My First Job: Scott Beardsley

EDITOR’S NOTE: We’re doing a series on recruitAbility employees’ first jobs and the lessons they learned. Below we hear from Scott Beardsley, recruiting manager at recruitAbility. To read other posts in this series, click here.

I’m originally from Pittsburgh, and I had plenty of jobs growing up, starting at a Subway sandwich shop and then working with my dad as a boilermaker’s apprentice when I was 17.

But my first real job was working for a moving company when I was a freshman in college around 1980. My friend, Ray Kotewicz, connected me to the owner, Don Farr, who paid me $5/hour under the table. It began as a summer job, but I was one of the good eggs, so they kept me around for two years.

At the time, it was just a small moving company. Don worked out of a spare bedroom, and we’d rent U-Haul trucks, use them to move all day in and around the Pittsburgh area, and then return the U-Haul trucks at night.

The work was grueling. We’d bring items up and down three flights of stairs, and the winters were freezing and slushie. We’d move in the rain, too. It was horrible. 

What kept me coming back was the people. A lot of my colleagues were my knucklehead friends, but they were scrappy. I have some great memories of us trying to make each other laugh on the job and turning something physically exhausting into fun. It’s a good reminder that if you enjoy who you work with, it’s possible for work to seem like play.

About two years ago, my wife told me to run over to check out the T.V. The movie Jack Reacher was on with Tom Cruise, and the film was shot in Pittsburgh. I looked closely, and there was a Don Farr moving truck. The company has come a long way!

The best lesson I learned from that moving job is something that I still carry with me to this day: Life is a gigantic ball of hard work. It doesn’t matter what the job is. You could be moving furniture, seeing patients as a physician, or working at a butcher shop. They’re all different jobs that require different competencies, but the common thread is that there are no shortcuts. To be great, it’s hard work.

Just embrace it, and you’ll be much happier.