Interview with Jenny Galluzzo, Co-Founder of The Second Shift by Jennifer Janechek
Before I had kids, I never could have imagined how difficult it would be to try to build a career while parenting small children. As a very career-driven person, I also never anticipated the profound desire I would have to stay home with my children when they were young. This desire has often created a real tension for me, where I’ve felt a nagging pull between work and home. Luckily, I was able to find a work situation that enables me to join my two passions: parenting and working. Indeed, there are many opportunities in today’s work world for women to find part-time, remote, and/or project-based work—opportunities that help women develop their careers when they previously might have had to leave or hit pause on them.
Enter The Second Shift, a job agency co-founded by Jenny Galluzzo and Gina Hadley. The Second Shift helps women find non-traditional or temporary work situations so that they are able to have more freedom to parent, care for a sick child or parent, travel frequently, or do whatever they need to do. It is not a re-engagement platform, or one that helps women move back into the workforce after taking time off from their careers. The job opportunities that it features are top notch because they cater to women who are experts in their respective field. So, note that to use this platform, you’re expected to have a minimum of 10 years of experience in your area, which may exclude younger moms who are just starting out on their career paths. Nonetheless, this service ensures that women who have worked very hard to attain an executive position do not need to step down from it in order to have the work-life situation that they need or want.
Recently, I talked with co-founder Jenny Galluzzo about how The Second Shift came into being, the challenges and joys of being a working mom, and the important mission her company has of encouraging gender equity and increasing support for moms in the workforce.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
My name is Jenny Galluzzo, and I co-founded The Second Shift with Gina Hadley. The Second Shift is something that we needed for ourselves, but it didn’t exist at the time. I was a journalist for a really long time, and Gina was a marketer. We both needed to find a different way to work for different reasons. Her husband kept relocating, and every time she moved she needed to start over again at work. I was a journalist looking to leave the field. In 2014 we built a platform to solve for all these things—to help women identify the skills they have and find a work situation that was a better fit for them—and early on we saw the possibilities. In the first year, we tried to do it on our own—to find companies to work with women, but we didn’t know what kind of women and what kind of jobs we were really looking for. We refocused the search process to move beyond boundaries of job titles and to help women identify what skills they had that would be appealing to various businesses. This is important to us because we believe it is crucial to keep women going throughout different points in their lives. Currently, less than 5 percent of CEOs are women. We have a very high-talent member profile and a four-step vetting process. We encourage businesses to make changes to support these incredibly talented women and to benefit their organizational climate as well. We believe that companies that support these sort of project-based, part-time, or otherwise flexible work situations will thrive just as much as their employees.
What types of jobs will someone find on The Second Shift? Are there certain types of fields that are better represented than others?
The majority of jobs fall into three categories: HR, CFO, and market research. They are often maternity fills, or big projects with a start and end date (long-term and contract based), or quick turnaround projects, or ongoing part-time routine jobs (e.g., PR, interim COO, etc., where there’s a set amount of hours). We have moved into full-time roles, as well. We curate jobs: we take only really high-level jobs that we think we can fill. Our goal is to follow the life cycle of our members through their career journey. At least half of the jobs are remote. We are always pooling different markets and looking for new members.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about “work-life integration” instead of “work-life balance.” What are your thoughts on this?
I think that it’s trying to find a solution to an ultimately unsolvable balance. There’s really not a way to run everything perfectly smoothly. You just need to be more patient and more realistic and realize that every day is going to be a different setup and every year your children’s needs will change.
What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard or would give to a new mom trying to juggle work and parenting?
Think about the long game and just keep swimming. Figure out a way to keep going, and don’t give up because it will get easier. Sometimes parents make hard decisions based on short-term circumstances, but it’s important to see things through. There are resources that are available to help you. Even if you leave the workforce, keep networking. Keep up with every colleague you’ve ever known. Keep everything going, even if it’s just the smallest amount, because it will help you in the future.
Do you believe that women can “have it all”?
Yes. I don’t believe you can have it all all the time. You won’t be able to do everything perfectly all day every day. Some days you will be a perfect worker, some days you will be a perfect mother, and some days you will be neither. But go into each day with the expectation of trying, and if nothing else, you tried. Lead by example for your kids, colleagues, and partner—show that you are human and fallible but that both your work and your family are a priority.
Jennifer Janechek is the director of content strategy for Sound Wisdom. In her spare time, she writes for her website, The Work-at-Home Mom Blog. She loves that she gets to join her two passions—reading and writing about great books and empowering working women—in both these pursuits.