Recruiting Trends Sourcing and Recruiting Social Summit Huge Success
Various sourcers and recruiters gathered in Washington DC to learn about sourcing, recruitment and best practices for utilizing social media in both areas from some of the industry’s leading HR and recruiting experts, including: Recruiting Toolbox Consultant Ben Gotkin ; industry veteran and Founder of Recruiting-Online.com Glen Gutmacher ; and Intuit’s Social Media Program Manager Gail Houston, to name a few.
Attendees had the opportunity to gather useful information and tips from seven different sessions all the while networking with their colleagues in the field. Topics ranged from sourcing automation, and attracting and engaging talent via social media to Twitter tactics, and making Facebook work for you.
Carmen Hudson, principal consultant at Recruiting toolbox and co-founder of Talent42, presented on “The Modern Recruiter’s Guide to Twitter.” She covered everything from creating lists to source candidates, using Twitter’s advertising tool to promote jobs, and merging personal and professional content on the site.
“Think about your employer brand and humanize it,” Hudson said about deciding what to Tweet. “That’s what’s really going to get people involved.”
Laura Stoker, the executive director of Global Training at AIRS, presented on mobile recruiting. She said her speaking experience was a wonderful opportunity 1) because AIRS really appreciates its relationship with Recruiting Trends and 2) because of the summit’s audience.
“This is a really great audience,” she said. “Usually the DC audience is well networked and conferences are usually very well attended.” Stoker also said the one thing she hopes attendees took away from her presentation was the fact that recruiters need to support mobile recruiting.
“I hope that the audience takes away the ideas that we really need to be champions for this,” Stoker said. “That they can be champions for that message and say, ‘If we’re not doing this, we’re missing candidates that our competitors are getting, and it’s hurting our brand.”’
The summit produced a lot of new faces within the industry this year. Dalia Naami, a recruiter for Johnson Johnson, flew in from Canada to attend the summit for the first time. She said she decided to attend because, as a firm believer in social media, she uses the tools both personally and professionally and thinks they’re the best way to connect with people.
“I thought it was really interactive, which is important given the fact that it was a social media conference,” Naami said at the conclusion of the summit. “You’ve got a level of expertise here that is bar none. There’s some really interesting behind-the-scenes elements to social media that the average user doesn’t know and that’s why it’s important for recruiters to come to these types of sessions because there are things that we can do that makes us a little bit better than the average social media user.”
USfalcon Recruiter Daniel Harris traveled from North Carolina to receive information from the conference.
“I really needed to get up to date on the new recruiting and sourcing piece of my job,” Harris explained his reason for attending. “I felt like I was kind of falling behind a little bit, so I wanted to get all the latest and greatest. I got that here.”
This too was Harris’ first time attending the Recruiting Trends event.
“I needed to be able to gather a large amount of candidates in a short amount of time and they gave me the tricks of the trade to do that,” he said. “They really helped me a lot.”