Career Advice Talk

Web 2.0 in SF - Job Seekers, I hope you were there! What??

7th April, 2009 - Posted by Robin Ogden -

Being a huge proponent of growing your network the Web 2.0 conference I attended this past week was a perfect example of just what I mean about networking outside your regular arena to find new opportunities and gain new connections, while at the same time gathering new up-to-date marketplace knowledge.

This was a great event and I was lucky to be in the company of both Heather Gardner , Recruiter Extraordinaire, Blogger and Web 2.0 Maven, not to mention our FiredUP Careers ‘recruiting expert’, as well as Valerie Goynea, Founder of CareerCourageously – who will help you build a consistent personal and professional online brand.  We all went from booth to booth, checking out new companies and finding out about their products, operations and yes, often asking the ‘big’ question these days “Are you hiring?”

We spied Amazon.com’s booth and said “hmmmm, what are they doing here?” (sorry Amazon – we love you, but weren’t sure about your web 2.0 applications).  We approached the booth and asked “What is Amazon doing here?” and the answer was “We’re hiring!”  Yes they are and here a few of the openings they are trying to fill and if you want to view even more of their openings go to Amazon/careers:

Flexible Payments Service (FPS) Technical Program Manager
Senior Marketing and Product Manager, Shoes & Endless
BI Data Engineer
Software Dev Manager, Personalization Platform
Software Dev Engineer RCS Guided Shopping
Sr. Mgr Software Dev – Utility Computing Amazon Web Services
Software Dev Engineer in Test, Kindle Quality Assurance Team
Senior Software Dev Engineer – Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Sr. User Experience Designer

Another company we learned about at Web 2.0 was Vignette– and they have openings too.  Currently they have openings for:

Director, North America Sales
Inside Sales Expert
Inside Sales Team Manager
Product Marketing Manager
Sr. Account Executive
Senior Consultant
Senior Sales Engineer
Senior Accounts Payable Clerk

Ascentium was another company we spoke with, and when we asked if they were hiring the answer was “We’re always hiring”. Check out their website for current openings.

Now, tell me…would you have expected to have had an opportunity at Web 2.0 to discuss employment opportunities?  Probably not - even so, that is not as important as understanding how critical it is to ‘branch out’ and grow your network from different platforms - not just the ‘usual suspects’.

So - bottom line, get out there and start having some fun with your networking opportunities, there are hundreds if not thousands of places you can network, meet people and learn about new employment opportunities (don’t forget to check out MeetUp.com for help with what’s going on in your community for growing your network - they were at Web 2.0 too).