Allow myself to introduce... myself....

I figured a nice initial post would simply be to introduce myself a little further. I want to be someone you feel comfortable working with and feel you know fairly well. I appreciate the opportunity to work with you and for the chance to let you know more about me as well!

I am a lifelong Minnesotan, born here in 1976 and have lived here my whole life. I believe the longest I’ve ever been out of the state, consecutively, is about three weeks or so. Needless to say, Minnesota is really all I know and (even despite the weather we have seen lately) I don’t ever see myself being anywhere else!I grew up in Chanhassen and eventually moved to Chaska -- which meant I was always part of the Chaska school district. I think growing up both towns had a population of less than 10,000, which was really cool – I felt I grew up in both “a small town” and “the Big City” since we weren’t THAT far from Minneapolis. I graduated from Chaska High School in 1995 and stayed busy with a ton of sports and activities in high school (one thing you will learn about me is that I really, really can’t sit still for too long).

I moved on to the University of St. Thomas and spent a fantastic 4 years there. I was fortunate to have been involved in both athletics (varsity swimming for four years) and student government (class president a couple years) all while getting out with a double-major in Computer Science and Business Administration / Marketing. After graduating I was extremely fortunate to have jumped right into the IT Consulting Services world. While in college I was an intern at 3M where I picked up Lotus Notes development. For whatever reason it really clicked with me and I was able to earn a few certifications, then leveraged that skill set my first couple years out with BORN, which at the time was probably the largest consulting firm in the Twin Cities.

In 2001, of course the market turned a little soft in our industry and after going through a real tough layoff, I found that development was something I enjoyed but it wasn’t necessarily the thing I was going to excel at the most. I always had more of a knack of working directly with people and my competitive side made it easy for me to get into sales. After spending some time as an account executive with a couple IT training companies (with a short detour into the medical device world) I was extremely blessed to have gotten the chance to get into the recruiting field. I have been in recruiting since January of 2004 and at this point I can’t imagine doing anything else. I love what I do! At some point in the near future, I’ll blog a little more about why I love recruiting so much.

As far as my personal life, I have been married to Kate since July of 2005, about the same time we bought our first home down in Savage. We welcomed our first child, Brady, into the world on October 2nd 2007 (his birthday is one day before mine!) So we’re still getting the hang of the parenthood thing but Brady is absolutely the joy of our lives!

In my spare time I am a gigantic sports fan. Sadly, this means I have to put up with an enormous amount of disappointment being here in MN, but I am still optimistic that one day we’ll be able to see a local team win a World Championship again. I am a fierce competitor when it comes to Fantasy Football and am always happy to share advice on players and such. I was unable to win a championship this year but had won at least one title the previous 6 years.

I’m a big fan of music and movies as well – and have a pretty diverse taste in both. Really, if it involves pop culture, fun gadgets, the Internet, etc… I am probably going to be real interested in it.

Recently I’ve been a big fan of social networking online. I am an extremely avid user of LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/kirkwalton) and Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/people/Kirk-Walton/679991124) and have started to use Twitter a bit as well (https://twitter.com/RecruitingGuy). These are all sites I would HIGHLY recommend – I think that in this day and age, using tools such as the above sites are going to be much, MUCH more effective when it comes to finding new opportunities than simply relying on the job boards (which are still effective, of course, but utilizing multiple sites and online tools is the way to go).

I don’t want this to be too much longer but in general I’d love to be thought of as an extremely friendly, helpful individual who is easy to work with and dedicated to finding the right opportunity for the people I work with and vice versa! Please do feel free to drop me a line at any time – kwalton@tech-pro.com.