I attended a workshop presented by Scottsdale Job Network on Monday April 27th, 2009 from 6-8pm at the Jobing.com offices in Phoenix, Arizona, facilitated by Angelo Fernando.

I was invited to the workshop  to talk and speak briefly about a job seekers view on blogging, why I decided on blogging,  the learning curve, any problems I’ve encountered, topic I picked, benefits of blogging in relation to the job search, and if I’d recommend blogging to others.

Angelo was kind enough to email me the first picture,  in which I am addressing the audience,  and he posted some other photos of the event on flickr here.

Angelo did a very good job cramming a 3 hour workshop into a 2 hour time frame.  He gave an overview of what a blog is, being a permanent record of an experience, interaction, or an event.  How it can be used to get noticed by employers, and that blogging is a community of people, with shared interests and ideas on numerous topics.

Angelo gave an interesting comparison between business cards, resumes, other social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace, and a Blog going over about 11 comparison points, and how a blog can show so much more than any of the other forms in relation to marketing yourself.

One of the last things he went over and helped some in the class was to actually set up a blog, Bette Publicker volunteered to have him help get her set up and running.

I’ve done a search since then on google and found another member that started a blog that night Liz Alexander.

For those of you that attended the event, please leave a comment here letting me know your blog site,  I’m interested in following your blogs to see how they develop.

Over the coming week I will write more about my experience, and the talking points I mentioned above.

Happy Reading!

-Martin

When I was laid off I started attending network meetings, one place in particular I found through a site called meetup.com was Scottsdale Job Network.

For anyone local to the Phoenix Arizona metro area that is currently in transition it is a group I highly recommend connecting with and attending the bi-monthly meetings.

I simply searched meetup.com for “Networking” and found several local groups including BNI chapters, ASBA Arizona Small Business Association, and a few other groups.

When I looked at the calendar for the group posting the meetings for Scottsdale Job Network there was an event entitled “Creating Your Vision and Personal Marketing Plan” which caught my attention.  I started attending the bi-monthly meetings for Scottsdale Job Network.

I had made the acquaintance of Chris Vicari who is the founder and executive director of Scottsdale Job Network from an initial email to find out more about the group.

Some of the things that Scottsdale Job Network offers those in transition are:

1. personal connections
2. moral support
3. job transition training through various events and a job search curriculum
4. networking opportunities
   
5. resume reviews at meetings
6. access to online resources to assist those in job transition
   

Over the next couple of months I continued to attend the meetings and expand my network, finding out about other network meetings through out the valley from others who were in attendance. I continued to make personal connections, and with the technical advice of Bill Austin who is also a supporter of Scottsdale Job Network, I began this blog.

I had come to realize that I have a passion to help the people I was connecting with, and started volunteering for Scottsdale Job Network in a capacity related to my IT experience, Chris Vicari had asked me to monitor the LinkedIn group, and re-post information about jobs posted there to the Yahoo group they also have, which members join after attending a meeting and registering.

There is a variety of other resources available on the Scottsdale Job Network website as well some of which include:

1. Events Calendar
   
2. About Scottsdale Job Network
3. Frequently Asked Questions
   

I continued to build my network, and began attending other network meetings in the valley that I found out about through other members of Scottsdale Job Network.

In February I decided that I wanted to do more for the group so I approached Chris Vicari and asked her how I could help, she introduced me to Michael Prahl, a board member of Scottsdale Job Network, who was forming an ambassador program. I felt it was a great fit for me for many reasons, one of them being my passion and desire to help others.

The ambassador program has since begun, and I am attending local networking events representing Scottsdale Job Network, helping get the word out to the community, and letting people know of the resources available for those in transition through this great group of volunteers.

I will continue to volunteer and give back to this group once I’ve landed my next position as I want to continue to help others in finding their next great career opportunity.

Happy reading!

-Martin

During my job search I have come into a little bit of a routine, but I do remain flexible if something does come up that is more pressing.

Monday mornings I generally follow up with contacts and recruiters, to set up coffee or lunch meetings during the week, I  also let these contacts know of my networking schedule, so they can meet me face to face at the networking events as well.

This coming week I plan on attending a job fair hosted by National Career Fairs today from 11am-2pm, then a SJN meeting Tuesday morning, after that I’ll be meeting with a recruiter Tuesday afternoon to discuss an overnight position he’s got down in Tempe, it will be my first meeting with him.

Tuesday evening I’ll be attending a meeting of Austin J Feldman’s -  Austin’s “Who’s who” in Arizona, at Barcelona in Scottsdale. Tuesdays lately have been one of the busiest days of the week for face to face networking depending on the week.

On Wednesday evening from 7 to 9 PM, there is the St Patricks Employment Support Ministry network meeting I will be attending at St Patricks Church in Scottsdale.

