Sr. Recruiter - I build the teams that build the satellites. Recruiting Truth Teller & Mythbuster. Somehow, LinkedIn Top Voice 2022

Recruiting Manager - Amazon Leo
Job Search Strategist - www.recruiterauntie.com
YouTube Creator - AMA Friday with Amy Miller

***I work at Amazon, but these comments and opinions are my own***

TL:DR - interested in roles with my company? The FASTEST PATH to consideration is to apply directly. You can also follow up with the recruiting team at amazonleojobs@amazon.com  

Read on for more "about me"!

After 20+ years in recruiting, hunting everything from truck drivers to CFOs, I'm currently a Recruiting Manager at Amazon Leo. I've spent the last several years in big tech (Microsoft / Google) after many years in various agencies learning how "real" recruiting is done. I'm passionate about client AND candidate experience, and I believe that good consulting sometimes looks like bad customer service.

Feel free to connect with me at amy@recruitinginyogapants.com. 

Looking for TEMPLATES and REFERRALS?

On my website www.recruiterauntie.com you'll find a link to Career Coaches and Resume Writers I personally recommend, as well as my Networking, Salary FAQ and Recruiter FAQ templates - all designed to help empower job seekers. 

Salary FAQs - how to address all things compensation at every stage of the recruiting/interviewing process

Recruiter FAQs - questions you can ask your recruiter at any part of the process

Networking - 3 way networking (Recruiters/Peers/Hiring Managers) insights and templates you can modify

Specialties: sourcing, recruiting, employment branding, blogging

Amy Miller

The notion that recruiters have to be experts in the field they recruit for is silly goose stuff. 

Y'all I promise you if I was a trained as a rocket scientist I'd be doing THAT. 

Full video drops tomorrow but enjoy this lil sneak peek!

Recruiting Manager - I build the teams that build the satellites. Recruiting Truth Teller & Mythbuster. Somehow, LinkedIn Top Voice 2022

Many moons ago I sat with a new (to me) hiring manager who had spent 25 years at our (at the time) employer. I was newly in role/company, and had been a bit of a job hopper prior. After we did all the usual introductions, what are you hiring for, etc I asked a very nosy question:

"Mike, you've been here for YEARS - what makes you stay? Aren't you BORED?"

(super tactful as always 🙃)

His answer surprised me and reframed my thinking in a huge way. 

He looked at  his career in 3 year sprints. He would take on a new project, move to a different team, start scaling a new idea - and commit for 3 years. If he was winding down that internal clock, he started looking both inside and out. If he was enjoying it and there was more to accomplish, he'd commit for another few years. He hadn't up to that point found an external opportunity that was as compelling as whatever new thing he was moving to inside.

He had lived so many professional lives without ever updating his work email address. 

It made me think of MY career in a whole new way. I ended up staying at that company longer than any other before - until now. As I am coming up on 6 years next week, I have lived several professional lives in that time. Huge thanks to that engineering manager who helped me see growth differently, and enabled me to give myself permission to find it right where I was.

Hot take -  Recruiters are not technical experts. Blaming them for that is missing the point.

Recruiters aren’t hired to *do* the job.
They’re hired to 𝙛𝙞𝙣𝙙 𝙥𝙚𝙤𝙥𝙡𝙚 𝙬𝙝𝙤 𝙘𝙖𝙣 - at scale, under pressure, with imperfect information.

The hiring manager owns technical depth.

The recruiter owns:
🎯  translating vague business needs into real humans
🎯 spotting patterns across hundreds of hires
🎯 keeping bias and ego from wrecking the process
🎯 making sure “non-traditional” candidates don’t get filtered out

If recruiters had to be experts in every role they touched, career pivots would disappear, transferable skills wouldn't count, and hiring would grind to a halt. Because we'd be doing YOUR job - not ours.

Your job as a candidate isn’t to out-smart the recruiter.
It’s to clearly show you can do the work the team needs done.

Watch here --> https://lnkd.in/gPfe5cYg
Because this myth is creating way more job search frustration than it deserves.

