👋 Hiya, job sneakers!
Dani had the tab open again.
The same tab she always opened on slow afternoons when the urge to see what else was out there got too loud to ignore. HealthForward’s careers page. She’d bookmarked it eight months ago, told herself it was just in case.
She scrolled through. Saw nothing new. Closed the tab.
The email landed in her inbox a few days later. HealthForward Summit, coming to Chicago. Two days, forty speakers. Tickets were $1800. No way was her company sending her. And her bank account could only send thoughts and prayers.
Her friend texted her a link an hour later. She almost didn't open it. The conference was looking for volunteers. Free t-shirt, free meal, and more importantly free admission.
But did she really want to burn a vacation day on a registration desk at 7am?
She signed up anyway.
Dani smoothed the front of her blazer one more time.
The coffee cart wasn’t even set up yet, but she had found her spot behind a folding table stacked with lanyards and badge sleeves. Not exactly where she’d imagined breaking into her dream company. But here she was.
The first hour was a blur of printing badges, handing out tote bags, pointing down the same hallway over and over. By 9am, her feet already hurt.
Then a woman walked up, frantically scrolling through her phone, clearly looking for her registration email.
“I can’t seem to find it.”
Dani pulled up the list, found her in a few seconds, printed a new badge.
“Thanks,” she exhaled. “I couldn’t find that email to save my life.”
She looped the lanyard around her neck.
“Do you work for HealthForward?”
“No, just volunteering.” Dani hesitated. “I work in marketing at ClearPath. I’ve been following HealthForward for a while though. Couldn’t swing the ticket price, so.”
The woman smiled. “Smart. What kind of marketing?”
They talked for a while longer. Dani didn’t realize until later that she’d described her last marketing campaign in the kind of detail she never managed in interviews. It hadn’t felt like a pitch. It just felt like talking.
The woman handed Dani her business card as the line picked back up.
“Send me your resume. I mean it.”
Her name was Eve Wollman. VP of Marketing, HealthForward.
That night, Dani sat down to write the email.
She opened a draft, stared at it, closed her laptop. Made tea she didn’t drink. Opened it again.
The first version ran four paragraphs. She cut it down to two, then decided two was still too much. She deleted the line about how their meeting felt like it was straight out of her favorite movie. Too much.
She landed on five sentences. Read them until they stopped making sense. Hit send at 11:47pm before she could talk herself out of it again.
Two weeks went by.
She checked her inbox with the specific kind of obsession only job seekers understand. She also double checked her spam folder and triple checked that she’d sent the email to the right person.
She started to make peace with it. A VP at a fast-growing healthtech company probably gets dozens of emails after every conference. The moment at the registration table had felt significant, but not every coincidence is magic. Sometimes you're just two people reaching for the same glove. That's all.
Eventually, the reply came.
Eve had been traveling. She apologized for the delay and got right to it: she’d mentioned Dani to their Head of Marketing. Would Dani be free for a call the following week?
One video call. One panel interview. One take-home project that felt more like the type of work she’d love to be doing than the work-flavored work she’d been used to.
The offer landed in her inbox a couple slow afternoons later.
She closed her eyes, let out a long breath, and let herself feel it.
Then she closed the careers page for the last time.
The door prize? If you know what you want, stop waiting for it. The clear path may never present itself. But somewhere out there is a strange, awkward step forward that most people would talk themselves out of, and that step is the one that puts you somewhere the universe can actually work with. You can't engineer the serendipity. But you can show up somewhere it might find you.
Go grab a lanyard,
✌️ Kirby