Connecting the Community with WordPress Jobs

Mendel: Hey, I’m Mendel. With me today is my co-host, Zach Stepek. Zach, who do we have joining us for today’s show?

Zach: We have Michelle Frechette.

Michelle: Hi guys. Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here.

Mendel: Awesome. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Why don’t you introduce yourself?

Michelle: Yeah, so I’m recently in a new position. I am the Director of Community Engagement for StellarWP, which is the software division of Liquid Web. So I have lots of different plugins under the stellar umbrella. And I’m less than a month actually in the new job. So tomorrow will be one month in the new job. And so far everything is awesome and I’m loving it. And it gives me lots of opportunities to do things in the community, like working with Jobs and working at Post Status and working with Big Orange Heart and all the other fun stuff that I like to do to try to help people out in the WordPress community.

Zach: Congratulations on the new role. I know that after the acquisition of GiveWP, you were able to transition into doing what you do just on a bigger stage, which is amazing.

Michelle: Yeah. It’s pretty exciting for me, for sure. And anybody that knows me, it all knows how much I love the WordPress community and giving back as much as I can, because I’ve been so blessed in this community with so many things, and by so many people. And so any opportunity I have to help people find jobs or to help people be able to communicate or any of that kind of stuff is definitely something, sorry, guys, I got to hand my keys over here to somebody in the office, let’s making a noise, but the opportunity I get to help other people be successful in the WordPress space is definitely something right at my alley.

Mendel: Well now, so Michelle, it wouldn’t be Do the Woo without asking you, how do you Do the Woo?

Michelle: Well, let’s see, if we’re talking about WooCommerce, I have helped lots of my personal customers from my freelance days have WooCommerce stores on their websites. And I also now help promote some WordPress products that work alongside with WooCommerce. Specifically, I helped launch Orderable a few weeks ago, which is online ordering basically for local delivery, like restaurant pick up and delivery, things like that, so that you can have real time ordering on your WooCommerce website.

Zach: Would you say that some of the products that you work with related to WooCommerce are iconic?

Michelle: They are, they’re very iconic actually. Like I go to bed at night and I just see icons in my head. They’re so iconic. But seriously huge shout out to James Kemp because he does so much good work on the stuff with Iconic and with Orderable that it’s been easy to support that product and those products easily.

Mendel: Okay. So you’re deeply steeped in the WordPress and WooCommerce community. You are what many would consider a veteran of this community. You see a lot, you know a lot. What we haven’t started to talk about and what I would like to focus on, I hope Zach’s down with this too, is your HR experience and kind of how that’s intertwined with your WooCommerce or your WordPress experience. And so if you can maybe paint us a picture with a story about how you got started and how you fell into some of this HR’dom and how that has come about within the WordPress and WooCommerce space. That’d be awesome.

Michelle: Well, I was born in 1968, just outside of Chicago in a small town, but seriously….

Mendel: I was excited, right? You’re like, I’m taking it way back. And I’m like, oh my God, she’s prepared an entire lifetime narrative, right? I’m thinking black and white videos and like old timey music, you know?

Michelle: You could download the book, the e-book on, no, you can’t. There’s no e-book. Someday, it would be really boring for other people to read the story of my life, but it would be so much fun to write, you know? But in all seriousness, I actually was born in Hammond, Indiana, which is not far from Chicago, for all, Chicagoans over there. But I’ve been in WordPress for, I keep telling people it’s been over 10 years and it hasn’t actually been over 10 years yet, in 2022, I will have been using WordPress for 10 years. My best friend and I started a nonprofit. We needed a website. Her husband built us one, gave us the login, and said, go forth and populate your website. And ,I’ve told the story before I was terrified. I was like, I’m going to break it. I know I’m going to break it.

He’s like, you can’t break it. Just stay away from these files, put anything out there you want. And it didn’t take very long before I had the bug and really like, wow, this is really cool. I wonder if I could build one of these from scratch. So I went over to their house. She worked nights. I made spaghetti dinner for their four kids and him in exchange for him, teaching me how to go from purchasing a URL and hosting, to actually having a website on the URL. I understood the two ends. I didn’t understand how to get the one on the other. And so by the end of that night, I had like four steps written down on a piece of paper. I think I still have that paper somewhere. One of the steps was salt keys.