#RecruitingTruths #JobSearchAdvice #HiringReality #Careers #Recruiters #RecruitingAuntie #RecruitingInYogaPants

Spicy Saturday! This one’s gonna sting just a little.

I see this EVERY DAY on social media. 

“I worked so hard for X years!”

“I have so much experience in Y!”

“It’s not FAIR that I’m expected to cut down my resume!”

“Recruiters just want a unicorn!”

Y’all. I’m gonna hold your hand and get real close to you while I tell you this. 

Your. Resume. Is. NOT. About. YOU. 

Change your mindset on this. 

When you view your resume through the lens of a decision maker, you see it differently. 

Understand that the recruiter AND hiring manager share the same goal: identify enough of a fit that it warrants an interview. 

That’s it. 

You could be the world’s best baker, capable of the sweetest treats and the most elaborate cakes - but if the hiring manager is looking for BBQ?

It’s a no from them. 

Give the people what they WANT. 

Clear indicators through your background and accomplishments that you can solve their problems. 

What do they want? Got a long form video on that - How to read a resume like a hiring manager: https://lnkd.in/gki93yWB

Recruiters don’t guess your age.

I honestly can't think of a single recruiter who CARES how old you are.

A lot of folks worry about ageism. I get it. I'm over 50 so BELIEVE ME - I am well aware of the disparity between me, my peers, and my potential competition on the job market. 

Here's the thing - the REAL problem with your resume? It's not your AGE. It's your FRAMING.

Your resume is still doing things like:
🛑  Listing graduation dates
🛑 Showing 25+ years of roles in detail
🛑 Highlighting tools nobody uses anymore

Ageism is real in hiring. It's also a bigger issue well beyond the resume. How we show up in interviews, biases about our looks, (hahahaha I'm a woman you think I don't have that clocked???) you name it. I get it. BIG ISSUE.

But THIS week? I'm talking purely resumes.

A lot of people are getting screened out BEFORE that bias even has a chance to show up.

That’s what this video breaks down:
✔️ The resume signals that accidentally age you
✔️ What to remove (without erasing your credibility)
✔️ How to look experienced, current, and still learning

You are not “too old.”

But your resume might be stuck in a different decade. THAT part is fixable.

Watch here: https://lnkd.in/gJeFrafw

If you know someone who’s been told they’re “overqualified,” do them a favor and share this.

#RecruiterTruth #JobSearch #ResumeTips #Ageism #CareerAdvice #ExperiencedProfessionals #RecruiterAuntie

🎉 4 years at Amazon Devices & Services! Let's celebrate Natalie who's been hard at work hiring Mechanical Engineers AND Learning & Development Architects for our Amazon Leo recruiting team.

Natalie, THANK YOU for your hard work this year! You've seen lots of change (managers, business alignment, sourcing strategies) and handled it all with grace. Love working with you!!  

Want to join our team and work with awesome people like Natalie? Check us out: https://lnkd.in/gHrP-FQS

#TechRecruiting #WomenInTech #AmazonLife #Recruiting #TalentAcquisition

Spicy Saturday! 

Y’all are about to find out how many of your connections are suddenly experts in political science, international law, and special forces. 

🫣

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If there were such a thing as a perfect resume, you'd already have the template. Recruiters, hiring managers, coaches, ANYONE AND EVERYONE involved in hiring would all agree on it.

We don’t.

Because perfect resumes don’t exist.

What does exist?

Resumes that are clear, relevant, and good enough to start a conversation.

In this week's AMA Friday, I break down why chasing perfection keeps job seekers stuck - and what actually moves the needle with hiring authorities.

If you’re rewriting your resume for the eleventy billionth time wondering why you're STILL not getting calls… this one’s for you.

Watch here - https://lnkd.in/e6_n2rRu

RMCI, Inc.

Contract work for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Converting to an employee of RMCI effective 11 Dec 2023.

