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.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/career-fair-day-jobingcom-phoenix-21109

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

We then decided to try to find another one that I didn’t have luck in finding before, and this time we hit paydirt, walked right up to it, GPS coordinate right on track, and bam, there it was, now that I know of this type of hide, it will be easier when another one comes up like this. This second one was called Run Turtle Run! – GCMN6M and is at a local park.  So I got out and enjoyed the weather after the rains ended.

Patty had an idea for a geocache hunt that we’ll discuss in more detail, but likely not something to be posted on the geocaching site if her idea comes to fruition it will likely be a new site, for the local area.  I’ll have to discuss it with her in more detail to find out more about her complete idea.

Best-Interview-Strategies.com has some great post-interview advice (especially #3):

POST-INTERVIEW STRATEGY #1: Immediately send a Thank-You Letter.

POST-INTERVIEW STRATEGY #2: Don’t be shy about making follow-up calls.

POST-INTERVIEW STRATEGY #3: Don’t worry, be happy

POST-INTERVIEW STRATEGY #4: Negotiate your salary when you are offered the job.

POST-INTERVIEW STRATEGY #5: If you got the job, go celebrate! If you didn’t, don’t despair, just start again.

Having had four interviews in January, I’ve been down to #3 a lot, skipped #4, and went to the end of #5. 

I know if I’m being considered for the positions even through recruiters, I’m one of a small group of candidates to make it to that point. I do follow up after the interview, and one of the good things about the recruiters is that I do get some feedback from them regarding my interview, so I know how to prepare best for the next one.

Hopefully this new week will turn up something great.  I did get a call yesterday from a recruiter, and do have another interview scheduled for late next week. I’m also scheduling some time for network meetings next week and don’t want to overbook myself either.

I also have an alert for “Martin Piraino” and a couple of other variations, and get at least one or two emails a day lately.

I found myself quoted on another blog – regarding a tweet I answered about avatars on Twitter, should it be a picture or logo? My take on it was to have picture unless it is a company, then logo is ok.

The post in it’s entirety is located here:  Twitter Avatars – Photo vs. Logo

Pretty interesting to have my opinion counted in this and to find it on Google.

My little piece of it is noted below:

MartinPiraino I prefer to see a picture not a logo, unless it is a business, then logo is ok.

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 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.

I’m actually meeting with an investment professional on Friday to discuss my current state and where I want to be, I’ve got some investments in 401K’s scattered with previous employers, and want to find a good way to consolidate them as it’s hard to keep track of other than getting quarterly statements and not really following up on ‘is it working for me?’

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.”