Michelle: Anybody who you ever used to do the download and upload you’ll remember the salt keys step. And of course now everybody just pushes that one button install, which is so hopeful everywhere you go. But that kind of gave me the bug and gave me the start. And within a couple years I was attending WordCamps and be like, wow, this, all of this for $25, like or $20 or whatever it was at the time I get to learn so much cool stuff learned about WooCommerce. I think one of the first talks I ever sat in, two back-to-back. One was Mike Demo. The other was Chris Lama. And I was just mind blown that these people were sharing all this really good information and thought I want to be able to help people and do that kind of thing too.

So I started attending more WordCamps, went to WordCamp US. The first one in Philadelphia, signed up our meetup as an official meetup. And the next year we had our first WordCamp here in Rochester. And so I’ve kind of been all in since then. My career has progressed through WordPress until I was hired at GiveWP about four years ago. And I signed my paperwork at WordCamp us in 2017 and started work there 2018. And as Mendel said, GiveWP was acquired by Liquid Web this year. And now I’m working with StellarWP as the Director of Community Engagement. So that’s how I got started in it. And it’s just kind of interesting through the pandemic. I was noticing all these people posting, “I need a job. Does anybody know of any word, press jobs?”

And I was seeing all these other people posting. We have these openings, we have these openings. And I was like, these people need to meet those people because I think there’s some connections that can be made here. And so one day I had all this vacation time, but no place to go, because we were in lockdown. I took a vacation day and I built WPcareerpages.com. And it’s not a job listing site so that you’re not going to find individual jobs there. But what you will find is a ton of websites that are WordPress focused businesses and links to their career pages. So if they have a place that like the get hired, jobs, career of their website, it’s listed on WPcareerpages.com. That turned into me posting every Wednesday, just a whole list of jobs that were available. And over the last few months, a couple companies have come forward to sponsor that and take it a little bit further.

And then as a result of that, I started working with Post Status and doing some of job related stuff at post status tomorrow, which is December 1st. We have our first Twitter spaces to talk about WordPress jobs, and hiring, and getting hired, and those kinds of things that go together. And then next spring, April 8th, we have our first WP Career Summit and we are going to be doing a full day of two tracks, one for job seekers and one for employers on ways to do better at building your portfolio, building your resume, understanding how to do interviewing better, things like that. But also on the hiring side, better recruiting tactics, better recruiting for inclusion and diversity, those kinds of things. And at the same time, a giant job fair. So it’s going to be a very cool day for hiring, very cool day for job seekers. And moving up to that point, we’re going to be doing, we’re doing one this month, which is the Twitter Spaces Tomorrow, and then we’re going to do them weekly, starting in January.

Zach: That’s awesome.

Michelle: That was a big data dump, sorry.

Zach: No, no, that’s fine. And we’ll make sure that there are links to all of these things in the show notes for the episode. So one of the things that kind of plays into all of that, you talked about WP Career Pages and how you’re helping people get connected to the people who have jobs that they’re trying to hire for. But on the other half of that, you’re also working to try and connect people who want jobs with employers who are looking for people who are in underrepresented communities.

Michelle: Yes.

Zach: So you started Underrepresented in Tech.

Michelle: Yes. Allie Nimmons and I found that underrepresentedintech.com and it’s a database. So if you are an underrepresented person, you can join the database. It’s free to join and then anybody who’s looking to find podcast guests, hire somebody part-time, hire somebody full-time, get speakers for your events, those kinds of things can peruse through that. There’s a whole bunch of different search criteria. You can use to search the database and find people in underrepresented communities for making our entire space, our entire ecosystem, more friendly towards under-representation and make sure that we are a more representative community. And it’s all free.

Zach: It’s something incredibly important and you have great sponsors that help you and Allie to run that resource, you have sponsors helping you to run WP Career Pages. The community has really come together to help in these areas to put these resources forward. And I know you probably say it best yourself when you call yourself a, oh what’s the term that you use?

