Online Recruitment the Year Ahead Conference Roundup

On Friday I was at the Enhance Media "Online Recruitment The Year Ahead" conference (I am actually in this photo!).  The event was superb.  I had planned to write an article for the newsletter or one blog post about it.  However, I came away with 25 sides of A4 worth of notes. So my new plan (if I can transcribe any of it!) is to write a series of blog posts about what each of the speakers shared.  The conference also provided a great networking opportunity in the generous coffee breaks and over lunch. I travelled home on Friday night with a long list of new contacts made and business friendships re-ignited.   

There were over 200 delegates signed up for the conference; a mix of corporate and agency recruiters, job boards and other industry suppliers.  The venue was the Royal Geographic Society building near Kensington (for such a large building a surprising number of people had trouble finding it!) and I thought the conference hall was great (although I know of one person who moved seat four times in order to find somewhere with good visibility which wasn't too cold). 

There were eight speaker presentations covering the topics of how job boards can add value, mobile (as in mobile phone not physically mobile) recruitment, search engine marketing/optimisation, testing (psychometric, aptitude, etc), employer branding, community driven recruitment and social networking. Tim at Enhance also gave an overview of the results from their "How e are you?" survey.  I have to admit that I didn't think anyone brought up anything particularly revolutionary in terms of suggestions of how online is affecting the recruitment space.  Maybe that's because I spend a lot of my time reading about new trends (how exciting to think I may be up to date with the industry!) or maybe it's because we are still catching up with the technology that already exists.  One thing that struck me as interesting was that Second Life (which has been heralded as the future of online recruitment by some) wasn't mentioned until the very last presentation - and then only briefly. 

As promised earlier I plan to share key information from all of the presentations over the next couple of weeks.