I encourage anyone local reading this to come to these events, if you’re looking for work and we meet up there (or after the event) we can talk about how we can help one another, and if you want to contact me to find out more, my contact information is here.

I will be making time early in the week to speak with Jim McVeigh, who I’ve met at a couple of networking meetings in the last month or so, he’s in the marketing and PR field. I want to discuss some opportunities that have come across my plate in the last few weeks as possible business opportunities.

I will also be making some phone time early in the week to speak with Charee Klimek who is Volunteer CMO and COO for JobAngels. I met her on Twitter last week and connected with her on LinkedIn, told her about my job search, and how I stress networking as a very important part of the job search. She wanted to make some phone time to talk with me, I’ll be emailing her to find out when she can get some time to talk.

I may have what I will call ‘piece’ work during the next week as well. After I’d made some connections last week, a couple of them saw that I was blogging and were interested in starting it themselves, and wanted to talk with me about what’s necessary to get it set up on their own domain host.  I also had a couple of hardware problem requests emailed to me over the weekend from people I’d met in the last couple of weeks.

A few tips for the job search for this week:

1. Find and attend at least one or if possible two network meetings a week some resources for are listed below:
   • networkingphoenix.com (login is required to view details on the calendar which is extensive)
   • meetup.com (search for ‘networking’ and this is a national site, so you can look in your local area)
   • networkingeventfinders.com (is national so it can be searched by each state as well)
2. Bring the following with you to any network event or job fair:
   • Pens/Pencils, a small notepad, or portfolio
   • Business cards (I call it a ‘networking’ card) – things I recommend including on the card for job seekers:
     • Name
     • Phone Number
     • Email address and web site address if you have one
     • LinkedIn profile address
     • 2 or 3 items in your area of expertise or what you’re looking for
       • Don’t use old business cards from previous employers if you’re unemployed and looking for work
         1. print your own on your home computer
         2. purchase business card stock from a printing place like Kinko’s and print them on-site
         3. vistaprint.com is another resource for printing busines cards
   • A cheerful attitude
   • A firm handshake
3. Set up alerts on key words from various job boards
   • monitor and change keywords if you’re not getting the results you expect or no results at all
   • utilize your RSS reader and subscribe to feeds of your search terms if the job site has that capability
   • make sure your resume is updated on the job board, and attach a cover letter with specific information related to the job you’re applying for
4. Work your personal network
   • Talk with family/friends and let them know what’s going on
   • Make contact or reconnect with old coworkers, even if they themselves moved companies
   • Make several coffee or lunch dates
     • Have specific questions or an agenda in mind
     • make it brief, unless more time is needed,  30 minutes is fine, you can always extend as needed
   • Don’t be afraid to ask for help from those in your network, you won’t know until you ask

More tips coming up soon!

Happy reading!

-Martin

Having been laid off back in September 2008 and still looking for work, I attended the Jobing.com career fair held in Glendale, Arizona at University of Phoenix Stadium on 2/11/09.

Some photos from ABC15 are posted here. The entire article on the event written by Christopher Sign is posted here: Thousands circle Valley Stadium looking for work.  (linked with his permission)

To give you a little more of a background story about what’s been going on with me,   I had made a connection on Twitter back on January 30th to a guy named Greg Scott, who is co-founder of Jiibe.com, we exchanged messages, connected on LinkedIn, and continued to communicate.

I Emailed him back in response to his “how’s the job search going?” question he asked, and a day or so later he asked if he could use my email on his blog.  I agreed and said yes, but asked that he please remove references to the place I lived, and companies I spoke about to protect my privacy.  I followed up with him several days later to find out if he’d ever blogged about it, and he gave me the link, which I am sharing here:  “A personal letter about a tough job search – can you relate?” (Yes, I am the “Steve” in that blog post)

When I got to the arena a little before 4 pm the line was wrapped half way around the building and back again to the entrance. I immediately started networking with those around me, asking things like “What kind of work do you do?” and “What kind of work are you looking for?”,  “How long have you been waiting in line?” and struck up conversations with several people, one response I got a lot to the second question was, “anything, I just need to get some money coming in.”

There was a guy in line who was looking for any kind of work, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, though his most recent experience had been in construction.  People talked about the possibility of losing their homes unless they were able to procure some kind of work to pay the mortgage or rent.

While my unemployment has only been a little over 5 months there were some in the crowd who have been unemployed for almost 2 years at this time.

With unemployment rate in the state of Arizona hovering at 6.9 percent as of December, it’s no wonder the turnout for this four hour event was so huge.

