, which is where our profits and commissions come from. So, we take your contact information, references, and any other phone numbers or emails off your resume before sending it out to the hiring team.

It is a hard, cold, racist, sexist, and age-discriminating world out there. This merits an entry of its own. My impression is that it is a lot of passing the buck: recruiters blame hiring managers, hiring managers blame recruiters, liberals blame the culture, conservatives blame anyone who speaks with an accent.

It is a hard, cold, judgmental world in smaller ways too. A lot of recruiters hate seeing holes on resumes, but some would rather not know you were a homemaker for five years. For some reason, it is okay to talk at length about your church or religious activities in just about any industry, but you most often need to be reserved about volunteering at gay pride parades, feminist conferences, and just about anything political.

Be up-front with your background, but do not disparage who you are. I hate calling someone about a junior accounting position and hearing them say "No one likes me because I'm just in accounts payable/ have no corporate experience/ no Bachelor's degree, boo hoo." Do not lie, but do be confident! Would I, as a recruiter, feel good about you representing me in an interview?

Looking to immigrate to the United States? Be wary of exclusively corp-to-corp firms. Skilled professionals moving to the United States should advertise those skills, but need to be aware of how many entities want to take advantage of them. H1B Visas, or any variant on company sponsorship, does not guarantee an eventual green card. It may guarantee money, and more employment. Unfortunately, a lot of that employment will involve paying professionals at less than half of their profession's market rate.

Be wary of any recruiting firm that hesitates in its transparency. Look, recruiting firms exist for a lot of reasons. So corporations do not have to pay certain taxes by having all their workers on payroll. To take advantage of the uninformed. Sometimes, to make a profit providing a service that is in demand via honest means. If a recruiter calls you but refuses to answer any of your questions, politely ask why.

The recruiting industry is big and diverse, but a good relationship with a good recruiter pays off. The absolute majority of the time, an honest recruiting firm that contacts you has incentives aligned with your own. They only really get paid if you get a job, and the more you make, the more they make. Unless you are a direct hire, they are also working for your future payroll department. Finally, they will continue to find work for you if you are friendly and perform well.

This is already many times longer than I meant for it to be, but I would not mind writing more if this subject interests anyone.

If you were to have any take-away from this piece, have it be this: we are not freaking telemarketers! Give us the time of day, in a kind matter, and we can either help your career or never bother you again. What else could you want from a stranger cold-calling you?

Tips and Tricks for a Perfect Risotto

Risotto! Who doesn't love it? For some reason, risotto has a reputation of being time-consuming to cook and you will ruin it if your broth is lukewarm or if you leave the stove, even just to pick up the phone.

It really is not like that.

I made risotto for my first time about a year ago. I used long-grain rice, knowing that it would be a challenge, but otherwise went with a recipe similar to this one. The result was a taupe purple-gray, and took about 1.5 hours and sink full of dishes to complete. It tasted okay, but was not worth the effort.

Serendipitously, it was not long after that failed experiment that I met my boyfriend Matt. Matt is ridiculously good at making rice dishes. I still have not tried his paella, but if it is anything like his risotto, then I am one lucky girl.

Here are Matt's risotto tips! Although he made the risotto you see in the photos, he walked me through my own risotto just a few weeks ago. The worst thing about my second risotto ever was that it was a little too buttery.  And honestly, when that is the worst part of your meal... the situation cannot be half bad.

Our caramelized pear & bleu cheese risotto:

I am not providing a recipe here, just to be clear! We bought special short grain rice and blue cheese for this particular risotto, just because we were bringing it to a potluck, but all you really need is any rice (preferably short grain), a little veg like onion, and cheese (although vegans are free to say and do otherwise).

Tip #1: Risotto is an elegant way to clean out the fridge.

The Ingredients. Nescafe is not one of them.

Invited a hot date to your place for dinner tonight? But you don't have anything to cook, just rice! And an onion, half a zucchini, and some parmesan cheese. Oh, and that leftover brie cheese you had with that bottle of wine yesterday. And butter and olive oil, of course. Guess what you are making.

Tip #2: Get into a homemade broth habit.