DevOps Implementor/Administrator

WellSky

Senior Software Engineer

Jack Henry & Associates

Focused on improving granularity of MSI deployment mechanism using WiX and implementing a merge/branching strategy to improve productivity. Replacing multi-feature installers with multi-installer Burn bundles.  Author several installers for new products. Introduce build improvements into the VS2010/TFS build environment. Working towards an end-to-end develop-build-deploy-test system. Implemented a local NuGet package feed. Created custom NuGet packages to support internal build needs. Implemented multi-branch source control structure with full forward and reverse integration.

Huron Consulting Group

Implemented a custom workflow activity to override the "Update Build Number" widget in the TFS 2010 "Default Template" to use a custom build number format.  Complete C# implementation with supporting unit tests and "mocked" BuildDetail testing environment.

Recomended changes to the source control system and recommended use of branching to avoid code freezes that block developer productivity for extended periods.

Diagnosed and recommended changes to build definitions and build agent configurations that severely limited developer productivity and blocked multi-configuration buidls and the use of features like gated check-in builds and true continuous integration builds.

Build Manager

Microsoft

Shipped Opalis 6.3

The System Center Cross Platform & Interop team.  Strong, motivated and results-oriented build engineer with experience in building products on various Windows and UNIX platforms including Solaris, Linux etc. Challenging and key role in the release management of products. Challenges include supporting parallel product development, integration and testing, requiring the individual to be able to work closely with the development and QA teams.

Builder 2

Creating, maintaining and improving build agents and build flavors, maintaining the build server, build tools, automation for integrating security tools in the build, integrating automation for deployment in a TFS 2008 / and soon in a TFS 2010, enabling build reporting, integrating test automation in the post-deployment, working with BGIT, emailing tasks for two big projects.

Improving the quality of our build system by writing tools, build targets , automation and deployments… checking for the bugs in the nightly build and CI, working with the dev and test team for automating more deployment tasks.

Worked on updating a WiX-based Installer.  Converted scripts based on WiX v1 and WiX v2 to version 3.

Software Design Engineer / Test

FreeBSD

Volunteer Maintainer for a number of Ada ports.  Work entails patching the underlying port and then creating a build environment compatible with the FreeBSD Ports Tree.  Also perform frequent "world" builds to test out new patches and features and to track the -STABLE branch.

Maintainer

Contractor under Volt Technical Resources.  Migrated all team builds from MESE to BuildTracker.  Adapted all the Zune scripts for use with the Experiences tree.  Wrote all the scripts for the PMX tree.  Six builds with between four and seventeen variants were run in official (once per day on change), rolling (multiple times per day on change), and buddy (on demand with a user-supplied pack of changes to the enlistment to test).  Also worked on zip, MSI, and WiX build kits.  Also setup a bidirectional mirror between TFVC and Source Depot enlistments with integrations at five minute intervals across the mirrors (the mirrors were physically located in Japan and the U.S.).

Note:  Source Depot is a Microsoft licensed version of Perforce.

Builder

Baltimore County Public Schools

Taught five sections of Algebra I to 9-12th graders.

High School Math Teacher

Cleared.

Deployment Software Engineer, Builder, Build Engineer, Build Manager, Release Manager, Tool Developer, and Technical Writer in both open source and Microsoft Windows projects.

Particularly interested in projects involving Windows Installer Xml ("WiX"), C++/C, C#, Java, PowerShell, or Python.

  * Microsoft Certified Professional in C#.
  * Microsoft Specialist in C#. 

Actively exploring, exploiting, and developing new software technologies including WiX, Docker, Custom Database Deployment, and AWS.

Accomplishments:

  * authored twenty-six MSI installers using WiX
  * authored three WPF/C# WiX Burn Bootstrappers
  * authored a complete custom action library for custom IIS configuration and custom SQL Server database deployment and upgrade
  * migrated from Azure Classic Pipelines to Azure YAML Pipelines
  * used best-practices PowerShell in Azure Pipeline Jobs and Stages

Contact me at jmcooper8654@gmail.com

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