How the heck?

The story of how I got the job

Since announcing that I’ve accepted an offer with Hormel Foods Corporation, people have been asking how this opportunity came about. Gotta say, it was an ass-backwards process on my part.

When I started thinking about moving back to the Midwest, I would look at property listings on Zillow and Realtor.com and dream of what it would be like to live on a little hobby farm with chickens and goats and a big organic garden, or in a log cabin in the woods on a lake or river, or in a faithfully restored vintage modern home in a smaller town where houses could be bought for half the price of what I had in Denver. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one. Check out this skit from Saturday Night Live:

The difference with me is that I’d actually talk to the agent. The agent would then obligingly set up MLS listing feeds that dumped straight into my email inbox. This led to me buying a cabin last March near the two-stoplight town of Spooner in northwest Wisconsin with my friend, Erica, who had the same real estate fantasies.

The reality was better than the dream. The little cabin in Spooner, situated on 1.7 wooded acres with frontage on the shallow and wide Yellow River, is where my heart wants to live all the time. Every time I left our Mellow Yellow River Retreat, as we call it (MYRR for short), I was devising schemes in my head on how to get back again. And maybe stay for good.

I mean, look. Wouldn’t you?

So I kept Zillow scrolling. I thought I might find a great little house anywhere from the Twin Cities down to Des Moines, pay mostly cash for it after selling my ridiculously appreciated house in Denver, and live a low-cost life with a fattened retirement account to boot. Maybe I could work remotely at the job I had in Denver. After all, everyone else was working from home through the pandemic, and some still are more than two years later. During my stints at the MYRR, I had proved working remotely was entirely doable.

I broached the idea with my employer. The response was lukewarm. The pandemic would end and people would need to come back to collaborate face to face in the office. Being 700 miles away 100 percent of the time wasn’t ideal.

But those MLS listings kept coming. Erica hadn’t stopped looking at them either. In late November she texted me a listing of an interesting mid century modern home in Austin, Minnesota. Austin? Hey, that’s close enough that I could send my mother, Bonnie, to go check it out. So I scheduled a showing and she went and looked at it with her friend, Diane.

I also looked intently at the pictures in the listing and did the 360 virtual tour. I zoomed in on a diploma on the wall in the office. A lawyer. Hmmm. I could actually make out his name. A Google search revealed he had just started a job at a firm in Chicago. I called the agent to ask about him. Why was he and his wife leaving Austin? Well, he had worked at Hormel but wanted to move to Chicago to be closer to their family.

So … you’re saying there’s an opening at Hormel?

I found the listing on the Hormel website. It appeared they were looking for someone not too far out from law school, 2+ years or so experience practicing. The job duties weren’t extensively detailed. Corporate attorney stuff. Contracts. Well, I thought, I can do that. And I can even add a zero after that 2 on the years of experience.

I pulled together a resume and cover letter — something I hadn’t done in more than eight years and two computers ago, so I had to build it all from scratch. I hesitated after proofreading. What am I doing? I actually love my job. This would be a massive pay cut. I’m not what they’re looking for; it’s an entry-level job. My finger hit the submit button anyway.

The recruiter called a week later. After about twenty minutes, he said folks in the legal department already wanted to schedule interviews with me over Microsoft Teams. Could I do that next week? Uh, yeah, sure. He emailed a packet that outlined the company’s benefits package, a summary of its 2020 annual report, and a description of the interview technique to expect — behavioral interview questions.

Huh? I have to admit I’d never heard of this technique. It’s when the interviewer asks you to provide an example of a problem you solved or a situation you handled. Some examples are, How do you handle a challenge? or Give me an example of a mistake you made and how you fixed it, or Explain how you handled a difficult situation. There’s a particular “STAR” formula you follow to answer: Situation, Task, Action, Result.

Cripes. I had homework to do. The night before the interviews, I spent a couple hours wracking my brain to come up with examples of things. It wasn’t easy. After 20 years of practicing law, you just know how to go about getting problems resolved. You don’t think about the specific Tasks or Actions you take to get to the end Result. You just do it. For example, when a contract needs to be reviewed, redlined and sent back to the vendor, you just Review, Redline and Send Back. Situation handled.

Turned out, the attorneys I interviewed with the next day must not have heard of the behavioral interview technique either because not one of them asked me those types of questions. Instead, it was three hours of Hey, sorry about the noise in the background, those are my three dogs, do you have dogs? and Let me tell you about how we staff things here, and What can I tell you about Austin? and I need to go in to grab the gift on my desk from my Secret Santa. The time flew, and I smiled and laughed and told them my life story and felt like I had known them from somewhere before.

When I met more of the team in person a few weeks later in Austin, it was more of the same. It became clear to me that these were people I wanted to work with. Smart, nice, interesting, practical, busy. Midwestern.

Before I even left town, some of them were texting and emailing listings of homes for sale in the area. I knew it was time to come home.