1. Get out and get noticed, a great local resource in Phoenix for networking events is networkingphoenix.com search the internet for local network groups for your own area
2. Set daily, weekly and monthly goals in your job search, make them realistic, not unattainable, you don’t want to set yourself up for defeat
3. Take constructive criticism gracefully.  I’ve learned from some very helpful people that if someone tells you something about how you handle an issue, that more than one person likely has seen the same thing, so don’t over-react.
   • These are more than likely people in your ‘inner-circle’ and noticed something, whatever it is.  Pause a moment and listen, they care and want to help you succeed in your life.
   • Use it to your advantage
   • Take time to reflect on it
   • Grow and learn from it
   • Thank the person for bringing it to your attention later
4. Find someone else who shares your story, and bounce ideas off each other.  Remember the saying, ‘there is no I in team’, and teamwork is something that will help out in the long run, so don’t try to go it alone, here are  some resources you can utilize:
   • Alumni association and/or career services office of colleges you attended
   • Your LinkedIn Network
   • People you previously worked with in your field

I came across the following message on twitter this morning from a buddy of mine who runs jobshouts.com, Mike Quale that was Retweeted from another couple of people.

So I had to go look at it, and just a quick overview of that article, I am doing 5 of these things, I will go over them here. The full article is located here if you don’t click on the short link above: http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/career-experts-8_little_known_tricks_for_the_job_hunt-79

1. Add a signature to your outgoing email messages
   • While I have almost always included my name and email address, since I’ve been searching for a job and since starting this blog, I have added a bit of additional information to my email signature, to include name, email address, blog site and LinkedIn profile URL and I do recommend everyone not currently doing something like this to add one, most webmail providers also include an option to add a signature.
2. Include your LinkedIn profile URL in that signature
   • This is something I started doing once I had my LinkedIn profile up and running, my LinkedIn profile mirrors my resume for the most part, but still does need some tweaking
3. Use Twitter to keep your fans in the loop
   • I’m making a point to connect with people, and I send relevant messages, also letting people know when I’ve made a new post here so they can read it and follow what I’m doing, not only do I do that but I have my twitter feed pulled in to facebook, and I utilize the LinkedIn “What are you working on?” status update as well
4. Make your Facebook page work for you – not against you
   • This one is the one that I’m not doing, I just need to figure out how to work this, if there is anyone out there that can help me with this, I’d appreciate it
5. Add a qoute to your resume
   • This is another that I’m not doing, I can think of several things, but if anyone has a format or idea on where and how to place it on the resume, I’d like some suggestions
6. Get a Moo card
   • I have a ‘network’ card, listing my contact information, this Moo card idea is a bit different and something I will be looking into
7. Put a voice on your job search profile
   • This is one that I plan on implementing in a different way, currently my ‘voice’ was the short news interview I had on ABC15 which there are links to from my sidebar here on my site, but I need to expand on that a bit more in my own video or audio
8. Rewrite your resume so it sounds human
   • Currently working on my resume with Christian Kaijser of Career Evolutions to retool my resume and take it to the next level.

Happy Reading!

Martin

For those of you that came to my site from that link initially, thank you But for those of you just coming across this now, it’s a link to a story and video clip of my job search and networking.

I started a dialog through email with Chris Sign last week after the Jobing.com Career Expo, because I wanted to link my blog post about my experience at the job fair to a story he wrote about it.

I sent him an email and asked him if I could use the link to pictures and the story in my blog post.  He responded, and said yes, and I told him I’d let him know when I posted the story I was writing.  I shot him a quick email after that, letting him know I’d published my blog post.

I never imagined a week later I’d get an email from him saying:

‘I would like to do a story about your blog and experiences involving the job search’

I got the email  about an hour after after he sent it as I hadn’t been checking my email often, I thought about emailing him back, and asking more information, but he did give me his cell # in the email, so instead picked up the phone and called him and I am glad I didn’t miss out on the opportunity.  Chris said they were doing a quick interview in North Scottsdale, and he would like to come over after that to interview me.

I figured I was one of many they were interviewing for this story, and it would be fun to get out there, to have a little clip or comment on the news.

He asked me a question during the interview which I’m paraphrasing here as I don’t recall his exact words, “What would you say to people who may be afraid of or unfamiliar with the technology?”, and my comment about “You can choose to embrace it and go with it.” was part of my comment that made it on the air.

