After 100 Interviews, She Landed Her Dream Job. Here’s How

When Arin Goldsmith bought her first video game — Diablo III, btw — at 14 years old, she didn’t know that she was going to find her dream job in the gaming industry. She also didn’t know that what it would take to land her role as a talent marketing specialist at major developer and publisher Blizzard was something that scares most people: Failure. 

Sharing her story during Thursday’s R29 Twitch steam, Goldsmith told R29 Entertainment Director and Twitch host Melissah Yang, that her first dream job was actually to be a costume designer on Broadway, which she moved to NYC to study in college. But when her first contract job showed how exploitative and demanding the industry could be, she quickly realized she couldn’t do it for the rest of her life. In a sense, it was one of her first career “failures” — but it was one she turned into a different opportunity. As one of the youngest people working on that play, the director assumed she was good at social media and passed control of the company’s Instagram account over to her for an extra $100 a week. “I was like, ‘I’m 20 years old and I have no money. I would love to do that,’” she said. 

That started Goldsmith — who is also a popular content creator on LinkedIn — on the path of social media and marketing. She graduated in the spring of 2020, pushed through the uncertainty of COVID and, after quick-applying to essentially every New York-area marketing job listed on ZipRecruiter, had a gig lined up at a fertility clinic. That job was unexpected — she said she single-handedly ran the marketing department as a junior employee — and she learned a lot. But she didn’t click with her environment. Another quasi “failure.” Again, Goldsmith pivoted, this time doing marketing for a construction company, and, again, it was not right for her so she put herself back on the job hunt.

But after six months she was still looking. “I was getting rejected and rejected,” she said. “I did roughly 100 interviews before I got my job at Blizzard, and I got three offers during that entire time.” 

Goldsmith figured that she had to learn from her failures. She took a professional certification program to boost her marketing know-how, and having that extra education helped her attract better opportunities and taught her the ins and outs of an industry in which she previously had no formal training. She also seriously thought about every unsuccessful job interview. “I had to be brutally honest with myself,” she said. “When you fail, you have to be really paying attention to what went wrong and what you can change to make the next time a little bit better.” 

By the time a recruiter for Blizzard reached out to Goldsmith about a potential position there, she was ready (though, deep down, she never believed she was going to get the job until she received the offer). Now, she’s been at her dream role for seven months and loves the creative, passionate environment, and how people make her feel valued. “If you keep investing in yourself, it will pay off,” she said. 

That ethos and make-your-own-opportunities determination is also why she started making content on LinkedIn, a social media platform she feels is safer for big conversations and differing opinions without trolls and toxic comments. When she posted about getting her job at Blizzard, she got 3,000 likes. Suddenly, her inbox was flooded with questions from people interested in working in the gaming industry. Goldsmith decided she wanted to use this newfound platform to provide an authentic, realistic look at what the industry is really like (especially for women in gaming) and give advice — like she wishes she could have to her younger self. 

Content creation is something she does purely because it’s fun, and if being a creator is your dream job, that’s the message she hopes you take away. “I make $0 off of LinkedIn and have no exception of ever making money off of LinkedIn — it’s something I like to do because I like helping people,” she said. “You need to accept that you might not make money off of this. If you’re just going in because you want to be the next MrBeast or something, you’re not going to enjoy it, and you’re going to burn yourself out. Make sure that you’re using a medium that you like and that you like what you’re putting out.” 

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