I'm in the process of organizing and scrubbing my personal contact lists. So far I've imported databases from Outlook, GMail, Facebook, Linked-In and a variety of other contact lists that I have connections to. This lists includes people from just about every industry and professional level. A brief sampling includes the likes of Michael Milken, the CIO of the FBI, various tech CEOs and CTOs, a mishmash of bankers, VCs, programmers, etc. etc. (and of course friends, I have at least a few of those).
Next, I cross referenced everything through Linked-in and updated the job profiles data. After cleaning all the data I pulled out a subset of 5,000 people who I could actually identify from name, title or notation. Of these 5,000 people, 327 of them are currently unemployed.
This little exercise allowed me to determine that my personal network has an unemployment rate of nearly 6.5%, that's a full 3.5 points better than the US unemployment rate (below, courtesy of Google). With the heavy focus I've had on startup companies in my career I honestly expected that to be MUCH higher... But then again, a bunch of them have sales and marketing in their blood, so maybe there's some "smoke and mirrors" being called into play.
