1569 - Hobby Hiring: Finding Jobs

Foreign. Doctor James Beckett Sports Card Insights. Thanks Sponsors. Top Spinini Upper Deck Heritage Auctions Hugs the Scott Auctions Mike Stadium Sports Cards burbank sports cards compc.com and Beckett Media Beckett Grading Beckett Authentication My friend is a free agent I talked about in the previous episode two days ago and he is not going to the National. He did go to the Waters Creek Dallas card show in Plano. Allen Several leads he can pursue there, but I think the national is the best place. The Mint Collective a few years ago was an outstanding opportunity for job seekers, career seekers to approach companies who may or may not be hiring right then, but to get on their radar. So I think that's exactly what the national is. So if you're an individual, it's a free agent looking for a new job. The important companies in our industry, the vast majority, it's rare that one of them who would be hiring is not at the national, including these shark tank companies that don't even exist yet. Maybe, but if they do get their funding, they're going to be looking for assistance from people who can jump in and jump in probably full time. My friend would like a full time job, but there's also some part time or contract work, consulting work, but this guy's not looking for that. And I've told him if you just go out there and say I'm looking for a job, just be a problem solver. What is your area of expertise? So, so be very clear that you're out there and you aggressively want to make a difference for a company and whatever that means. And if you're mainly a customer service or sales guy, just say it. If that's what they're looking for, they're going to appreciate your directness. If they're not, they're going to appreciate your directness. But again, I think my friend, he's not pessimistic but just there's a little anxiety when you're in between jobs, but you can't let that come across. I could sense he was not happy about being out of work, but if you go to the national, you got to be wide eyed, smiling and like I said, it's like Disney World or Disneylands is great. I'm here, I'm walking around and I think for my friend there's at least 50 companies that if he came to the National, I could circle 50 booths and say, just go up to him and say you're a free agent and here's my digital resume, here's what I'm good at. He presents well, he Was not working in the industry, although he has done industry stuff as a side gig. But I think he's looking for a full time job. But just say that if you're looking for part time, just tell them. In fact, one of the problems we had in our company, not a huge problem, but I think if you're really into the hobby and the buy, sell, trade aspect, many of the companies, I'm sure Beckett Publications, Beckett Media wasn't the only one that did this, but we had some conflict of interest, especially when doing the price guides that you can't. You can be buying and selling the same cards you're pricing on the level of a dealer. If you're a collector, that's one thing, but if you're doing all this flipping, we did not allow that back in my day. So if that's important to you, if you say I've got some Whatnot stuff going side, some ebay live, just tell them. And if they say I'm sorry, you'd have to give that up, that may be a negative, but at least you asked the question, you didn't go down the path too far without finding out that this is the way they do it. My friend, again, just trying to encourage him to put his best foot forward. If you just walk up to the table and say, I love the hobby, I want to work in the hobby again, that's nonspecific praise or non specific criticism. I need to know what is it that that floats your boat? You've got to let them know what you do well, what you really enjoy, if you've got any kind of results that you've produced, produced in the past, hobby or otherwise, or the Topps of problems or opportunities you handle well, let them know that. My friend, if he's going to the national, which he's not, but those of you who are, when you are interviewed or you are presenting yourself at the National, I think you need to have some understanding of the full hobby ecosystem. If you've never been to a card show, you've never been to a local card shop, you don't know what the letters TCG mean, you've never watched anything on YouTube or listened to any podcasts, know who the manufacturers are, don't really understand the importance of grading authentication, not familiar with all the different major auction platforms and sales platforms there, are there the content creators, the technology, the current state of figuring out comps and all that, vaults, supplies, distributors, all these adjacent services. If you're not knowledgeable about the whole hobby, to me that's A negative. So do the homework on the way to the national or way before. On the way to the national. Try to get some research on what's going on. What are the current trends? There's ample podcasts and YouTubes and books on the hobby that have come out. Jeremy Lee's books on pops and