Outside and almost immediately when I got there, I ran into Zach Hubbell co-founder of  pursuethepassion.com handing out the program listing the employers attending inside. We chatted briefly as I’d met him on at least two previous occasions, one being a SJN event where Zach and Brett Farmiloe gave a presentation recently, and prior to that was at the last Jobing.com career fair in October 2008 at this same location, they are great guys with a passion for what they do as well, seeking to interview people who are passionate about their careers, check out their web site for more information on who they are, and what they are doing in this on-going project. I recommended one of my friends be interviewed for their project and need to follow up with Brett about it soon. Brett also blogged about the job fair prior to it happening and that can be found here: The Great Recession

It took me about 30 to 40 minutes before I was finally down on the field level inside the stadium, and one thing I recommend for these types of job fairs, is to register online if possible, Jobing.com had a ‘quickpass’ when you register, which I printed out and took with me, so instead of having to walk through their registration on-site, I handed them my quickpass and was on the floor immediately. I had checked the program on my way down and knew which employers I wanted to get to in the short amount of time I had left.

I waited in some short lines, and some longer lines. Some of the longer ones were with health care companies, and I did wait in a line for Triwest Healthcare, the gentleman who stepped up behind me in line was clean cut, very short hair, and very personable, we started talking and I found out he was in the military, and looking for any kind of work, the lady standing in line in front of us heard part of our conversation and turned around asking, “Did I hear you say you were in the military?” to which he said yes, and she shook his hand and said, “Thank you for serving our country.” I gave my network card to both of them letting them know that I had some networking resources I wanted to share with them, and to contact me soon.

As the event was coming to a close I had been standing in line to speak to someone at the Casino Arizona booth, and once again I found myself networking with those around me, there was a gal who was laid off recently, who  had just bought a house and lost her job, the closing was coming up within a couple of weeks, and she was in desperate need of work.

There was another gentleman in line I talked with, by the name of Bhawani Baral.   I gave my card to him, and out of all the job seekers I’d talked with he is the only one to respond in kind, while he didn’t have a network or business card to hand me, he did the next best thing, he handed me a copy of his resume, which had his contact information on it.  I plan on following up with him, and blogging about his experience at a later date.

The day after the event I made the acquaintance of Alison Doyle with About.com on Twitter.com when she sent a message out about her blog and job search tips asking for input.  I told her about my networking efforts and wrote up a little something about my networking efforts to share with her. The blog she specifically mentioned can be found here:  Best Job Search Tips and it includes some very sound and good advice from other experts, and people like myself who are looking for work.

Also in my networking efforts I’d talked with Michael Prahl a few days ago prior to the job fair, who is a member of the board  at SJN, about how this form of social media (blogging) may be utlizied in the efforts of the outreach of SJN to the community at large in conjunction with face to face networking, and had I thought of the opportunity before I attended this job fair, I would have asked the board president and founder of SJN, Chris Vacari for some of their business cards to pass out along with my own.

I’ve also been attending another networking group at St Patrick’s Church in Scottsdale, which will be a topic of another blog post soon.

My next post will be a continuation of this and the feedback I’ve gotten since the event on Wednesday.

Permalink: http://martinpiraino.com/2009/02/13/career-fair-day-jobingcom-phoenix-21109

Back on January 23rd I was on twitter.com and at that time I’d been on the site for about 2 weeks so it was still very new to me, when I saw a message pop on my screen from @Tall_Geek that stated:  “Ok try to break this server….www.jobshouts.com”

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

Bill Austin passed that qoute along on Twitter yesterday, thanks @wbaustin!

I guess in some ways the quotes I come across, and people I’m meeting who have been an encouragement during this time for me, are all positive, as this quote is for me.

I know Bill personally and I’ve talked with him on a few occasions, most recently was about my blogging effort this past Tuesday after the Scottsdale Job Nework meeting.  I had set up but not started the blog here, but knew I just needed to jump in head first to get started.  This is a whole new world to me, and one which I will continue to explore and expand upon.

I have been following up on leads, and today is going to be another busy day for me.

I came across that qoute on a friend of a friend’s profile on Facebook, my connection on Facebook is Israel Class and his friends name is Jason Matthew Herrington

I met Israel at a meeting at SJN a couple of months ago and have exchanged a few emails with him about my job search, and he connected me with some recruiters I’ve now built relationships with in hopes of landing a new job.

I never spoke with Jason, but his tag on facebook profile is currently “will do whatever it takes!!” 

The other quotes on his profile are also a bit profound, but this one in particular caught my attention.   I know with social media and the internet, it is about creating yourself, getting yourself noticed, creating a brand, being in the right place at the right time, and building that network of support through a variety of channels.

During my job search in January I had four different interviews, and hope to keep up that average this month.

I also attended several network meetings, one in particular was  Scottsdale Job Network, on January 27th at Temple Chai in Phoenix

I found it extremely helpful as they had a special presentation from speaker Dave Sherman.  I found his presentation to be engaging and entertaining, he gave a presentation on “Elevating your Elevator Speech.”