Tag: ATC

7th Annual ATC Conference coming up

Brochure

The 7th Annual ATC Conference is just around the corner and from the looks of the agenda it will be as fantastic as the previous ones. This year’s theme is around agile talent management and will be looking at the different ways you can structure your talent management function.

As always the speaker line up is top quality and once again including several international representatives, including the likes of Gerry Crispin and Kevin Wheeler. Not to be out done by the international speakers there are local practitioners and consultants to help provide the Australian perspective; Davin D’Silva, Kimberley Hubble, and Jared Woods to mention a few.

The agenda has a few very interesting sessions that I hope to attend. Jenny Hoysted and Tony Wallace are running a session about agile workforce planning which given many organisations struggle with regular workforce planning going agile with it would prove to be difficult. Also Richard Lishewski, Global Talent Acquisition Director, Nike session on the different options to deliver talent to your organisation will provide a bit of a global context to things. There are several session around social recruitment, no surprise there, even a “social media bootcamp” for those yet to jump on board. Several sessions are looking at how to balance your workforce in an era of outsorcing, offshoring, contigency and redundancies.

While not speaking this year I am certainly planning to attend to catch up on what is going on.

(Disclosure: ATC have been a previous client and business partner of mine and the team are good friends.)

UPDATE: Since publishing this post I have been asked to assist in running one of the pre-conference workshops, Building a Winning Social Recruitment Business Case with Jared Woods.

ATC Social Media Presentation

Here is my presentation from the ATC Social Media event. My main messages that I hope people took away were:

  • Using social media for marketing is ok, but engagement and community is better
  • Engagement and community is harder than just a Twitter account or Facebook
  • Social Media is not easy, nor is it free
  • True engagement with social media is about people conversing with people, not brands servicing people
  • CFO’s like to talk about dollars
ATC Social Media Conferencehttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=atcsocialmediaupload-111202000832-phpapp01&stripped_title=atc-social-media-conference&userName=mspecht

Sourcing in Australia

A growth area for both agency recruiters and internal functions is that of sourcing and over the last few years the availability of tools to source candidates have changed dramatically. A decade ago to undertake the sourcing of a hard to find candidate involved a lots of phone calls and a really good contact list. While in 2011 the same holds true the internet has provided sourcers with a massive database of potential candidates. The rise of search engines and social media may have made us lose our memory but they have also given rise to the role of the internet sourcer.

Usage of boolean search, LinkedIn and other social media sites have made it easier than ever to proactively find candidates. For many of you this will not come as a surprise.

What might be of interest is a small conference I am speaking at in August, Finders Keepers, put on by my friends at ATC. Finders Keepers will have several international speakers in attendance, in fact the speakers list reads like a Who’s Who of sourcers; with internationals such as Glen Cathey (Boolean BlackBelt), Jim Stoud, Kevin Wheeler, Bill Boorman, and locals Ross Clennett, Martin Warren, and Andrea Mitchell. I will be doing a half day workshop with Jim Stoud looking at “How to Find the Hidden Talent Your Competition Overlooked”.

While the act of building a half day workshop with someone from the other side of the world is interesting enough, I suspect trying to keep up with Jim will be the hardest part of the session. If you have no idea who Jim is, watch the video below and you will see what I mean.

If you are interested in sourcing and where it is at in Australia get along and attend.

10 days to go!

Only 10 days to go before the early bird pricing for this year’s ATC Social Media conference expires! If you are thinking of going, and why wouldn’t you, register now to save 20% on your registration.

What will you get from coming along? Well other than listening to me natter on about mobile recruiting you will hear from international speakers such as:

  • Chris Hoyt: Talent Engagement and Marketing Leader at PepsiCo
  • Kevin Wheeler: a globally known speaker, author, teacher and consultant in human capital acquisition and development, as well as in corporate education

Local speakers include:

  • Jared Woods, now at OneSteel looking after all sorts of things including their social media strategy for recruitment
  • Nick Duggal, Special Counsel at Tresscox Lawyers, has practiced exclusively in the area of workplace relations
  • Simon Cariss is one of the founders of PageUp People

If you attend you will also get to experience social media in it’s human form with our unconference and world cafe sessions.

Mobile Recruiting

At the upcoming ATC Social Media conference (early bird prices until 30 September) I will be talking briefly about mobile recruiting. A topic I know is a little strange to some people, but I think effective use of mobile technology is going to become a critical part of a recruiters toolkit. Let’s face it mobile technology is not something you can ignore, as of December 2009 there were over 4.5 billion active mobile subscribers globally!

I am going to look beyond SMS, Bluetooth and email on smart phones, while they have a critical place in your mobile strategy there are other things to consider.

For example, while a traditional computer is replaced on average every 3.5 years mobile devices are averaging a replacement cycle of 18 months! This means just because something did not work last year doesn’t mean it won’t work this year!

Other topics I will look at include location based services, there is more to it than FourSquare or Facebook Places, areas like sales force automation and the impact of cloud computing on mobiles.

I am also trying to think of a good demonstration for the session so if you have any ideas, leave me a comment.

Once again AWOL

Yes once again I have gone AWOL on this blog, I know I’m a bad blogger. Well if there are any readers left I will try and post some more here.

