Onward Search Career Cast, Episode #4 - Trade Show and Conference Strategies for Job Seekers

Onward Search Career Cast on RecruitingPods.com

RecruitingPods.com, my joint-venture with Chris Russell, added a new podcast today from Onward Search, based in Wilton, CT. The "Onward Search Career Cast offers the latest insight and career advice from experts within the Internet marketing and creative space. Onward Search is a leading nationwide provider of web-based talent and offers a full range of recruitment and staffing solutions. "

If you're looking for a career in search engine optimization, interactive design or emerging technologies, then this is the podcast for you!

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Onward Search Career Cast, Episode #4 Transcript:

Peter Clayton, Host: Welcome to an exciting new episode of the Onward Search Career Cast. I’m here with Josh Gampel, Vice President of Onward Search and Tim Dineen who is Vice President of Internet Marketing for Onward Search. as we head into the week here, it marks the start of the interactive marketing tradeshow season and we thought it would be a great time to sit down and discuss a few of the different ways to maximize your experience at conferences across the country. Josh, why don’t you kind of just give us a little overview of some of the events that are coming up in the spring?

Josh: Thanks Peter and thanks for having us. One of the most recent events is SMX, it stands for Search Marketing Expo. That’s going to be out in California. Ad:tech is coming up pretty soon. PubCon, which is typically in Las Vegas every year is actually going to be doing PubCon Dallas in April, and there’s also SES or Search Engine Strategies which comes to New York City. A lot of shows, those are some of the major ones. There are some smaller venues that are a little bit more on the advanced topics but those are some of the main ones that we’re going to be at at least over the next few months.

Peter: I know a lot of these shows like SES, have multiple shows throughout the year in major markets. So, it’s not just the show in New York but it shows across the country, is that right?

Josh: Yeah. SMX is going to be out in California, Ad:tech is out in San Francisco, PubCon is in Dallas. It has been in Austin. It’s always in Las Vegas every year and then SES, they’re all over the place. They’re in Chicago, they’re in New York, they’re out in the West Coast, they’re overseas. If you’re in the search engine marketing industry, there’s s conference coming to you real soon.

Peter: And I know you’re going to be speaking at SMX out on the West Coast. Does Onward Search have a booth as well?

Josh: Yes, we have a booth. I’m going to be actually speaking a few times. There’s going to be theater presentation on Tuesday about how to find “SEO Rock Stars” and I’m also going to be speaking on Thursday, really talking about how to build an in-house PPC team. We’re excited to be presenting and sharing some ideas that we have in the industry and we’ll also have a booth, so if you’re there, come on up, ask us any questions and we’d love to get to know you.

Peter: Josh, this is a really great opportunity because of the number of shows that you have participated in over the last couple of years. From a job seeker’s perspective, is this a good investment of time and money to attend these shows?

Josh: Absolutely. Coincidently, as we sit here and I’m here with Tim, that’s how I met him. I have been attending shows for years as Tim has and he and I met each other several years ago at a networking function at PubCon Las Vegas probably three, four years ago, didn’t really get to know each other then but we had met, shook hands, and last year, we met again at PubCon again in Austin. I was speaking on a panel and Tim came up to me and asked me a few questions afterwards and we got to know each other and we are able to build up a good rapport and I didn’t ever think of the ability to hire Tim for Onward Search at that point. It wasn’t until he called me several months later that he was going to be out into the active job market and we happened to have an opportunity at that time.

Just by building up that relationship with Tim, we were able to hire him… A great success for Onward Search on our corporate side.

Peter: That’s a really great story. Tim, can you share with us from your perspective -- how did this all happen and how did you connect with Josh to get this job offer?

Tim: Sure. I’ve attended a number of conferences over the years, probably about two a year, maybe three. I met Josh, I’d seen the Onward Search booth, and I’ve used conferences as a learning experience – in that go out and attend as many sessions as I could and meet as many people as I could. I never really looked at it from a job seeking perspective but I did meet a whole lot of people, different people at every show, and when the time came to look for a job myself, I had a network that I could rely on and one of those happened to be Josh, so I gave him a call first.

Peter: Let’s talk about the kinds of things you should prepare to do before going to one of these conferences to really maximize your time and what you’re able to accomplish at a show.

Josh, can you give us some tips on things that specifically a job seeker should consider and plan ahead of time?

Josh: The best thing I would recommend if you are an active job seeker, you’re going to one of these conferences, you need to have a plan. The plan has to be around understanding what your goals are and executing them, like all plans are. Understand who you want to meet based on the speaker roster. Every website has a list of speakers, you can see the companies that they work for. If you’re willing to relocate, you can talk to a lot of people. If you’re not willing to relocate, understand which speakers work at companies that are located near you so you can really target those people.

Bring your resume with you; that’s important. Have it ready to go or at least be ready to send it to somebody very quickly from your iPhone or whatever mobile device you’re using so they get that right in front of them. Have your 30-second commercial of yourself down pat.

What do I mean by that? It’s your elevator pitch. Be prepared in 30 seconds or less to tell somebody what you do, what you’re looking for, what your strengths are, and keep in mind to include a little bit of that wow factor. You want a hiring manager – a potential hiring manager – to think about your background, maybe not have an opportunity for you at that moment, but be very excited that he/she met you and that you know what, I might just have something for them and I almost want to create role because this person’s really good and they’re available now.

The other thing I would do is leverage social media tools. Twitter for example, every show is using Twitter. If you’re not at a show or if you want to follow all of the events, let’s use PubCon as an example as we’ve talked about that one, follow HashTag #PubCon and you’re going to see everything going on in every conference for the networking events, you’re going to really be able to know where you need to be to maximize your exposure.

Another idea is to find a sponsor. What I mean by that is get to know somebody that’s connected and very well networked and if they trust you, if they can vouch for your and know your skills, they’re going to introduce you to a lot of people that you normally might not have had the chance to. At networking events, if you can have a sponsor, you know, really walk you around, introduce you to some key people, that’s all you need.

Actually just last year, I remember I was at one of the conferences, there was somebody that actually came up to our booth with their resume in hand and was doing a great job, actually probably followed all of those tips that I mentioned and I went to call her up about a week after the show because we have a few opportunities that I wanted to introduce her to and she had three job offers. Three job offers, one week after spending her own money to go to a tradeshow and that was really impressive. The ROI in the show has paid off because she got a great job. It was a great success story for the networking piece.

Peter: I think that’s some great advice and you know, people joke a lot about Twitter but I’ll tell you that, talk about a stealth application, especially at a conference and as you mentioned, using a Hashtag and putting in #PubCon or #SESNYC, you’re going to see real time, and be able to follow all of these people and all of these activities that are going on at these events and really do a better job of planning what you’re going to be doing there.

Tim, talk to us about how you recommend someone go about figuring out which of the conference events to attend. As you know, a lot of these shows are really big, they have multiple tracks, so how do you decide which speaker you go see and….

Tim: Do them all! It’s so hard to pick because these shows are so big now. There are five different tracks, SEM, SEO, pay-per-click, social media, affiliate marketing, there’s so many different tracks now that they – it’s incredibly hard to pick but obviously you have to.

The way that I look at it is I try to go by the speakers. There could be a topic that I really feel I need to learn, obviously, I’d choose that one first. Secondly, I’d look at the speaker list. If there are speakers from a search engine for example, you get the opportunity to hear information right from the source that are usually very useful and then if there’s somebody who’s speaking who’s in your industry, in your particular niche, that’s always a good idea to attend that. And then having gone for a few years, you get to learn who the good speakers are and who gives away information.

Peter: We’re talking about a number of really high profile, very valuable conferences here. So how do you go about picking and choosing which events to attend?

Tim: It’s really a good idea to just mix them up. Personally, I don’t go to the same show every year, year after year but I like to pick a couple of different shows one year and then go to different two or three shows the following year. After a few years of doing that, you get to learn that sometimes you’ll learn a certain subset of information at a PubCon that you wouldn’t learn at an SES New York.

One way to look at it is from your own skill set. SES may be a good show, a good starter show if you’ve never been to a show before. New York is also pretty commonly targeted to advertising whereas SMX, SMX Advanced, some of the West Coast shows including PubCon would be more SEO focused and more technical.

Josh: If I can add on that Peter, budget obviously if you’re a job seeker and you’re very cost-conscious, budget is going to be important for you, so you want to look at the hotel prices in the area. Also, from a job seeker’s perspective, networking events. Every conference has a list of networking events. Sometimes you can find a blog, talking about the different events. If you really want to maximize your exposure to different people, make sure you go to one that has a lot of organized, open networking events. You also want to look at local shows coming to you and if you’re not going really to be able to afford the pass to go to the whole show, at least get the Expo Hall pass or buy the $50 networking pass that allows you to go to the cocktail hour with the cheese and crackers and the really long lines but at least you get to talk to people. So, look at the networking events, look at the ability to get in front of the most amount of people and really maximize your time.

Peter: That’s great. Josh, let’s talk about some of the hot jobs that Onward Search is working on right now.

Josh: We’re busy. Across the board on our temp staffing and our executive search space, we have more and more jobs coming in every day. A simple quick solution, go to Onward Search, go to our jobs page, you can see the most up-to-date jobs for some of our hot jobs that we have.

Right now for instance, we’re working with a major digital marketing agency. Actually the job is going to be headquartered in Chicago. It’s going to be a VP of Search Engine Marketing that’s going to really spearhead a major financial services account. We have iPhone developer jobs all over the place. We have some that are for agencies that are you know, going to really do fun, cool iPhone apps. We also have another financial service iPhone application that we’re looking to develop that requires somebody to have significant, enterprise-wide iPhone application development experience.

We’re looking for SEO copywriters, Flash developers, interactive designers. We have several e-commerce companies right now that are going to be redesigning their website.

The latest thing in 2010 is internet retailers are going to redesign their website and the biggest thing is to increase conversions. So, if you’re a web designer out there that has had experience redesigning a website for landing page optimization, increasing conversions, anything that’s going to help an ROI, CEOs want to know who you are and they want to hire you so give us a call and we’ll help you out.

Peter: That’s great news. On our last show, we talked a lot about the new iPad; are you getting some calls and some inquiries about that at this point?

Josh: We’re getting a lot of inquiries. Not everybody knows what it’s going to turn into. iPhone developers have been all the rage and you have to get your hands on one because you need to develop an iPhone app, just because you do.

iPad is the next big thing. It’s just a matter of time before we’re going to do a lot more on Android application development because they are really growing. We really try to stay focused in everything that’s cutting edge and emerging technology. So, take a look at our website, follow us on Twitter at Onward Search, follow some of our list, you really get to see some of the things that we recommend and there’s a lot of industry news out there that we try to share with everyone to keep you up to date on what’s going on in the growth of the job market across everything internet marketing and creative.

Peter: Josh and Tim, thanks so much for taking time to speak with us again on Onward Search Career Cast and we really recommend and encourage all of the listeners to check out some of these tradeshows we’ve been talking about today; I’m sure you’ll find some really valuable information to help you in your job search.

Thank you for tuning in to Onward Search Career Cast. For more information on the career opportunities available through Onward Search, you should visit us online at OnwardSearch.com or call 1-800-829-0072, and speak with an experienced recruiter. And you should follow Onward Search on Twitter at Twitter.com/onwardsearch.

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