There was of course things that didn’t make it to the edited version which runs a little bit longer than a minute 30 seconds, I mentioned several other important groups and sites in the unedited interview that are a part of my job search efforts:

1. Scottsdale Job Network – SJN (www.scottsdalejobnet.com)
2. St Patricks Employment Support Ministry (www.stpatrickscottsdale.org/W2/ministries/)
3. Health care network group meeting (currently no active website, but hope I can help with that soon)
4. Jobshouts  (jobshouts.com) @jobshouts on twitter
5. JobAngels (www.jobangels.org) @jobangels on twitter

There are other resources I also didn’t mention in the interview and off camera that I will be sharing as I start to write more, as well as sharing more of my experiences since the story aired.

I will be adding a page to my blog with contact information soon, so anyone wanting to contact me off the blog can do so, but please feel free to post comments to my posts.

I have also tagged names of people who are part of the above mentioned groups and will write about the people and their relationship to each group at a later time.

Look for more coming in the next few days.

Happy reading!

-Martin

Me being the techy that I am and taking him up on the challenge, I dug in and banged at the site for a bit, doing test job posts, clicking on things and seeing if I could really ‘break it’.

One thing I noticed right off the bat, that appeared like a thorn in my side from an aesthetics standpoint and which would have been a very simple and easy code change to fix was the title window for the site showed ‘this is the homepage title‘ (and I wish I had a screen shot of it now!).

I sent a message to Mike saying basically, “It’s broke.” He sent one back saying, “thanks for breaking it.” So during that first 20 or so minutes ‘tweeting’ back and forth on twitter.com over the issues on jobshouts.com, our relationship had been born.

After about an hour going back and forth that first night, I got one of the nicest compliments I’d gotten from anyone in a long time, Mike said “Ohh and thanks for all the help, I got more out of you than any other beta tester I have used in recent memory.”

Mike has a nice little writeup about how jobshouts.com came to be  posted here and I recommend reading his story.

After the initial release to Beta, Mike asked for others to join in on using the site, so I started telling people about it both online and offline.  I continued to watch the site, check things out and on occasion I’d notice something wrong, if a tweet from @jobshouts didn’t look right, or when I went to the site and noticed something odd. I would tell Mike about it. I also made a suggestion that the tweet from @jobshouts should include city and/or state  as it would let people following @jobshouts on twitter focus on or filter by that to find jobs posted local to them, and that has since been implimented.

I sent messages to two other job related organizations in my local area,  the Scottsdale Job Network, and St Patricks Employment Ministry, and when my messages were posted to their respective yahoo groups, I got responses from some people including a recruiter asking me questions, which I’d then in turn ask Mike, as one of the recruiters asked me “Are these just for local jobs?” The reply I got back through Robin one morning was in essence, “it’s global.” and that was and is their vision on this project.

I really like his tenacity and his passion in how he’s worked on this and wanting to keep it completely free for both job posters, and job seekers.

That same day that Robin told me it was Global,  there was one instance where Mike asked me to test the apply for job functionality and I found a problem that in my eyes would be a setback for some job seekers when trying to apply for a job, I use ‘filtered’ email addresses on gmail, so when I tried to use an email address like “myemailaddress+jobsearch@gmail.com” it gave an error but didn’t really tell me where the error was exactly.

I had to figure it out hmmm.. checked the file format for the resume I was sending (and I sent my real resume, not a dummy file), that was ok, checked other things on the apply for page, and they were ok too, so last thing I checked was the email address and thought ‘lets drop the +jobsearch from the email address and see what happens’, and it went through.

Since this was a problem that I couldn’t exactly spell out very easily in 140 characters on twitter and since he was asking me to test it right then, I figured there was a time sensitive issue, so I send him a message on Twitter saying something like ‘call me, got an issue with the apply function.’ and left my phone number. About two minutes later he called, we discussed, and he said it would be something corrected in a later release. It was the first time we’d talked on the phone since we met on twitter about a week earlier.

The power of the search engine on twitter was used to find a lot of the links, so kudos to twitter.com for that, and in that regard a disussion I’d seen floating around the net on various blogs with this being one example:

Does Real-Time Search Make Twitter a Google Killer? Its Fanbots Think So (BoomTown Not Quite Yet).

By the way, along with another site JobAngels, the jobshouts.com site and both Mike and Robin were mentioned in the LA Times today - ‘With JobAngels and JobShouts, Twitter helps jobless find work’ By David Sarno

As you read this post, please click on the links, they are very relevant to the story and a timeline of how I came to know this great guy named Mike Quale, and Robin and their venture together with their site jobshouts.com.

Happy reading! Martin