“Work” is kind of a funny concept. I do a lot of work on different fronts, but I’m currently only monetarily compensated for one of them. Things like blogging, writing TripAdvisor reviews, helping friends write CVs, exploring ideas for future projects, don’t have immediate financial dividends.
However, I do have a paid job, working remotely for a tech startup based in San Francisco. Often when I talk about work, I’m talking about that job as well.
The name of the company is RecruitLoop. Here’s our story:
I met RecruitLoop when I worked at a different tech startup, Influitive, in Toronto. Influitive makes an advocate marketing software, which aims to help b2b companies create online communities of their best users/advocates. RecruitLoop was a customer, and I knew them quite well because I worked in frontline customer support.
When they found out that I was quitting my job at Influitive to go abroad and spend some time living in southeast Asia, they offered me a job. Part of that job involves operating the community platform that Influitive created, since RecruitLoop is a customer.
RecruitLoop began in Australia, and then opened a US office around 2 years ago.
We’re a marketplace company, aimed at connecting independent, billable-by-the-hour recruiters with companies looking to hire. RecruitLoop finds the recruiters and the clients, bringing them both together, and makes a software that is used to manage the hiring engagement between the two parties (it’s kind of like Air BnB for recruiters that bill by the hour). You can see our list of recruiters here: recruitloop.com/recruiters
They hired me to work with/manage our Australian client base, which is quite large since the company has been operating there since 2011.
There was a big internal shift at the company recently, which has led to a much bigger focus on growing our number of recruiters, so my job has changed quite a bit (typical in a startup, particularly one as small as RecruitLoop – we’re just 9 people in total!).
My job title is Customer Success Manager, but the focus of my job changes constantly. At any given time I can be selling RecruitLoop to clients, helping recruiters manage their client relationships, designing email marketing campaigns, managing our community of advocates, creating educational content for recruiters, troubleshooting technical issues, chasing invoice and revenue and beyond. It’s less a question “what do I do?” and more a question of “what needs to be done?”.
With so much to do, you’d think it would be hard to work remotely, but fortunately it’s par for the course at RecruitLoop. We have people working in San Francisco, Berkley, Sydney, the Philippines, and wherever I am. I have Skype calls with various team members almost everyday, and I actually love working for a tech startup from outside of ‘the valley’. I think my remote location helps me keep a fresh perspective on my job and on the tech startup industry itself.
As for my location, I’m very lucky – as long as I’m online for Australian hours, then I can be anywhere. This was obviously very easy in Asia. It was a bit challenging in Canada, and it’s quite awkward in Portugal – I typically work from 8pm to 4am GMT so I can be online for most the day in Australia.
Working while travelling has been really great, though sometimes I wonder if I miss out, since I end up spending so much time indoors, working. Still, it means I can travel this way for longer, which I love.
Here are some photos of the various places I worked over the past year:
In the living room, my everyday workspace – with a good luck fish!
view from our favourite cafe!
Our unpacking space, and my workspace
The view from the window beside my desk while working in our hotel in the UAE
Sometimes in Cambodia I also worked from our balcony
In the alley near our hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
while working in Canterbury at night, I could see this beautiful church from my window!
the stories that I'm telling. 