Michelle: Director of community engagement?

Zach: Well, no, it’s a pay it forward WordPresser, that’s the term I was looking for that really resonated with me from your site. And you do mentoring, and job coaching and all of those, teach WordPress, run marketing classes, all of these things just in addition to your career as a way to give back to the community that’s given so much to you. And so I find it amazing that you are putting effort into connecting people, and I always tell people that one of my superpowers is connection, right? Being able to connect people to each other. And I think you very much have that same superpower.

Michelle: Yeah. That’s one of the ones I think that I am really good at and I don’t necessarily do, I mean, I could build websites. I’m not the best of designer that’s out there, but I’m really good at helping people network together.

Mendel: So Michelle, I want to know, why do you care? Why do you care about under representation? Why do you care about helping match people in the community to jobs and matching people that are trying to find candidates to their positions? And I know these things are important, right? I know intuitively that these things are important, but I think in understanding why you care, maybe other people that will spark something in them to be interested in the same.

Michelle: So as far as the under-representation piece, I tick a bunch of boxes myself as an underrepresented person, especially in technology. There are a lot of women, but we don’t have a lot of seats at the table. I’m not a minority as far as my ethnicity status, but my daughter is, and I’ve raised a daughter who is a proud black woman who is not afraid to stand up for herself. And so I take my cue from her as far as I’ve learned so much from her about helping be an ally to people who are in the BIPOC community. And then also I am a person with disabilities. And so being able to navigate the world as someone who has a disability and still be able to do all the things that I do. If I serve as a role model for even one person to inspire them to do something, I think that I’ve served my purpose for sure.

But if I could help amplify voices, if I can help people find jobs, we talk about democratizing publishing and that anybody can create space on the web and that’s true, but can anybody make money doing publishing on the web? Yes. To a degree, right? But is it sustainable as a vocation. And sometimes you can’t do it on your own. I was freelance for years. I got divorced and I needed a steady income. And so I needed to find employment that wasn’t just me trying to find the next site to build in the next marketing campaign that I could help with. And so I went in search of a real, full-time job with benefits and all, I think everybody should have that opportunity. To be able to find something in our community, certainly there are enough companies to go around. It’s just a matter of matching the right skillsets to what people need.

Thanks to our Pod Friends FooSales and Wayflyer

Mendel: Okay. So I’m, I’m going to lead you a little bit really quick but I want to make sure to come back to this question I asked you, why do you care? And before you start talking more about why you’re marrying job seekers with jobs, I want to know why should other people care, right? What value, and like I said, I’m leading you a little bit, what value does diversity bring to tech? To companies? To the experience? Because there are plenty of people that are not in an underrepresented population. They’re listening to this podcast and they might be wondering give me some passion as to why I should care.

Michelle: So let me take it down to a basic marketing for years and years, the only dolls that were sold were little white, blonde dolls. And so the only people that actually benefited from little white, blonde baby dolls was little white girls, little white children. And any person who was not a white person, wanted a baby doll, they got a white baby doll. So like my daughter, had she grown up in my age would be somebody who is a black woman with a white baby doll. And that’s not representative. So if you want to be a company that can market what you have to everybody, then you better have some representation sitting around that table to understand what that means.

If Mattel had had black women sitting at the table instead of a bunch of white guys and a couple of white women early on, they would’ve been able to market to more than white children. And the part of what happens when you invite more people to leadership within communities, when you invite more people to be part of the whole process, and part of the team is you get a much richer background and experiences from those people, which can make your products and services so much better because now you can make them applicable to anybody who wants to partake of them. And you understand where everybody’s coming from.

Mendel: So actually on a very basic business level, diversity breeds greater success for the companies that embrace it.

Michelle: Absolutely, but it’s not just diversity, it’s inclusion. Diversity for the sake of diversity in and of itself is harmful. Diversity for inclusion, for hearing the voices, listening to the voices, and incorporating the things that people bring to the table. That is where the magic happens. So it’s not just look, we hired somebody who’s got different color skin than us. It’s like, oh my gosh, we got this amazing person who brings so much richness, so much experience and so much value to our team. And that’s what makes us better.