What I mean by this is to start making your own broth. All you have to do is save all your vegetable clippings in a container in the fridge or freeze- onion skins, zucchini ends, lettuce stubs, overly dry herbs, anything like that. You can even add hard cheese rinds. If you eat meat, you can save the carcass of a chicken dinner to make chicken stock, among many other stock and broth techniques. Vegetarian or otherwise, this is a very easy ingredient to make and the flavor is incomparable.

Homemade or not, heat your broth before you start your risotto, then set it aside. It does not need to be boiling at all times, but your risotto will cook much faster and more evenly with hotter broth.

Our broth is cloudy because we made pasta the night before, and we added a cup of starchy water to it.

Future broth.

Tip #3: Chop your onions as finely as possible.

TWICE as fine as this.

Those little guys cannot be finely chopped enough! Tiny pieces of onion will contribute wonderfully to the texture of your risotto. Matt’s brother, who lived in Italy for four years, always tells him to cut his onions smaller and smaller.

Tip #4: While sautéing your onions and/or garlic in oil, sauté the rice as well.

There is a good 1/4 cup of olive oil in this rice.

Sauté whichever vegetables you mean to cook for the entire duration of the risotto- onions, garlic, mushrooms, squashes, and some herbs should be added here. In Chile, rice is always sautéed in oil before water is added to the pot. Matt actually sautés the rice before adding the onions. In any case, let the rice absorb a good amount of oil, but do not let it brown!

Tip #5: Stirring is your first priority from here on out.

This does not mean you need to stir constantly. The most important thing is to make sure all of the rice gets an equal amount of heat, and does not even get the chance to stick together. Another thing to watch for is pieces of rice and vegetables that stick to the higher walls of your pan or pot. Make sure those get pushed back in. A figure-eight style of stirring works well.

Bear all of this in mind through the very end, and keep the rice moving as much as possible in the early stages. However, after you start adding cupfuls of broth, you can just give the risotto a good stir every minute or so, and it will be just fine.

Tip #6: Make sure all of that alcohol burns off.

Good Chilean wine is so cheap, we drink and cook with the same bottle.

Before you even start adding that broth, remember this fun step. Do not be afraid to pour plenty of white wine into the rice at this point, and do not worry about heating the wine up beforehand either. Just burn off all of the excess liquid, and the flavor will stay in harmony with the rest of the dish. Red wine is trickier due its color, as I learned via error. You can also use Chilean Pisco instead of wine, if you find it in the imports section of a liquor store. If you have been to Chile or Perú, you probably already know about this grape brandy as it is everywhere.

Pisco Alto de Carmen runs like water in Chile, and Trader Joe's has its own brand too.

(sources: Weinquelle and WineHarlots, respectively)

Tip #7: Butter has flexible timing.

You can use butter for your initial sauté, or add it for the creamy, salty taste as you go along. Make sure it does not burn. This is all we added for this risotto:

Most of the liquid in this photo is wine.

Tip #8: Add the broth one cup/ ladle/ spoonful/ splash at a time.

Whatever instrument you prefer to add broth with is fine. Stir the rice, watch it absorb the liquid, then add more broth. Try not to lose the boil- check for those bubbles. Taste it as it starts to look done. Put in just a tiny bit more broth than you think you need at the end. Your risotto will keep absorbing it after the heat is turned off.

Our starchy broth yielded an uncontrollably creamy risotto, which was still good! I would suggest using starch water in risotto, although I doubt we will try mixing starch with our broth again. They may be interchangeable as an ingredient, but they are just not that versatile when combined.

Tip #9: Add remaining ingredients and cheese at the very end.

Before turning that heat off, add any ingredients that did not need to be sautéed and cooked back in Tip #4. For us, that was the caramelized pears. Raisens, tomatoes, rosemary, and other fruit and herbs work well at this point too.

We caramelized the pears while making the rest of the risotto.

And of course: cheese! Matt believes it is never necessary to add cream to risotto- just use a creamy cheese. I am not sure to what extent this belief is founded in fact or tradition, but there it is, and I agree with it. We used roughly chopped bleu cheese in large chunks. We used a little fresh parmesan as well, but our starch-broth had already made our risotto as creamy as it needed to be.

Tip #10: Serve to your loved ones as side, or as an entrée with a nice veggie dish.

At this point we were running late for the potluck, so a pretty picture of the plated dish was out of the question. Here it is though:

Too tardy and hungry for a good photo.