The last 2 months have been filled with lots and lots of work two major projects not to mention the planning for the ATC Social Media 101 conference in December, more on that later, and the InsideJobs Social Media for Recruitment Course.

That’s it, just a short post to let you know I have not forgotten about the blog.

Presentation from ATC Social Media Event

The slides from my joint session with Trevor Vas from HCMS are now available for you to view.

Creating Social Recruiting Strategyhttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=creatingsocialrecruitingstrategymstvv3-091203185421-phpapp01&stripped_title=creating-social-recruiting-strategy

ATC Social Media Event

Yesterday was the first joint ATC/Inspecht event looking specifically at the usage of social media in recruitment. My personal opinion is that overall the day was a great success, although we will wait for the formal feedback from participants to know their feelings. Here are some of my thoughts and observations.

  • Having over 130 people in a room designed for 120 is a little cramped, but that is what happens when you sell out an event.
  • A lot of people knew very little about social media in general, let alone how they could be using it as part of their day to day work.
  • 80% of the participants were internal recruiters or consultants, very few agencies were represented.
  • Mark Pesce is always a great speaker.
  • There was lots of good discussion on Twitter.
  • E&Y are doing some very good things.
  • Atlassian as always have their finger on the pulse of their community.
  • People are very confused about how to include social media as part of their recruitment strategy.
  • There is a lot of concern about the legal and management issues of social media in the work place.
  • Job boards are not going away anytime soon.
  • We need to really start to promote Enterprise 2.0 as part of talent management strategies

We will be pulling together as many of the presentations as possible and make them available on the conference site. Also all sessions were captured on video once the videos are edited they will be posted online.

Here are a couple of blogs post I have found discussing the event:

A final note, we are talking about a bigger and better event for 2010 so watch this space.

What’s next with social recruiting

If you have been following this blog for a while you would know that I am always looking for the next thing. I have been doing the same thing with using social media in business.
I Want You
Social Recruiting has a lot of  buzz at the moment. How do I know there is a buzz, well 200+ people attended the Social Recruiting Summit in New York City last week, we have almost a full house at the ATC Social Media event, RecruitTech 2009 had social media as a primary theme.

But let us take a step back, for most social recruiting is just about using social media as another marketing channel. A terrible waste in my eyes.

My definition of social recruiting is:

  • Using social media tools as part of the recruiting process
  • Building a community of potential candidates
  • Engaging with candidates as people not numbers

From an employer’s perspective recruitment is about fueling organisational growth, renewal, building the most efficient and sustainable business. This can only be done through personal relationships and cultural fit. (Yes there is a bit of sales and marketing in the mix but that is just attraction, the rest of the process is all personal.)

This brings me to Doc Searls’s recent blog post “Beyond Social Media“. If you do not know Doc Searls you should, also you should read the book he co-authors 10 years ago, Cluetrain. In the post Doc raises several very good points.

  • Twitter is now as necessary to tweeting as Google is to search. It’s a public activity under private control.
  • Most other popular activities online are not owned by anyone, they are public.
  • Personal and social go hand-in-hand, but the latter builds on the former.
  • Today in the digital world we still have very few personal tools that work only for us, are under personal control
  • Individually-empowered customers are the ultimate greenfield for business and culture.
  • What we’re not doing because “social” everything is such a bubble of buzz right now

Are we really finally about to enter the age of Brand You or is it another 10 years away? If the individual is now the key to business and culture what does that mean for:

  • The recruitment process?
  • The HR Management practices in your average corporation?

I hear recruiters complaining they do not have time to develop relationships with candidates or use Twitter etc.  But what happens when the candidates are developing that relationship with a potential hiring manager or potential peer? Where do recruiters add value in this transaction?

For HR the issue is just as difficult. When employees view themselves as individuals who own the ideas, conversation and intentions to create the “business”. How do structured learning and development programs remain valid in an era of so much open information? How do you keep employees engaged? How does that traditional compensation plan survive?

I could go on, but I hope you get the picture. So if what Doc Searls is saying, “individually-empowered customers are the ultimate greenfield for business and culture”, is true then the companies who first leverage these concepts will be the ones we are talking about in 5 years time. Just as recruiters now marvel at Microsoft and the like who all started on their paths in around 2005.

ATC Social Media Conference

We are coming to the end of the early bird discount period for the joint event between Inspecht and ATC Social Media: A Recruitment Revolution. while the early bird discount is good, register 2 or more delegates and you get an even better deal.

So why attend?

  1. Listen to Australian case studies from Ernst & Young and Atlassian
  2. Hear from Futurist Mark Pesce
  3. Participate in workshops on social recruiting strategies, digital branding and the use of social networking for sourcing
  4. Watch the debate between Stephen Collins and Jake Andrews, from SEEK, on “Do you need a job board when you have social networking?”
  5. Put forward your own ideas and thought in the World Cafe session
  6. Listen and interact with your peers in the special unconference session where you get to control the agenda

This event was inspired by the ERE Social Recruiting Summit so I caught up with Paul Jacobs from Tribe HQ a New Zealander who attended the event with me to find out why he trekked all the way from Wellington New Zealand to San Francisco. (These are definitely NOT Oscar winning performances but we had fun.)

Finally if you are a member of Recruitment 2.0 APAC you could win a free ticket to attend