Mendel: Yeah, that’s awesome. I remember listening to some, I think it was in Boston sitting at an accessibility workshop at a WordPress event at a WordCamp. And one of the striking things to me was learning for the first time about accessibility on web sites and learning about struggles that people go through. And then learning that the structured data required for accessibility also lends itself well to SEO. And so I think this is one of those basic examples of how thinking about all sides can lead to a better product overall, right? You have more people that are able to use things, you’re including people, you’re also leveling up your SEO game in the process, and that’s the nice side effect of it all, right? So that’s interesting.

Michelle: Absolutely. I gave a talk last year for WordCamp Santa Clarita Valley called Accessibility Is More Than Disability Accommodation, because accessibility means everybody has access to it. Not just people who are deaf, or blind, or all seeing, but it’s actually inviting everybody to partake and truly democratizing our community, which I think I’m just from this conversation starting to come up with perhaps a tagline for WP Career Summit, something about democratizing hiring or democratizing the ecosystem or something like that.

Zach: Well, and I think one of the things that’s really important for people to get their head around is that giving back to WordPress is not just becoming a core contributor, right?

Michelle: Absolutely.

Zach: And so one of the ways that you can do so is by fostering community. And that’s one of the areas where you focused, is fostering communities and whether that’s the support organization for the best donation plugin in the world, in my opinion.

Michelle: I have to agree with you on that one.

Zach: I thought you would, or building communities around job seekers and companies that are looking for employees. Building community really seems to be at the core of a lot of what you do. And a lot of how you give back. I think that’s awesome. There are, there are tons more ways to spend your five for the future than just writing code.

Michelle: Absolutely. And I’ve learned never to apply the word just to anything, right? So we don’t just build community. We don’t just write code. And I’m not coming down on you about that at all. But a lot of people will say, I’m just a designer or I’m just a marketer, in that they’re not a developer. There’s no such thing as just a developer, just a marketer, or just a designer. If you’re creating and helping move whatever the product is, or yourself, or whatever forward, then take the just out of it and own it. Because that’s pretty amazing.

Mendel: Yeah. Words matter, right? So talking about something else that matters your day job, right? Nobody can deny the fact that you are Michelle, the one that does all of these crazy, cool side projects. And then you have like a day job where you’re doing significant work for a great company in the ecosystem. And so I’m curious both how your experiences outside of work help to propel you inside of work and also how you balance that time.

Michelle: So my outside work is, so almost all my friends are WordPressers now, so there is no outside of work. It all kind of bleeds into one another. I do have family and friends. I don’t mind to make it sound like that, but a lot of what I do, what I find enriching my life is still connected somehow to the WordPress community. You referenced my work at Big Orange Heart, we recently crowdsourced a coloring book. And so I got to put my artistic talent and my writing skills to work on that and create artwork, which to me is therapeutic. So I got my own therapy by creating something that other people can find therapeutic. And that makes a little bit of money for Big Orange Heart as well. So it’s called Color My Heart Orange. So, I mean, it’s a great coloring book.

It’s out. We just launched it about two weeks ago, I got 15 copies in the mail the other day. It’s phenomenal. And to be able to do that, the sense of accomplishment that comes with that. And so for me, that was just sitting in front of the TV at night, just I’ve bought an iPad so that I could make digital art instead of having to try to digitize Penn and ink drawings. And so for me, that was phenomenal. So as that balance? I call it balance, right? But other people might say, but you were still working. Well, no, I wasn’t really. I was doing something that for me is therapeutic, but just actually had an application outside of that therapy for myself. So I am a single woman. I live with three cats, no children at home.

Mendel: What are your cat’s names?

Michelle: My cat’s names are Marilyn, Stella, and Charlotte. Marilyn’s the oldest, she’s 16, she weighs 19 pounds, she’s a big old maine coon cat. And then Stella’s a pastel tortie. And Charlotte is a tortoiseshell.

