Sometimes You Can Make a Difference

As recruiting goes generally days are spent chasing candidates to fill openings and when lucky, we receive a fee for a placement. Seldom does a recruiter talk about the work they do without making a statement about how good it feels to make a difference in another person’s life. It is true, when an offer is made and a candidate is selected for a new job, this is a life changing experience and it feels great. There are not a lot of differentiators though, between staffing/recruiting companies beyond specialties and regions served.

Bridge Resourcing Solutions was selected as a participant in the Cisco SRS Program and included in Cisco’s Partner Talent Portal as a provider of resources to the Cisco Channel Partners. The reasons Bridge was selected to participate in this program are because Bridge provides to Cisco and their Partners the next evolution of ethical, professional, intelligent, creative and value focused resourcing solutions. With this in mind it is unusual to find a company with so much opportunity to generate revenue interested in getting involved in activities that do not. This past week saw the culmination of an international effort to help a Cisco Engineer under extremely difficult circumstances. We would like to share this story with you.

Back in October of 2007 one of our staff received the following email;
“Good day, I saw your article about how to improve job searching for Cisco professionals, it is so interesting but living the role of finding a real job is so hard, I have my CCSP certification also some other vendor certifications some for CompTIA and others for Siemens, I worked in the IT field for 5-6 years but for the bad circumstances I had to leave my homeland (Iraq), I tried every possible way (I think) to have a job in my specialty, but always I fail, 90% of the rejection I receive from companies is that because I am Iraqi, what can I do to have a job, I spent about a year looking for a job in middle east (many countries I searched in) but no response, by the way I can’t search in the united states or Europe because they do not permit Visa’s for iraqi’s, what can I do please I need your advice.”

We began a dialogue with this engineer Karam, to see if there was some way to help him. What followed was a long journey with frequent communications going back and forth between our employee, Eman and this engineer often times just to keep his spirits up. While getting to know each other they discovered that he had a wife and family and they were Christians. This created its own problem in Iraq for them, even before the war as we soon learned. Christians in Iraq are mostly of Assyrian decent and one of the oldest Christian groups on the planet, we seldom hear about their plight. In Iraq, Christians under the reign of Saddam Hussein were allowed to work and earn a living, although they were frequent victims of violent attacks.

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