An Unspoken Problem: Commuting

A new year and a new decade begin in just a couple days. How time flies?!

I thought this would be a perfect time to share a personal story that may help job-seekers and managers/HR professionals.

To give you some background on me, I graduated from Purdue University in May of 2018. My then-fiancé (now husband) and I moved to Houston, TX for his engineering job (I have an inspiring story to share about that too, but that’s for another time! Stay tuned!).

So, I just graduated college, moved to a new city and state, and hadn't received an offer for my first "adult" job yet. I knew I wanted to be in recruitment, so I began applying to recruiter positions all over the city of Houston.Y’all, I did not realize just how big and spread out our beautiful city is!

I took the first job that I was offered. I was thrilled because it was in recruitment. The only downside was the commute. It was an hour and a half in the morning and two to three hours in the evenings. By the way, the office was only 35 miles away.

So, I began casually job hunting. Let me be clear in saying that I really enjoyed my work (and I was darn good at it too!) and my coworkers. I was getting to the point where I couldn’t handle driving 3-4 hours a day (more on commuting later).

This is where my piece on helping job-seekers comes in.

After two months of job-hunting, I decided I would just stick with it until I reached my one-year anniversary and then resign. I put my search on hold. Then, about a week after I made the decision to end my search, I saw a post that my coworker "liked" about a Talent Acquisition Specialist opening that was a lot closer to home!

The great thing about LinkedIn is that when your connections like posts, you are able to see them too.The posts show up on your feed. I was curious, so I reached out to the author of the post. We set up a phone interview for later that week. I continued through the interview process and was offered the job!

I would not have even known about the vacancy if my coworker hadn’t liked that post. Because of one click of her mouse, I landed myself a job offer. I didn’t end up taking the job for a handful of reasons, but I walked away with a wonderful experience and a new professional friend (my interviewer).

It is so important to like and share posts. My coworker had no idea I was looking for a new job, but her simple click led me to a job offer! You could be doing the same for your connections. How cool is that?

As I stated earlier, this story can help managers and HR professionals as well.

I mentioned that my main reason for leaving the company was the awful commute. My manager and I discussed that reason when I handed in my resignation. Instead of offering a flexible schedule or a remote work option, I was offered a bit of a bump in salary. However, money can't buy time!

Managers and HR pros: your employees may be in the same boat. They may absolutely adore their job and the environment, but can’t handle the lack of work-life balance that a terrible commute causes. What are you doing to ensure you retain your talent and mitigate stress when possible?

Consider implementing a flexible schedule. Explore alternative locations. Change meeting times to ensure everyone will be able to make them.

We are seeing more and more job-seekers expecting flexible schedules and work-from-home options. These are effective solutions to the issues that commuting causes. (Check out the link in the comments for more on this).

To summarize, let’s do more to help out our fellow job-seekers. Let’s start liking and sharing posts (but stay mindful when tagging someone who may be in stealth mode). You just don’t know how your “like” could help someone! Additionally, let’s see how we can mitigate employee flight risk. Let’s implement strategies to reduce stress caused by commutes so we can retain our top talent.