You never know where or when?

So I was on vacation celebrating my 25^th wedding anniversary. We went to Las Vegas. While there I meant this person, from SF who was out of work interestingly enough. I was thinking, okay they are out of work but in Las Vegas. Not being by business I chose to just have a casual conversation. I had not told them what I do for a living. At some point the conversation went back to what they do for a living.

Turned out they are a Software Development Engineer. In listening to them it was obvious they were good, and very passionate, Eventually it came out that they were in a startup and funding went away. They had been out of work for about 6 months, but had been looking. Just not getting anyplace. For some reason they just were not getting any interviews.

At this point I decided to tell them what I did. The conversation quickly changed to them wanting me to tell them what they are doing wrong.  I asked them a bunch of questions, and asked if by chance they had a copy of their resume, which they did. I first of course asked my wife if she would be okay with me stepping away to help the person. My wife being the gracious understanding person she is, was all for it, if it meant helping someone. So we went to their room and they showed me their resume. After seeing it and having listened to the way they were searching for work it was obvious they had not looked a lot. In fact the startup found this person, and prior to that they had been at one company for 10+ years. So it became obvious I needed to one help rewrite their resume and 2 show them how to search and 3 make sure their interviewing skills were good. So for the next 2-3 hours that is what I did. We even applied to a few jobs.

So a few days ago they contacted me telling me they had gotten several interviews, and even a few job offers, one of which they took. They were very thankful. In fact they sent several people they knew my way and I got a couple of them hired. Now of course I did not help them with the intention of getting anything out of it, just the great feeling of knowing I helped. But as in most cases when you make an act of kindness often it returns 3 fold.

The morale of the story is you never know where or when an opportunity will present itself, to help someone and in the end also help yourself.