Kennedy Information Conference & Expo.
Once again Kennedy impressed me with the number of attendees, hospitality and gracious to not only me, my friends but listening and providing quality content that the audience wanted. I try and get as much feedback as I can from people attending not only from my speaking engagement/session but how the conference is overall. As a current and former conference attender I think it's very important to get the value out of something that you pay for.
As far as my panel and presentation the people that I spoke with seemed to enjoy it and even liked the fact that the banter that I and Jeff Benrey from Trovix had between each other as I speculated that resumes will be going away and passive candidates will have more of profiles and he felt that resumes would never go away. For those that were there in person please feel free to add your comments if you liked the presentation and what can be done to add to it. As long as people walked away with some knowledge and I opened their mind up as well that's all I can ask for and hopefully Kennedy will give me my own session so I be myself.
Okay enough about myself, I got the chance to meet some great new people see some old faces and but of course have some cocktails on the house provided by Recruiting.com and thank you to them for that. One of the people that I got a chance to rap with is Jeff Hunter from EA. Jeff is a great guy and I really appreciate what he is doing with his unconference and adding value to the recruitment community. It's people that care like Jeff that allow us to grow, expand and turn from good to great recruiters. If you get the chance get out to san fran and check it out. I'm sad to say I won't be there as I will be in London speaking at that time, so make sure you take notes so I can quiz you.
It's usually at this point that I give my thanks and un-thanks but I think I'm going to shake it up a bit this time. This time I'm going to give you....
What's Hot & What's Not from the conference
What's Hot:
Passive candidates are hot and not only because our core business is focused on them but the whole conference spoke about this. Presentations from Steve Lowisz on a How To Guide for attracting and hiring passive candidates and Peter Weddles presentation on Blink recruiting spent a lot of time on passive candidate recruiting. Let's face it if your not playing in this sandbox now you better start, the war on talent is getting heated by the day, with these people you can increase your quality and decrease your days to hire.
What's Not:
The number of companies not blogging. In my session I asked how many people were using blogs to recruit and no one raised their hand and I mean NO ONE. I then followed up with the question why aren't you and the main reason was legality. Folks let me make this real simple that companies with the most to lose are blogging so can you. Companies like Skype, Microsoft and Intel just to name a few are blogging than it should be on your recruiting agenda to do so as well. We create blogs and get them indexed into search engines usually within a month.
What's Hot:
Companies and recruiters that will take information they learned from the conference go back to their companies and or bosses and implement it. It's easy to come to conference agree with us and take notes....action...action...action is the hard part. Your boss was nice enough to spend the money on the conference and wants you to learn more now show him he was write and put a plan of action in place.
What's Not:
Not having the decision makers with you at the conference. I have yet to meet one CFO, CEO or COO of a company at these conferences that have been dragged by their recruiting department. The company with the best talent wins and in order to get the best talent you boss needs to be in the know along with you. C levels don't have time to spend with you to listen about the conference but they do have time to learn about how to save money, get the best talent and becoming a pillar in the industry. What's better than be in an “Echo Chamber” (thanks to paul from indeed for that piece of whit) with other people saying the same things but to have your boss get reinforcement from industry leaders and look to you and say your right we should be doing these things. When they say to you how can I afford the time to go to this.....ask them how can you afford not to? When they are in their board meeting and they can say here is our R&D budget and this is how we get the best people to put the budget to use.....you can't get any more effective than this.
So that's it for now, if you were at the show I hope you left with knowledge. If you weren't there you should be.
Cheers.
