I traveled to San Francisco last week to attend the Social Recruiting Strategies Conference held by GSMI. The question most people ask me, especially my boss is, “did you find it valuable?”
The short, yes, yes I did.
Sure there were some social networking kool aid being served, but it was backed up by details and metrics. Anyone attending could find something beneficial.
Talks from the following speakers (not all inclusive by any means) included:
I apologize for not listing all of the speakers which also included folks from Pfizer, UPS (yes the brown can do for you), Intuit, and Verizon.
Topics ranged from measuring your social media efforts in the recruitment space to using video in your recruitment efforts be they interviews, job descriptions or day-in-the-life.
Many new tools were brought to my attention. Many of the tools I come across, be it Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, whatever, comes from folks that talk about what they use. It may be from Twitter, a podcast, or word of mouth. Some tools that were mentioned can help you determine when your followers check twitter which provides you optimum times to spread your message. Other tools, like LinkedinLabs.com, can provide some unique tools that tie into your Linkedin features.
The conference lasted a couple days and covered quite a good amount of information, too much to actually spell out here. I hope to incorporate some of the tactics and strategies into my own personal brand – rewriting my Linkedin profile to be more SEO-based, use this blog more to better define my name, tweak twitter with the same profile info, etc. Become more of a goto contact for IT jobs. Then it won’t matter where I work.
In the end, it was a good place to meet good people like Brad the Blackhawk pilot who does recruiting, the aforementioned Jason, Craig and Jen. Others include Matt from Jobvite, everyone met from Work4Labs – Kurt, Ken, and Andrew. Alissa from Verizon, Gail from Intuit, Todd and many more I should mention. Don’t be offended I didn’t. I know we’re connected.