Victoria Blalock

I recently started as a recruiting manager at East Energy Renewables in Farmville, North Carolina, about a month ago. It's been a very positive experience and a great step for my career professionally. I work in the renewable energy sector at a power plant, still around heavy machinery and heavy equipment. Before this, I spent almost 8 years at Heister Yale, a global forklift manufacturing company. I was a recent graduate from Liberty University with a human resource degree when I started there. I knew I wanted to focus on the talent recruitment aspect of human resources, and I was lucky enough to get a job in that area. I spent about 4 years helping with career fairs, early education, hiring new recent grads for all sorts of positions whether it was accounting, plant positions, or marketing. I had a very heavy focus on recruitment marketing, really marketing our company and our jobs, selling the company for attracting the right talent. I really enjoyed doing that creative work. Then I decided to try something new and transitioned to a sales support position within the company. It was very data-heavy, research heavy, and very different from the creative work I was doing with recruitment marketing. It was correlated with the success of sales, so it was a very rewarding position. I did that for about 4 years until the company went through a very big reorganization. I didn't lose my job, but I wanted to prepare myself and started looking for new opportunities. I live in a pretty small area where finding work was very difficult - you either worked at the local university, where I currently worked at the manufacturing place, or at the hospital. Things were very limited and I felt very discouraged. Then somebody reached out to me on LinkedIn about a recruiting manager position at a small company close by. I interviewed virtually, then went in a week later for an in-person interview, and they offered me the job on the spot. It was a very scary transition leaving the only company I knew, but I did it and it has been just a very positive experience. Outside of my professional career, I am also a photographer in the community and was voted Best Photographer back-to-back years in Pitt County. I work very hard as a photographer outside of my 8 to 5.