Mendel: You said tortoiseshell, I was just thinking you have a turtle cat, which I know is impossible, but if this were a video podcast, we’d make you go collect all of them.

Michelle: Except I’m in the office, I’m not at home.

Mendel: Oh, oh, Good point. Good point.

Michelle: They live at home. Which is another thing is being able to get up and leave the house in the morning, come to the office for my day job, right? Which sometimes leads into other things like doing podcasts like this and that kind of thing. But then at the end of the day, I go home and if I choose to do work, that’s fine, it’s on my time. If I choose to lay on the couch and be a bum and pet a cat while I binge watch WandaVision and those kinds of things over the summer, that’s what I do too.

So for me balance isn’t about, I have this many hours, I do this, and that many hours I do that. It’s about finding what’s right for me in that particular moment if I need to take an hour out of my day, during my day job to go take a nap, I’m allowed to do that. You know? So I have a lot of flexibility in my day job to be able to create. I hit my 40 hours every week, probably more than that. And nobody’s making me clock in and clock out. And that’s what allows that creativity, part of it to be present too, right? Is that you’re not just sitting here pushing buttons all day.

Zach: I find having a creative outlet to be super important. A lot of the work that we do requires extreme levels of focus, regardless of what your role is, it requires focus to get work done. And I find the only way that I disengage from that, because I work from home is to walk away and have something else that occupies my time. So whether that’s music or concert photography, or any of the other things, and I know your photographer as well.

Michelle: Yep. I take my camera out in nature all the time.

Zach: But those things provide a way to reset your brain and to do something that doesn’t require your normal thought process, your normal skillset that you’re employing in your day job. And it’s incredibly therapeutic. So it’s awesome that you were able to work on the coloring book and get art in there and really chaperone most of the project through the finish line. And I’m looking forward to getting my copy as well.

Michelle: Yeah. And for example, this past Sunday, I posted in our local of Facebook Buy Nothing, Sell Nothing group, which are people who are looking to get and give things that I would do a full day of photography. They could sign up. I had put a calendar link out there and I gave away family portraits, holiday portraits. And I had eight families come through and I got to do portraits of eight families during the day, just because I enjoy it. I had a lot of fun doing it, but also was able to give families who said things like we haven’t had pictures of our families since the day we got married. And to be able to give, and they now have like three kids or four kids. So to be able to do that for different families and that kind of thing, it’s fulfilling. And that’s part of the balance for me is I like to be busy, but it doesn’t always have to be WordPress.

Mendel: That’s awesome. So going back towards the HR stuff, right? Going back towards the job seekers, because you read a lot in the news right now, job market’s hot. A lot of companies hiring, people say it’s a job seekers market, but you also hear a lot of reports about job seekers having a really, really hard time. Because they’re unprecedented amount of people they’re quitting their jobs, they’re moving, they’re changing, they’re rearranging their lives.

And so I think that there’s a group of people, of course, that is heading out into the job market for the first time, there are other people that are super experienced and they’re just looking for the right fit, and then there’s this other group that maybe is looking to either change directions or they’ve been hoping for a good, tight fit and they can’t find it. And they don’t know, is it the resume? Is it the LinkedIn profile? Is it how I’m positioning myself? Is it the interviews? What is it? So what are the top maybe couple most impactful things that you could have advise people specifically in the WordPress space to do, or to look at, or to evaluate in order to get that tight as a glove fit for the job that they’re looking for?

Well, the first thing I always say is I hate the fact that it’s so much of the time it’s who you know, but it really does come down to a lot of the time who you know, or whether you know somebody who knows somebody that can recommend you. And for that purpose, you can never network too much. And I know I’ve been throwing the Post Status name out here, but the Post Status Slack is really very active. The Big Orange Heart Slack is very active. If you can join a community like that, if you can get active on Twitter, start paying attention to what, follow people that are influential in the areas that you’re interested in. If you’re a developer, follow some developers that are talking about things and make sure you’re aware of what’s happening in the industry. Being up on information, and being connected to other people by and far is going to help you find the right job.

