Part 1: My Journey Into Crunchyroll

and how my wife, the Army, and Mills College helped me get there...

Growing up as an 80’s baby - and 90’s kid - I had the unique privilege of watching anime on VHS 📼 📺 📡

Wait for it…

(Insert ‘what is VHS?’ joke here 😝 )

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, it’s important that I mention my anime viewership in the past tense because I rarely watched it after becoming a teenager. There were lots of outdoor activities such as football, rollerblading, skateboarding, and bicycling that took up the majority of my childhood. Suddenly, anime was a long-forgotten hobby of mine tucked away for decades…

In this blog post, I’ll cover my story leading up to Crunchyroll, my candidate experience in joining, the amazing people I befriended, and some fun facts that may go down in recruiting history.

I hope you enjoy reading it — Welcome to Chapter 2 of Recruiting Conversations 😃

---

Fast forward to 2016, Crunchyroll hopped on my radar as my career was just kicking off in Technical Recruiting. My manager gathered our team of Direct Hire Recruiters (agency lingo — more on that in a future chapter) and presented a list of accounts that were of interest to the company.

My manager asked, ”Crunchyroll is in need of an Android Engineer, anyone interested?”

(Crickets…🦗 🏏)

(And…more crickets 🦗 🦗 🦗)

I cautiously responded, ”So, it sounds like we’re working with Tech Restaurants now? Sure, I’ll take it. I’m not a big fan of Android anything (📱) but I can learn about the technology and work on the account.”

And that was my introduction to Crunchyroll. Of all the paths to cross, I learned of the 360 Platform as a Recruiter, and not a consumer of the product or active participant of the industry. At that point, it had been ~ 20 years since I even uttered the term “anime.”

I did my due diligence — face-palming 🤦🏽‍♂️ myself when I realized Crunchyroll was an anime streaming service — and ultimately built a great relationship with the internal recruiting team by successfully helping them hire their Android Engineer. It was my first hire as an Agency Recruiter and would be the catalyst to an entirely different conversation with Crunchyroll the following year 🤔 .

January of 2017 rolled around and I decided to take a huge risk in my career, pivoting into Software Engineering. At the time, I was an active Army Reserve Soldier itching to become an Officer in Cyber Security; it was a new branch within the service that was taking off and I felt the timing was perfect to overhaul my life.

The plan was to attend the Interdisciplinary Computer Science Master’s Program at Mills College (Mills’ campus is amazing, btw!), commit to a 2 year ROTC program at Cal Berkeley to commission as an Officer in the Army Reserves, and keep performing in my day job as a Recruiter. Oh, and raise a 9 month old child while at it. Piece of cake 🍰 , right?

As you can imagine, that wasn’t possible. In the span of 2 weeks, I had quit my day job as a Recruiter, was learning Java 8 from a textbook while coding in Eclipse, and trying to balance life, school, and looking for a part-time job. It was exhausting and I was only a couple of weeks into my semester at Mills.

Then a notification went off on my LinkedIn app. It was the Recruiting Coordinator from Crunchyroll reaching out to reconnect as they were hiring a 3 person recruiting team. Little did I know, this was the very beginning of my “Candidate Experience” and my opportunity of a lifetime.

---

The following LinkedIn message is from January 19th, 2017…

Recruiting Coordinator:

“Long time no talk! I wanted to let you know that we have an opening for a Sr. Technical Recruiter position. You were the first person I thought of :)”

Henry:

“Oh my goodness, thank you so much for thinking of me:) I noticed [Naruto] left recently and I'm assuming this is his backfill?

Unfortunately I just enrolled in a masters program for computer science and can only work part-time on contract. Is there a JD I can pass along?”

---

And that’s how I responded. 😩

Looking back, it was crazy of me to say no to such a great opportunity but my mind had already been made up as I just kicked off my studies to become a Software Engineer. I literally had decided that a career in recruiting was officially behind me and turned down a full time role with a company that was just taking off.

Then the semester ended and in May of 2017 I had 3 months of time to spare before the fall semester kicked off in August. What to do…what to do… 🧐

My plan was to kick back and make repairs around the house (dad life!), study code, hang with my daughter, and pick up random gig jobs to hold me over. Well, after little luck with daytime Lyft driving and user researching gigs that never really fit my schedule, my wonderful wife stepped in and had some words of wisdom.

“You know, I think it’s amazing that you’re courageous enough to follow your dreams in engineering and I know you’re going to do amazing things; However, having spent 10 years in school to get my doctorate and working three jobs to make ends meet for all of those 10 years, I think you should go find a job. It’s summer time, and guess what? Students get jobs in the summer. Go out and get one.”

Thanks, honey 🤗 .

She was right…

After wiping the embarrassment off of my face, I began applying for all kinds of jobs.

Starbucks barista, check ✔️ . T-Mobile Sales Rep, check ✔️. Data Entry Admin, Resume Writer, Home Depot and Lowes Customer Service Reps; check, check, and CHECK ✔️.

I didn’t land any. of. them. Naturally, I felt defeated and upset with the system.

There were other roles, but for the sake of brevity, let’s say I applied to over 20 ‘entry level’ positions and never received an interview. At this point I was burning through my savings like I had a hole in my pocket🧧, and anxiety was creeping in more often than Roger from Sister Sister 🏠.

To be continued…