comps. That's really helpful to be able to speak intelligently about that professional side of the hobby, my friend. This goes for all of y'. All. I encourage you to look beyond the obvious position. If you go to a grading company and and look for work there, they don't just only hire graders. And the auction houses don't only hire catalogers and a card shop doesn't only hire a person to work behind the counter. Technology companies don't always hire just programmers. There's lots of other functions for any of those that could involve sales or customer service or operations, marketing, logistics, depending on your age and your experience. I don't think it's good to play the leadership card too early. I think your leadership in your new organization, unless you're 60 years old, if you're in your 20s, everybody wants to be the boss. But I would just say it's going to be obvious by the way you carry yourself and the way you've moved up in your previous careers that you're good at managing people, which is a learned skill. I think TCGs are here to stay because it's not just Pokemon, but Pokemon is gigantic. And a lot of the companies in the industry, it really gave us a new lease on life in our company after the baseball strike and we were doing some other things and some companies went out of business and we got early on into the Pokemon and it was just great. I'm encouraging anybody that's a job seeker. In fact, the path to being a grader to me would be to learn how to grade TCGs. They're easier to grade. But if you say no, I just don't do TCGs. I think that's a huge growth area. Again, if you hate it, then maybe it's not for you, but it's pretty interesting. There's a lot of dynamic elements there. So if I were. If I were the person looking for a job and I wouldn't be able to say that I was a DCG expert, but I could say I've done some events, I've gone to events and organized events. I have bought collections. I priced a lot of cards. I've sorted and organized a lot of cards. And I was a teacher at one point A professor. So again, just let them know who you are, that you're a person. I think the criticism of the medical profession to me is that they treat the chart instead of treating the patient. They're just looking at the chart. And the same thing in the card industry. Don't hire the resume. Hire the person. Buy the card, not the slab. You need to see what's in the slab. Do you want that? So if you want this, this candidate is a strong candidate, then, then hire him. The, the lowest hanging fruit to me for my friend. And he tried it and he, he failed the first test. But I just said, you know what? Grading is such a, a growth path, whether it's TCGS or modern. Unless you were a vintage card collector and have great eyes, then I don't, I don't think grading vintage, I think that's a, that journey to get to mastery there. But, but grading TCGS and modern cards, I, I just think my friend and anybody looking for a job, you have to consider they're, they're looking for graders there. There's some turnover with graders there. There's, it's, it's a tough job, but once you get up and running, you, you. I one-of-one save a job for life necessarily. But that's really good job security. When, when you're in the, in the, in the growth path of the industry, you just read about it from Ryan Staczinski's Gem Rate. You can just see that every month PSA is doing more and they're getting so many submissions they gotta hire a whole bunch more people. My friend did apply for a grading job there and he did not pass the grading test. And I haven't seen that. I know what BGS used to do. To me, it's not expecting somebody taking the test to identify everything perfectly, but you either see defects or you don't. If you don't see the defects, defects later you can say that that defect is, is a major defect as opposed to a minor defect, as opposed to a micro defect. But if you don't see that anything's wrong, that's the problem. So I don't know why this guy didn't pass the test. Maybe he had a low pass and they already had enough quota of people that had high passes. Okay, but why would somebody have a pass it on a higher level than my friend? I don't think my friend prepared. He's done some side gig card activity and he's done Whatnot as I recall, been to some card shows. But he would need to get serious. And I would recommend pulling out a box of 80s cards that you could kind of practice on. They have poor quality control, 80s and not that they're roughed up, but just to get a sense. And maybe you've got a friend that you say, hey, here's my first draft of what I think the grades are because you can do your own grading, but then evaluating how well you did, you need a third party and hopefully somebody's knowledgeable about grading. If they don't have a clue, they're saying, that looks good to me. No, you want somebody that's more experienced. I had a friend that did. I said, just grade these five cards in front of me. And he graded them and he got four of them really well. But he missed something on the back or whatever on one of the