My first job was pizza delivery for a local shop. My mom knew someone who worked there, and I got the job through her. They weren’t exactly hiring for the position yet, but they knew they were going to need someone seen because their current delivery guy was going back to college in a couple months. She knew I was looking for a job, floated my name to the owner, and he called me.

Second job was a warehouse shipping/receiving position. Again, got it through a family friend who was their accountant or something. He mentioned they were looking for someone, I said I might be interested, and he basically set everything up for me to come in and interview and I was basically hired on the spot.

Now I work in 911 dispatch. This is basically the only job I actually found and applied for myself, I saw they were doing some sort of hiring event and I thought it was something I could do. Still though, I worked my connections, my brother in law is a firefighter, and knows a lot of people in local public safety/first responder circles, so I got him to ask someone he knows who works here to put in a good word for me. It could be that I just really impressed them, but I only had one interview and a lot of people who got hired at the same time as me, some arguably with more impressive resumes, had to go through an additional round or two of interviews.

So as the old saying goes, it’s not so much what you know as who you know.

When I was applying for jobs on my own back at 16-18 years old, even shitty retail gigs, I never seemed to get anywhere, online, paper applications, etc. never seemed to go anywhere, occasionally I got an interview but they never panned out. But when I know someone, or know someone who knows someone, I have a 100% success rate of getting hired and I’ve gotten to skip some of the bureaucracy to boot, and they’ve turned out to be pretty stable, reasonably well-paying jobs given my level of experience and such.