What’s next for Kevin - another interview scheduled, an attempted poach, and a rejection
Since yesterday’s post, I have another interview scheduled an odd email and one rejection.
Another interview scheduled
I’m heading down to Burlington, MA tomorrow to meet with @patrickmoran at Mzinga. Very cool to have a chance to sit down with him. I’d discovered the Mzinga podcasts a few weeks ago and started working my way through them. Very excited about the potential to work with the thought leaders behind We Are Smarter. Spent a few hours today doing my research, but still more to do. I’ll let you know how the conversation goes tomorrow.
Hopefully Patrick doesn’t mind my mentioning it. 
You don’t mind Patrick, do you?
An attempted poach?
Received an email today from the CMO of a Dimdim competitor. I won’t share the name or company, but here’s the message:
Hi Kevin, I am enjoying reading your blog! Best of luck for your job search with DimDim. I am the CMO of **** - which is quite frankly, the best free instant web conferencing service out there! If you were in the SF Bay Area, I would love to meet up and have the opportunity to persuade you to come and join us instead! Keep in touch.
How did I respond? I told him SF Bay area isn’t out of the question and to let me know what type of help he is looking for. I’m interested to see if the conversation goes anywhere. (Personal note: I hesitated about posting this part, but if my blogging through this process is going to be useful for anyone, I have to make it more public. Steve Chazin, if you are reading this, I still love Dimdim and would love to work with you!)
A rejection
The recruiter who setup my interview with that Boston-based startup for the web product manager role called a few minutes ago. Unfortunately they’ve decided to pass. The only feedback was they felt it was not a good technical fit. It sucks is always tough to hear that someone doesn’t want you, but in the end it’s their loss (and I’m lucky enough to have friends who constantly remind me of that). All I can do is try to learn from the experience to improve future interviews.
I think part of my challenge going after product management roles is the lack of product management roles/titles in my work history. I’ve always focused on the experiences and skills I could gain, rather than on what title I’ve held. In the end it may make selling myself to the next company as a product manager a bit more difficult.
Now, back to my presentation for Dimdim and my Mzinga research…
What’s next for Kevin update - interviews, more unexpected discussions, another opportunity, a new blog, and a non-answer
It doesn’t seem like it, but it’s been 3 weeks since my last ‘What’s next for Kevin’ update. More interesting updates since then. It’s been nice to stay busy while still enjoying the change of seasons and being home with my faithful sidekick.
Interviews
The process with Dimdim for the Web 2.0 Marketing Specialist and Community Manager position continues. I have a follow-up this Friday (10/12) to give a presentation answering one question Steve Chazin, CMO, posed, “How would you help us achieve huge, rampant, stupendous awareness and buzz?” Been working on the presentation since last Thursday, still refining it.
On September 11, John Cass published an interview with me on his PR Communications blog. It’s called “The Interview: Kevin Micalizzi “. Not a job interview, but a great opportunity to talk with John and to be a part of his blog.
Received a call shortly after my last blog update from a recruiter I worked with when I was at Avid Technology . He noticed from a status update I made on LinkedIn that I was looking for work and reached out to me. (I’m using Ping.fm to update my status simultaneously on Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo Pulse, LinkedIn, Bebo, MySpace). He got me an interview Sept. 29th with a Boston-based startup for a web product manager role. I think the interview went well and they have some hot technology, but they were getting ready for a product launch and wanted more time to discuss internally what exactly they need in the role. I hope to hear back from them this week. Here’s a pic of me heading to the interview.
More Unexpected Discussions
Monday I received a Facebook message from someone I used to work with. He’s with a company I interviewed at almost a year ago. At that time I went through some extensive interviews with them and definitely liked the people. In the end they decided they needed a different skill set than mine for that role. As I understand it, they’ve had some changes to their web team and would like to talk to me again. I’m looking forward to hearing back from them.
Another Opportunity
Last night, I was going through my “tweets” and saw one from @patrickmoran the CMO at Mzinga. They are looking for a Web Director. I met @alexa at my first Tweetup in August, who is at Mzinga, and reached out to her last night. I’m going over my resume today so I can get it to them.
A New Blog
Since leaving Avid back in July I’ve spent a considerable amount of time meeting people online and in person. Most of my connecting / re-connecting has been online and while I’m a lightweight in terms of the how many people I am connected to, I’m seeing firsthand how difficult it can be to stay on top of things. To help me (and of course to help others), I’ve started the Practical Conversations blog. I’m interviewing people who are managing online conversations about ‘how’ they are doing it. I had my first interview on Monday and hope to have it posted within a few days. If you know anyone who has a great system for managing online conversations, give them my contact info or have them get in touch with me –I’d like to talk to them.
A Non-Answer
When I first started blogging about What’s next for Kevin , I had questions I felt needed to be answered:
Should I go after another web strategy role? make the move to product management for an online product/service? is there something I haven’t thought of yet?
As I’ve spent more time in this process, I’ve decided to continue avoiding answering them. I’m finding interesting jobs in a number of areas. Since the web is constantly being refined, I’m going to take that approach myself. Instead of limiting myself from the start, I want to remain flexible to find the right opportunity more than the right title.