cards that may have flunked you out of the test. You really have to see the defects and you looked right past it. Okay. So I believe you can practice and you can build up speed and you can build up ability, but you're going to need some feedback. I do think there's some Yu-Gi-Oh assistance if you scan the card and shoot it through ChatGPT or Claude and just say, what do you think the centering is? What do you think the corners look like? They're not always right, but they're going to give you different perspectives. I would play with it and I would retake the test. So my friend, if he really wants to be a grader, there are people out there hiring. Retake the test if you're interested and go for it. Because I do think you can get better. I'm not looking for a grading position. My eyes just can't do it. But I do need to pre grade. The other aspect, there's probably jobs in the pre grading area. In fact, that might be a pathway to being a grader is to be a pre grader for some of these companies where they're not expecting perfection but you're making piles of not only don't grade this, but this is a 7 or less. This is an 8 or a 9, this is 9 or a 10, whatever. So if you're a job seeker, you go to the national, you don't start at booth number one and go to through booth 3000. I would narrow it down to 2550. There's corporate booths and don't approach them when they're in the middle of something else. They may have some indication. There may be on their website or through their social media, they may indicate they're looking at Something. But you just show up and say, hey, what do you guys do? I'm interested. I'm unemployed and I want to. That's not going to work. Have your elevator pitch. And I don't mean going from the first Fleer to the 50th Fleer I'm talking about one or two floors, one or two sentences of your elevator pitch of the here's my name, here's where I live, here's my hobby, experience, and here's where I think I could contribute. And if you're a candidate and you don't know anything about that coming. Hey, what do you do? Who would go up to psa? I'm looking for a job. By the way, what are you looking for? I'm sure they're looking for graders and many other things. So you need to make a connection that you're not completely in the dark. And the other thing is just walking up and say, hey, are you looking for good people? Everybody's looking for good people. Are you hiring now? It's better to engage. And what part of your business is growing the fastest? What are the challenges that you have? Again, you're not going to be fully a consultant, but what are the growth areas in your business? And if you're too busy right now, is there somebody I could contact after the show? And then you have some kind of leave behind. Maybe it's a digital thing, but maybe it's a card or a note or something just so they've got some connection. And then I'd follow up. And one of my favorite employees, Dave Slepka, who's been a lifer in the hobby and a great friend too, he interviewed and I told him we were going to keep his application on file or whatever and we hired him 10 months later. Now, I think he thought we forgot, but I did not forget. We did not have a need. And my mistake, because he was so versatile and I think he probably followed up. I don't know that he followed up with me, but I followed up with him when we had the need because I remembered him and he made great contributions to our company in several areas that were unexpected at the time. And then finally, anybody that's going to the national what is success? Success, if you're looking for a job, may not be coming back with a job, riding back with new employer. It may be that you just got some interviews or some scheduled interviews, which might be a later zoom. But if you're recognized as a talented person in this industry and you work hard, you will be noticed. I have A lot of employees that used to work for me and when I was gone then they were gone at some point and they're in other very responsible jobs in the industry and very well respected. I'm doing another episode in a couple days and it's going to be about why it's so difficult for the companies and the jobs seekers to connect. I think the companies could do a better job of articulating what they're looking for and I think if you're looking for a full time job in the hobby, go to the national. Knock on the right doors. There aren't doors there, but knock on the right booths and be courteous about how you are raring to go. You've got this set of skills and they may say we're not hiring but why don't you go over to these other people are hiring? You could even ask that. Thanks everybody. I'm bullish on the hobby and I think a lot of people are hiring so never better time to be thinking about jumping in with both feet into the hobby. I still love it as a side gig too, but if you're looking for a full time position, I think many companies are hiring. Let's just get the companies that are hiring connected with the people that are looking with the right skill set. Thanks everybody and be back in a couple days.