It tasted incredible too, very rich. I may have had too much fun at the potluck to take any pictures, but here is a bad selfie to make up for it:

*     *     *

That’s that! Feel free to comment with any other tips and tricks you know about risotto. I am not exactly the recipe-using type, but some risottos I would love to try include this sweet strawberry risotto or this fancy truffle concoction. My favorite online cooking inspiration, Thug Kitchen, even posted a vegan whole-food risotto recipe recently.

I love cooking, which is a fairly recent development in my life. The biggest thing that led me to this hobby, aside from the presence of cheap quality ingredients in Chile, was an unwillingness to view any delicious thing as "difficult," just "demanding of more attention," or something like that. 

Taxi Driver Questions

I am not surprised I spent a week deciding what my first real blog entry should be. Then, it hit me like a ton of bricks... or like how taxi drivers almost hit bike commuters on a regular basis here in Chile.

My boyfriend calls these the Taxi Driver Questions. I am asked them almost every time I open my mouth here. For the first month, I loved them. Talking about yourself in the simplest verb tenses of another language is edifying. For the next year, I hated them. Is no there no creative way to get to know a person on this planet, or at least in this city? Now, I just answer them.



¿De donde eres tú?

I'm from California. I'm also from the United States, but I do appreciate being from a state that often helps skip this middleman:

¿De que parte?

Los Angeles. Anyone who is from anywhere near Los Angeles knows that Long Beach is not Los Angeles, but that's okay.

¿Que haces en Chile? Eres Estudiante?

Hell no. Just workin' for peanuts at otherwise better jobs than I could ever get Stateside.

¿Pero por qué Chile?

Good question. It's actually my favorite. My father is Chilean, I visited a few times growing up, and it was always a presence in my life like any specter of identity first-generationers are bound to feel. Who knows if I ever would have been here if that had not been the case? Can I have even been without it being the case?

Anyway, what I actually say is...

I arrived for a South American vacation with a good friend before Christmas 2012. Within a month, I realized there was some sort of opportunity in front of me. Just that much. But I got a job in a bar, started learning vocabulary like arriendo and garantía, and everything fell into place from there. On that front, it bears mentioning that my dual nationality has helped out.

¿Cuando llegaste?

Over a year ago. This question is boring, unless the answer is one week or ten years.

¿Y te gusta Chile?

NO.

...sarcasm translates into Spanish just as poorly as it translates over the internet, and do I miss it! Of course I like Chile, that's why I'm here. I would wager that's why the majority of foreigners are here. Those aren't the interesting stories though, and maybe that's why taxi drivers ask these questions anyway.




Do Taxi Driver Questions happen to other foreigners in other foreign places? I really don't know, this is my first time experiencing this perspective. And, hey, as long as it makes for an easy start to a new blog, I'm not complaining.

Statement of Purpose, or A Brief History of My Blogs

This is the fifth blog I have tried to start.

The first was a Xanga, but whose wasn't?

I still use the second, although only six or so close friends are allowed to view it, and we have a decade-long close friendship based around it. 

The third was a Tumblr of this same name, which was intended to have a literary theme, but I misunderstood my own interest in the Tumblr community from day one.

The fourth was a beer and travel blog, and I am happy with its three entries. It was put to rest by two things:

(1)

I moved to Chile. I'm not traveling, just living.

(2)

I know a little bit about beer. I know jack shit about all there is to know about beer.

No, your MySpace blog posts and Facebook "notes" don't count, and neither do mine. I don't have a good reason for this assessment, other than that they're lazy venues.

So, fifth time's the charm? It doesn't need to be a charm, but it's something! Especially because I am abandoning all pretense of a theme. So, this is me:

Seriously, this is me about one minute ago.

But I also have an ex-brace-face smile that just screams, "That chick's not wearing a bra, which is sort of hot. But I don't think she's taken a shower recently."

It's true.

Over the past few weeks, I have had a few writing ideas that are suitable for nothing but a personal blog: lists and rants, hobby musings and thoughts on living abroad, insights into cooking and biking and alcohol other all the other hip nonsense that I love. I am just starting to land a freelance writing job here and there, and I hope I produce something- anything- that has its own link for those darn "samples."

So, enjoy this first entry while it still cusses about boobs and beer!

Here's a Photobooth picture of me using the 'Frog' feature: