Actually a combination meeting of the Richmond .NET and SQL groups, put together for me. They normally meet on consecutive weeks, but the SQL group moved theirs to match my trip and the .NET meeting.
About 40 people showed up, plus my Mom and daughter, so this was a pretty busy room. My Mom had never seen me speak, so it was a treat for her. This was Kendall's fourth time seeing this presentation, so she's had enough. Likely I won't inflict any more of these on her if I can avoid it.
The group started out with a short housekeeping session and then a short presentation from a recruiter. I liked that, and I actually came up with a few things that I asked him during the talk. Like a poll on who has used recruiters (about 20% had) and how much recruiters check on your profile (they do).
Some stats from my polls:
Author Poll: A few people know Kalen Delaney, not many Kim Tripp, though she's pretty easy to guess since there are only two women. No one really knew the others, aside from Celko, so it was a good illustration that you can keep your privacy. I had moved the poll to the section just before I talk about authoring and speaking, and I think that matched up better.
Blog Poll: Similar results from other events. Only 4 (of 40) technical blogs, so right on par with my 10%. I think this was a little under 80% of people reading blogs regularly. That was a little surprising. I need to add something in there about how many people check Database Weekly for blogs, and plug that a bit.
Social Networking: As expected, more people have profiles. Linked in had the most people, Facebook next, and then 1 person on Plaxo, and 5 or 6 on Twitter. Surprisingly none of them follow me (that I didn't know), though they did follow their local MVPs. A good thing for MVPs to be aware of. There were a few MySpace people, which I picked on again, though one of them has a band, so I said that was a great place to be.
The talk went well, about 75 minutes, with relatively few questions afterwards. Maybe 5 or 6. Some interesting ones that came out of it and I need to address.
- What about separating business from social profiles on Facebook? Definitely something I need to address. I know I have business people and social friends on Facebook, and most of my postings there are "friend" related with pictures, etc. I need to experiment a bit here and see how you can separate things out, maybe look at their security more.
- Length of resume - I definitely stick with 2 pages, and having key words in there. Someone mentioned that they will ask about them, and recruiters scan for them, so don't include things you don't want to do.
- Someone asked about how effective these can be. I had a few stories, as did a few other people.
- Once again no one asked about recommendations, which is something I still haven't spent enough time on.
I didn't know many people in the audience, which is new for me. Typically I have met, or know well a dozen of the people. In this case, I only knew my two fellow MVPs, Andy Leonard and Jessica Moss. However the talk went well and I had a lot of hand shaking and congrats afterwards.
This was a good talk, and it gave me a few ideas for things to change when I go to Baton Rouge in August.
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