Garden Club Board President Lexie Dendrinelis (left) and founder Bob Kolf. (Photo provided by Lexie Dendrinelis)
Photo provided by Lexie Dendrinelis
When COVID-19 sent all non-essential workers home, Bob Kolf experienced a light bulb moment. He was working for Rocket Careers in Chesterfield – a post-retirement job – when he was told to go home.
“With 200,000 people in greater St. Louis losing their employment simultaneously, I got this idea to start a LinkedIn group to help get job seekers back to work,” Kolf said.
It didn’t take long for the group to swell to about 200 job seekers. Now, he needed to add recruiters and other connectors.
“It’s not like I had jobs for them,” Kolf said. “My concept was to connect them with people who did.”
That task proved challenging. Many of the group’s first job seekers came from industries, such as hotels and hospitality, shut down by COVID-19. No one knew when they were coming back. The key, as Kolf saw it, was to focus on transferable skills.
Soon, the group was helping job seekers and recruiters to open doors.
Today, the Job Seekers Garden Club is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that has more than 6,200 members. It also has an international bestseller, “Discovering Your Purpose in Today’s World.” Subtitled “Finding Hope While Navigating Career Disruption,” the book shares the stories and advice of Garden Club members, including the stories of Kolf and the Garden Club’s board president, Lexie Dendrinelis.
When Kolf recruited Dendrinelis, she was working in the health and wellness industry. He said he knew that job seekers not only needed employment but also help with their health, wellness, mental acuity, spiritual and financial. The answer was to bring in speakers for the group’s in-person events, its coffee and happy hours. Dendrinelis was one of those speakers.
The group’s unusual name, Kolf said, came from what it brings to job seekers.
“Well, we came up with the Garden Club because we wanted to put humanity back into the job search,” Kolf explained. “We do for job seekers what gardeners do for plants. We care for them. We nurture them. We help them grow in their careers by eliminating the weeds of negativity.”
Those weeds can grow thick when job seekers sit behind a computer screen, applying to job after job online and getting ghosted or rejected by one employer after another.
“We want to uplift people, encourage them and create a community where we have coffees, luncheons and happy hours where we tell them that they have value and we’re going to introduce them to people and they’re going to grow their connection base,” Kolf said.
Dendrinelis added that having in-person events to attend is a powerful panacea for the psyche.
“It’s like, ‘OK, I have a networking event to go to this afternoon or at lunchtime, so I have to get up, take a shower, dress professionally.’ Creating those opportunities for people is part of the nurturing and caring that happens in the Garden Club. It makes a difference because if they didn’t have a place to be, they could be like, ‘Well, I’ll just stay in my pajamas all day,” Dendrinelis said.
Once connections have been made, job seekers are encouraged to schedule one-to-one meetings with those connections to continue to network and get to know them.
“There are numbers out there, and I believe they’re pretty accurate, that 80% of all jobs are found through networking and 50% of all jobs aren’t even advertised,” Kolf said. “So, unless you’re out and about in the community and talking to people and networking, you’re never going to know of those opportunities.
“Lexie and I both have examples of job seekers we’ve introduced to the right person that’s directly led to their current employment and they’re very, very happy because it’s not just a job, it’s a vocation.”
“That’s why the title of the book is ‘Discovering Your Purpose in Today’s World,’ Dendrinelis explained. “It’s not just about, ‘I lost a job, I found a job.’ It’s not just about financial replacement. It’s about, are you happy? Are you living your best life? Are you doing what you feel you were made to do?”
In the book, people talk about how they navigated the journey of finding their purpose, not just a job.
“It’s about discovering yourself through the process and how that can be very positive,” Dendrinelis said. “There is hope, inspiration and motivation embedded in the stories of 41 different authors (job seekers) who are sharing their stories.”
She added that current job seekers will also find practical advice in the book.
“I made sure that in my chapter, I cover those things, Dendrinelis said. “One is network. Two is to take care of yourself. Make sure you are exercising, eating correctly and getting enough sleep.
“I’m a big believer in putting your time in on LinkedIn to find the things that sound interesting. Then, get off LinkedIn and go to those companies’ websites to put in your application. Don’t stay online all day. You will freak yourself out if you spend too much time on social media.”
Both Dendrinelis and Kolf say it’s too easy to lose your sense of self when you’re in a protracted job search.
“Too many people feel that when they lose their job, they’ve lost their identity. That’s not true,” Kolf said. “You have an identity that is not your job title. It’s who you are inside. You never lose that. Everybody is important and everybody is here on the planet for a purpose.”
To learn more about the Job Seekers Garden Club, visit jobseekersgardenclubofstlouis.net, plan to attend a monthly event, and for added inspiration, consider purchasing their new book, available on their website and on amazon.com.