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Garden Club Board President Lexie Dendrinelis (left) and founder Bob Kolf. (Photo provided by Lexie Dendrinelis)<\/p>\n
Photo provided by Lexie Dendrinelis<\/p>\n
When COVID-19 sent all non-essential workers home, Bob Kolf experienced a light bulb moment. He was working for Rocket Careers in Chesterfield \u2013 a post-retirement job \u2013 when he was told to go home.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith 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,\u201d Kolf said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t take long for the group to swell to about 200 job seekers. Now, he needed to add recruiters and other connectors.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not like I had jobs for them,\u201d Kolf said. \u201cMy concept was to connect them with people who did.\u201d<\/p>\n
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That task proved challenging. Many of the group\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Soon, the group was helping job seekers and recruiters to open doors. \u00a0<\/p>\n
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, \u201cDiscovering Your Purpose in Today\u2019s World.\u201d Subtitled \u201cFinding Hope While Navigating Career Disruption,\u201d the book shares the stories and advice of Garden Club members, including the stories of Kolf and the Garden Club\u2019s board president, Lexie Dendrinelis.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s in-person events, its coffee and happy hours. Dendrinelis was one of those speakers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The group\u2019s unusual name, Kolf said, came from what it brings to job seekers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, we came up with the Garden Club because we wanted to put humanity back into the job search,\u201d Kolf explained. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe 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\u2019re going to introduce them to people and they\u2019re going to grow their connection base,\u201d Kolf said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dendrinelis added that having in-person events to attend is a powerful panacea for the psyche.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like, \u2018OK, I have a networking event to go to this afternoon or at lunchtime, so I have to get up, take a shower, dress professionally.\u2019 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\u2019t have a place to be, they could be like, \u2018Well, I\u2019ll just stay in my pajamas all day,\u201d Dendrinelis said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are numbers out there, and I believe they\u2019re pretty accurate, that 80% of all jobs are found through networking and 50% of all jobs aren\u2019t even advertised,\u201d Kolf said. \u201cSo, unless you\u2019re out and about in the community and talking to people and networking, you\u2019re never going to know of those opportunities.<\/p>\n
\u201cLexie and I both have examples of job seekers we\u2019ve introduced to the right person that\u2019s directly led to their current employment and they\u2019re very, very happy because it\u2019s not just a job, it\u2019s a vocation.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s why the title of the book is \u2018Discovering Your Purpose in Today\u2019s World,\u2019 Dendrinelis explained. \u201cIt\u2019s not just about, \u2018I lost a job, I found a job.\u2019 It\u2019s not just about financial replacement. It\u2019s about, are you happy? Are you living your best life? Are you doing what you feel you were made to do?\u201d<\/p>\n
In the book, people talk about how they navigated the journey of finding their purpose, not just a job.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s about discovering yourself through the process and how that can be very positive,\u201d Dendrinelis said. \u201cThere is hope, inspiration and motivation embedded in the stories of 41 different authors (job seekers) who are sharing their stories.\u201d<\/p>\n
She added that current job seekers will also find practical advice in the book.<\/p>\n
\u201cI made sure that in my chapter, I cover those things, Dendrinelis said. \u201cOne is network. Two is to take care of yourself. Make sure you are exercising, eating correctly and getting enough sleep.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m 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\u2019 websites to put in your application. Don\u2019t stay online all day. You will freak yourself out if you spend too much time on social media.\u201d<\/p>\n
Both Dendrinelis and Kolf say it\u2019s too easy to lose your sense of self when you\u2019re in a protracted job search.<\/p>\n
\u201cToo many people feel that when they lose their job, they\u2019ve lost their identity. That\u2019s not true,\u201d Kolf said. \u201cYou have an identity that is not your job title. It\u2019s who you are inside. You never lose that. Everybody is important and everybody is here on the planet for a purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n
To learn more about the Job Seekers Garden Club, visit jobseekersgardenclubofstlouis.net<\/a>, plan to attend a monthly event, and for added inspiration, consider purchasing their new book, available on their website and on amazon.com<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Garden Club Board President Lexie Dendrinelis (left) and founder Bob Kolf. (Photo provided by Lexie Dendrinelis) Photo provided…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":48829,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[64,420,37258,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-48828","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-jobs","10":"tag-lifestyles","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114817952468975014","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48828\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}