Last month, more than 35 former Plexus Boulder Design Center employees convened at Cardinal Peak’s Lafayette headquarters to participate in a networking event aimed at both filling open positions and inspiring hope among a group of recently laid-off tech employees.
Plexus, like Cardinal Peak, offers contract engineering services to design products for clients. However, Plexus recently experienced a layoff, and the company decided to close the Plexus Boulder Design Center in Louisville, just two years after moving into the new facility.
Having worked at Plexus in the past and now a part of the Cardinal Peak team, solutions manager John Nichols leveraged his network and collaborated with our HR team to put the networking event together.
During the event, Cardinal Peak team members offered attendees encouragement and advice on how to get noticed and hired in the 2020 job market. CEO Mark Carrington showed slides highlighting Cardinal Peak’s advantages and the benefits of joining our team, and Cardinal Peak managers discussed available openings. Resumes were collected, and 10 former Plexus employees are already going through our interviewing process.
“These people are good engineers, and we want to help them all out. Our goal is to help them get past their worries about being laid off,” said Nichols. “These people already know our environment, how to work in a time and materials-type environment. We won’t have to train them to account for their time and how to talk to customers. It’s really a good group of people on multiple skill levels — and many would make great additions to our staff.”
At Cardinal Peak, one of our core values is building community, and events like this help us do precisely that. Through this event, we’re able to support a group of engineers that found themselves suddenly unemployed and help out the local engineering community as a whole. Even if we don’t have an opening for a specific role, we’re able to leverage our experience working with a wide range of clients to provide attendees insight into how some client companies work and a glimpse into their culture. In some cases, we even have people on-site who can offer deeper insights.
The local engineering community is close-knit, and it’s not uncommon to work with the same colleagues at different organizations decades apart. Additionally, a lot of the work we do is from repeat customers and referrals. Consequently, having a good reputation is of utmost importance. When you do right by others, it spreads, and the karma comes back to you in the future.
Beyond events like this, Cardinal Peak strives to elevate the engineering ecosystem through quarterly Friends of Cardinal Peak events and corporate sponsorships because we wouldn’t be where we are without our community. From a deeply talented workforce that lives close by to the business that stimulates the prosperity of our organization, the community that surrounds us is essential to our success — and giving back to the community supports the area that provides us with great people and a sustainable business model.