Michelle: And then also make sure you identify properly. You said a little while ago, words matter, and they really do. Because we see things like junior dev, senior dev, full stack developer, we see product designer, we see the words engineer instead of developer sometimes. We see things like UX and UI, and I don’t know that everybody has the same definitions for all of those different words. And so understanding exactly what they’re looking for, and not disqualifying yourself right away. Maybe you think that you’re a jr dev, but you read that senior dev job description. And it’s like, oh, wow. I really do know all those things, you know?

So why not throw your hat in the ring for that job, that kind of thing. So I think understanding the job market in that you want to learn more about specifically what those jobs are looking for, understanding how you identify yourself, putting together a solid resume that you can adjust as needed per job that you apply to, and then network your bum off, because seriously, that’s going to be some of your best opportunities to learn about jobs and to be recommended for jobs or even just to know somebody and get hired directly.

Mendel: Awesome.

Zach: Yeah. It’s really interesting how much networking and knowing your community matter when you’re looking for work, but it’s also amazing that there are a number of terms in this industry that mean similar, but not exact things. I have a friend D Sadler who, if I said that UI and UX were the same thing would drive all the way here from the east coast and slap me because they’re not, right? They’re very different disciplines. And there are a number of people who think those are just the same role and they’re not, and then where is the line between who is a developer, and who’s a designer, and who is an implementer, and where do those lines blur? What does developer mean in the WordPress community?

Mendel: And how does experience influence those names too, right?

Michelle: Yeah, for sure.

Mendel: That’s another big one.

Michelle: That’s I think some of the biggest hurdles to getting hired and hiring is the terminologies that we use around those things. And I have a podcast, as you all know, that I ask people what’s something that they think that we as, and then I say, web designers, web developers, web builders could do better to make our products better for the end user. And I use all three of those terms, because I want to make sure that they know, no matter what role you think you are, you’re one of those things, right? So if you don’t think of yourself as a designer developer, you’re part of the web building process because I don’t want to leave anybody out of it, but everybody thinks of themselves along different roles.

Zach: Well, and I think that’s something that Bob’s done a really good job with Do the Woo, is focusing on the builder community. Not saying, “Hey, this is a developer podcast, or this is a, a designer focused podcast.” It’s not, and while we’ll have episode that skew either way, or that go into the business of this business, like what we’re talking about today, in the end, it’s all to make builders better and help builders build better sites.

Michelle: Absolutely.

Zach: That’s awesome.

Michelle: Yep, for sure. And let’s agree that every developer does not have a designer’s eye, and every designer does not understand the development that goes into a website. And you don’t have to be either one and you don’t have to be either one of those to build a good website, right?

Mendel: That is the truth.

Michelle: So however you count yourself, you’re part of the group.

Mendel: Indeed. And with that, I want to thank you. Deeply thank you for the insights that you’ve shared, hoping that there’s an opportunity for people to get in touch with you in between your cats and your TV shows and things like that. And your day job, which is also your regular community and your friend community and all of this. So how can people get ahold of you if they have a question for you?

Michelle: Absolutely. Well, my DMs, I’m always checking my DMs on Twitter. You can DM me @MichelleAmes on Twitter. I have a website, worksbymichelle.com. You can visit any of my other sites as well, which are underrepresentedintech.com, WPcareerpages.com, or you can find me over at StellarWP as well.

Mendel: Wow. Just a few places.

Michelle: I know, Big Orange Heart, Post Status. I’m at everywhere. You have to work hard not to find me at someplace.

Zach: And that is just a Testament to who you are as an individual. And I love it.

Michelle: Either that, or I’m a busy body one or the other, I don’t know, you only live once, right? Make the most of it. Help as many people as I can.

Zach: It really is amazing that you have such a focus on legacy. And I think that a lot of people could do with focusing equally on legacy. So thank you for everything you do to support our community and to support the people in it.

Michelle: Thank you. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me here today.

BobWP:I would like to give one more shoutout to our two Pod friends. If your clients are looking for cash flow assistance with their marketing and inventory, make sure and send them to Wayflyer.com. And for those clients looking for a powerful point-of-sales, FooSales.com has you covered.