‘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)

Web Innovators Group (Sept. 15)

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.