I heard of another job fair here in Phoenix through an email list and it will be on 2/23/09 and forwarded it on to two other email lists I belong to.

I got back a question from a contact on one of the lists:

With some 14,000 people attending the recent Jobing.com fair, should we even consider these fairs worth our time?

My response in part is below:

I went to the Jobing.com career fair the other day, arrived later than I had originally planned, but still got in front of employers, and got my resume in their hands, and what happens next, is anyone’s guess, but I did what I felt needed to be done in order that I may secure a job in the near future.

To put the answer to the question you posed “With some 14,000 people attending the recent Jobing.com fair, should we even consider these fairs worth our time?” The simple answer, for me, I say is YES, it is worth it, even if you never get in front of an employer (but hopefully that won’t happen), you are out there to network not only with the employers, but those around you also seeking jobs, and you never know if a recruiter or business owner might be one of the people you strike up a conversation and talk to ‘out in the open.’

It may sound counter-productive, but you never know where that next opportunity will come from, if it’s from a job seeker who’s got a friend or relative working at a target company or company in the same industry you’re looking in, all the better. I carry a business card holder with me with about 15-20 of my nework cards at ALL times, you never know when that opportunity will be there to network with someone.

Also, something I heard in the Connections meeting Wednesday evening … that got a laugh out of just about everyone in the room, and I can’t remember who said it, but they were at the job fair too and said ‘if you apply online at a company that was at the job fair, tell them you were at the job fair and talked to someone there, and they would ‘never know the difference’. That last part is what got the laugh, but it’s also mostly true.

Even though these folks behind the booths at the job fair didn’t have personal business cards for the most part (or if they did, they were not sharing), I would ask their name and write it down, and what company they were with if they were willing to share that information, one of the gals I talked to at one of the health care booths even offered me her work email address to follow up with her later.

As I was leaving the job fair with my portfolio in hand, I met one last person walking out with me who actually asked, “Are you a recruiter?” and I told her that no, I wasn’t,  and I asked her what prompted her to ask me that and she’d overheard part of a conversation I was having with someone else as I was walking out and I’d mentioned to that person about a recruiter I was currently working with to find a job … We talked briefly about our experience inside, I handed her my network card, and asked her to follow up with me later.

…I could be an advocate for any number of groups or causes, I happen to have strong feelings for both SJN and the St Pats employment ministry, each doing good in their own way on their own merits, and I’ve learned so much in such a short time about the importance of building face to face relationships and being professional about it…

My main point being, is get out in front of people, even if you think it’s a bit inconvenient, crowded, or whatever, make the time to connect. I networked with those around me at the job fair, and handed them my ‘network’ card, and asked them to follow up with me later.  How many of those people that will actually contact me, I have no clue. Only one other person I spoke to had a business card, and someone handed me a copy of their resume that had their contact information on it as it was the only thing they had.

…because I’ve really started to learn the value of networking, and it’s not just ‘collecting business cards’ or ‘connections’ on sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, or followers on twitter, but building real face to face relationships that will connect you with that ‘next great career opportunity’…

I have to admit that I’m a bit in awe of what face to face networking and social media has done for me, and the exposure it’s gotten me in just the last few days.

I asked Chris Vicari at the last SJN meeting “how can I help this group? I want to volunteer.” She referred me to another board member, Michael Prahl, who is in charge of forming an ambassador program for SJN, and we’ve discussed a few things, I will follow up with him next week. I’m no longer afraid of picking up the phone, or asking to meet someone for lunch, a drink, coffee or whatever, and saying ‘this is what I need, how can you help me?” or “this is what I have to offer, how can I help you?”

I even emailed a reporter for ABC 15 on Thursday morning asking to use a piece of his article on the job fair in my blog, he allowed me to link to the story and pictures, and I plan on following up with him once I post the information to my blog.

I was sent a private message by another prominent blog poster saying “thanks for the kind words.” I made some comments about networking and the tips they had on their blog, when we were chatting back and forth on Twitter, I went to their blog and posted my ‘tip’ about networking because they requested new tips and I didn’t see a guest commentary about networking, I don’t know if it will appear on their blog, but I did give that as my ‘big tip’

Also on Thursday after I sent out a message to about half of my network contacts on LinkedIn asking them politely to join a group on LinkedIn that I felt was going someplace and important to me, I got a reply back from the CEO of a company that I’d met at networking events the last two months, that he was ‘serious about working with me.’ He initially was looking for some free PR for his own business through various avenues of social media by my messages, (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn to be specific), but through a short dialog with him, I ended it with saying, “we need to meet and talk about how we can help eachother.”

I contacted a co-owner of another company who reviews job blogs, who said to me, “you should talk to ‘so and so’ at this ‘other company’, and here’s my idea on how to approach him…” … He’s already been reading my blog and said I was off to a good start and said if I needed anything to just ask.

I hope my long answer gives you enough insight on why I say “Yes” to your question “is it worth the time?”

Regards,

Martin

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I’m meeting with someone this morning in about an hour that I met through a connection and we are going to go over my resume and ‘spruce it up a bit.’  I’m looking forward to that, and he is meeting with a new client right after we meet, so my information will be fresh on his mind, and he will be thinking of a way I may be able to help this other company based on my experience.

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