Today we’d like to introduce you to Taylor Desseyn
taylor, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
i moved to nashville, tn in 2011 to pursue my career in music (like everyone else lol). i was a drummer…still am? idk. i moved up to nashville with my dear friend jake etheridge who is still doing music to this day. i played the honkey tonks, played in some country cover bands, and did some touring. but I was losing money pretty fast. i was serving tables 5 nights a week not playing ANY music bc I was working nights so I decided I needed a 9-5 job. i leveraged the little network that I had and found out one of my friends, at the time, nannied for someone that was looking for a ‘recruiter’ I had no idea what that was but I interviewed and got the job a week later! my boss was pretty accepting of me playing music and I did a week long tour which we ended up breaking down on the side of the road in the middle of south Carolina in august off of no sleep and that’s when I decided I was done doing music.
i then spent the next 11 years of my career at vaco. i worked my way up from a recruiter to a lead, to a manager, then director, then my last stint at vaco was leading a small division. then in 2020 it all changed. when covid hit I saw a shift in the market that relationships across the globe is where we were heading with a remote first workforce. at the time I was just focused on recruiting engineers locally in nashville. i realized I needed a way to reach the masses so I decided to go live on LinkedIn in its early days. i started a live stream daily where I can help software engineers navigate the job search and level up their careers (little did I know id still be running this live stream 5 years later). i also delved into building community. i didn’t know it at the time but that’s what I started to do. i started to host more meetups around town, I started an email newsletter, I started a discord. after another 2 years of this I moved on from vaco. spent a short stint at another local talent marketplace in nashville then when that came to an end I found my dream job at torc.dev.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
hahahaha oh no. the road has not been smooth at all. the road was VERY smooth probably for the first 7 years of my career. i was breaking records, leading the team in revenue, and growing quickly through the ranks at vaco. then in 2020 when I started my new way of recruiting/selling I had a lot of folks question what I was doing. while I still saw growth with what I was doing for 2 years people still were wondering why I was doing what I was doing and if it was paying off. then when the market decided to go south then it really got difficult. building community is hard but on top of that driving that to revenue is a delicate balance and when the recession hit in the tech market it just was a perfect storm. over the last 2 years I took about a 40% paycut due to being in no mans land when it came to my role. so man people tried to put me in sales, or recruiting, or marketing or back to recruiting or back to sales. so I could never get a foothold in an organization and that really hurt from a compensation perspective. however looking back on the last 4 years, it’s a time where I grew the most professionally and really stretched myself and now I have this dream job at torc.dev where I’m building community for engineers across the globe!
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
so my job is vp of global community which basically just means I’m a professional friend maker:) my goal is to build a community where individuals across the globe can feel like they can come and hang out and make friends/network and learn something that elevates their career. this community/growth area is relatively new and it’s a mix of a lot of different skills. for my role its a mix of recruiting, marketing, content creation, public speaking, managing a team, and much more.
personally I think I’m known in the engineering community for always wanting to give back and help people. your career can be a very scary journey and I’m trying to help you realize that you aren’t alone and you have someone in your corner.
I’m most proud of the team I have at torc.dev and the amazing things we’ve been able to accomplish so far! we’ve been able to grow our discord thousands of members in just a few months, essentially have our own media channel through 5-6 live shows my team does throughout the week and we are still building on all the ways we can give back to the engineering community.
what sets me apart from others? while I’m a big softy and I do care what others think about me I’m incredibly competitive and play with a chip on my shoulder. I’ve had a lot of people tell me throughout my career I couldn’t do x or y and to be honest I try to prove everyone wrong to this day. i would also say that I have a unique way at delivering content through social media channels in the engineering/tech community that people actually want to read/listen to.
Do you have any advice for those looking to network or find a mentor?
man i think networking is EVERYTHING. its pretty much all I’ve preached over the last 4 years and what my entire career is built on. i would not be where I’m at today if it wasn’t for networking.
i think finding a mentor is HUGE. i legit would not be where I’m at today if it wasn’t for scott gordon at vaco. he took me under his wing for the first 5 years of my career and I legit don’t think id be where I’m at today if it wasn’t for him. I’m also super blessed to have had a ton of other mentors in my career like alex naddell, sid mitchener, and taylor roberts. my biggest advice for folks is find a mentor!
i would say going back to networking that I’m a HUGE introvert. i just have coined myself a social sprinter (thank you elyse Myers for that). the one hack for me is to leverage social media to network. networking its just commenting and liking peoples posts. that’s it. i legit have transformed my career bc I’ve written lol on a bunch of peoples posts (well kind of).
my biggest biggest advice? get on LinkedIn and start dm’ing strangers. it’ll transform your career.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://torc.dev
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tdesseyn/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylordesseyn/
- Twitter: https://x.com/tdesseyn
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@tdesseyn/videos
- Other: https://taylordesseyn.substack.com/