-k
‘What’s next for Kevin’ update–new connections, resume feedback, and an unexpected discussion
Some interesting developments in my “What’s next for Kevin?” work.
Since last week I’ve attended 2 technology events in the Boston area:
Ignite Boston 4 (Sept. 11)
Image from Ignite Boston
Web Innovators Group (Sept. 15)
Web Innovators Group meeting
They were both good opportunities to network. At Ignite Boston I saw 2 of my favorite Tweeters (@CMajor, @znh). Got some great advice on my resume from people who saw it on this blog (I need to better illustrate the business/marketing side of my experiences), and met some new people.
The Web Innovators Group was a much larger meeting. I went for a nice dinner with a friend in Harvard Sq., thinking ‘hey, I’ll be in Cambridge it should be right down the street.’ After dinner, with 5 minutes left before meeting time, I looked at the directions and realized I had to take the train through Boston and back out to Cambridge on a different line. It ended up being 1 hr after the meeting started when I arrived, which may not have been a bad thing. A number of people told me the presentations were useless and the networking was the only reason to go. Not having seen more than the last 5 minutes of presentations, I can’t comment on the quality.
I did get to meet some new people that night. Two of them were from a company I’m almost 100% certain a recruiter put my resume in at. After we talked about it, it’s pretty clear that my more “tech-focused” version of the resume I have been circulating didn’t resonate for their Director of Web Strategy role. It was good to get validation that I’m doing the right thing in rewriting it again, but tough to find out I may have missed an opportunity because my resume wasn’t targeted properly. Lesson learned.
The most interesting development for me was catching up with a former colleague (Steve Chazin) for coffee early afternoon yesterday. He and I passed each other about 2 months ago at my favorite Starbucks, but we both had family with us and were heading in opposite directions, so we didn’t stop to talk. I dropped him an email a few weeks ago, but he’s CMO of Dimdim, so I have no doubt he’s busy. Last week he dropped me an email about getting together. So we setup a time to meet at my favorite Starbucks (you remember, the one that voted me customer of the month in June 2008).
I arrived for the meeting a few minutes early and sat down to wait. Steve arrived, but had to take care of a call before coming in. Once that was out of the way, we got our drinks and sat down to talk. I walked into the meeting with an expectation of maybe getting some words of advice on what he would look for when hiring someone for Web Strategy — at best maybe get him to look over my resume and give some feedback. Steve started the conversation by talking about Dimdim. It’s an interesting approach to the web meeting space — and a lot easier to use that the other tools I’ve had to use (and spend considerable amounts of time helping co-workers use.) He talked about the company for a while, then mentioned his ’soft sell.’ He talked about where he needs help, primarily in search optimization and in developing and executing a strategy for leveraging the web.
I guess I wasn’t quick enough to realize the conversation was heading in a direction other than the one I had expected. When he started talking about Dimdim at the beginning of the meeting, I thought it was just out of excitement for what he was doing. A few minutes after the ’soft sell’, I stopped him and asked him what he was ’selling’ me. He was asking me if I was interested in looking at being considered for his team. Wow, I really didn’t see that coming. I guess when he called around to ask people he trusted who they would recommend, three separate people suggested me. You bet I’m interested, and I told him. We’re hopefully going to setup time to talk further in the next week or so.
As exciting as that has been, it doesn’t change the fact that my resume still needs more work. So enough blogging for now — back to updating my resume to better reflect the depth and breadth of my experiences.
Web Strategy Resume - v1
After a minor glitches, the first draft of my updated resume is below.
A couple things to note:
- my goal is to shift the focus of my experience from just technology management to better reflect the broader web management and strategy experience I have
- the formatting is readable, but I’ve had to switch editors and reformat 4 times now, so I’ve given up on going for the truly beautiful layout until a later draft
- I feel like the summary bullets at the top are incomplete. I loosely used Jeremiah Owyang’s web strategy competencies for organizing the summary — does it resonate?
- the objective statement is a first pass — and lacking. it generally covers what I’m looking for but any advice is greatly appreciated
(the doc is shared with Scribd — use the icon in the upper right to expand viewing area for an easier read)
Please let me know what you think.
Thanks!
-k
**** update 9/10/2008 9:50 am EST ****
Changed objective statement with @jamesrsullivan’s help from “Attain a leadership position focused on web strategy within an organization that leverages web/online as a core tool to further business objectives.” to “Lead cutting-edge web organization with focus on strategy, in a company that embraces innovation.” Scribd gave an error on the upload of the revision — had to post it all over again. Sorry for anyone who saw an error on the embedded doc.
Resume - work history, exaggeration and ethics
As I’m working through my resume re-write mapping my work experience to the web strategy competencies, I’m trying to be careful how I state my role in the events/projects/initiatives I reference. I want to avoid exaggerating my work. Not sure if it stems from my personal standard of ethics or because I’m under-valuing the work I did. Either way, I don’t plan to join the 30% or so of people who over-exaggerate on their resume.
So to keep my ego in check (or to boost it), I’m IM-ing friends and former co-workers to get their perspectives. Not sure if there is a better way to approach this — it makes the whole process much more time consuming.
