Cold calling for a job

[Merle Nelson]

On the first visit or two a logging company told me hiring was 3 months off yet in April and they had to hire their guys back first. On the second visit a week later he re-stressed those points. On the third visit he said, " Well he'll if you're gonna be coming here all the time you might as well be working here."

 

[Boomslang]

On the first visit or two a logging company told me hiring was 3 months off yet in April and they had to hire their guys back first. On the second visit a week later he re-stressed those points. On the third visit he said, " Well he'll if you're gonna be coming here all the time you might as well be working here."

Persistence pays off sometimes. It kinda like dating. Either she's gonna say yes or she's gonna call the cops.

 

[Reach]

I’ve cold called jobs and I’ve shown up to inquire about open positions. Employers seem to like that, shows motivation.

I would be thrilled to have someone cold call and then show up, or at least call a second time without my chasing after them. Calling me first would really mean a lot, and might be enough to get someone hired just due to their persistence.

 

[evo]

For any in person interaction dress for work. Be clean and well kept but ready to jump in a truck and start a saw.

 

[Fred_Berkelhammer]

If you're moving somewhere with a tree company and have done any tree work before, you'll almost certainly get a job-

Whether that job is with safe folks you like working with or pays well is a different question. Don't get stuck in a gig you don't love just cause they were the first to offer you a job!

I've been on both ends of this. At 25 I jumped in my '62 GMC and drove out to Denver (the brake slave cylinder on one wheel went out just W of St Louis, and I kept driving until I saw an auto parts store adjacent to the highway, which was near Kansas City --talk about being motivated to move out West from Jersey). I was ostensibly looking for work in the oil industry (great timing -- it was 1983 and the last employed geologists were still drinking three martini lunches in the Downtown Athletic Club, but that was because they were about to lose their jobs, not because they were still riding the gravy train), but knowing deep down that I was a tree person.

After about two weeks of desultory resume handing-out and cold calls to exploration companies, I did an about-face and went looking for a tree job. I called a few places that had ads in the paper and had a job within an hour. But that place largely SUCKED, other than having Lee Patrick as the general foreman (if anybody in the Boston area who knows what became of him, please reply). The owner was a three hundred pound rich kid whose dad set him up in business, so of course he needed climbers all the time. They put me on the Denver city removal contract just about right away. I stuck around for two years, which gave me enough time to figure out where I'd rather work and made a lateral move to Boulder Tree.

But now I've been in business a while (actually, exactly 35 years in one week). Climbers call me and I listen but haven't hired a climber since Dustin G, which was something like 20 years ago -- we hire ground workers and train in-house. If the right person came along, I'd consider it, but it's not worth upsetting the social structure (yes, "pecking order is apt"), and we'd rather not audition people in our clients' trees.